Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism & New Technologies of Power by Byung-Chul Han. Review (2017)

An examination of the internet age suggests that we should cultivate the heresies of secrets and silence Stuart Jeffries During a commercial break in the 1984 Super Bowl, Apple broadcast an ad directed by Ridley Scott. Glum, grey workers sat in a vast grey hall listening to Big Brother’s declamations on a huge screen. Then a… Read More Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism & New Technologies of Power by Byung-Chul Han. Review (2017)

18th March 202318th March 2023 Dilip

Money as Empire?

Money and Empire: Charles P. Kindleberger and the Dollar SystemBy Perry Mehrling. Reviewed by Herman Mark Schwartz Money makes the world go round, or as Karl Marx put it, Geldgespräche, Quatsch-Spaziergänge. How does this work at the global or international level? Perry Mehrling’s elegantly written biography of the MIT economist Charles Poor Kindleberger illuminates the relationship between… Read More Money as Empire?

16th March 202316th March 2023 Dilip

Dissent, Diversity Run Deep in Karnataka and in Indian Philosophy: A Conversation

Rahamath Tarikere and Chandan Gowda talk about philosophy, culture, resistance and syncretism in some traditions in Karnataka. Tarikere worked as professor of Kannada literature at Kannada University, Hampi from 1992 until his retirement in 2021. His extensive publications, which include literary and cultural criticism, travel writing as well as short essays on wide ranging matters,… Read More Dissent, Diversity Run Deep in Karnataka and in Indian Philosophy: A Conversation

9th March 2023 Dilip

Three Versions of Judas: Jorge Luis Borges

There seemed a certainty in degradation: T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom In Asia Minor or in Alexandria, in the second century of our faith (when Basilides was announcing that the cosmos was a rash and malevolent improvisation engineered by defective angels), Nils Runeberg might have directed, with a singular intellectual passion, one of the… Read More Three Versions of Judas: Jorge Luis Borges

5th March 20234th March 2023 Dilip

Michael Duffy: Jorge Luis Borges’s Course on English Literature

“Reading should be a form of happiness” – Jorge Luis Borges IT’S HARD to fall asleep in lecture when you’re on the edge of your seat. Borges kept his students perched in this position throughout his 1966 course on English literature at the University of Buenos Aires, and now keeps us there as we read… Read More Michael Duffy: Jorge Luis Borges’s Course on English Literature

4th March 2023 Dilip

An Entire Society Exists Within Me

Jafar Panahi after the ban MARK KROTOV Jafar Panahi (director). No Bears. 2022.Jafar Panahi: Interviews. Edited by Drew Todd. University Press of Mississippi, 2019. JAFAR PANAHI’S NO BEARS opens with a long, 270-degree pan around the T-intersection of two streets. We know the action takes place sometime in the post-pandemic present because in the background of the frame… Read More An Entire Society Exists Within Me

3rd March 20233rd March 2023 Dilip

Let Kids Read Roald Dahl’s Books the Way He Wrote Them

The beloved author’s books are being edited by their publisher to suit contemporary sensibilities. That robs us of the author’s vision—and any sense of history. By Katha Pollitt The United States can be a harsh place to be a child. There are guns galore and bullies in school. Suicide is on the rise, homelessness is rampant,… Read More Let Kids Read Roald Dahl’s Books the Way He Wrote Them

3rd March 20233rd March 2023 Dilip

The Center Cannot Hold

A kaleidoscopic journey through a divided country…The river of bile on which Sharlet fights to stay afloat courses from one end of the country to the other. By Elizabeth D. Samet The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War by Jeff Sharlet Jeff Sharlet’s new book, The Undertow, plunged me into a vertiginous fever-dream. It induced a physiological response… Read More The Center Cannot Hold

3rd March 20233rd March 2023 Dilip

The Betrayal of Adam Smith

How conservatives made him their icon and distorted his ideas Kim Phillips-Fein How did Smith’s ideas become so thoroughly integrated into conservative defenses of the free market against regulation? And are these the only ways of reading his work? These are the questions at the heart of Adam Smith’s America, Glory M. Liu’s intriguing account of… Read More The Betrayal of Adam Smith

1st March 2023 Dilip

Shakespeare and the Politics of the 21st Century

His power as a writer came not only from the beauty of his poetry, but his deep understanding of the ambiguities and contradictions that go into making a human being and a human society. He grasped that human history is merely itself. It moves towards no goal. By Chris Hedges / The Real News Network Shakespeare’s… Read More Shakespeare and the Politics of the 21st Century

20th February 202320th February 2023 Dilip

After the truth-shower

Philosophy, history, literature, current affairs, and other stuff. Posted by Dilip Simeon

Tag: Books and literature

Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism & New Technologies of Power by Byung-Chul Han. Review (2017)

Money as Empire?

Dissent, Diversity Run Deep in Karnataka and in Indian Philosophy: A Conversation

Three Versions of Judas: Jorge Luis Borges

Michael Duffy: Jorge Luis Borges’s Course on English Literature

An Entire Society Exists Within Me

Let Kids Read Roald Dahl’s Books the Way He Wrote Them

The Center Cannot Hold

The Betrayal of Adam Smith

Shakespeare and the Politics of the 21st Century