As for Don Quixote, though, if he had been newly created in 2025, he would certainly be squaring off against AI. Anthony Grafton The Study: The Inner Life of Renaissance Libraries by Andrew Hui The Librarian’s Atlas: The Shape of Knowledge in Early Modern Spain by Seth Kimmel Libraries were all the rage in Renaissance Europe, and no wonder. Theatres of knowledge,… Read More No Cheese Please
First posted November 29, 2019 The single best thing ever written on the idea of the university in India is Ashutosh Mukherjee’s Convocation Address to Mysore University in 1916, and published in the now inaccessible Dacca Review (October 1918). It literally anticipates every single debate we have on the idea of the university – from… Read More Pratap Bhanu Mehta: Once upon a time there was another public, another India
Sapan Bookshelf: Coming Back: The Odyssey of a Pakistani Through India – By Shueyb Gandapur Countless Centuries Press, 2025By Sayali Goyal / Sapan News As someone who has worked on writing stories on the interconnectedness of the world for the last decade, now researching kinship in East and West Punjab through material cultures, I was immediately… Read More Coming Back: The Odyssey of a Pakistani Through India
Prem Shankar Jha The following are excerpts from The Dismantling of India’s Democracy: 1947 to 2025 by Prem Shankar Jha; reproduced with permission from the publisher, Speaking Tiger. Over the decade since Narendra Modi has been the prime minister of India, at the head of a BJP government supported by a few local allies in the states… Read More Narendra Modi’s Step by Step Journey Towards Creating Fascism in India
Gideon Levy Pablo Picasso painted his famous picture in response to the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica on April 26, 1937. We now have a modern filmed version from Gaza. This report by Gideon Levy, in Haaretz, July 13, 2025 // The people of Guernica, which was bombed by fascists and Nazis during… Read More Gaza’s Guernica / Guernica stands in solidarity with Gaza (2024)
This impeccably sourced account of the secretive agency during a period of global turmoil deserves a Pulitzer John Simpson In 1976 when we were both based in Brussels, my BBC mentor, the great Charles Wheeler, came back to the office from a grand US embassy party one evening and remarked: “The cleverest and most entertaining… Read More The Mission by Tim Weiner: Unmasking the CIA
Based on classified documents and first-person interviews, a startling history of the American war on Vietnamese civilians. Turse’s central aim in Kill Anything that Moves is to expose the unparalleled obscenity of the Vietnam War: unparalleled both in terms of the devastating scale and variety of harm done and the diabolical levels of premeditation on the part of the… Read More Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam
Chandan Gowda After publishing several major Kannada stories in Prajavani and other publications in Mysore state, the nineteen-year-old Rajalakshmi N. Rao published The Rain, her scintillating debut story in English, in The Illustrated Weekly of India in late 1954. On the heels of the buzz around this story by a Kannada writer, B R Nagaraj,… Read More A precious discovery: The Living Stream
First posted June 19, 2016 “Islamic civilization developed a construct of history that labeled the pre-Islamic period the Age of Ignorance and projected Islam as the sole source of all that was civilized – and used that construct so effectively in its rewriting of history that the peoples of Middle East lost all knowledge of… Read More S. B. Zaki: Arab women before and after Islam. Opening the door of pre-Islamic Arabian history
by Mark Cartwright The Mongols conquered vast swathes of Asia in the 13th and 14th century CE thanks to their fast light cavalry and excellent bowmen, but another significant contribution to their success was the adoption of their enemies’ tactics and technology that allowed them to defeat established military powers in China, Persia, and Eastern Europe. Adapting to different challenges and… Read More Mongol Warfare
After the truth-shower 