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SN Balagangadhara and Rajiv Malhotra on Reversing the Gaze
On 12 February, Penguin India announced it was withdrawing and destroying—in India—all published copies of historian Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History (2009). Penguin’s decision came...
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Hot, Bothered, and Devout: The Religious Policing of Sex
Yesterday, I posted a review essay on a pair of books by SN Balagangadhara and Rajiv Malhotra that critique the field of “Indian studies.” In my essay I attempted to place into some context the recent...
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Carl Sagan’s Glorious Dawn: The Promise of Cosmos
The YouTube video titled “A Glorious Dawn” starring Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking (their voices run through Auto-Tune), and snippets from Sagan’s epic Cosmos, has now racked up almost nine million...
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Margaret Cavendish, Epicureanism, and Philosophy as Confession
In her erudite and enjoyable Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity Catherine Wilson makes note of Margaret Cavendish‘s participation in the so-called “Cavendish Salon” in Paris, which served as “the...
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Jehane Noujaim’s ‘The Square’: Enthralling and Frustrating
Jehane Noujaim‘s The Square is an enthralling and frustrating documentary record of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. It tells its story by holding a steady narrative focus on a small cast of central...
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Jacob Bronowski on the Missing Shakespeare of the Bushmen
Jacob Bronowski–who so entertained and edified many of us with The Ascent of Man–was very often a wise man but he was also Eurocentric, a weakness that produced astonishingly reductive views about the...
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The AllRounder Kickstarter
I don’t normally make fundraising pleas on this blog, but I’m going to make an exception to that rule today. Very soon, I will be contributing articles to a new online sports journal The Allrounder,...
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Relativity and the Immigrant
As a postscript to an essay explicating the theory of special relativity–written at the request of the The Times (London), Albert Einstein wrote: Here is yet another application of the principle of...
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Constantine Rafinesque’s Anticipation of Evolutionary Theory
The opening paragraph of the Wikipedia entry for Constantine Rafinesque notes that he was: [A] nineteenth-century polymath who made notable contributions to botany, zoology, the study ofprehistoric...
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Yosemite and Sequoia: Visiting John Muir’s Playgrounds
Last week, my family and I traveled to California; more precisely, to Yosemite, Sequoia, and Kings Canyon National Parks. (We visited family in Los Angeles as well.) Superlatives for national parks are...
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My Mother’s Books: Symbols of Resistance
Among the many old books on my shelves are a couple of dozen especially battered ones. Some belong to my father’s collection (I will write on these on another occasion); some belong to my uncle’s. And...
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Causation and the Extinction of the Passenger Pigeon
In reviewing Joel Greenberg‘s A Feathered River: The Passenger Pigeon’s Flight to Extinction (Bloomsbury, 2014), and in particular in noting his analysis of the causes of the mass disappearance of the...
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Beverly Gage Misses the Mark on Ken Burns’‘The War’
Ken Burns‘ The War–a seven-episode, fourteen-hour documentary on the Second World War, released in 2007–was never going to find favor with all who viewed it. Mostly because it is unabashedly...
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War is Hell – I: The Battlefield as Open Toilet
The smell of the battlefield is, quite often, a recurrent theme in the ‘war is hell‘ school of military writing. As the dead decay, slowly putrefying in the open, their remain are worked on by maggots...
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Does the Left Hate America? The Case of Soccer
Yesterday, as the United States struggled to hold on to its 1-0 lead against Ghana, the rumblings on social media grew: Ghana were surely due to equalize any moment now. When they did, the jubilation...
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Iraq and the Pottery Barn Rule: Don’t Break It Any More Please
As turban-wearing hordes ride down on their stallions from the hills, their sharpened scimitars gleaming in the bright Mesopotamian sunshine, threatening to add to the steadily growing mound of heads...
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Ian McEwan’s ‘Atonement’ and Post-Apocalyptic Literature
There comes a moment, as the reader moves through Part Two of Ian McEwan‘s Atonement, of sensing something familiar and recognizable, a deja-vu of sorts, in the sparse yet rich, brutal, unsparing...
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My Missing Uncle
The year I turned thirteen, a year after my father’s passing away, I spent part of my summer vacation, as usual, at my grandfather’s home in Central India. The days were long and hot, the afternoons...
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The Asymmetric Fallout of Operation Protective Edge
‘Collateral damage‘ and ‘friendly fire‘ seem to be two euphemisms with which we–as a civilization–are doomed to be persistently reacquainted. Especially if war continues to retain its popularity as an...
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Noam Chomsky, My Palestinian Student, and a Gift
A few years ago, at Brooklyn College, I taught a class on the formal theory of computation. We covered the usual topics: finite state automata, context-free grammars, Turing machines, computational...
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