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Bad Marxism

I can’t say when it happened, but somewhere between the youthful summer of my ignorance and today, I awoke to the reality of Karl Marx. Nothing about my life so far had prepared me for this man. No, wait – that isn’t quite right. Everything about my life so far had ensured that I would…

The oldest weapon

Throughout history, humans have invented an infinite array of tools to perfect the art of waging war. Over time, this has created a variety of weapons to choose from: guns, swords and arrows are the most visible ones. But there were so many others that didn’t quite survive into the modern age – like spears,…

The Indian Conservative: Hindu apologism goes mainstream

Jaithirth Rao is an Indian businessman who founded Mphasis, a cookie-cutter IT outsourcing company based in Bangalore, India. In time, his stature as one of India’s aspirational new tech elites gave him space to air his views on politics, history, culture and a range of other social subjects. Rao calls himself a true-blue conservative in…

Book review: Bullshit Jobs

David Graeber’s ‘Bullshit Jobs’ is a 360-odd page expansion of his earlier essay ‘On The Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs’, which set out to make the case that many high-paying, respectable jobs are completely unnecessary and meaningless. I must admit, I wasn’t familiar with Graeber’s essay before reading the book. For the most part, I hadn’t…

Book review: Early Indians

‘Early Indians’ by Tony Joseph has a simple claim: to bring us up to speed on what we know about prehistoric Indians. To do this, he uses a variety of sources to triangulate arguments and make a simple and robust claim: all Indians have a mixture of immigrant ancentries. The book begins, as any work…

Bundles

Do you ever look at things and go “hmm, I wonder what makes this the thing, and I wonder what makes it a thing”? People have, for a long time. The problem of what makes a thing what it is was tackled by people as removed from modern life as Socrates and Plato. Ancient Greek…

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