Junk speak, like junk food, encourages verbal littering. Moronic vagueness is another form of junk. Not to mention how amazing and awesome everything is… Louis de Bernières Ilive in the Norfolk countryside, and what irritates me most about living here is the deluge of litter that gets thrown out of car windows in the lane outside my… Read More I really don’t like ‘like’ – or other imprecise and redundant speech
“Was it always the case that half of our students would cheat if it were easy enough?” By Jay Caspian Kang In my writing, and in my idle thoughts, I often return to Arjuna’s lament upon surveying the battlefield of Kurukshetra and finding that he must kill his friends and family. What is his duty in… Read More The Despair of the Professor in the Age of A.I.
For tens of thousands of years, these Palaeolithic artworks were unseen. When they were rediscovered, onlookers marvelled at their vivid beauty. One of the world’s leading experts took me up close. The latest thinking on the subject proposes that our ancestors painted their way across western Europe, and what we now know as “cave art’ is… Read More ‘They take you out of life, out of time’: a journey into Spain’s astonishing cave paintings
How unemployment, addiction, and frustration are turning youth into society’s unwanted category. by Ashraf Zainabi Every modern society has two lists. The first list contains creatures it wants to protect, dogs, butterflies, pandas, dolphins, snow leopards, motivational speakers, billionaires pretending to be simple, and occasionally trees, but mostly on environment day. The second list contains creatures… Read More Linguistic cruelty and beyond
Beyond remittances: A rare insight into the everyday lives of migrant workers Social anthropologist Shankar Ramaswami’s ‘Souls in the Kalyug’ is a rich, multi-layered text that provides a window into workers’ lives in India, including some hopeful strands within the destructive churnings of global capitalism. Sapan BookshelfSouls in the Kalyug: The Politics and Cosmologies of Migrant… Read More Book review: Souls in the Kalyug
The Tribune, 16 December, 2025 Chat GPT and Google Gemini are rapidly becoming the go-to places for students. That by itself is not surprising-after all generations of students have found ways to avoid rigor and skirt around academic engagement. Champion Guides (which condensed the whole course into a pocket-sized paperback) were followed by short YouTube… Read More Shobhit Mahajan: As AI replaces thinking, learning is eroding
NB: The story of this remarkable man may also be read in Chapter 3, The Heart of the Heart, of Benjamin Labatut’s book When we Cease to understand the World; which is where I first read about hi. Alex Lebrun This is an English translation of a post written in French by my father Gérard Lebrun. The pages… Read More Alexander Grothendieck, the secret genius of mathematics
The head of the Catholic Church is adding his moral suasion to a growing backlash against the impact of artificial intelligence By Margherita Stancati and Sam Schechner VATICAN CITY—Pope Leo XIV warned that artificial intelligence “threatens to normalize an anti-human vision” and said that the concentration of immense digital power in the hands of a few private actors… Read More Pope Leo Compares AI Threat to Biblical ‘Tower of Babel’
NB: This literary enormity is very serious, but I have no idea whether the academic community will take it seriously. I have taught for many years, but these past few weeks have made me more concerned than ever before about what AI is doing to the minds and mentalities of our younger generation. It’s bad… Read More The Commonwealth Short Story Prize is Dead
Academia has become unrooted from pedagogy. William Deresiewicz That liberalism is under threat is now a cliché—yet this has done nothing to stem the global resurgence of illiberalism. Part of the problem is that liberalism is often considered too “thin” to win over the allegiance of citizens, and that liberals are too afraid of speaking… Read More Colleges, Maybe Try Teaching!
After the truth-shower 