The world imagines the Taliban to be a monolith of bearded Islamic fundamentalists. However, much like Afghanistan and the rest of the region, the Taliban are deeply divided. There are two main factions: the Haqqanis and the Kandaharis. The former...
Wars are nasty affairs that destroy people, property and, so long as they last, any hope of perceiving even minimal truth in the news. That is why, after an urgent appeal initiated by the United Nations following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a group of philosophers from the world’s most prestigious universities came together last week to pool their thoughts on how political power might be redesigned to carry out...
The audience for video games is massive. According to Nielsen, 82% of global consumers either played video games or watched content related to them in 2020 — a trend accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The Fusion of Polish Nationalist Groups and Roman Catholicism READ MORE In 2019, the anti-hate organization ADL published survey data of US gamers, revealing that 23% of respondents had been exposed to white supremacist ideology in...
At the 2003 Academy Awards ceremony, host Steve Martin, a white comic, made a not-so-funny gag aimed at Jennifer Lopez, born in New York to Puerto Rican parents. Lopez was sitting with her beau of the time, Ben Affleck, a white Californian built like a light-heavyweight boxer (she may be back with him now). You’ll understand shortly why I’m being specific about their particulars. You Can Take the Man Out...
Terry Southern’s 1959 novel, “The Magic Christian,” is about a billionaire who has a hypothesis: Everyone and everything has a price. His attempts to prove it lead him to offer inordinate amounts of money to people in exchange for irregular behavior. He bribes a parking warden to eat a parking ticket he’s just written, for example. He buys a cosmetics company just to sell useless products. The plot climaxes when...
Seeing Devi, our servant maid, brew a cup of hot filter coffee for my mother, thoroughly shook me up. Devi? Enjoying free access to that sacrosanct location in a Tamil Brahmin home, its kitchen? Free to light the stove, boil the milk, prepare a south Indian decoction, make a steaming hot cup of filter coffee? That too, for my nonagenarian mother? Evidently, Devi has free access to every part of...
In March, as part of Women’s History Month, we rightfully celebrate women’s achievements and the strides toward equity we have made collectively. Yet we need to be honest about how we got here and how far we still have to go. Women’s History Month should have an intersectional lens and be a celebration of all women and their lived experiences, but it is often the voices of white women that...
In a recent article, Ellis Cashmore raised the provocative question of whether or not we should lift the ban on Russian sport instituted as a result of the invasion of Ukraine. Cashmore advances a number of sensible arguments, most importantly that this ban might turn out to be counterproductive. Instead of coaxing the Russian population to question the neo-imperialist delusions of its "great leader," President Vladimir Putin, it might provoke an...
