The American Republic Stands By For A 3-6 Shellacking
The American Republic, not content with having one election decided by nine unelected officials (Bush v. Gore, circa 2000), is gearing up yet again to have its Grand Prize, its esteemed (and very...
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Cover And Catalog Copy For ‘The Evolution of a Cricket Fan: My Shapeshifting...
The good folks at Temple University Press have a cover design for my forthcoming book, ‘The Evolution of a Cricket Fan: My Shapeshifting Journey.’ Here is the catalog copy for the book: An...
View ArticleA Constitution Should Help A Country Govern, Not Hobble It
My short essay ‘A Constitution Should Help A Country Govern, Not Hobble It‘ is up at Aeon Magazine. Comments welcome. (Many thanks to Sam Haselby, my editor at Aeon, for all his help.)
View ArticleVale Satadru Sen (1969-2018)
It is with great sadness that I make note here of the sudden passing of my friend and CUNY colleague, Satadru Sen (of Queens College’s History department), on October 8th, 2018–he would have turned...
View ArticleNations, Nationalisms, And The Natal Crime
Patriots and nationalists of many stripes are often committed to the view that a certain kind of nation-building violence was inevitable, and written into the very idea of the nation, into the national...
View ArticleSpace Exploration And The Invisible Women
Yesterday being a snow day in New York City–for school-going children and college professors alike–I spent it with my daughter at home. Diversion was necessary, and so I turned to an old friend–the...
View ArticleMy Conception Story
As the month of March drew to a close in 1993, I traveled to India to spend some time with my terminally ill mother. I arrived ‘home’ on March 30th; my mother passed away on April 25. In those four...
View ArticleSteven Pinker Should Read Some Nietzsche For Himself
Steven Pinker does not like Nietzsche. The following exchange–in an interview with the Times Literary Supplement makes this clear: Question: Which author (living or dead) do you think is most...
View ArticleGide’s Immoralist And The Existential Necessity Of The Colony
The immoralist at the heart of André Gide‘s The Immoralist, Michel, does not travel just anywhere; he travels to French colonies like Algeria and Tunisia; the boys who he meets, is attracted to, and...
View ArticleStudying Ancient Law In Philosophy Of Law
This semester in my philosophy of law class, I’ve begun the semester with a pair of class sessions devoted to ancient law: Mesopotamian, Biblical, and Roman. (My class is reading excerpts from a...
View ArticleOn Being Both ‘Bad’ And ‘Great’
Recently, in response to Richard Seymour‘s essay on Winston Churchill in Jacobin–one whose tagline read “Churchill was no hero — he was a vile racist fanatical about violence and fiercely supportive of...
View ArticleRamachandra Guha On The Lack Of Modern Indian Histories
In India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy (HarperCollins, New York, 2007), Ramachandra Guha writes: Of his recent history of postwar Europe, Tony Judt writes that ‘a book of...
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‘Passing for Pakistani and the Two-Nation Theory’ At Three Quarks Daily
My essay ‘Passing for Pakistani and the Two-Nation Theory‘ is up at Three Quarks Daily.
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Toppling Confederate Statues Does Not ‘Erase’ The Confederacy From ‘History’
News from Baltimore and Durham suggests a long-overdue of cleaning American towns and cities of various pieces of masonry known as ‘Confederate statues’; young folks have apparently taken it upon...
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The Bollywood War Movie And The Indian Popular Imagination
In 1947, even as India attained independence from colonial subjugation, war broke out in Kashmir as guerrillas backed by Pakistan sought to bring it into the Pakistani fold. That war ended in stalemate...
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Prophecy And Propaganda As Compensatory Fantasy
In a footnote in his chapter on Herder in Three Critics of The Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2000, p. 231), Isaiah Berlin writes: Like other passionate...
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The Trump Presidency And The Iran-Contra Precedent
Perhaps because it has been over three decades, memories of the ginormous political clusterfuck that went by the name of Iran-Contra seem to have faded from our collective memory. As our nation’s...
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Historical Amnesia And Stasis In Political Action
Over on his blog, and on his Facebook page, in response to a series of repeated claims stressing the uniquely dysfunctional and authoritarian nature of the present administration¹, Corey Robin has...
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Nixon, Kissinger, And The 1971 Genocide In Bangladesh
This evening, Jagan Pillarisetti and will be speaking at the New York Military Affairs Symposium on ‘Indian Air Force Operations in the 1971 Liberation War.’ Our talk will be based on our book Eagles...
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John Muir On The ‘Negroes’ Of The American South
John Muir often wrote soaring prose about the beauties and majesties of nature, about how the outdoors were our ‘natural cathedrals’; he urged his fellow human beings to leave behind their sordid,...
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