Ivan Hewitt in Prospect Magazine:
One of the things that attracts a keen but lazy enthusiast for Indian music like me is that the sounds and the elaborate ritual of an Indian classical concert never lose their mystery. I am still puzzled by such things as the disbelieving shake of the head and sigh with which proper devotees greet a particularly expressive moment. What does that actually signify? What is the role of the almost-inaudible instrumentalist who sits next to the star soloist, and why does he not play his modest little drone in time with everyone else? What makes Raga Bhairavi a “morning raga,” when to a western ear it seems just as redolent of evening melancholy as an evening raga like Durga? And what is a raga anyway?
The reason I’ve never troubled to find more than a cursory description of these things is that the mystery is part of the enjoyment. I don’t really want answers, which is why I hesitated before reading this book. But then I remembered the special pleasure of Amit Chaudhuri’s novels, where the subtle weave of relationships between people and sights and smells is gently evoked in a way that leaves their essential unknowability intact. One apprehends them like a scent, rather than a piece of discursive knowledge.
Chaudhuri achieves a similar miracle in Finding the Raga—which isn’t to say you won’t learn many specific things, such as the fact that Raga Todi has flattened second, third and sixth degrees. But this is no text book. He tells us that there are literally thousands of ragas, and many rhythmic patterns or talas, but focuses on just a few. He spends several pages on a rhythmic cycle called teentaal, a recurring pattern of 16 beats. To the western ear that simply sounds like four bars of four-four time. Chaudhuri shows how when combined with a system of faster “triplet” beats this iron regularity is overlaid with ambiguity, so to land decisively on the first beat of a cycle becomes a challenge. He leads us gently towards different a way of hearing and playing, and through them to different ways of feeling and knowing.
Chaudhuri is well placed to write such a book. He’s a performer, often leading his own group which combines Indian elements with blues and jazz idioms, and is the son of a well-known classical singer. During his teens Chaudhuri encountered rock music, and for a while seemed more in love with that than with his own heritage. He forsook the Indian accordion for a guitar, and tried to turn himself into a singer-songwriter on the lines of Joni Mitchell or Neil Young.
More here.
“The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society,” Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York said during a lecture at Harvard in 1986. “The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.” Moynihan, an apostle of complexity, lived at the intersection of those two truths, a place where he was free to become one of the most creative American thinkers of the late 20th century. He sensed, and then came to know, that the social problems of what was being called “postindustrial” society would be different from those that came before. He identified these problems, sometimes controversially. In so doing, he predicted the dislocations of the 21st century with uncanny accuracy. He did it with elegance and wit and — this may be a surprise — transcendent humility. His spot-on sense of what truly mattered deserves to be revisited now, if we’re to grope our way past the mess we’ve become as a society.
This time last year, the United States seemed stuck on a COVID-19 plateau. Although 1,300 Americans were dying from the disease every day, states had begun to reopen in 
Last Saturday was Nakba Day, which commemorates the 700,000 Palestinians who were expelled by Israel – or who fled in fear – during the country’s founding in 1948. The commemoration had special resonance this year, since it was Israel’s impending expulsion of six Palestinian families from the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah that 
I would imagine that anyone approaching Edmund Gordon’s comprehensive biography, The Invention of Angela Carter, has a memorable “first time” with Carter. When it comes to cult figures of the intelligentsia, the story of the first time is practically de rigueur. Gordon himself mentions his own in his epilogue. During a post-university year in Berlin, he came upon a secondhand copy of The Magic Toyshop, which Carter had described to her editor in 1966 as a “Gothic melodrama about a sort of South Suburban bluebeard toymaker & his household.” A writer Gordon admired, Ali Smith (an iconoclast of her own order), had spoken highly of Carter, whose reputation he’d previously thought had something “off-putting” about it—“a sense, perhaps, that she was just for girls.” Nonetheless, he bought the novel and “tore” through it “in a few intoxicated hours, stunned by the fearless quality of the imagination on display and by the luminous beauty of the prose.”
As a tormented young anarchist pacifist pining for radical deliverance while cooped up at home with his parents in Berlin during the First World War, Gershom Scholem felt absolutely committed to one cause: Zionism. The only problem, he acknowledged in his journal, was that Zionists had not yet defined the contents of their ideology. As far as Scholem was concerned, Zionism had no political implications. It did not necessitate an oceanic ingathering of the Jewish people from the diaspora. There was no imperative to farm the Holy Land. The movement, in the eyes of the future pioneering scholar of kabbalah, was a humanistic, anti-bourgeois endeavour that probably required a commitment to living in Palestine or thereabouts. But it did not require the acquisition of sovereign control over territory, let alone taking possession of land belonging to the Arab peoples resident in the country.
Leading Indian authors Pankaj Mishra and 
Since the modern era of research on autism began in the 1980s, questions about social cognition and social brain development have been of central interest to researchers. This year marks the 20th anniversary of the first annual meeting of the 
It’s hard to understand the culture of policing in America from the outside.
One pillar of the modern world was the project to transform science from a discipline for contemplating nature into a tool for mastering it. Queen among the new sciences was mathematical physics, made possible by a corresponding transformation of mathematics. Ancient mathematicians, said René Descartes, had misunderstood their subject. They offered a procession of dazzling spectacles, but mathematics properly understood is not the presentation of beautiful chance discoveries. It must instead provide a systematic method for solving problems.
In a study of the effectiveness of putting calorie counts on menu items, consumers were more likely to make lower-calorie choices if the labels were placed to the left of the food item rather than the right.
France’s literary institutions have long struggled with a diversity problem. Though France doesn’t collect statistics on race and ethnicity, a majority of top editors and authors have historically been white. Its literary awards heavily favor men: Since France’s top literature prize, the Prix Goncourt, began in 1903, only 12 women have won. The integration of marginalized literary voices, especially those of second-generation French or people of color, has come in fits and starts. Until the 1990s, literature written by children of immigrant parents of Maghrebis descent was categorized using a pejorative term for Arab. The publication of a 1999 novel by Rachid Djaïdani, which described daily life in France’s housing projects where many immigrants live, was a landmark in breaking the mold. Another was the publication in 2007 of a controversial literary collection by second-generation French writers about their complex relationship with France.
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