First posted December 12, 2011 How to describe Kafka, the man? Like this, perhaps: It is as if he had spent his entire life wondering what he looked like, without ever discovering there are such things as mirrors A naked man among a multitude who are dressed A mind living in sin with the soul… Read More The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head: Franz Kafka: A Biographical Essay
China feels the country isn’t patriotic enough. A new law aims to change that Hong KongCNN — On a brisk December day, junior high school students in Fuzhou, southeast China, converged at a country park to study the thoughts of Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Unfurling a red banner that declared their outing a “walking classroom of politics and… Read More Nationalism = Enforced patriotism
The intrepid logician Kurt Gödel believed in the afterlife. In four heartfelt letters to his mother he explained why Alexander T Englert As the foremost logician of the 20th century, Kurt Gödel is well known for his incompleteness theorems and contributions to set theory, the publications of which changed the course of mathematics, logic and… Read More Kurt Gödel to his mother: We’ll meet again
Parvati Sharma It is an odd thing about very famous works of art that the better they are known, the more they can surprise you with their brilliance. This is how it was for me when, a few months ago, I had the luck to see Michelangelo’s David. In the flesh, or so it seems,… Read More Goliath is now David
Kevin B. Anderson and Russell Rockwell, eds, The Dunayevskaya-Marcuse-Fromm Correspondence, 1954-1978: Dialogues on Hegel, Marx and Critical Theory, 2012 Reviewed by Ben Watson Raya Dunayevskaya died in 1987 aged 77, but her ideas remain alive and to-be-lived-by today, a permanent reproach to thought’s accommodation to an intolerable present. Dunayevskaya inspired and inspires a special enthusiasm, evidenced here by… Read More The Raya Dunayevskaya – Herbert Marcuse -Erich Fromm Correspondence
Bharat Bhushan Democracy is in peril in Bangladesh with elections widely perceived as flawed. Combined with economic woes and social unrest, the country is on the brink. The Bangladesh general election on January 7 is widely expected to be neither inclusive nor competitive. The main Opposition party, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), is boycotting the elections… Read More Bangladesh: A staged election could result in political instability
H. PATRICIA HYNES President Joe Biden “Missile Theft,” by Juan Cole, Digital, Dream/ Dreamland v. 3/ IbisPaint, 2023 Dear Joe, I would wish you a Happy New Year; but it seems trite and banal, given all the challenges and troubles you and our country face in 2024 – some inherited from previous administrations, others of… Read More Dear President Biden: About your Record on Guns, Arms, and Belligerence
By ANDREW JONES It may be a new year, but America remains mired in a myriad of national dysfunction. The list is endless: A close ally continues to an immoral human rights disaster, Republican madness is ramping up at the behest of Donald Trump and we suffered through yet another return by the father of North and Saint West who… Read More America’s addiction to awful people
Michael Hardt Progressive and revolutionary movements of the 1970s, which took place across the globe, provide an inspiring and useful guide for contemporary radical political thought and action, even more than those of the 1960s. The sixties were a crucial historical turning point and we can certainly learn from those movements, both the victorious and… Read More The Subversive Seventies
NB: Gideon Levy’s voice reassures us that reason and compassion live in all of us, regardless of religion, nationality, time or place. He has always spoken against injustice, and for the rights of suffering humanity, especially those closest to him, in Palestine. Here he talks about the phenomenon of evil, of whose existence, every now… Read More The Legitimization of Evil Will Remain With Israelis Long After the War in Gaza Ends
