The campaign of erasure banishes intellectual inquiry and the dispassionate examination of history. It celebrates magical thinking… The Israeli government bans public commemorations of the Nakba… a day of mourning for Palestinians who seek to remember the massacres and expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians carried out by Jewish terrorist militias in 1948 for this reason. Palestinians… Read More Israel’s Assassination of Memory
Dilip passed away at the age of 79, in Pune, after an eventful life. We first met in Kolkata in the mid 1970’s; and were comrades for over fifty years. He was a teacher of physics in Kolkata, always supportive of students; an active fighter for Adivasi rights and the Jharkhand movement; for contract labourers… Read More Dilip Hota. Jan 11, 1946 – Aug 12, 2025. Friend, comrade; companion of the underprivileged.
We’re Right Again. Now that it is too late, it’s no longer forbidden to use the word “genocide” in polite company. Now, as Gazans starve, as they are shot by soldiers from the Israel Defense Forces while seeking food aid at sites run by the farcically-named Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, the world has decided it is, after all, “against this.” Only recently,… Read More For Once in Our Lives
Rafael Behr There is a Russian proverb: don’t blame the mirror if your face is crooked. I first came across it as the epigraph to The Government Inspector, Gogol’s 1836 masterpiece satirising corruption and hypocrisy in the provinces of the tsar’s empire. The phrase sprang to mind last week when I learned that a 21st-century… Read More By sanctioning journalists, the Kremlin admits how much the truth hurts
The singularity of the Israeli campaign in Gaza lies in the asymmetry of power, its intensity, its enclosure, its direct connection to a settler colonial project. All this leads us back to the 1940s and Raphael Lemkin’s definition of genocide, which he modeled on Nazi-occupied Poland. That line of thought should not be dodged, or… Read More Bulldozing Gaza
Two bizarre weeks in a Boston courtroom and the threat to intellectual life in America… It is a feature of our intractable times that political conflict nearly always takes the shape of a conflict over the nature of reality. By Charlie Tyson It was the first day of a federal trial, in Boston, for a… Read More Can Academic Freedom Survive the Surveillance State?
By Zeynep Devrİm Gürsel “Just as any advanced comrade must have a watch, he shall also possess mastery of a photo camera.” So declared Anatoly Lunacharsky in 1926, in his role as the Soviet Union’s Commissar of Enlightenment. This programmatic statement was included in the very first issue of the photography journal Sovetskoe Foto, published that same… Read More Strangers in the Family Album: Reflections on Soviet Amateur Photography
Elizabeth Alker It is a sunny October afternoon and I am sitting in a long wood-panelled hallway in an old converted townhouse in London waiting to be called into the office of Paul McCartney. I am dressed in my best clothes and trying not to let nerves get the better of me. I am here to… Read More ‘The King Lear in I Am the Walrus? That came from John Cage’: Paul McCartney on the Beatles’ debt to great avant-garde composers
One word, in particular, stood out to researchers as a kind of linguistic watermark. “Delve” has become an academic shibboleth, a neon sign in the middle of every conversation flashing ChatGPT was here. NB: I’ve found ‘delve‘ occuring very frequently in students assignments. DS Sara Parker Join any Zoom call, walk into any lecture hall, or… Read More You sound like ChatGPT
pilgrimage journal the Great Beast From Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace: The Great Beast [society, the collective] is the only object of idolatry, the only ersatz of God, the only imitation of something which is infinitely far from me and which is I myself. It is impossible for me to take myself as an end or, in consequence,… Read More the Great Beast
After the truth-shower 