Based on various interviews Professor Robert Pape, University of Chicago, and Ian Bremmer have given in the last 10 days. Pape founded the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, and Bremmer is the founder of of Eurasia Group, the world’s leading political risk consultancy. The question sounds provocative. But follow the logic and it becomes […]
I came across a number the other day.Even Roger Federer lost 48% of the most important points in his matches.Almost half. It doesn’t sit well. We remember control. Precision. Mastery. We remember the points that worked.But nearly every second decisive moment — didn’t.Lost. Not because he wasn’t good enough. Not because he made a mistake we […]
We were visiting a friend yesterday.She was telling us, slightly stunned, about a group of people nearby who are teaching how to plant trees and plants in a very specific way — in bundles, in a certain order. Only then, they said, each plant could fully unfold. I found myself nodding, but also hesitating. Because, […]
I have been spending time lately with Iris Brosch, the photographer and artist who worked closely with Shere Hite for more than a decade. Together we are exploring how to bring more of that work — the photographs, the intimacy, the whole charged world of it — back into public view. I knew about Shere […]
I have to admit, I am a huge fan of Michael Pollan. His latest book, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness, brings together scientific, philosophical, literary, and psychedelic perspectives to ask what consciousness is, who has it, and why. Pollan argues that consciousness is under siege — and ends with the idea that learning […]
This morning I watched a conversation on the war in Iran. What Vali Nasr describes about the countra and its people feels precise and grounded. But what stayed with me was something else — the way his words touched something in me that I hadn’t expected. It connects to much of what I am grappling […]
A lecture hall at the University of Pavia. First-year political science students. Italy. Eastern Europe. Africa. The Middle East. When I started speaking about the United Nations, the room became very quiet. So quiet you could hear a pin drop.I did not celebrate the UN. I reflected on it.Not as a perfect institution. But as a political arena — […]
Yesterday I returned to “my” island, Armona. It welcomed me with its light. Clear. Wide. Quiet. So different from the cities I moved through over the past seventeen days. Milan — a small independent publishing house. Pavia — political science students, thoughtful, restless, searching for orientation. Berlin — conversations about the soul of cities, about meaning beyond data. A […]
There are moments when I catch myself wondering: What if it isn’t ideology that unites people — but disgust? Not left.Not right.Not North.Not South. But a shared realization that those who call themselves “powerful” have been protecting something far smaller than power. The Jeffrey Epstein files sit like a stone in the collective stomach. They […]
To apply for a Schengen visa with an ECR stamp in your passport — a mark used for Indian citizens whose international travel is officially classified as requiring protection and supervision — is not a single act. It is an accumulation.The fact that such a classification is physically stamped into a passport, visible at every […]