First posted October 27, 2011 ‘The essay is a marvellous account of the hundreds of ways in which the Ramayana has been told, complete with examples of this narrative diversity. I can’t imagine that the vice-chancellor, a member of that urbane cohort, the Class of ’75, wanted the essay removed because he agreed with the Akhil Bharatiya… Read More Mukul Kesavan: Delhi University and the purging of Ramanujan
One of the strangest things about an American university education is that it bundles a whole lot of different things together. If you want to take a course in high-level mathematics or listen to the lectures of an accomplished historian of Ming China, you must also buy membership in one of the country’s most lavish gyms;… Read More Unbundle the (American) University
As a Presidential candidate, Donald Trump made his world view plain: there was “us” and there was “them.” Once he was in the White House, the fear factor would prevail. By David Remnick The young Donald Trump was the Nelson Muntz of Jamaica Estates. (Or was he its Draco Malfoy? Scholars will debate such questions for… Read More The Politics of Fear
Genuine, human content is increasingly sidelined by algorithmic prioritization, receiving fewer interactions than the engineered content and AI slop optimized solely for clicks…. The problem is not just the rise of fake material, but the collapse of context and the acceptance that truth no longer matters as long as our cravings for colors and noise… Read More The Last Days Of Social Media
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
After the truth-shower 