For Iris Murdoch, morality is not about duties and rules but stopping our ego fantasies and attending to others with love Cathy Mason Being in love is one of the most profound experiences we can have, one that can powerfully move us and irrevocably change the way we see ourselves, one another, and even the… Read More Why love matters most
NB: This is a simple and brilliant interview given by Camus nearly seven decades ago but with many lessons for us today, wherever we may live. It is time to think of human life in generational terms, rather than of divisive identities and factional politics. DS Published in Albert Camus, Resistance Rebellion & Death (1960)… Read More Albert Camus: The Wager of Our Generation
Raymond Geuss, Changing the Subject: Philosophy from Socrates to Adorno Reviewed by Frederick Neuhouser, Barnard College This volume belongs to the genre of works that aim to tell us something about what Western philosophy is — or, in this case perhaps, about what it was — by recounting its history from ancient Greece to today (which here means,… Read More Changing the Subject: Philosophy from Socrates to Adorno
A very beautiful documentary on what makes us human. Human is a 2015 documentary by French environmentalist Yann Arthus-Bertrand. The film is almost entirely composed of exclusive aerial footage and first-person stories told into the camera. It was the first movie to premiere in the General Assembly Hall of the United Nations, to an audience of 1,000 viewers, including the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. Human… Read More The Documentary That Found Humanity by Interviewing 2,000 People
The campaign of erasure banishes intellectual inquiry and the dispassionate examination of history. It celebrates magical thinking… The Israeli government bans public commemorations of the Nakba… a day of mourning for Palestinians who seek to remember the massacres and expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians carried out by Jewish terrorist militias in 1948 for this reason. Palestinians… Read More Israel’s Assassination of Memory
One word, in particular, stood out to researchers as a kind of linguistic watermark. “Delve” has become an academic shibboleth, a neon sign in the middle of every conversation flashing ChatGPT was here. NB: I’ve found ‘delve‘ occuring very frequently in students assignments. DS Sara Parker Join any Zoom call, walk into any lecture hall, or… Read More You sound like ChatGPT
pilgrimage journal the Great Beast From Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace: The Great Beast [society, the collective] is the only object of idolatry, the only ersatz of God, the only imitation of something which is infinitely far from me and which is I myself. It is impossible for me to take myself as an end or, in consequence,… Read More the Great Beast
Mario Praz (1896-1982) was an Italian-born critic of art & literature, and scholar of English literature. His best-known book, La carne, la morte e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica (The Romantic Agony, 1933) written in 1930 was a comprehensive survey of the erotic and morbid themes that characterized European authors of the late 18th &… Read More Mario Praz: The Romantic Agony (1933)
Goodbye Professor Naim By Vidya Rao Re-reading, now, his essay on ‘The Art of the Urdu Marsiya’, I realise once more what a wonderful teacher CM Naim must have been. I, sadly, never had the privilege of being his student. But, then to have known him briefly, even if only as an editor—that was privilege… Read More Remembering C.M. Naim, A Scholar Extraordinary. Vidya Rao and Shefalli Jha
First posted June 16, 2016 NB: Two perceptive comments on Modi in America: Kesavan notices his pathetic yearning to be accepted at the high table of the Anglophone powers; Chatterjee sees through to the symbolism of his homage to US soldiers killed during the Vietnam war. For those who may not know it, the RSS referred to the American intervention as… Read More Mukul Kesavan: Speaking in tongues – Narendra Modi & the Anglosphere / Garga Chatterjee: Modi salutes US military casualties in the Vietnam War (2016)
After the truth-shower 