There seemed a certainty in degradation: T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom In Asia Minor or in Alexandria, in the second century of our faith (when Basilides was announcing that the cosmos was a rash and malevolent improvisation engineered by defective angels), Nils Runeberg might have directed, with a singular intellectual passion, one of the… Read More Three Versions of Judas: Jorge Luis Borges
A kaleidoscopic journey through a divided country…The river of bile on which Sharlet fights to stay afloat courses from one end of the country to the other. By Elizabeth D. Samet The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War by Jeff Sharlet Jeff Sharlet’s new book, The Undertow, plunged me into a vertiginous fever-dream. It induced a physiological response… Read More The Center Cannot Hold
Concern is growing in Iran after reports emerged that hundreds of schoolgirls had been poisoned across the country in recent months. On Wednesday, Iran’s semi-official Mehr News reported that Shahriar Heydari, a member of Parliament, cited an unnamed “reliable source” in saying that “nearly 900 students” from across the country had been poisoned so far. The first… Read More Alarm grows in Iran over reports that hundreds of schoolgirls were poisoned
By Lynn Parramore / Institute for New Economic Thinking When you think of original sin and the fall of Adam and Eve, an economics class probably isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. After all, economics is a secular discipline. Or is it? Maybe not entirely, considering that the earliest economic thinkers had religion very… Read More The Original Sin of Economics
Jamila*, a widow living in Herat, lost her husband in a suicide attack about eight years ago. She has an 18-year-old daughter who is blind and a 20-year-old son who lost both legs in a mine blast. Jamila used to be a housemaid and bake bread for people in their homes. With this income she… Read More Afghanistan: single women and widows are struggling to find their next meal under Taliban restrictions
It was the first time that the Iranian authorities have admitted to holding tens of thousands of political prisoners. Some 500 persons were shot dead by government security forces in the course of last fall’s demonstrations, and most of those detained were simply protesting peacefully, which should not have been the basis for an arrest… Read More Iran’s Khamenei admits to holding “Tens of Thousands” of Prisoners of Conscience
More than four months after the death of Mahsa Amini, the Kurdish woman who died in custody after being arrested for incorrectly wearing her hijab, the Iranian authorities’ attempts to crush nationwide protests have seen more than 500 people killed by security forces, including 70 children. Four protesters have so far been executed by the state, with… Read More ‘They used our hijabs to gag us’: Iran protesters tell of rapes, beatings and torture by police
NB: The Iranian theocracy has banned happiness, in Gods name. I wonder what they understand of the promised paradise. DS An Iranian court has handed jail sentences of more than 10 years each to a young couple who danced in front of one of Tehran’s main landmarks in a video seen as a symbol of… Read More Iranian couple filmed dancing in Tehran are jailed for 10 years
Sarah Shaffi Rushdie’s Twitter account was inactive for a period following the attack, but the author begun posting again at the end of last year. He has also supported friend Hanif Kureishi’s recovery from a fall and spinal surgery, with Kureishi tweeting: “My friend Salman Rushdie, one of the bravest men I know, a man who has… Read More Salman Rushdie will not promote new novel after attack
Chandan Gowda Sara Aboobacker and her husband, an engineer with the government, moved to Bangalore in 1981. He had been transferred from Mangalore. One day, as she was heading out of a public library in Halasur, Lankesh Patrike, which was dangling in a roadside stall, caught her eye. She bought a copy of the eight-page Kannada… Read More Nadoja Sara Aboobacker
After the truth-shower 