NB: A blurb for a book of philosophical essays asks if ours is the era of ‘faint-hearted’ philosophy, because we were/are not ‘able to bear the greatness, the immensity of the claims made by the human spirit.’ The ongoing ideological assault on the mind and the very soul of humanity point to the widespread failures… Read More Natalia Ginzburg: Our Monstrous Ideas
NB: The idea of collective guilt or collective punishment is sheer poison. Everyone, especially the ruling establishments of various countries I need not name, should be aware of the inhumanity of this idea. You cannot defeat darkness with more darkness; violence with more violwence. For all its technological progress, global society seems not to have… Read More ‘We are all human beings first’: Jews and Muslims embrace at vigils for those killed in Bondi beach terror attack
Shobhit Mahajan 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… Read More As AI replaces thinking, learning is eroding
A plutonium-packed generator disappeared on one of the world’s highest mountains in a hush-hush mission the U.S. still won’t talk about. By Jeffrey Gettleman, Hari Kumar, Agnes Chang and Pablo Robles Photographs and videos by Atul Loke. – Dec. 13, 2025 The mission demanded the utmost secrecy. A team of American climbers, handpicked by the C.I.A. for their mountaineering skills —… Read More How Did the C.I.A. Lose a Nuclear Device?
Iranian security forces have “violently arrested” Nobel Peace Prize winner and women’s rights activist Narges Mohammadi, her foundation has said. The Narges Foundation said Ms Mohammadi, 53, was detained in the eastern city of Mashhad, along with other activists. The Nobel Committee said it was “deeply concerned by today’s brutal arrest of Narges Mohammadi” and… Read More Nobel laureate Narges Mohammadi arrested in Iran
Miłosz’s complicated Second World War Alan Jacobs The Polish poet Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004) had a complicated Second World War. He was in Warsaw when the Germans invaded, fleeing then to Ukraine. But then, discovering that his wife had been unable to escape Poland, he tried to return to her by way of Romania, then Ukraine… Read More A Quarrel With the World
++++++Readers outside of India can donate hereto support Mainstream Weeklyhttps://tinyurl.com/2rsy4ss6++++++ In this issue DOCUMENTS: BOOKS IMAGE & SOUND Editor’s Picks: Books of Note
NB: There seems to be Sino-Indian unity on torturing the innocent. DS Arrested in 2013 on India’s Himalayan border after fleeing Beijing’s ‘genocide’ against Muslims in Xinjiang, the siblings have been imprisoned indefinitely ever since then On the evening of 12 June 2013, according to court documents, three “Chinese intruders” were arrested by the Indian… Read More How three Uyghur brothers fled China – to spend 12 years in an Indian prison
In the atomic age, the traditional political distinction between “friends” and “enemies” utterly failed, not because we all became “friends” but because the very notion of “enemy” is now meaningless. The only real enemy threatening us is atomic annihilation; the only real totalitarianism is the atomic condition, which transforms the whole planet into a borderless… Read More The Concrete Possibility of Total Nihilism: Günther Anders and the Atomic Bomb
Peace cannot be engineered on the basis of coercion. It requires justice, and justice is precisely what has been denied to Palestinians for generations – Rashid Khalidi In a region where peace has been promised and broken more times than history can count, optimism is a luxury few can afford. The latest proposal put forward… Read More Trump’s Gaza Plan Is Built on Sand: Why This Proposal Cannot Deliver Peace
After the truth-shower 