Hugo Chavez of Venezuela takes home this week’s Big Brother Innovation Prize for his decision to launch a new all-seeing, all-powerful, crime-fighting blimp in Caracas: “Venezuela launched a Zeppelin on […]
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“Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are entering uncharted territory by seeming to elevate ironic detachment to the level of a political manifesto with their rally in Washington.”
In George Orwell’s dystopian novel ‘1984’, the world is ruled by three superstates. Unfortunately, there’s not much ‘super’ to these states except their size.
n n I first encountered the term ‘galoshes’ in the same Russian novels that also introduced me, albeit equally theoretically, to the samowar*. Subsequently, I’ve always thought of galoshes (also […]
IT is ten days since French MPs voted to ban the Burqa, on the grounds that the garment “is an insult to the country’s values”. Yesterday two women wearing a […]
The Chronicle of Higher Education recalls George Orwell’s advice on writing in order to explain why American academic writing is so unfortunately esoteric and—poorly written.
n n (click on the image for a larger version) n ‘Everybody Is Against Everybody – Somebody Has To Be For Them’: the message behind this Amnesty International poster is […]
Why don’t people notice that Apple has no qualms pressuring the police to barge into the homes of journalists? Or that we are now automatically signed on with our Facebook ID on 50,000 websites, all of which have added this functionality just in the last week? No, we are too busy standing in line for hours to buy the iPad or checking if our Facebook friends like Lady Gaga as much as we do to take stock of what’s really happening behind the curtains.
“The object of torture is torture.” As George Orwell wrote in 1984, torture is not a means to an end, it is an end in itself. As I’ve argued, there’s […]
“Obama’s War,” the smart Frontline episode about Afghanistan and Pakistan, includes a disquieting exchange between a U.S. Marine and two tribal elders in a remote Afghan village. Since this Global […]
“Every joke,” George Orwell wrote, “is a tiny revolution.” That’s because what makes something funny is that it upsets the established order. The more subversive the joke—the more it says […]
India’s rural poor are still waiting after over six decades of independence for their share of the pie. The way things look, this won’t happen anytime soon, and they will continue to scratch a meagre living from the soil unless some dramatic big idea thinking is done – and implemented.