The Tribune, 16 December, 2025 Chat GPT and Google Gemini are rapidly becoming the go-to places for students. That by itself is not surprising-after all generations of students have found ways to avoid rigor and skirt around academic engagement. Champion Guides (which condensed the whole course into a pocket-sized paperback) were followed by short YouTube… Read More Shobhit Mahajan: As AI replaces thinking, learning is eroding
Review by Patrick Malcolmson “In a time when tyranny is resurgent all over the globe, in a bewildering variety of forms – military and civilian, theocratic and kleptocratic, ideological and tribal – this book provides a synoptic historical and philosophic perspective that does full justice to the manifold phenomenon in all its range and complexity.”… Read More Tyrants: A History of Power, Injustice, and Terror
NB: An instructive essay on our current dispensation. I would sum up this regime’s method as a confusion of wisdom with cunning; its speech as unending sophistry (लफ़्फ़ाज़ी); and its goal as the eradication of simple human decency from public life. DS India’s current regime rests on three interwoven factors: Hindutva, a captured civil society,… Read More Suhas Palshikar: Anatomy of India’s New Regime
NB: A well written account of the ideas of a great thinker. However, when the author tells us that ‘Straussians are not necessarily but mostly Republicans‘, it jars, because in his own words, Strauss ‘did say that philosophy had been endangered by adopting a political agenda‘. The domain of the spirit cannot be reduced to… Read More The Legacy of Leo Strauss After 50 Years
Increasingly isolated president is determined to press on with Ukraine war, say well-placed sources, despite ailing economy Pjotr Sauer and Shaun Walker Vladimir Putin pulled up to a hotel in central Moscow earlier in May in a Russian-made SUV, dressed casually in jeans and a light jacket. Carrying a bouquet of flowers, he walked unhurriedly into the… Read More ‘There is profound disappointment in him’: mood in Russia turns against Putin / Russia hits Kyiv with hypersonic ballistic missile in ‘deranged’ attack
NB: This literary enormity is very serious, but I have no idea whether the academic community will take it seriously. I have taught for many years, but these past few weeks have made me more concerned than ever before about what AI is doing to the minds and mentalities of our younger generation. It’s bad… Read More The Commonwealth Short Story Prize is Dead
Academia has become unrooted from pedagogy. William Deresiewicz That liberalism is under threat is now a cliché—yet this has done nothing to stem the global resurgence of illiberalism. Part of the problem is that liberalism is often considered too “thin” to win over the allegiance of citizens, and that liberals are too afraid of speaking… Read More Colleges, Maybe Try Teaching!
From 30th May – 4th June, 2026 in Chandigarh ~Applications are open~ Apply here. Last date to apply is 17th May, 2026. Context We live in an era of rapid technological progress. Building on the advancements in electronics and computing, just the last two decades have been marked by the emergence of buzz words like digital… Read More Summer School on Technology, Environment, and Society
John Boersma Tyranny and Revolution: Rousseau to Heidegger By Waller R. Newell; 2022 Waller Newell: Interview: The Characteristics of Tyranny Today’s political discourse is rife with the prognosis that liberalism is in trouble, evidenced by the rise of anti-liberal and post-liberal thought, each of which maintains that a politics based on material self-interest is incapable… Read More Tyranny and Revolution: Rousseau to Heidegger
For decades, many Chinese viewed the United States with a mix of admiration, envy and resentment. President Trump’s volatile second term shattered that image. Li Yuan When President Trump visited China in late 2017, Xi Jinping welcomed him with a grand display of Chinese history and culture: a four-hour private tour of the Forbidden City culminating in… Read More China Increasingly Views Trump’s America as an Empire in Decline
After the truth-shower 