Over a decade ago, a young IAS officer deployed in Bastar told this reporter that as much as they wanted Bastar to be freed from the Naxals, their ouster from the jungle would immediately lead to it being taken over by mining companies. Ashutosh Bhardwaj As the Maoist insurgency reaches its fag end with the… Read More As Naxalism Fades, Adivasi Futures Still Stand on Precarious Ground
In this issue DOCUMENTS BOOKS IMAGE & SOUND Editor’s Picks: Coverpage artwork credits: Drawing from photo of Saint Exupery station in Lyon from Nov 2025 by Harsh Kapoor) https://mainstreamweekly.net/article16390.html
The Serbian-American economist Branko Milanović has emerged as one of the most discerning thinkers of our time – and certainly one of the most productive. In his books since 2016, he has moved from measuring global inequality to theorising capitalism’s competing forms to excavating how we’ve historically thought about inequality. His new book, The Great Global Transformation, studies… Read More The Great Global Transformation
Tina Brown Jeffrey Epstein is the slug who will not die. His trail of slime sticks to everyone who ever crossed his path. The copious accretions have even buried Trump’s futile efforts to browbeat MAGA Congress members to vote against the full release of the Epstein files. In a total backflip to avoid the humiliation… Read More Why Trump Doesn’t Stand a Chance of Killing the Epstein Story
As GenAI becomes the primary way to find information, local and traditional wisdom is being lost. And we are only beginning to realise what we’re missing… GenAI is trained on massive datasets of text from sources such as books, articles, websites and transcripts – hence the name “large language model” (LLM). But this “training data”… Read More What AI doesn’t know: we could be creating a global ‘knowledge collapse’ / Study Finds More Than Half Of AI’s References Are Fabricated or Erroroneous
The fundamental problem is this: that most of the means of communication are owned or influenced by the very rich George Monbiot If this were just a climate crisis, we would fix it. The technology, money and strategies have all been at hand for years. What stifles effective action is a deadly conjunction: the climate… Read More Dark forces are preventing us fighting the climate crisis – by taking knowledge hostage
By Siyavash Shahabi on November 4, 2025 In the past 24 hours, security forces carried out coordinated raids on the homes of several left-wing researchers and translators in Tehran, arresting Parviz Sedaghat, Mahsa Asadollahnejad, and Shirin Karimi. They confiscated the belongings of Mohammad Maljoo and summoned him for questioning; the home of Heiman Rahimi was also searched, and… Read More The War on Minds: Inside the Iranian Regime’s Coordinated Arrests of Left Scholars
Donald Trump is using US power to insert himself into other countries’ affairs, treating them as vassals Steven Greenhouse For decades, president after president has sought to rid the US of its image as a bullying, imperialistic nation. But with his blustering, often brutish behavior toward other countries, Donald Trump has rapidly revived that notion. Under Trump,… Read More Brutish, bullying, imperialistic: the Ugly American is back
The enduring lesson of Zohran Mamdani’s victory is that the moderate Centre is invariably the respectable front for right-wing prejudice. The voices of the liberal Centre, the political ‘moderates’, the newspapers and the magazines responded to Mamdani’s candidacy in a way that was indistinguishable from Donald Trump’s denunciations Mukul Kesavan New York’s mayoral race was… Read More Zohran’s run
Where the postcolonial Left meets the Hindu Right NB: This is an interesting overview, although I cannot agree with some of the author’s arguments. For instance, I think it is true that Hindutva marks an attempt to recast Sanatan Dharma as an Abrahamic-style faith; the main objective being homogeneity and subjugation of an entire population… Read More India’s Conservative Revolution
After the truth-shower 