1/ He went to bed, turned on the BBC World News and switched it off again. Half-truths. Quarter-truths. What the world really knows about itself, it doesn’t dare say. John le Carre, Our Kind of Traitor; 2011, p 241 2/ We live in very remarkable times. We find with astonishment that progress has concluded an alliance with… Read More Reflections on ideology, morality and conscience
The problem is becoming worse than the condition of inter-passivity, with student disengagement now often leading to mass chronic non-attendance in lectures and seminars. Rather than go through the motions of learning, many students simply do not bother to go through the motions, except to submit essays and often that is done with the assistance… Read More Apathy and the neoliberal university
Chris Hedges Education is meant to be subversive. It gives students the ability and the language to ask questions about reigning assumptions and ideas. It questions dogma and ideology. It can, as Zinn writes, “counteract the deception that makes the government’s force legitimate.” ************* The attacks on colleges and universities — Donald Trump’s administration has warned some… Read More Trump’s War on Education
Nothing has so radically transformed the world as the distinction between true and false religion NB: This is one of the most thought-provoking studies in the history and philosophy of religion that – in my limited reading – I have come across. The author Jan Assman (1938-2024) was a German Egyptologist, cultural historian, and religion… Read More The Price of Monotheism
A generation who came of age online now feel deprived of real connections. The upside is they are doing something about it Gaby Hinsliff It’s the love-hate relationship that defined a generation. We think we know all about teenagers and the phones to which they’re so umbilically tied: sleeping with them under the pillow, panicking… Read More It’s the age of regret: gen Z grew up glued to their screens, and missed the joy of being human
Starts August 2025 – Apply by 30th April Today the way our knowledge system is set up, it is possible for a city bred person to go through school and then higher education followed by a doctorate in a subject like economics from the most reputable institutions in India and abroad and subsequently become influential… Read More Pagdandi Fellowship 2025-‘26
Robert S. Leventhal Lou Salomé was undoubtedly one of the most intelligent and articulate women of her era. Her own writing, especially her essays on sexuality and erotism, have value not merely in their historical reflection of the era in which they were written, but in their own right as documents of radical femininity in the… Read More Nietzsche and Lou Andreas-Salomé: Chronicle of a Relationship 1882
Laura Kipnis Agnes Callard doesn’t just admire Socrates, the philosopher forced by his fellow Athenians to drink hemlock in 399 BCE; she wants to be him. Entirely conscious of himself as an icon, Callard writes, Socrates “presented himself as a person one can become.” Following in his path, she styles herself as the sort of… Read More Is Agnes Callard Making You Uncomfortable?
Brain workers, comrades, scattered throughout the world, kept apart for five years by the armies, the censorship and the mutual hatred of the warring nations, now that barriers are falling and frontiers are being reopened, we issue to you a call to reconstitute our brotherly union, but to make of it a new union more… Read More Declaration of the Independence of the Mind (1919). Manifesto Signed by Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, Rabindranath Tagore, Jane Addams and Others
From the myth of Europeans’ “healthy drinking culture” to the surprising harm of some common family traditions, science is overturning old beliefs around alcohol and young people David Robson I turned 18 the day before I left home for university, conveniently passing the UK’s age threshold for buying alcohol just in time to explore student pubs and… Read More Why alcohol is so dangerous for young adults’ brains
After the truth-shower 