Based on classified documents and first-person interviews, a startling history of the American war on Vietnamese civilians. Turse’s central aim in Kill Anything that Moves is to expose the unparalleled obscenity of the Vietnam War: unparalleled both in terms of the devastating scale and variety of harm done and the diabolical levels of premeditation on the part of the… Read More Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam
Chandan Gowda After publishing several major Kannada stories in Prajavani and other publications in Mysore state, the nineteen-year-old Rajalakshmi N. Rao published The Rain, her scintillating debut story in English, in The Illustrated Weekly of India in late 1954. On the heels of the buzz around this story by a Kannada writer, B R Nagaraj,… Read More A precious discovery: The Living Stream
Readers outside of India can donate here to support Mainstream Weeklyhttps://tinyurl.com/2rsy4ss6++++++ In this issue: Letter to the Readers, Mainstream July 5, 2025 [expected by June 6 ] Why India’s poverty decline may not be what it seems | Santosh Mehrotra Why Zoran’s NYC Victory Matters to India and the USA | Papri Sen Sri Raman Postcolonial Realism… Read More Mainstream, Vol 63 No 27, July 5, 2025
It’s a breakthrough moment for a language long left out of the global literary conversation. By Iqbal Bhat It’s not often a novel written in Kashmiri reaches the global stage. But on June 16, that changed. At the Himal Southasian Fiction Fest, a big announcement was made. The 1975 novel To Each Their Own Hell by Akhtar Mohiuddin won… Read More For the First Time, a Kashmiri Novel Crosses Borders, Wins Global Spotlight
Guy Debord’s Comments on the Society of the Spectacle issue #19, 1991 As late as 1979, Guy Debord could write about his 1967 book of theory, which is entitled The Society of the Spectacle: “There is no a word to be changed . . . . [Since 1967] the spectacle has done nothing but meet more exactly… Read More Guy Debord’s Comments on the Society of the Spectacle
Ellen Wayland-Smith admires how Is a River Alive? places the reader in immersive contact with the nature we regard as mere backdrop to human activity. Is A River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane. 2025 IN RELIGIOUS COSMOGONIES, anthropologist Mircea Eliade argues in his 1957 book The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, the natural world… Read More What Would It Take to Re-Sacralize Nature?
We have previously written about the debates over the political relevance of the Enlightenment today, drawing on Antoine Lilti’s critical review of the histories of Jonathan Israel. We present the English translation of his essay, which has import far beyond any disciplinary boundaries: Viewpoint Magazine David A. Bell: The Uses and Abuses of Enlightenment: AV lecture; January 2025 ***… Read More How Do We Write the Intellectual History of the Enlightenment? Spinozism, Radicalism, and Philosophy
Kieran Setiya reviews Christoph Schuringa’s A Social History of Analytic Philosophy IS THE FORM of philosophy dominant in English-speaking universities covertly resistant to radical thought? Does it present as the work of pure reason what is in fact the function of an ideology complicit in oppression? In A Social History of Analytic Philosophy (2025), the philosopher Christoph… Read More The Politics of Apoliticism
Letter to the Readers, Mainstream [expected by June 15] Mahakumbha 2025: Dharmanomics & its Aftermath | Jayita Mukhopadhyay All-Party Delegations’ Visits Abroad : Some Reflections | P S Jayaramu Memeification of Kejriwal as a Leader | Survesh Pratap Singh From Truman to Trump | Sunit Singh Aadhaar Number database is beyond national control | Gopal Krishna Trade Diplomacy, Civilisational &… Read More Mainstream, Vol 63 No 24, June 14, 2025
Søren Kierkegaard in “The Present Age” warns that the modern state seeks to eradicate conscience and shape and manipulate individuals into a pliable and indoctrinated “public.” This public is not real. It is a “monstrous abstraction, an all-embracing something which is nothing, a mirage.”… Thomas Paine writes that a despotic government is a fungus that… Read More Chris Hedges: The Rule of Idiots
