"Recovered Utopian Notions"

"The imprint of his childhood among anticolonial poets and his father's generation of war poets, evident in his Romantic sense of his own agency, also manifested in his insistence on poetry's importance to liberatory politics. EP and his father drew on their vestigial belief in the potential for heroic action to question the imperial, great-man historical imagination that had given them that belief. In doing so, they helped imagine a new kind of history and history-making, infused with a poetic vision."

At Aeon, Priya Satia looks at the early influences on E.P. Thompson.

Burmese Daze

"Orwell may have felt he ought to be on the other side of the prison bars, but he did not seek penance by surrendering himself to the police or prison for his sins; those institutions had no moral legitimacy. Rather, he felt he would find expiation in understanding and giving voice to an oppressed community. What if all police officers heeded the pangs of conscience as Orwell did? It is time for us too to recover the cooperative values that policing seeks to suppress and find community-based forms of moving forward, of redeeming the past and keeping societies safe and just."

At Slate, Priya Satia discusses George Orwell's experience with policing.

"If Ever There Was a Time to Rejoin the Two and Leverage Nationalism to Counter Ethno-Nationalism, It Is Now"

"Post-Vietnam progressives answered King's call to eschew imperialism but they mistrusted nationalism. Many came to regard it as just another expression of toxic tribalism that modernization and popular enlightenment would one day wash away. Democrats have told stories of class, gender, and racial injustice, and they have rightly pressed for ameliorative policies, but they have typically failed to scale up their message to a full-blown narrative that joins the pursuit of justice to the nation's ideals, identity, and greatness. Most party leaders have also refrained from taking the lead on national interests and security, leaving that to the Republicans. As a result, they left the flag with politicians who carried it into another reckless war—and eventually turned it over to Trump, whose patriotic pretensions too often go unchallenged despite their manifest hollowness."

M. Steven Fish, Neil A. Abrams, and Laila M. Aghaie at Slate argue that "American liberals have been relatively comfortable talking about race but have forgotten how to speak the language of nationalism."

"Legible States"

"I don't think these stances can be explained merely by Trump's much-discussed fondness for Benjamin Netanyahu, Vladimir Putin, and Xi Jinping. The notion that the central government's control over the contested regions should be made official, recognized, and unambiguous accords with his overall worldview."

Joshua Keating in Slate writes that "[w]hen hard-line nationalists take power, such ambiguity in borderlines is no longer tolerated."

"I Kept Finding Parallels"

"The Buddha doubted the existence of an omnipotent, benevolent God. In his doctrine of 'emptiness,' he suggested that we have no real evidence for the existence of the outside world. He said that our sense of self is an illusion, too. The Buddhist sage Nagasena elaborated on this idea. The self, he said, is like a chariot. A chariot has no transcendent essence; it's just a collection of wheels and frame and handle. Similarly, the self has no transcendent essence; it's just a collection of perceptions and emotions.
"'I never can catch myself at any time without a perception.'
"That sure sounded like Buddhist philosophy to me—except, of course, that Hume couldn't have known anything about Buddhist philosophy.
"Or could he have?"

In a 2015 Atlantic article, Alison Gopnik describes her efforts in investigating a link between Buddhism and David Hume.

"A Fanatic, a Fundamentalist, and a Fraud"

"MT was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction. And she was a friend to the worst of the rich, taking misappropriated money from the atrocious Duvalier family in Haiti (whose rule she praised in return) and from Charles Keating of the Lincoln Savings and Loan. Where did that money, and all the other donations, go? The primitive hospice in Calcutta was as run down when she died as it always had been—she preferred California clinics when she got sick herself—and her order always refused to publish any audit. But we have her own claim that she opened 500 convents in more than a hundred countries, all bearing the name of her own order. Excuse me, but this is modesty and humility?"

In light of Pope Francis canonizing Mother Teresa as a saint, Slate re-runs a 2003 article by Christopher Hitchens.

The Roots of D'Souza's Rage

"Hart's brand of imperial nostalgia pervades the wider National Review conservatism that shaped D’Souza’s worldview. A foundational text in this weltanschauung is James Burnham's Suicide of the West (1964), which D'Souza cited in his book What’s So Great About America (2002). Thematically, Burnham pioneered many of the themes D'Souza has expanded upon in books like The Roots of Obama's Rage (2010) and Obama’s America (2012): the insidiousness of white liberal guilt in disarming the West, the underappreciated virtues of imperialism and manifest destiny, the need to affirm the unequivocal cultural superiority of Western civilization. Among the founding editors of National Review, Burnham was second only to William F. Buckley in importance. His book is key to understanding the contradictions of D'Souza's role in the conservative movement as a non-white advocate for 'the West.'"


