Composed between the 10th and 12th centuries, these moral observations from old Kannada texts show great care about how to be properly charitable. Chandan Gowda ‘A person of understanding gives in charity without wondering, “What do I stand to lose?”, without hesitation, without the weight of self-doubt, and without any dampening of enthusiasm.’ “The one… Read More The grace of giving
In the atomic age, the traditional political distinction between “friends” and “enemies” utterly failed, not because we all became “friends” but because the very notion of “enemy” is now meaningless. The only real enemy threatening us is atomic annihilation; the only real totalitarianism is the atomic condition, which transforms the whole planet into a borderless… Read More The Concrete Possibility of Total Nihilism: Günther Anders and the Atomic Bomb
László Krasznahorkai was awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature “for his compelling and visionary work that, amid apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art”. Krasznahorkai is a great epic writer in the Central European tradition, stretching from Kafka to Thomas Bernhard, and characterized by absurdity and grotesque excess.The writer recalls how Franz Kafka introduced… Read More László Krasznahorkai, 2025 Nobel Laureate in Literature: “Human beings remain the same, dangerous to themselves”
NB: Anyone with the faintest idea of what is happening to Indian education will understand the importance of this book by this esteemed and highly accomplished scholar. The policies of our rulers can be described as nothing less than assault on education. Government enthusiasts could ask themselves why every year, hundreds of thousands of Indian… Read More Scholar GN Devy asks whether India risks becoming an anti-knowledge nation
“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
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
There can be no healing until the world stares into and acknowledges the void torn open by this conflict Orly Noy About two weeks after 7 October, I received a WhatsApp message from an acquaintance in Gaza. He asked me to check on his mother, who at that time was hospitalised in East Jerusalem. He had… Read More Disappearing people, disappearing morals – how two years has changed Gaza and Israel
In a new memoir, journalist Lara Marlowe recalls the life she shared with her former husband Lara Marlowe When the British journalist Robert Fisk died of a stroke at St Vincent’s Hospital in Dublin on October 30th, 2020, we had been divorced for 11 years and separated much longer. In the year since Robert’s death,… Read More Life with Robert Fisk: I realised I would not be at peace until I wrote this book
After the truth-shower 