New secrets from our past have been coming out in droves. By Ross Andersen Some 50,000 years ago, modern humans wandered into Ice Age Europe. The continent was new to us Homo sapiens, but not for beings of our general kind. Neanderthals and their ancestors had been living among Eurasia’s glaciers for ages, and in ways that… Read More The Human-Origin Story Is Being Radically Revised
NB: August 9 is the 81st anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki Henry Giroux: Remembering Hiroshima Hiroshima: Why The Bomb Was Dropped – ABC News (1995) By Alex Wellerstein | August 10, 2025 – Author’s observations + Q & A on Reddit Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists When it comes to marking anniversaries of the atomic… Read More Truman never ordered the use of the atomic bombs — but he did order atomic bombings to be stopped
The Ram Mandir donations theft and Modi’s men who should answer for it ‘Aham Brahmasmi’ – The Grandiose Self Dhirendra K Jha, Amrita Singh August 1, 2026 FIVE MONTHS AFTER Narendra Modi began his second term as prime minister, the Supreme Court delivered his government a momentous gift. On 9 November 2019, it settled a land dispute in… Read More Trust Issues
The life of the hugely influential ‘people’s historian’ is explored in a wide-ranging new book that brings in everything from wars to civil rights to Matt Damon When times got tough for Zinn: “… he was able to live through these times when he was also able to lecture in the classroom, about all sorts… Read More The incredible life of historian Howard Zinn (1922-2010)
Unpacking Trump’s End Game in Latin America with William Callison and Verónica Gago Source: PATTERNS by Naomi Klein Naomi Klein, William Callison, and Verónica Gago Jul 30, 2026 Several readers of this newsletter have asked us to cover the attacks on democracy in Latin America. With that in mind, this week, I am thrilled to share Patterns’ first… Read More The Goal is a Fascist Continent
In the words of the Swedish Academy, he “uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression’s closed rooms.” The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti,… Read More Harold Pinter: Nobel Prize lecture; 2005
NB: The tangled web of communal politics in South Asia as a whole is exemplified by the circumstances in which Nasrin was hounded out of her own country for defending the human rights of minorities; and thereafter from India, for her critical remarks about religious extremism. Criticism of religion as well as of communal versions… Read More Taslima Nasrin returns to Kolkata after two decades
How the RSS is infiltrating India’s intellectual spaces NB: The Caravan article below indicates why the Modi government was so reluctant to dismiss the Education Minister. News Flash: Pradhan submitted his resignation a few hours ago. Read his statement here. It took over a month of agitation by millions of students and also overseas Indians… Read More The Takeover (2019)
As the far right fulminates about who ‘belongs’ in Britain, let’s remember Fritz Lustig, who arrived here in 1939, just months before war broke out. Initially jailed as an ‘enemy alien’, he played a vital role in a top-secret military intelligence unit Robin Lustig When the Nazis came to power in Germany in January 1933, Fritz Lustig,… Read More My father, the German refugee who fought the Nazis as a ‘secret listener’
Tom Engelhardt ( Tom Engelhardt Substack) – I recently drove to a gas station in Massachusetts to fill my tank with regular gas, the cheapest around, and, to my surprise, given what’s going on, it was only $4.59 a gallon. Okay, okay, I take back that “only” and admit it. It’s not good to joke about the nightmare… Read More America’s Imperial Wars, from Korea to Iran