In The New Republic, Jeet Heer investigates Dinesh D'Souza's pro-colonialist mindset.


And in New York, Jonathan Chait investigates Rudolph Giuliani.


As does Ezra Klein at Vox.


William Saletan in Slate argues that Obama's real enemies are Republicans.

The Fabric of Our Lives

"If there is an ancestral home for the Industrial Revolution, it's Manchester, England, where the first factories were built. Cotton propelled the factory's emergence, created after British inventors found a way to spin slave-grown cotton into yarn more swiftly. The man who invented the mechanized cotton mill at the center of these new factories was Samuel Greg, the prototypical genius-inventor of capitalist lore. By tying Greg’s success to slave-grown cotton and the ghastly conditions of factory workers, Beckert recasts him in a garish new light. Women and children comprised the vast majority of these first factory workers, all of them expected to work 14-hour days and huddled into barracks at night. If we celebrate Greg as a genius, Beckert implies, we must also accept that he was utterly dependent on the most coercive labor systems imaginable."


Eric Herschthal in Slate reviews Sven Berkett's Empire of Cotton: A Global History.

Brave New School

"Those that have signed up are a mix of for-profit and nonprofit institutions, many of them business schools, both in the United States and overseas. Professors and administrators say they have been won over by on-the-job performance. 'This is what they do for a living,' says Ms. Whisenant. 'We're working with professionals.'"

Audrey Williams June in The Chronicle of Higher Education writes about companies in India that allow American college professors to outsource grading.

"The Architect of Satyagraha"

"Nonetheless, Lelyveld also writes, while he may have 'struggled with doubt and self until his last days,' Gandhi 'made the predicament of the millions his own, whatever the tensions among them, as no other leader of modern times has.' And, for all his inconsistencies, his dream for India remained constant throughout his life. 'Today,' Gandhi wrote less than three weeks before he was murdered by a member of his own faith, 'we must forget that we are Hindus or Sikhs or Muslims or Parsis. . . . It is of no consequence by what name we call God in our homes.'"

In The New York Times, Geoffrey C. Ward reviews Joseph Lelyveld's Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India.

"Oneness with the Big Self"

"Soon, Marilyn Monroe was claiming that yoga improved her legs. Yehudi Menuhin wrote the foreword to Devi’s 1959 book 'Yoga for Americans.' Yoga was quietly going mainstream. Syman slightly discounts the contributions of B. K. S. Iyengar, the author of 'Light of Yoga' (1966), the most widely read book on modern yoga, and gives Devi credit 'for ridding hatha yoga of sordid associations and accumulated ill will.' Indeed, she writes, 'Indra Devi was so good at packaging hatha yoga as a defense against illness and aging' that it became 'easy to lose sight of its real purpose—spiritual liberation.'"

In The New York Times, Pankaj Mishra reviews Stefanie Syman's The Subtle Body: The Story of Yoga in America and Robert Love's The Great Oom: The Improbable Birth of Yoga in America.

Destroying the Gateway

"The terrorists who reportedly heaved their weapon-laden bags up the steps of the wharf to begin their assault on the Taj, like their cohorts at a dozen other locations around the city, knew what they were doing. Theirs was an attack on India's financial nerve center and commercial capital, a city emblematic of the country's energetic thrust into the 21st century. By attacking Mumbai, the terrorists hit India's economy, its tourism and its internationalism, and they took advantage of the city's openness to the world. A grand slam."

In the Los Angeles Times, Shashi Tharoor considers this week's terror attacks in India.


"The terrorists’ message was clear: Stay away from Mumbai or you will get killed. Cricket matches with visiting English and Australian teams have been shelved. Japanese and Western companies have closed their Mumbai offices and prohibited their employees from visiting the city. Tour groups are canceling long-planned trips.
"But the best answer to the terrorists is to dream bigger, make even more money, and visit Mumbai more than ever."

As does Suketu Mehta in The New York Times.

And in Slate, Christopher Hitchens expresses solidarity with Indians, and Christopher Beam explains why Bombay changed its name to Mumbai.

Sexy Sadie

Lily Koppel in The New York Times reports the death of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the guru who introduced transcendental meditation to Europe and American in the 1960s.