Pjotr Sauer The body of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has been handed over to his mother nine days after he died in an Arctic prison, his spokesperson announced on Saturday. In a post on X, Kira Yarmysh thanked “all those who had demanded” the return of his body, but added that she did not know if… Read More Alexei Navalny’s body given to mother by Russian authorities
How paranoid accusations of “violence” became all the rage… When scholars of higher education write the history of this strange period, they will surely wonder that, with so much real violence raging elsewhere, the denizens of some of the safest spaces in the world fretted so much over merely verbal arrows. By Len Gutkin Shai Davidai,… Read More The Hyperbolic Style in American Academe
First posted August 15, 2013 “Yes, I know all that. I should be modern” – begins Ramanujan’s ‘Conventions of Despair’. Others in India have felt this impulse, and it has pulled them in different directions. In politics, it has drawn them towards nationalism, socialism and fascism. In religion, it has had similarly contradictory effects: either… Read More Nakul Krishna on A. K. Ramanujan: The literary legacy of an Indian modernist / The essay censored by DU’s Academic Council
Leading press freedom groups and human rights organisations have called on Joe Biden to do more to pressure Israel to “abide by international law” amid accusations that its military is targeting journalists in the Gaza war, and to hold it to account for the killings of reporters. The Committee to Protect Journalists, Human Rights Watch, Freedom House… Read More Press freedom groups urge Biden to hold Israel accountable for killings of journalists
Greg Conti It has quickly become a commonplace that American elite higher education is in a more perilous position than it has been in recent memory. Long-standing conservative discontent has crystallized as a result of recent events; multiple proposals targeting universities’ pocketbooks have been floated by lawmakers in the past weeks. Republican officials have made… Read More The Rise of the Sectarian University (in the USA)
GAZA casualties live statistics United Nations Documentation on the Origins and Evolution of the Palestine Problem JUAN COLE Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The chief characteristic of the current Israeli government of PM Binyamin Netanyahu is the inclusion in it of elements that were shunned in Israeli politics until recently — the Kahanaists, who are… Read More Can Masha Gessen get an Apology now that Israel’s Cabinet Minister Smotrich called Gaza a ‘Ghetto’ that Should be Depopulated?
US-Russian journalist Masha Gessen won Germany’s Hannah Arendt prize for political thought. Supporters of Gessen, who is Jewish, and whose grandfather and great-grandfather were among family members murdered by the Nazis, have been quick to point out the irony of suspending a prize awarded in memory of Arendt, the German-born Jewish-American historian, philosopher and antitotalitarian… Read More Award ceremony suspended after writer compares Gaza to Nazi-era Jewish ghettos
How the politics of memory in Europe obscures what we see in Israel and Gaza today By Masha Gessen Berlin never stops reminding you of what happened there. Several museums examine totalitarianism and the Holocaust; the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe takes up an entire city block. In a sense, though, these larger structures… Read More In the Shadow of the Holocaust
How legal frameworks are being used to throttle free speech and the media…The dangerous beauty of this framework is that each bill touches upon only certain key aspects that may be crucial for freedom of speech, but, together, they constitute a gargantuan web that is difficult to escape. ANANT NATH On 10 November 2023, the… Read More Drowning Voices
Fahad Shah, whose case was a symbol of harassment of region’s media, says he has different outlook after months behind bars Aakash Hassan During his more than 600 days behind bars, Fahad Shah, a Kashmiri journalist, had begun to lose hope that he would ever see freedom again. It was in February last year that… Read More ‘Jail crushes you slowly’: Kashmiri journalist reflects on prison ordeal
After the truth-shower 