Friday, August 02, 2024
Film: "Eid Mubarak" - Streaming on PBS
Monday, May 20, 2024
"Shakespeare through Islamic Worlds" by Ambareen Dadabhoy
In case you have trouble with the Twitter embeds above, here's the link to Professor Ambareen's blog entry describing her book and here's the link to order the book from the publisher. Use the discount code EFLY01.Please use this discount code for 20% off: EFLY01. https://t.co/fZvAC9cPaH
— Ambereen Dadabhoy 🪬 (@DrDadabhoy) February 11, 2024
Tuesday, April 02, 2024
The Failed Academic Who Became a War Propagandist: A Minor Character in Leo Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina"
A Russian soldier laughing at an Ottoman Turk. Before being pitted against each other in WWI, bad blood between Russia and Turkey dated back to the 16th century. source |
All quotes are from Book 8 of Constance Garnett's translation of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina on Project Gutenberg. Go read Book 8, Chapter 1, and then return to this page. The character on whom this article focuses is Sergey Ivanovitch Koznishev, the half-brother of Konstantin Dmitrievitch Levin, at whose estate Sergey Ivanovitch will later in the Book spend some time and from which more quotations will be drawn.
So Sergey Ivanovitch spent years writing a book which he expected "would be sure to make a serious impression on society, and if it did not cause a revolution in social science it would, at any rate, make a great stir in the scientific world." Instead, after indifference and a devastatingly effective hostile review, "Sergey Ivanovitch saw that his six years’ task, toiled at with such love and labor, had gone, leaving no trace."
Sergy Ivanovitch turned his talents and energies into mobilizing Russian support for Slavic peoples revolting against the Ottoman Empire, in particular, the Serbs and Montenegrins.
Tuesday, January 09, 2024
Support Local Independent Media Like Atlanta's "285 South" by Sophia Qureshi
R to L: Robert Redford & Dustin Hoffman in "All the President's Men (1976)" |
Friday, December 08, 2023
Film: "A Town Called Victoria" by Li Lu
Sunday, November 19, 2023
Review: 36 Seconds: Portrait of a Hate Crime by Tarek Albaba
I watched 36 Seconds: Portraity of a Hate Crime by Tarek Albaba via the NYC Film Festival, where it is available for streaming through November 26, 2023.
Monday, October 30, 2023
Review: "Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood and the World" by Tom Wright and Bradley Hope
Let us respect the colonialist plunderers of old. At least they had to risk "cannibals" and malaria. Today's plundering colonialists risk bad sushi and paper cuts in hotel lobbies in Switzerland and Singapore.
Reading Tom Wright's and Bradley Hope's Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood and the World engendered in me the same nausea and disgust I felt after reading The Secret World of Oil by Ken Silverstein. Every dollar extracted from the poorer nations of the world is a dollar taken away from development efforts. And while Wright's and Hope's narrative takes advantage of the extravagence of Jho Low, the central character, to maintain the reader's interest, it matters not if the people who extract the money spend it on birthday parties, yachts and jewelry or actual productive business enterprises. It's all theft from the world's poor.
The looting of 1MDB is the subject of Billion Dollar Whale. Former Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak oversaw the creation and management of 1MDB, a sovereign national fund, and, through cronies and bankers, pilfered millions (tens, hundreds?) of USD.
The best passage in the book is towards the end, on p. 371:
Western financial institutions, from Goldman to auditors and private banks, had unwittingly helped Low get away with it, impoverishing Malaysia. (emphasis added)