NB: Meanwhile the JNU History Centre collection, one of the most valuable in the country, is being dismantled by the authorities to make room for a new centre of Tamil studies. I am sure lovers of Tamil language and culture do not wish for the university’s history collection to be removed. This is nothing but… Read More Sri Lanka, thirty one years after: Burning of the Jaffna Public Library, May 1981
NB: The temptation of our day is to accept the intolerable, for fear of still worse to come: Hermann Rauschning, The Revolution of Nihilism (1939). DS This is an appeal to the national and global academic community at large, including JNU alumni as well as teachers’ associations, student bodies and individual professors and students across the world.… Read More Appeal & Signature Campaign to Save the Centre for Historical Studies Library in JNU
Paula Marantz Cohen: Talking Cure: An Essay on the Civilizing Power of Conversation Reviwd by Danny Heitman As we’ve often been told, the art of conversation is on life support, ravaged by the excesses of technology. Hooked to our phones and laptops, or so the theory goes, we’ve lost the true gift for gab. Sherry Turkle,… Read More The Joys of Spirited Conversation
There are no softballs in Arianne Shahvisi’s “Arguing for a Better World: How Philosophy Can Help Us Fight for Social Justice.” Instead, the Kurdish-British author, ethicist and academic sets up the reader with exactly the sort of provocative questions many of us heard from our most whataboutist friends and family members. “Has ‘political correctness’ gone too far?” she asks in one… Read More ‘We are all implicated in this system’: A philosopher’s advice for surviving unethical times
By Philippe Clifton, William Gao, Oskar Zimowski WHO: Gillo Pontecorvo, Saadi YacefWHAT: The Battle of AlgiersWHEN: 1966 – 1971WHERE: The Republic of FranceWHY: For depicting a pro-Algerian perspective of the Battle of Algiers The Battle of Algiers (1966) is a historical film depicting the resistance efforts of Algerian national groups against French colonial authorities between 1954 and… Read More The Censorship Files: The Battle of Algiers (1966)
In the face of an inscrutable, indifferent universe, Pessoa suggests we cultivate a certain longing for the elusive horizon Jonardon Ganeri In elusive point sits on the horizon. A deep yearning stirs within to move closer to this point, perhaps in search of the unknown, perhaps in search of questions without answers. It is a… Read More Solace and saudade
@ravishkumar.official भारत में किताबों की कितनी ऐसी दुकानें होंगी जिनकी सारी किताबों को अगर आप एक क़तार में लगा दें तो वो तीस किलोमीटर लम्बी हो जाएँगी। न्यू यॉर्क शहर में स्ट्रैंड बुकस्टोर में इतनी सारी किताबें हैं। और पढ़ने वाले भी कम नहीं हैं। हम सोचते हैं कि अमरीका में बर्गर-कोक ही चलता है… Read More हिटलर पर किताबों का ख़ज़ाना | Strand bookstore in NYC
First posted March 31, 2013 Shame, Guilt, and Violence / James Gilligan James Gilligan is the author of Violence: Reflections on Our Deadliest Epidemic During the past 35 years I have used prisons and prison mental hospitals as “laboratories” in which to investigate the causes and prevention of the various forms of violence and the relationships between… Read More James Gilligan on Shame, Guilt and Violence
Martin Sherwin struck the deal and dived into the research. But it was only when Kai Bird joined as a collaborator that American Prometheus came to be. By Andy Kifer Martin Sherwin was hardly your classic blocked writer. Outgoing, funny, and athletic, he is described by those who knew him as the opposite of neurotic. EDDIE… Read More Behind ‘Oppenheimer,’ a Prizewinning Biography 25 Years in the Making
Reviewed by Nile Green THEIR ARRIVAL WAS described in the deceptively mellifluous Persian of medieval historian Juvaini: “Amadand o kandand o sokhtand o koshtand o bardand o raftand”—“They came, they uprooted, they burned, they killed, they looted, and they left.” It is one of the tersest lines in world history-writing, summarizing in a single sentence the… Read More A Medieval Age of Disruption: On Nicholas Morton’s “The Mongol Storm”
