In this collection of conversations that were conducted in Calcutta, at the London School of Economics, through Jewish Book Week, and on the radical website openDemocracy, internationally renowned Jewish scholar Jacqueline Rose explores the debates t...

In these 99 meditations, poet and novelist Hans Magnus Enzensberger celebrates the tenacity of the normal and routine in everyday life, where the survival of the objects we use without thinking – a pair of scissors, perhaps – is both a small, human v...

Can humanity be divided into good and evil? And if so, is it possible for the good to vanquish the evil, eradicating it from the face of the Earth by declaring war on evildoers and bringing them to justice? Can we overcome evil by the power of memory...

In "Carnival and Cannibal", distinguished French philosopher Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) reflects on many of his most significant ideas concerning the significance of language and the relationship between the technological and the social. In this,...

Born in Tehran in 1957, filmmaker Mohsen Ostad Ali Makhmalbaf grew up in the religious and politically charged atmosphere of the 1960s, and the June 1963 uprising of Ayatollah Khomeini constitutes one of his earliest memories. In 1972, Makhmalbaf for...

Writing in 2007, French social philosopher Andre Gorz (1923-2007) was remarkably prophetic, foretelling the international economic meltdown of 2008: "The real economy is becoming an appendage of the speculative bubbles sustained by the finance indust...

From the Greeks and Shakespeare to the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, war has often been a major theme of dramatic performances. However, many of the most extraordinary theater projects in recent years not only have been about war but also have origin...

Nikolai Bukharin (1888-1938), an original Bolshevik leader and a founder of the Soviet state, spent the last year of his life imprisoned by Stalin, awaiting a trial and eventual execution. Remarkably during that time, from March 1937 to March 1938, B...

Circuses provide surreal, fantastic entertainment. At times magical and at others chilling, the circus is a world of magic and spectacle for the viewer, but for the performer, a career in the circus often brings with it a nomadic, lonely life. In "Ci...

Over the centuries, observances of Muharram, the first month of the Islamic calendar, have traveled far from their origins at Karbala – a windswept desert plain that is now a town in present-day Iraq – where, according to tradition, Hussein, the belo...