“Khalil,” I whisper, not sure which Khalil I’m addressing. “The sky is gone.” Illustration by David Sankey A short story “Black Hole above Gaza” is the winner of the second annual Commonweal Prize for Short Fiction, which recognizes original and outstanding short fiction by emerging writers. Written by Elina Kumra, the story was selected by… Read More Black Hole above Gaza
As GenAI becomes the primary way to find information, local and traditional wisdom is being lost. And we are only beginning to realise what we’re missing… GenAI is trained on massive datasets of text from sources such as books, articles, websites and transcripts – hence the name “large language model” (LLM). But this “training data”… Read More What AI doesn’t know: we could be creating a global ‘knowledge collapse’ / Study Finds More Than Half Of AI’s References Are Fabricated or Erroroneous
Mainstream media is ignoring the fact that the late sex trafficker was one of the world’s preeminent geopoliticians, which is why he entangled so many powerful people in his misdeeds. The human-trafficking sexcapades were not the main thing bringing him together with his pedo friends. It was money and power politics, forming a vital artery… Read More Jeffrey Epstein Was a Warlord. We Have to Talk About It
By Siyavash Shahabi on November 4, 2025 In the past 24 hours, security forces carried out coordinated raids on the homes of several left-wing researchers and translators in Tehran, arresting Parviz Sedaghat, Mahsa Asadollahnejad, and Shirin Karimi. They confiscated the belongings of Mohammad Maljoo and summoned him for questioning; the home of Heiman Rahimi was also searched, and… Read More The War on Minds: Inside the Iranian Regime’s Coordinated Arrests of Left Scholars
NB: No wonder lacs of Indian students do their best to go abroad for higher studies. This government wishes to abolish the thought process completely. This is not national rejuvenation but a national disaster. DS ‘Since I can no longer guarantee the intellectual integrity of the research colloquium and that it will not be cancelled… Read More DU Cancels Delhi School of Economics Seminar Without Formal Reason, Convenor Resigns
the ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction … no longer exists: Hannah Arendt NB: The author asks: If the first term of Donald Trump provoked anxiety over the fate of objective knowledge, the second has led to claims we live… Read More A critique of pure stupidity: understanding Trump 2.0
They make a desert, they call it peace: These plunderers of the world [the Romans], after exhausting the land by their devastations, are rifling the ocean: stimulated by avarice, if their enemy be rich; by ambition, if poor; unsatiated by the East and by the West: the only people who behold wealth & indigence with… Read More The shameless racists who perpetrated Gaza’s genocide pose as its saviours, survivors return home – to a wasteland
As platforms degrade into outrage and slop, users are turning away John Burn-Murdoch In years to come, we may well look back on September 2025 as the point at which social media jumped the shark and began rapidly accelerating its transition from the place to be seen (through a flattering Instagram filter), to a gaudy… Read More Have we passed peak social media?
The RSS’ intellectual stagnation and myth-based narratives risk alienating it from India’s knowledge-driven society Bharat Bhushan One hundred years ago, on Vijayadashami Day, September 27, 1925, the men who gathered at the residence of Keshav Baliram Hedgewar in Nagpur could have hardly imagined how powerful the organisation they were founding would become. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a… Read More RSS’ success also has seeds of destruction
After the truth-shower 