BY WILLIAM D. HARTUNG Here’s a seldom commented-upon reality of this century and this moment: the United States remains the number-one arms-exporting nation on the planet. Between 2017 and 2021, it grabbed 39% of the total global weapons market and there’s nothing new about that. It has, in fact, been the top arms dealer in every year but one for… Read More Joe Biden, the National Security State, and Arms Sales
Bidisha Mamata Last month, Elon Musk walked into Twitter and then all the good people left. I quit, too. It was a time-sink, a brain drain and an eye strain. In 12 years, I gained nothing, while witnessing peers and colleagues at their worst. Oh, the bliss of not turning every little thing into a quip. The… Read More I too quit Twitter this week – and have never been more relieved
Zoe Sottile, CNN A bird thought to be extinct for 140 years has been rediscovered in the forests of Papua New Guinea. https://ebird.org/species/phepig1 The black-naped pheasant-pigeon\ was documented by scientists for the first and last time in 1882, according to a news release from nonprofit Re:wild, which helped fund the search effort. Rediscovering the bird required… Read More Bird thought to be extinct for 140 years has been rediscovered in the forests of Papua New Guinea
First posted August 28, 2014 NB: With love to our very own Mother Courage; to whom so many of us owe so much, and whom we still call Ma Sen. She passed away in the evening of November 18, 2024. There are no words to express what I, along with many friends of my generation,… Read More Nandita’s story. Calcutta, August 1945
First posted Hiroshima Day, August 6, 2014 NB: This article was written for an edited volume on contemporary terrorism, more specifically, terror in the name of Hindutva. I disagree with the habit of approaching terrorism with a prefix, but nevertheless wrote it, in order precisely to make my point more explicitly. It was completed more than… Read More A matter of time
A wave of bestselling authors claim that global affairs are still ultimately governed by the immutable facts of geography – mountains, oceans, rivers, resources. But the world has changed more than they realise by Daniel Immerwahr Russia’s war in Ukraine has involved many surprises. The largest, however, is that it happened at all. Last year, Russia… Read More Are we really prisoners of geography?
In our age of global conflict, István Hont is finally having his moment Danielle Charette and William Selinger In 2001 a dispute over hiring in Harvard’s government department briefly became national news. The faculty had voted unanimously to offer a tenured position to the historian István Hont (1947-2013), a specialist in Enlightenment political thought at King’s College,… Read More The Political Prophet Harvard Didn’t Want
Protesters in Iran have set on fire the ancestral home of the Islamic republic’s founder Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as two months of anti-regime demonstrations show no let up. The house in the city of Khomein in the western Markazi province was shown ablaze late on Thursday with crowds of jubilant protesters marching past, according to images… Read More Iranian protesters set fire to Ayatollah Khomeini’s ancestral home
Michael Wood The Aphorisms of Franz Kafka; edited by Reiner Stach, translated by Shelley Frisch. In September 1917, having just discovered he had tuberculosis, Franz Kafka took a break from his work at an insurance company in Prague and spent eight months with his sister Ottla in the village of Zürau, now called Siřem. He also seemed… Read More Cage in Search of a Bird
Ironically, the late Asma Jahangir’s last public appearance and speech were at a demonstration led by Pashteen in Islamabad, February 2018, against the extrajudicial killing of a Pashtun youth in a ‘police encounter’ in Karachi in January 2018. The protest marked the launch of the PTM. Jahangir passed away just days later at her home in Lahore. Since then,… Read More Struggles for democracy and human rights in South Asia: Taking forward Asma Jahangir’s legacy
After the truth-shower 