Harry Belafonte obituary NB: He sang songs of plantation workers in the Caribbean, I remember hearing them through my childhood. What a great man. RIP Harry Belafonte (1927-2023) Harry Belafonte in a recording studio in the late 1950s. Photograph: Pictorial Parade/Getty Images Day O! The Banana boat song Day-o, day-oDaylight come and we want go homeDay,… Read More Harry Belafonte’s staggering musical and screen career
A Private Spy: The Letters of John le Carré; ed. Tim Cornwell by Peter Hitchens John le Carré, whose real name was David Cornwell, was Britain’s greatest novelist of the late twentieth century. He was also a sneaky government nark, who spied on his friends for the state. He sent damaging reports on them to the… Read More The double life of John le Carré
A First Folio edition of William Shakespeare’s plays that was published in 1623 is being put on display. By Yasmin Rufo Guildhall Library will be showcasing the rare book as part of a celebration of 400 years since the book was published. Copies of the First Folio edition were sold for between 15 shillings and… Read More First edition Shakespeare text from 1623 goes on display
The labor historians of the 1960s were born into the culture of unity forged in the working-class movement’s classical phase, between 1890 and 1945. In one form or another, they told the story of this era, not realizing how radically it might come undone. Gabriel Winant Labor’s Mind: A History of Working-Class Intellectual Lifeby Tobias… Read More “Hurrah for the Time Man!” Tribute to David Montgomery (1927-2011)
NEW DELHI: Breakthrough Science Society, a collective of scientists and researchers across India, has raised concerns over the deleted ‘Theory of Biological Evolution’ from National Council of Educational Training and Research (NCERT) books for Class 10. Condemning NCERT’s decision, the collective wrote that learning “evolutionary biology is important not just to any subfield of biology, but is… Read More NCERT Books: 1,800 scientists, researchers demand restoration of Darwin’s evolution theory
Olivier Bancoult US military personnel live in my birthplace, the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, but I am not allowed to. Since I was four years old, my people, the Chagossians, have lived in impoverished exile, while the US military has been enjoying the fruits of my homeland. The plight of my people has… Read More The US and UK stole our homes. 50 years on, we’re still being denied justice
According to the ‘basic structure’ doctrine of the Supreme Court put forward in 1973, there are features of the Constitution that are unamendable by Parliament under any circumstances. The doctrine is the only legal defence against parliamentary hegemony and a rewriting of the Constitution. SRIRAM PANCHU; APRAMEYA MANTHENA; VIKAS MURALIDHARAN The Constitution of India is… Read More The ‘Basic Structure’ Doctrine: Defence against Parliamentary Hegemony
First posted November 19, 2011 NB: I wrote this article in the aftermath of the January 2011 judgement by two Supreme Court judges on the murder of Graham Staines and his two sons in Orissa in 1999. The debate on religious questions is a secondary one. The first major point of my article is this:… Read More Terrifying implications of the Supreme Court’s Staines Judgement
The regime’s mimicry of Pakistan in rewriting India’s history Mukul Kesavan The decision to allegedly unburden schoolchildren by deleting the Mughal era from their history curriculum has provoked amusing memes: images of the Taj Mahal complete with captions about its mysterious origins and jokes about gallant medieval Rajput rulers routed by invisible armies. These are… Read More Maiming India
by J. BRADFORD DELONG Interpreting politics through the rise of technocracy, morality, and the “web of capital” NB: A thought provoking but to my mind flawed analysis. Our world is run according to the poltical theory of Carl Schmitt, moral principles are subjugated by power; the rule of law replaced by the rule of ideology; and… Read More The Modern World Reconceived
