The World at First Light: A New History of the RenaissanceBernd Roeck Tom Verde Historians typically trace the birth of the Renaissance to fourteenth-century Florence. Then, after three centuries, that brilliant era of artistry eventually gave way to the Reformation, with its shift away from humanism, and the Enlightenment, which picked up (and ran) where… Read More Why the West?
NB: An excellent commentary; except for one misnomer: when it comes to Western imperial establishments and their hangers-on, it’s not their moral stupidity, but their moral depravity that we are confronted with. The truth is as clear as crystal: they are irredeemably racist, as racist as the Nazi jurists who concocted the phrase ‘life not… Read More Gaza and the Problem of Moral Stupidity
The cultural fascination with the middle ages rarely acknowledges that power is still won and abused in the same wayIt makes a mockery of the idea that we use “medieval” as a term of abuse to fling at others, when really it’s a term that correctly defines enduring and deeply shameful characteristics of our own… Read More Our tendency to persecute others is as alive today as in medieval times
Saba Naqvi I am in a cab in the Awadh region of Uttar Pradesh, where our family village home is located. Ayodhya is 100 km away, the road signs say. The vehicle is clean, the driver courteous and clearly deeply religious. His telephone declares “Jai Shri Ram” a thousand times during our drive because it is set… Read More Ayodhya’s holy scandal
Adam Tooze April 17, 2026 In March in Beijing I had the privilege of meeting and talking with Professor Wang Hui of Tsinghua. This edited transcript is published in cooperation with Equator Magazine (many thanks to the editorial team there) with an introduction by my friend Kaiser Kuo. Introduction by Kaiser Kuo To sit in Beijing in… Read More The Two-Faced Present – A conversation about the “short twentieth century” – and the paradoxical twenty-first with Wang Hui
Imagine then, for a moment, not the darkness of the cinema so much as the darkness of the king and queen’s pillared hall, where guests are gathered for feasting and for telling stories. Against the flickering fire, the bard strikes up with his harp and starts to sing, performing tales of adventure and loss, return… Read More ‘More postmodern than ancient’: why the Odyssey is everywhere, from Oz to Westeros
The liberation of the American peoples cannot be achieved without the shedding of imperial weight, writes the Pulitzer prize-winning author in this somber essay marking the semiquincentennial VIET THANH NGUYEN The word I think of to describe the United States on its 250th anniversary is cruelty. There are other words, of course, that could describe… Read More ‘250 Years of Cruelty’ – Two essays on the ‘American Empire’ and How to Save the U.S.
What Gaza reveals about the ideology that shaped the modern West NB: Since October 2023, at least 20,179 Palestinian children have been killed; and 44,143 injured. 58,000 children have been orphaned. Palestine has the largest concentration of child amputees in the world. This is the blood soaked memorial of so-called western civilisation. And our cowardly government… Read More The End of Liberalism
The main pillars of the founding narrative have fallen on hard times. Today, its meaning is up for grabs Nikhil Pal Singh Writing during the carnage of the first world war, the iconoclast intellectual Randolph Bourne described the American revolutionary inheritance as a squalid marriage between the town capitalist and plantation patriarch. Glittering generalities of… Read More The American myth always came at someone’s expense. Now, it’s all but collapsed
NB: A profound reminder that our self-appointed decolonisers themselves need to decolonise their minds. DS भारतीय ज्ञान परंपरा और संघी एजेंडा पर समाजशास्त्री प्रो. पुरुषोत्तम अग्रवाल के तीखे सवाल। क्या हिंदुत्व एजेंडा के तहत सिर्फ वैदिक-ब्राह्मण परंपरा का महिमामंडन हो रहा है और बौद्ध, जैन तथा लोकायत जैसी लोक परंपराओं को दरकिनार किया जा रहा… Read More भारतीय ज्ञान परंपरा या RSS का कोई छुपा हुआ एजेंडा? Indian Knowledge System: प्रो. पुरुषोत्तम अग्रवाल
