Recent posts

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…


America is a (glamorous) “shithole country”
Think back to the last time you thought “damn, I like America”. What was it that caused you to say that? Was it Hollywood? Was it the military victories of the World Wars? Was it Yellowstone? Was it the history of commitment to internationalism and free trade? Or was it the unlikely story of a…
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