How to be a hands-on citizen

“Even as the Consumer Story collapses and threatens to take us down with it, the Citizen Story is rising, across … More

Rousseau’s Philosophy & the Savage Man (from The Socrates Express)

Rousseau’s philosophy can be summed up in four words: nature good, society bad. He believed in the “natural goodness of … More

Caste in America

Caste has affected my life in all of the tech jobs I have had, including now at Amazon. Once, at another … More

Can Women Recite the Vedas?

Similarly, a believer in ‘women should not recite Vedas’ usually also believes in ‘Sudras and untouchables should not enter the … More

Who is a Kafir?

“It [Kafir] has nothing to do with the absence of belief in the Islamic doctrine of divinity and prophecy. No … More

Gender Equality

“…the feminist anthropologist Eleanor Leacock’s suggestion [was] that most members of what are called egalitarian societies seem less interested in … More

Egalitarianism

The Oxford social anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard published his classic ethnography of the Sudanese Nuer community (who were held out … More

Bruno Latour, Philosopher on the Social Basis of Scientific Facts, Dies at 75

But a single thread ran through all of his work: the notion that facts do not exist outside of society, … More

Our Universal Civilization by VS Naipaul

A later realization—I suppose I have sensed it most of my life, but I have understood it philosophically only during … More

We are on a path to ‘catastrophic failure’ of our democracy if we don’t change

The degree to which we hate each other has gone up more or less steadily and continuously. You might just … More