Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
He recited “Puerto Rico, Puerto Pobre,” a poem by Pablo Neruda.
Nelson Denis • War Against All Puerto Ricans
Tagore invented secular festivals for the celebration of the different seasons in the region and brought together the urban and the rural during harvest festivals. He started cooperative movements among the tribal peoples and the rural folk, seeking to educate them in health, agriculture, savings and other modern ways of survival, while encouraging
... See morePrasenjit Duara • The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future (Asian Connections)
I sip my coffee. It’s good. “The de facto king of Iraq is a Kissinger acolyte named L. Paul Bremer III. On taking office, he passed two edicts that have shaped the occupation. Edict number one ruled that any member of the Ba’ath Party above a certain rank was to be sacked. With one stroke of the pen Bremer consigned to the scrap-heap the very civil
... See moreDavid Mitchell • The Bone Clocks: A Novel
respectively—transforms colonial possession into benign and mutually agreeable exchanges, all the while disguising the material, economic, and political conditions under which colonized islanders labored.
Adria L. Imada • Aloha America: Hula Circuits through the U.S. Empire
Some argue that militarized riot control is merely prudent preparation—for example, in Ferguson, Missouri. Shouldn’t authorities take whatever steps they can to protect life and property? There are two major problems with this line of thinking. First, it is not at all clear that these measures advance public safety; second, the right to protest can
... See moreAlex S. Vitale • The End of Policing
During the twenty years from 2001 to 2021, the US government spent between $6 and $8 trillion on invasions, surveillance, and efforts to shadowbox with elusive enemies. Brown University’s Costs of War project estimates that over three hundred thousand civilians may have died from war-related violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, and neighboring Pakistan,
... See moreSetha Low • Trapped: Life under Security Capitalism and How to Escape It
Visual culture studies in this period moved from understanding archives as repositories of documentary evidence to conceptualizing them as productive institutional sites of visual knowledge. This post-structuralist turn has led to innovative methodological inquiries into how archives elicit myriad negotiations around subjectivity, citizenship, and
... See moreWendy Kozol • Distant Wars Visible: The Ambivalence of Witnessing (Critical American Studies)
Those who resent the mutilation of Indian culture by the British Raj inadvertently sanctify the legacies of the Mughal Empire and the conquering sultanate of Delhi.
Yuval Noah Harari • Sapiens
