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
NB: The US-UK-Israel Axis is a sinkhole of murder and depravity. They will never recover any moral status whatsoever, not in this century nor the coming ones. Infamy is forever. May God protect the Palestinian people, whom humanity has abandoned. I salute those in the Western world who are resisting the criminal actions of their… Read More Israeli military preparing to expel Gaza City residents as baby in tent among those killed in latest attacks
For Iris Murdoch, morality is not about duties and rules but stopping our ego fantasies and attending to others with love… she sees the key moral activity not as choice but as attention – an idea she gets from the activist, mystic and philosopher Simone Weil Cathy Mason Being in love is one of the most profound experiences… Read More Why love matters most
Mukul Kesavan Freedom should have come in fifty-seven,a century after eighteen-fifty-seventwo centuries after Plassey’s fifty-seven,(which made our history rhyme with five and seven).But freedom came before its time,four and seven didn’t rhyme,the witching hour’s midnight chime,rang in twins before their time,conjoined twins before their time,in nineteen-forty-seven. Radcliffe carved the join and there was blood,that was… Read More Another Country
After the truth-shower 