Raghav Kaushik May 19, 2021 Gandhi is not well-known for his views on the environment. Indeed, in his vast output, there is little explicit mention of the environment. Yet, in Gandhi’s views, one finds a lot that is relevant to environmentalism. Like most great thinkers, Gandhi’s views are flawed; however we learn a lot by […]
Photo credit: wsimag.com Ellyn Kaschak April 16, 2021 It is definitely nothing that has come before All of us alive on the planet today are part of the most significant transition in centuries, whether we know it or not, whether it has touched us lightly or heavily and whether we choose to be or not. […]
(Mahatma Gandhi, ph. Rajni Kothari, photo credit: Wall Street International) March 2, 2021 Ashish Kothari In a world that is increasingly torn by conflicts and crises of many kinds. On October 2, political and business and religious leaders in India and elsewhere remember Mahatma Gandhi, sing his praises, and pledge to live by the ideals […]
Albert Einstein February 27, 2021 (Originally published in May 1949) Is it advisable for one who is not an expert on economic and social issues to express views on the subject of socialism? I believe for a number of reasons that it is. Let us first consider the question from the point of view of […]
Photo credit: wsimag.com By Roberto Savio December 5, 2020 The recent meeting of the G20 – scheduled to take place in Riyadh but held virtually due to the Coronavirus pandemic – has been an eloquent example of how the world is drifting, in a crisis of leadership. It was, in a sense, a showcase. Everybody […]
Fifty years later, One-Dimensional Man looks more prescient than its author could have imagined. Ronald Aronson November 23, 2020 When Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man appeared fifty years ago, it was a revelation. To many of us who were becoming the New Left, Marcuse reflected and explained our own feeling of suffocation, our alienation from an increasingly totalitarian universe that […]
Photo credit: Donald Trump at a rally in Montoursville, Pennsylvania. Source: AFP/Getty Images/sbs.com The Frankfurt School on the appeal of authoritarianism – and how to counteract it. By Charles H. Clavey* November 5, 2020 A number of recent books have put the methods of the social sciences in the service of understanding Trump, his movement, […]
John Scales Avery A new freely downloadable book I would like to announce the publication of a new book, which discusses the question of how oligarchs maintain their grasp on an excessive share of wealth and power when, as Shelley pointed out, the have-nots are many, while the power-holders are few. Please click to access […]
John Steppling October 7, 2020 Some books demand slower reading than others. Ed Curtin’s new book is such a case. But then this assemblage of essays, many published elsewhere, is a corrective to the growing intoxication with technology, with the surveillance and the policing it is being used for, and to what Jonathan Crary wrote […]
By Maria Popova October 8, 2020 In the mid-1950s, as the icy terror of the Cold War was cloaking the embering rubble of two World Wars, the BBC producer and cartoonist Hugh Burnett envisioned an unexampled program to serve both as a cross-cultural bridge and a mirror beaming back to a dimmed and discomposed humanity […]
