I write down every dream I have, which I suspect helps me remember even more of my dreams. Anyway, the dream goes as such:

In 19th-century Austria-Hungary, a nun initiated and led a peasant rebellion against lords and the emperor. However, a conservative, religious institution in our modern times organized a campaign to condemn the nun and label her and her convent as ‘communist.’ I was irked by this group's blatant attitude in rewriting history according to its whims.

The idea of a ‘communist’ nun intrigued me and so I did a bit of research in hopes of finding something pertinent regarding a communist nun or church. And I did find some interesting bits of history.

• The 1381 Peasants' Revolt in England. In June of that year, a band of rebels from Wroxham broke into the convent of Carrow where they demanded the prioress to hand over the convent's deeds which they burned.

I'd like to announce that I rewrote the 30,000 words or so (or, half of what I had wrote in total) that I lost due to my negligence and poor judgement. I had to pull an all-nighter every other day, to fetch literature and sources, of which I vaguely remember their spirit, on a scuffed search engine. I have to consistently live with the fear that I missed writing a groundbreaking observation or an ingenious concept now lost for eternity. Despite the pain I suffered (or perhaps becase of it) I was appreciative of the fact that I hadn't lost more than I did; the mere thought of having to search for more academic literature gives me goosebumps. My face is pale, body is sore, and I have neglected all the other aspects of my life for the sake of writing. Only three weeks have passed since the catastrophe, but they felt as long as the eternal hell realm in the Buddhist tradition. I am at last content, yet paradoxically the sense of loss has persisted in one way or another. Let this be a wort

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Pulitzer Prize-Winning author Nathan Thrall will discuss his book “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy.”

About the Book Five-year-old Milad Salama is excited for the school trip to a theme park on the outskirts of Jerusalem. On the way, his bus collides with a semitrailer in a horrific accident. His father, Abed, gets word of the crash and rushes to the site. The scene is chaos—the children have been taken to different hospitals in Jerusalem and the West Bank; some are missing, others cannot be identified. Abed sets off on an odyssey to learn Milad’s fate. It is every parent’s worst nightmare, but for Abed it is compounded by the maze of physical, emotional, and bureaucratic obstacles he must navigate because he is Palestinian. He is on the wrong side of the separation wall, holds the wrong ID to pass the military checkpoints, and has the wrong papers to enter the city of Jerusalem.

Abed’s quest to find Milad is interwoven with the stories of a cast of

It only takes a minute of your time to copy your important files to a drive or the cloud. I (potentially) lost one year of progress on a book I'm writing because of my negligence.

So please don't be like me.

LinkedIn will be using information shared on the platform to train AI models. Make sure you opt out in the settings (should you believe that the opt-out option is legit).

The term "neoliberalism" gets thrown a lot in intellectual and political discourse, yet with seldom clarity to what it entails. Some may loosely relate it to the de-politicisation of the economy, the weakening of the State in favor of private corporations, or even the revival of laissez-faire capitalism. While one cand find some truth in those assumptions, they inevitably stray from the ideology as conceived by the neoliberal intellectuals of the past century.

Besides narrating the marriage of neoliberalism and human rights (which we will cover later), this book sheds a light on what actually neoliberalism stood for. Whyte contends that what the neoliberals envisaged through their numerous gatherings following the second world war, was a new, global economic order premised on what they have termed the “morals of the market.”

[T]he ‘morals of the market’ were a set of individualistic, commercial values that prioritised the pursuit of self-interest above the development of common pur

I heard a lot of praise for Bulgakov's oeuvre in the past, so I decided to give it a go.

I have read Russian literature in the past by recommendation of family and friends who always showed much interest in it; be it Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov or Pushkin.

But recently I noticed that knowledge of Russian literature virtually stops at the onset of the revolution. When it comes to the Soviet era, there is a sort of intentional silence regarding the literature of that time, at least in the West and its colonized peripheries. Anecdotally, I once had a conversation with my mother during which she claimed that the Soviet period was a dark time to be living in Russia. When I asked her what's the basis of her statement, she said this is based on the novels she read, citing Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. The awkward smile on her face after telling her that these authors died decades before the revolution was priceless; bless her heart, but I am digressing.

When a few exceptions of Soviet literatur

When I asked my friend how she found the book to be, she described it as “a jumble of thoughts that felt familiar.”

As Orientals, they indeed feel familiar to us. Although I never picked up the book before now, I couldn't say I have not read it. I read it on the faces of Western "political experts". I read it in laws of counterterrorism and anti-immigration. I read it in the newspapers, listen to it on the radio, and watch it on the TV. But most crucially, I read it when I look into the mirror, this self perception of being an “Oriental”, an inferiority complex transfused throughout the years from teachers and professors, intellectuals and celebrities, family and friends, and especially strangers.

“Oriental students (and Oriental professors) still want to come and sit at the feet of American Orientalists, and later to repeat to their local audiences the clichés I have been characterizing as Orientalist dogmas.” (Ch.3, IV).

Orientalism, according to Said, is not merely a scientific,

Disclaimer: there is no English translation of this book

The setting is 14th century Syria witnessing a stand-off between the usurping Mameluke Sultanate, and the Mongol Ilkhan whose forefathers invaded from the East, and who, having converted to Islam, is seeking to govern the holy sites of Mecca and Medina.

However, amid the grusomeness of the scenes delicately described and narrated, there is an overarching theme which the author fixated on: that is History.

The author does not accept history at face value. There are political ramifications at play that go largely unnoticed by positivist scholarship in the field. For the production of history is neither an objective nor symmetrical process: not everyone has the privilege of writing history, not even one's own history for that matter. The historian's discretionary power in selectively choosing what to convey and what to silence from the past precludes him from being a disinterested observer. History does not merely transmit eve

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/10484701

The best way I could describe Uruguayan Journalist Eduardo Galeano's book is that it's a poetical obituary of the art of soccer. As the author writes in the first lines, “the history of soccer is a sad voyage from beauty to duty. When the sport became an industry, the beauty that blossoms from the joy of play got torn out by its very roots. In this fin de siècle world, professional soccer condemns all that is useless, and useless means not profitable.”

Galeano recounts the development of the sport from its ancient roots, its bourgeois upbringings in the modern age, through its proletarisation and to its eventual commercialisation by the global market. The history of soccer is one of those few instances whose origins are less grim than their present actuality.

The fact is that professional players offer their labor power to the factories of spectacle in exchange for a wage. The price depends on performance, and the more