The Great Global Transformation

The Serbian-American economist Branko Milanović has emerged as one of the most discerning thinkers of our time – and certainly one of the most productive. In his books since 2016, he has moved from measuring global inequality to theorising capitalism’s competing forms to excavating how we’ve historically thought about inequality. His new book, The Great Global Transformation, studies… Read More The Great Global Transformation

Dilip

Biblical Archaeology and the Judeo-Christian legends / The Deconstruction of the Walls of Jericho

This article, The Deconstruction of the Walls of Jericho; is an abridged version of The Bible: No Evidence on the Ground; by Zeev Herzog, Professor at the Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Studies at Tel Aviv University. He participated extensively in collaboration with other archaeologists in excavations at ancient sites relevant to Biblical legends.… Read More Biblical Archaeology and the Judeo-Christian legends / The Deconstruction of the Walls of Jericho

Dilip

Why Trump Doesn’t Stand a Chance of Killing the Epstein Story

Tina Brown Jeffrey Epstein is the slug who will not die. His trail of slime sticks to everyone who ever crossed his path. The copious accretions have even buried Trump’s futile efforts to browbeat MAGA Congress members to vote against the full release of the Epstein files. In a total backflip to avoid the humiliation… Read More Why Trump Doesn’t Stand a Chance of Killing the Epstein Story

Dilip

What AI doesn’t know: we could be creating a global ‘knowledge collapse’ / Study Finds More Than Half Of AI’s References Are Fabricated or Erroroneous

As GenAI becomes the primary way to find information, local and traditional wisdom is being lost. And we are only beginning to realise what we’re missing… GenAI is trained on massive datasets of text from sources such as books, articles, websites and transcripts – hence the name “large language model” (LLM). But this “training data”… Read More What AI doesn’t know: we could be creating a global ‘knowledge collapse’ / Study Finds More Than Half Of AI’s References Are Fabricated or Erroroneous

Dilip

Spain: Emerging from the Labyrinth / I grew up in Spain amid a collective amnesia about Franco. It is time we faced up to our dark past

María Ramírez Franco’s Crypt: Spanish Culture and Memory Since 1936 – by Jeremy Treglown Reviewed by Jeremy Adelman On August 19, 1936, militiamen loyal to General Francisco Franco murdered Spain’s famous poet and dramatist Federico García Lorca. Afterward, one of the killers, the Falangist Juan Trecastro, burst into a local bar and said, “We’ve just… Read More Spain: Emerging from the Labyrinth / I grew up in Spain amid a collective amnesia about Franco. It is time we faced up to our dark past

Dilip

Born in the forest: the women giving birth alone in the Kashmiri mountains

Far from hospitals, nomadic Gujjar women routinely go into labour – and die – on their herder communities’ long seasonal treks Arsalan Bukhari Dawn had just broken across the trail through the Pir Panjal mountains when Fatima Deader felt the first labour pains. She and her family had almost reached the midway point of their… Read More Born in the forest: the women giving birth alone in the Kashmiri mountains

Dilip