America’s epistemic challenges run deeper than social media. (NB: It’s not just an American problem) Dan Williams Many people sense that the United States is undergoing an epistemic crisis, a breakdown in the country’s collective capacity to agree on basic facts, distinguish truth from falsehood, and adhere to norms of rational debate. “The Yellow Press,” by… Read More Scapegoating the Algorithm
Prem Shankar Jha The following are excerpts from The Dismantling of India’s Democracy: 1947 to 2025 by Prem Shankar Jha; reproduced with permission from the publisher, Speaking Tiger. Over the decade since Narendra Modi has been the prime minister of India, at the head of a BJP government supported by a few local allies in the states… Read More Narendra Modi’s Step by Step Journey Towards Creating Fascism in India
There is a quiet crisis in higher education in India that runs deep, distinguished academician and former Chief Economic Advisor Deepak Nayyar said here on Wednesday (July 9, 2025), delivering the 2025 B.G. Deshmukh Lecture on ‘The Crisis of Higher Education in India: Disturbing Present and Worrisome Future’. Holding the Narendra Modi government responsible for… Read More There is a quiet and visible crisis in higher education in India that runs deep: Deepak Nayyar
The substitution of Large Language Models for genuine thinking is a generational threat. At stake is no less than the life of the mind. Aaron MacLean I have a warning for you. There is a conspiracy afoot in the land, targeting all of us. The computers in our pockets and the screens all around us… Read More A warning to the young: just say no to AI
The Spectacle is the guardian of sleep: Guy Debord Tina Brown The essential truth of long-form television is that even the best series – Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, The Sopranos – can only end, effectively, with mass death and unanticipated disaster, as events turn evilly against their own makers. They rarely achieve even the… Read More Orange Lotus: How the Trump Show Outwits Reality
As Alaa Abd el-Fattah’s mother remains on hunger strike, supporters say activist’s continued detention is campaign of vengeance by Egypt’s president… Mahmoud Shalaby, a researcher at Amnesty International says: “The whole thing is about making an example of him. He’s already been brutally punished. He has spent almost 10 years in prison solely for practising… Read More ‘The idea was to crush his spirit’: family of jailed British-Egyptian man describe awful prison conditions
How the media becomes an arm of the government Hartosh Singh Bal December 1, 2020 {1} AS IT BECAME CLEAR that Donald Trump had been ousted and Joe Biden was to be the next president of the United States, Anant Goenka tweeted, I hope after Biden’s victory, American news media takes time to introspect its partisan… Read More Executive (and) Editor (2020)
First posted March 2013 But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence… illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the… Read More Hans Magnus Enzensberger: The Industrialization of the Mind
Whether inept, driven by survival or corrupt, they are unfit to lead their countries, let alone make decisions that imperil the whole world Simon Tisdall This was not inevitable. This is a war Israel chose. It could have been prevented. Diplomatic talks were ongoing when the bombers took off for Iran. Israel’s continuing, illegal, unjustified… Read More Trump, Netanyahu and Khamenei – three angry old men who could get us all killed
It is necessary to see how news media has responded to the opposition leader’s article and how soon. Prem Shankar Jha It has taken the Election Commission four months to respond to opposition leader Rahul Gandhi’s first disturbing accusation at a press conference in February – that the Commission had somehow managed not to notice that there were… Read More Why the Response to Rahul Gandhi’s Accusation of a Stolen Election Is Less Than Convincing
After the truth-shower 