An Ancient Treatise and the Making of Modern India | Public Books | July 2016 In India today, the Arthaśāstra is considered analogous to Aristotle’s Politics and Machiavelli’s The Prince. Its topics include kingship, governance, and law in early India. Its perspectives on these subjects have proved to be as important to the project of Indian modernity as the theories
Read these searing quotes from an Auschwitz survivor’s essay on life in the camp | Vox | May 2016 Today is Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Memorial Day — a day on which it’s worth taking some time to actually understand what happened during the Nazi slaughter. One of the best ways to do that is to revisit the writing of Primo
LSD’s impact on the brain revealed in groundbreaking images | The Guardian | April 2016 A dose of the psychedelic substance – injected rather than dropped – unleashed a wave of changes that altered activity and connectivity across the brain. This has led scientists to new theories of visual hallucinations and the sense of oneness with the universe some users
Forget mindfulness, stop trying to find yourself and start faking it | The Guardian | April 2016 Unlike the philosophers we are more familiar with in the west, these Chinese thinkers didn’t ask big questions. Theirs was an eminently pragmatic philosophy, based on deceptively small questions such as: “How are you living your daily life?” These thinkers emphasised that great
Beginning Greek, Again and Again | New York Times | January 2016 But for reasons I don’t understand, some take far longer than others to “get it,” and a few never will. Lack of intelligence isn’t the problem; it’s more about adaptability, acceptance of change. How long should such students go on in the language, hoping for an epiphany? Should