Memories of Martti
by S. Abbas Raza “Martti Ahtisaari, ex-Finland president and Nobel peace laureate, dies aged 86” runs the headline of his obituary in The Guardian today. But he was much more than that. First of all, he was the father of one of my closest friends, Marko Ahtisaari, who was with me in graduate school in…
9:59 AM
Guantanamo, Here I Come
We, Camille Noûs – Research as a common
by Camille Noûs1,# 1 Cogitamus laboratory, France # Correspondence to: [email protected] Camile Noûs is a collective author intended to embody the collective dimension of scientific research. The sense of collective work has been devalued and forgotten for two decades in academia, through various neoliberal research policies that prioritize competition over cooperation, and thereby favor individualism…
A Sacred Vision of the World—and of the Word
Maxim D. Shrayer talks to Cynthia L. Haven about her new book, The Man Who Brought Brodsky into English: Conversations with George L. Kline Cynthia, let me begin by asking you to describe your path to the book—a double path that led you to Joseph Brodsky and to George L. Kline. I studied with Joseph…
Tech philosophers explain the bigger issues with digital platforms, and some ways forward
by Filippo Santoni de Sio[1], along with Marianna Capasso, Rockwell F. Clancy, Matthew Dennis, Juan Manuel Durán, Georgy Ishmaev, Olya Kudina, Jonne Maas, Lavinia Marin, Giorgia Pozzi, Martin Sand, Jeroen van den Hoven, Herman Veluwenkamp[2] Abstract: This article, written by the Digital Philosophy Group of TU Delft is inspired by the Netflix documentary The Social…
Three cheers for Akim Reinhardt and Happy New Year!
Some Unofficial Advice From Italy
Sahabzada Yaqub Khan, 1920 – 2016
So, I have written a cookbook!
by S. Abbas Raza Some of my nieces and nephews are now at an age where they sometimes call me to ask how to cook simple Pakistani dishes (Pakistani cooking is the same as Northern Indian cooking, while the cuisine of South India is very different) and this gave me the idea of writing a…
Thoughts on the Syrian Refugee Crisis
3 Quarks Daily asked a number of writers, artists, scientists, scholars, and public intellectuals to give us brief personal reflections on the Syrian refugee crisis in Europe and other places. The following have sent their thoughts and their responses are below in the order in which we received them: Feisal Hussain Naqvi Robert Pinsky Frans…
San Fruttuoso and Portofino: Photos
Department of Coincidences: A Drunkard’s Train Ride
by S. Abbas Raza No matter how many books we read about how coincidences are to be expected in our lives simply due to the sheer amount of information we are bombarded with every day (and psychological reasons that certain kinds of things become salient to us because of various mental traits we share as…
Poetry in Translation: Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s “Upon Returning From Dhaka”
by S. Abbas Raza Faiz visited Bangladesh after it had seceded from Pakistan and become an independent country following a year of bloody civil war (with the Pakistan army responsible for horrific genocide in what was then still East Pakistan). Then he wrote this. The last line is almost certainly an allusion to the apology…
Little Scenes From My Lovely Little Life
I was walking in Vahrn a couple of days ago when I passed some strawberry fields covered in plastic sheets that looked like a plastic ocean with waves as it was a very windy day. I stopped for a minute to make this crappy video. (The real thing looked and sounded much more impressive than…
Frustrated by thinking about gun control? Me too
by S. Abbas Raza Like many if not most of you, I'm sure, I spent much of the weekend reading various articles about gun control and signing various petitions about it. By Sunday night I just became depressed: while it is clear to me that the existence and easy availability of hundreds of millions of…
Poetry in Translation: Lullaby for a Palestinian Child
The legendary Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz was in Beirut in 1980 as Israeli helicopter gunships rained fire down upon Palestinian camps there. He wrote this lullaby as a response. I have translated it by listening to it one line at a time using the video given at the end, below, but then I also…