David Painter and Gregory Brew, The Struggle for Iran: Oil, Autocracy, and the Cold War, 1951–1954 Reviewed by MARC MARTORELL JUNYENT Munich (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – The figure of Mohammad Mosaddeq, Prime Minister of Iran from 1951 to 1953, is an uncomfortable one for both sides of the US-Iran rivalry. For the US, Mosaddeq… Read More The Origins of the West’s Iran Crisis: Oil, Autocracy and Coup
PRESS RELEASEFor Immediate Release: Ambedkar Jayanti Marks a Milestone: Release of Draft Policy for Strengthening Public Libraries in India by the Free Libraries Network5 PM, 13 April 2024, Press Club, New Delhi. [Delhi, April 3, 2024]: Commemorating the birth anniversary of Dr BR Ambedkar, the FreeLibraries Network announces the release of a landmark draft policy… Read More Free Libraries Network: Draft Policy for Strengthening Public Libraries in India
Rouven J. Steeves Introduction: “The Light Shines in the Darkness . . .“ The study of politics presupposes the study of man. The study of man demands we consider the nature of being as ensouled flesh. This leads us into the realm of philosophy and, by extension, given that we are interested in man as… Read More Psychologists of Evil: Nietzsche and Dostoevsky on the Darkness of the Soul
NB: Observation by a psychoanalyst: The writer seems to know little about psychotherapy: what the latter does is validate the feelings of trauma, and provide empathy and support. How the person copes is best left to themselves and to whatever strategies, personal and collective they can creatively access or create. We all live through adolescence… Read More ‘We are all unwell’: a scholar’s radical approach to health
Premiered on 10 Nov 2022 In anticipation of the opening of our upcoming exhibition, (De)constructing Ideology: The Cultural Revolution and Beyond, Frank Dikötter will present a brief history of the Cultural Revolution. Dr. Dikötter, Chair Professor at the University of Hong Kong and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, is the author of People’s Trilogy,… Read More The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History with Frank Dikötter
What happened to the 21st-century city? Smooth City: Against Urban Perfection, Towards Collective Alternatives – BY RENE BOER this sadness is felt by so many people who find a place for themselves in a city and who know what it means to see their spaces of security, community, and openness taken away in exchange for more… Read More A Seamless Dystopia
The infantilizing social control of the university. Rita Koganzon When I was a graduate teaching assistant at Harvard University a decade ago, one of my students missed a final exam because he forgot to set his alarm. I didn’t learn about this because he told me, in person or even by email; nor did he… Read More The Coddling of the American Undergraduate
The Unauthorized Version: Truth and Fiction in the Bible; By Robin Lane Fox By Christopher Lehmann-Haupt “The Bible is a book of faith, and a book of doctrine, and a book of morals, and a book of religion, of especial revelation from God,” Daniel Webster declared more than a century ago. But is the Bible true?… Read More Books of The Times; Viewing the Bible as Truth and Tale (1992)
Amy Hawkins At first glance, a Nobel prize winning author, a bottle of green tea and Beijing’s Tsinghua University have little in common. But in recent weeks they have been dubbed by China’s nationalist netizens as the “three new evils” in the fight to defend the country’s valour in cyberspace. Last month a patriotic blogger… Read More China Nobel Laureate for literature becomes a target in nationalist slander campaign
Averroes (Ibn Rushd; 1126–1198) was one of the greatest polymaths of the ancient Islamic world, whose practice expanded into philosophy, theology, astronomy, physics, linguistics and more Averroism’, ‘radical Aristotelianism’ and ‘heterodox Aristotelianism’ are nineteenth- and twentieth-century labels for a late thirteenth-century movement among Parisian philosophers whose views were not easily reconcilable with Christian doctrine. The… Read More Who Was Averroes?
After the truth-shower 