Nayanika Mathur, University of Cambridge “Corruption. It’s like a demon sitting on my brain and eating it with a fork and knife.” So bemoans a character in the novelist Aravind Adiga’s Between the Assasinations set in India. While it is commonplace and easy to bemoan the pervasiveness of corruption in India, it is harder to […]
You would be ill-advised to watch Wild Tales (2014) when feeling on edge. The brilliant ensemble film comprises six discrete stories that depict moments when pent-up passions are set explosively, terrifyingly – and often hilariously – free. The result is at once mesmerizing and, in its moments of unbounded brutality, rebarbative to the extreme. Four […]
“This goes all the way to the top” is one of the great clichés of conspiracy theory. It conjures an image of a group of cackling evildoers hatching a nefarious plot in a smoky room, swearing an oath and then secretly carrying out their elaborate design. In this model of a conspiracy, a small secret […]
In Bloomberg Business Week, of all places, I came across this piece on Proust and the Dreyfus affair by Caroline Weber, an associate professor of French at Barnard College. Weber draws on material from a secret dossier that was used by the French army to convict Alfred Dreyfus for treason. The dossier contains letters exchanged by two foreign […]
There is a good summary of many of the themes we’ve been discussing in this recent piece in the NYT: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/26/magazine/why-rational-people-buy-into-conspiracy-theories.html?pagewanted=all&src=ISMR_AP_LO_MST_FB One claim here is that ‘conspiracy theories wouldn’t exist in a world in which real conspiracies don’t exist’. The examples given of the latter are Watergate and the Iran-contra Affair. In both these cases […]