Forging stronger bonds in a post-pandemic world… will require acts of moral imagination that are not part of any political ideology or mission statement, but are functions of the human condition: tenderness, compassion, longing, generosity, allegiance and affection. These are the only answers to loneliness, alienation, dislocation and disintegration. But the fullest expression of these functions…… Read More Jill Lepore: Is society coming apart?
Many of the early twentieth-century champions of eugenics were social democrats and feminists. All shared a belief that science and technocracy could re-engineer society for the better. Attempts to institutionalize eugenics coincided with the emergence of welfare states and infrastructure to monitor the ‘feebleminded’. What Malthus called the population question looms large in the intellectual history… Read More Bryan Fanning: People like us
NB: India’s Prime Minister has warned the world of the threat of ‘regressive thinking.’ The rhetorical artistry of our Great Leader is indeed admirable; although I think his camp-followers will miss the irony. The article below describes what can happen in India in the name of politically correct nationalism. And here’s another: A Grateful Nation. We… Read More Mukul Kesavan: Photobombing death and the banality of evil / Evil, framed. By SLAVENKA DRAKULIĆ
One of the greatest satisfactions in the history of philosophy is the inconsistency, even the hypocrisy, of the Stoics. For as long as I have studied them, I have quarreled with them. Like the late Tolstoy, they get into your head. The Stoics were meticulous students of human breakability and raised it into a subject… Read More Leon Wieseltier: 'The Wise, Too, Shed Tears'
Meet Madam Jeanne Louise Calment, who had the longest confirmed human lifespan: 122 years, 164 days. Apparently, fate strongly approved of the way she lived her life. She was born in Arles, France, on February 21, 1875. The Eiffel Tower was built when she was 14 years old. It was at this time she met… Read More Madam Jeanne Louise Calment (1875-1997)
As the old saying goes, two Jews, three opinions. Add one headache for the Taliban. Meet Zabulon Simentov, 66, who is believed to be the last remaining Jew in Afghanistan. Emran Feroz recently profiled Simentov for Foreign Policy and uncovered some incredible stories about the feisty Afghan — including that the Taliban once imprisoned him… Read More LAURA ADKINS: The last Jews in Afghanistan argued so much the Taliban kicked them out of prison and stole their Torah
The International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies special issue on the COVID-19 pandemic comprises articles from across the globe, encompassing psychoanalytic perspectives from Europe, Asia and North and South America. Click here to read the issue for free. The issue features Ira Brenner’s new paper: ‘Disinformation, disease, and Donald Trump’. Issue Information Pages: 107-108 – First Published: 22 June 2021 Abstract … Read More The International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies. Special issue on the COVID-19 pandemic
The Middle Ages,” wrote Carl Jung in a 1958 book about ufos, “have not died out… Mythology and magic flourish as ever in our midst.” I doubt if Monica Black, a professor of history at the University of Tennessee and the author of A Demon-Haunted Land,a n intriguing, subtle, and occasionally startling examination of a wave of superstitious… Read More Book review: The sound of silence
The thesis of Macbeth is also the Socratic thesis, set forth especially in the Republic and the Gorgias, that the worst fate that can befall a human soul, far worse than becoming the victim of a tyrant, is to become a tyrant Macbeth is a moral play par excellence. In this, it stands in stark contrast to two more recent… Read More Harry V. Jaffa: Macbeth and the Moral Universe
An excerpt from Kabir, Kabir: The Life and Work of the Early Modern Poet-Philosopher – by Purushottam Agrawal. Why were Kabir’s detractors “forced” to escalate matters up to the sultan? Mostly because they were smarting from having failed so miserably to check his influence themselves. Kabir’s fame was sky- rocketing, despite his obvious lack… Read More Kabir’s search for solitude resembles our search for privacy in totalitarian times
