“The anger is huge, and so is the determination – my message to Mr Lecornu today is this: it’s the streets that must decide the budget,” said Sophie Binet, head of the leftwing CGT union Angelique Chrisafis in Paris CGT union members during a demonstration in Marseille. Sophie Binet, the head of the union, said: ‘It’s… Read More Strike action across France as hundreds of thousands join protests
NB: The reviewer (and Lilla) are too quick in their assessments of Leo Strauss. True he had right-wing followers (incidentally, card-holding Nazi’s such as Heidegger and Carl Schmitt have left-wing acolytes to this day). But Strauss took Heidegger seriously, and that is why he is the most effective and far-reaching critic of historicism, the core… Read More The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction (2016)
First posted October 27, 2011 ‘The essay is a marvellous account of the hundreds of ways in which the Ramayana has been told, complete with examples of this narrative diversity. I can’t imagine that the vice-chancellor, a member of that urbane cohort, the Class of ’75, wanted the essay removed because he agreed with the Akhil Bharatiya… Read More Mukul Kesavan: Delhi University and the purging of Ramanujan
The origin of May Day is to be found in the Woodland Epoch of History. First posted April 30, 2020 Once upon a time, long before Weinberger bombed north Africans, before the Bank of Boston laundered money, or Reagan honored the Nazi war dead, the earth was blanketed by a broad mantle of forests. As… Read More Peter Linebaugh: The incomplete, true, authentic and wonderful history of May Day
One of the strangest things about an American university education is that it bundles a whole lot of different things together. If you want to take a course in high-level mathematics or listen to the lectures of an accomplished historian of Ming China, you must also buy membership in one of the country’s most lavish gyms;… Read More Unbundle the (American) University
An untidy history of AI across four books Reviewed Here by Trevor Quirk Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks From the Stone Age to AI: Yuval Noah Harari The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI: Ray Kurzweil Genesis: Artificial Intelligence, Hope, and the Human Spirit: Henry A. Kissinger, Craig Mundie, and Eric… Read More Perplexity
Perhaps what was behind it all is only that individual human beings did not kill other individual human beings for human reasons, but that an organized attempt was made to eradicate the concept of the human being. Hannah Arendt to Karl Jaspers on the Nazi death camps, December 17, 1946 (Correspondence, p 68) Gaza is… Read More Gaza and the Death of Conscience
The Slave Ship: A Human History, by Marcus Rediker. 2008 Reviewed by by jayspencergreen Interview with Marcus Rediker The cover of my edition of Marcus Rediker’s The Slave Ship features a quotation from the Sunday Telegraph describing it as “A truly magnificent book.” Such is my prejudice that I imagine Telegraph readers coming to Rediker’s work not to be educated about the shaping… Read More The Slave Ship
As a Presidential candidate, Donald Trump made his world view plain: there was “us” and there was “them.” Once he was in the White House, the fear factor would prevail. By David Remnick The young Donald Trump was the Nelson Muntz of Jamaica Estates. (Or was he its Draco Malfoy? Scholars will debate such questions for… Read More The Politics of Fear
By Tora Agarwala in East Khasi hills, Meghalaya Excited chatter and the clattering of steel plates drown out the din of the monsoon rains: it is lunchtime in Laitsohpliah government school in the north-east Indian state of Meghalaya. The food has been cooked on-site and is free for everyone, part of India’s ambitious “midday meal”… Read More Fish mint, Himalayan chives and berry pickle: how wild ingredients are transforming school dinners in India
After the truth-shower 