First posted June 27, 2012 A Hard Rain Falling by Dilip Simeon He went to bed, turned on the BBC World News and switched it off again. Half-truths. Quarter-truths. What the world really knows about itself, it doesn’t dare say: John le Carre, in Our Kind of Traitor A baleful feature of contemporary Indian politics is the subjugation… Read More A Hard Rain Falling: on the death of T. P. Chandrasekharan (EPW, June 2012)
First posted December 15, 2011 This article appeared in the India International Centre Quarterly special issue titled India and China: Neighbours, Strangers, edited by Ira Pande; 2010. Glory Daysby Dilip Simeon Many years ago, when some of us argued about the ills of the present and, more to the point, the ills of contemporary India, we… Read More Glory Days, or remembering how Indians love(d) China
First posted October 26, 2011 Clark Whelton The decline and fall of American English, and stuff I recently watched a television program in which a woman described a baby squirrel that she had found in her yard. “And he was like, you know, ‘Helloooo, what are you looking at?’ and stuff, and I’m like, you… Read More Vagueness: the linguistic virus in spoken language in the late 20th century
First posted December 22, 2013 Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth By Reza Aslan Reviewed by Dilip Simeon (Biblio, November-December 2013) This is a fascinating account of the life of Jesus of Nazareth. I suspect it will also be disturbing for believers. The argument rests on the distinction between the historical Jesus and… Read More Jesus the man
First posted Tuesday, April 09, 2013 Letter from Members of the CPI (ML) Explanatory Note 1./ This is an open letter I wrote in December 1971, as a Naxalite cadre (among many) who experienced the political crisis accompanying the disintegration of Pakistan in 1970-71. It was anonymous, and I was the sole author. So the phrases ‘letter from… Read More An Open Letter to the world on the Bangladesh crisis of 1971
First posted April 11, 2012 By Colin Leys and Barbara Harriss-White The dominant process underlying the transformation of life in all societies, since at least the mid-nineteenth century, is the conversion of things and activities into commodities, or commodification. In advanced capitalist countries this process is now outstripping our political and social capacity to adjust… Read More Commodification: the essence of our time
Chrissy Stroop For centuries, American evangelical Protestants have been obsessed with religious ‘revival’. Fear of ostensible societal, moral, and religious ‘decline’ is the other side of the same paranoid Christian coin. The United States, deeply influenced by early Puritan settlers and other assorted Christian fanatics, has been slow to secularise relative to European countries. In fact, the… Read More Americans are rejecting religion as the Christian right becomes more extreme
Priti Gulati and Stan Cox TomDispatch May 23, 2023 Let me offer a small prediction: between this moment when I’m writing the introduction to Priti Gulati and Stan Cox’s new piece and the moment, a few days from now, when it’s actually posted at TomDispatch, the question isn’t whether there will be another mass shooting in… Read More The Violent Urge for Supremacy in the World’s Two Largest Democracies
Alas, all the evil of the twentieth century is possible everywhere on earth Ideology – that is what… gives the evil-doer the necessary steadfastness and determination . . . the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good… in his own and others’ eyes From this point the roads go to the right… Read More The Gulag Archipelago: An Epic of True Evil
Recycling plastic can make it more toxic and should not be considered a solution to the pollution crisis, Greenpeace has warned before the latest round of negotiations for an international plastics treaty. “Plastics are inherently incompatible with a circular economy,” the global environmental network said in a report that brings together research showing recycled plastics are more… Read More Recycled plastic can be more toxic and is no fix for pollution, Greenpeace warns
