The Colombian novelist on Trump’s new doctrine and the long shadow of US aggression in Latin America Intervention and imperialism: that’s what the new world looks like. It will take many shapes. One of them is what we saw in Venezuela, but other processes are at work. I’ve been worried for a long time about… Read More ‘An International Thug’
The president has vowed to kill off ‘woke’ in his second term in office, and the venerable cultural institution a few blocks from the White House is in his sights By Charlotte Higgins On 30 May last year, Kim Sajet was working in her office in the grandly porticoed National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC. The gallery… Read More Trump’s assault on the Smithsonian: ‘The goal is to reframe the entire culture of the US’
Once humiliation is naturalised as a civilisational condition, violence no longer appears as aggression but as rectification. Anubhav Singh Cinema has never merely reflected political life; it has functioned as one of its most efficient laboratories. From its earliest mass forms, cinema has been a technology for organising affect, disciplining perception, and training populations to… Read More How Hindi Cinema is Preparing India for Violence
NB: Justice in India today: no trial, no conviction, no bail; jail for 5 years. Sometimes we are punished not for what we did but for who we are. DS The young scholar’s work, though not without its flaws, is one of one of the most accomplished doctoral dissertations by an Indian that I have… Read More Ramachandra Guha: In praise of Dr Umar Khalid, from one historian to another
The United States is a republic forged by war; its founding document lists grievances against a king for quartering troops and waging war without consent. Yet modern Americans often cheer the latest intervention with little reflection on history or morality. The Maduro raid reveals a people quick to salute and slow to question. When the… Read More The Ugly Truth About Many Americans: They Love War
Opinion by Anne Applebaum In George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, the world is divided into three spheres of influence: Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia, all perpetually at war. Sometimes two of the states form an alliance against the third. Sometimes they abruptly switch sides. No reasons are given. Instead, the Party tells the proles, “We have always been at… Read More Trump’s ‘American dominance’ may leave the USA with nothing
How Did I End Up Living in Donald Trump’s Suicidal America? By Tom Engelhardt As 2026 begins, what a strange planet we find ourselves on. The two great empires of my youth, the Soviet Union (now Russia) and my own country, are clearly experiencing some version of imperial decline, even if Vladimir Putin is acting otherwise… Read More What Planet Are We On?
Maybe we have lost the quality of friendship in becoming too particular about whom we choose to have as friends, and in a sense eroding what is, after all, the essence of friendship—camaraderie of various kinds and a fundamental trust in the other : From Just Being NB: Professor Romila Thapar is a stalwart of… Read More Romila Thapar: Just Being
The kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro and his wife solidifies America’s role as a gangster state. Violence does not generate peace. It generates violence. The immolation of international and humanitarian law, as the U.S. and Israel have done in Gaza, and as took place in Caracas, generates a world without laws, a world of… Read More ‘Naked imperialism’: how Trump intervention in Venezuela is a return to form for the US
Ending the American Dream by 2029? For writers, the future has long been a tricky terrain. While the past can prove unsettling and the present uncomfortable, the future seems to free the mind from reality’s restraints and let the imagination soar. Yet it has also proven full of political pitfalls. The ‘Putinization’ of US foreign… Read More Alfred McCoy: The Future According to Trump / Julian Borger: The Putinization of US foreign policy has arrived in Venezuela
After the truth-shower 