On Carlo Ginzburg (1939–2026) Amelia Soth It was like falling in love: passionate, immediate, and naive. In the library at the Scuola Normale in Pisa, Carlo Ginzburg, age 20, made three decisions in the same instant: to become a historian, to study witchcraft trials, and to try and rescue (to use his term) the voices… Read More Playing Roulette in the Archives
NB: The towering achievement of the ‘crazy old women’ – the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo. Salute DS Tali Goldman The news broke on August 5, 2014, and it shook all of Argentina: After a thirty-six-year search, Estela de Carlotto, the president of Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo (the Grandmothers of the Plaza de… Read More Beyond Lost and Found
A conversation with David Rieff and Steve Wasserman / New Lehrhaus Robert Oppenheimer helped bring the atomic bomb into existence, then became a target of the government he served. In this conversation hosted by New Lehrhaus on October 25, 2026, biographer David Rieff joins publisher Steve Wasserman to explore Oppenheimer’s political awakening, his relationship to… Read More Oppenheimer, the Bomb and the Price of Serving the State
NB: (The counter revolution) tried many forms and devices, but soon learned that it could come to power only with the help of the state machine and never against it… the Kapp Putsch of 1920 and the Hitler Pustch of 1923 had proved this.. In the centre of the counter revolution stood the judiciary. Unlike… Read More Independence of Judiciary and Justice Sanjay Kaul’s Charge that Ex CJI Chandrachud was Deferential to Government
Israel’s supporters insist that the country’s oppression and mass killings of Palestinians is a legitimate response to the region’s complicated past. It isn’t. Aman Sethi And so each year since 2023, as the summer gives way to autumn, we must consider and contemplate 7 October. The thing that defenders of Israel say to anyone seeking… Read More The devastating simplicity of the genocide in Gaza
Brian Ulrich Informed Comment During the past seven months, the world has seen the significance of the Strait of Hormuz, a crucial chokepoint not only for oil, but natural gas, fertilizer, food for the Gulf states, and other industrial materials. That strait actually takes its name from a city and kingdom which once dominated the… Read More The Strait of Hormuz in World History & the Present Crisis
Roger Berkowitz Hannah Arendt’s homeland was populated with friends, most of them men—at least that is what her published correspondence would lead you to believe. The published letters between Arendt and her friends include books with Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Heinrich Blücher, Gershom Scholem, Kurt Blumenfeld, and Joachim Fest. The only woman whose correspondence with… Read More On Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy’s Decades-Long Friendship
How the ancient pharaohs attempted to preserve their legacies for eternity By Susan Tallman Not so long ago, heroic public statuary felt irrelevant—good for locating yourself in traffic circles but otherwise dismissed as a relic of some credulous, great-man-besotted past. The fact that places like Pyongyang and Ashgabat still went in for it just confirmed… Read More The Vanity of Kings
I stood on a hill and I saw the Old approaching, but it came as the New…. Bertolt Brecht Dear readers, in a note to an earlier post, Electoral Inquisition, I mentioned the outstanding features of our ruling establishment: it uses democracy to destroy democracy it demands eternal power in the name of the people… Read More India’s self-incubated East India Company
Philip Oltermann In a new book, German artist and writer Philipp Ruch argues that viewing the ascent of Hitler’s NSDAP through the prism of the Third Reich has distorted our understanding of fascism’s electoral breakthrough With your art collective Centre for Political Beauty you famously built a replica of the Holocaust memorial on a property… Read More ‘Hitler was a lazy criminal who slept in until noon’: why most of what we think we know about the rise of the Nazis is wrong
