Category: books

Philosopher Alain Badiou on How We Fall and Stay in Love

Love cannot be reduced to the first encounter, because it is a construction. The enigma in thinking about love is the duration of time necessary for it to flourish. In fact, it isn’t the ecstasy of those beginnings that is remarkable. The latter are clearly ecstatic, but love is above all a construction that lasts. We could say that love is a tenacious adventure. The adventurous side is necessary, but equally so is the need for tenacity. To give up at the first hurdle, the first serious disagreement, the first quarrel, is only to distort love. Real love is one that triumphs lastingly, sometimes painfully, over the hurdles erected by time, space and the world.

https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/10/26/alain-badiou-in-praise-of-love/?utm_source=Brain+Pickings&utm_campaign=713bfece18-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_06_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_179ffa2629-713bfece18-236986565&mc_cid=713bfece18&mc_eid=c1cf253ef7

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Books : Communism for Kids

Once upon a time, people yearned to be free of the misery of capitalism. How could their dreams come true? This little book proposes a different kind of communism, one that is true to its ideals and free from authoritarianism. Offering relief for many who have been numbed by Marxist exegesis and given headaches by the earnest pompousness of socialist politics, it presents political theory in the simple terms of a children’s story, accompanied by illustrations of lovable little revolutionaries experiencing their political awakening. Continue reading “Books : Communism for Kids”

Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America

In the final years of the nineteenth century, small groups of Muslim peddlers arrived at Ellis Island every summer, bags heavy with embroidered silks from their home villages in Bengal. The American demand for “Oriental goods” took these migrants on a curious path, from New Jersey’s beach boardwalks into the heart of the segregated South. Two decades later, hundreds of Indian Muslim seamen began jumping ship in New York and Baltimore, escaping the engine rooms of British steamers to find less brutal work onshore. As factory owners sought their labor and anti-Asian immigration laws closed in around them, these men built clandestine networks that stretched from the northeastern waterfront across the industrial Midwest. Continue reading “Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America”

Gabriel García Márquez’s Formative Reading List: 24 Books That Shaped One of Humanity’s Greatest Writers

from Brain PickingsWoven into Living to Tell the Tale (public library) — the autobiography that gave us the emboldening story of García Márquez’s unlikely beginnings as a writer — is the reading that shaped his mind and creative destiny. “Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it,” García Márquez writes, and kindred-spirited readers instantly know that memorable books are the existential markers of life’s lived and remembered chapters. Continue reading “Gabriel García Márquez’s Formative Reading List: 24 Books That Shaped One of Humanity’s Greatest Writers”

9yr old Papua New Guinean Tyra Sioni Award Winning Author & UN Ambassador

love the part where she said pizza slices in new york are HUGE! is true 🙂

To celebrate her award-winning book, Tyra was invited to attend the VoFG Children’s Summit in New York where she helped finalise a statement on the Declaration of Children and the World’s Sustainable Development Goals. Her book, which is based in her birth country of Papua New Guinea and focuses on discrimination towards women, was also launched at the summit, where she gave a short speech on the issues highlighted in the story.Here, Tyra talks about her inspiration for the book, the influences in her life and eating cheese pizzas in New York. “You can write a story too and maybe go to New York one day. However, you have to write about an important issue that can make a difference to people in the world,” she says. Hear, hear, Tyra!