Threads of the rich history of Sri Lanka – from the strategic value of its harbours to its deep Buddhist tradition, the long period under British Colonial Rule to the violence of the Sri Lankan Civil War – can be seen throughout its literature.
Author Archives: lookingbeyondborders
Join The Party Of Love
Politics is inescapably emotional. Political ideas – such as freedom or equality – are often talked about as if they’re dry concepts, sandpapered down in a seminar room or a theoretical conversation. But political ideas involve feeling.
Monks With Guns
The vast majority of introductory books on Buddhism and Buddhist philosophy do not mention Buddhist violence. Instead, they associate Buddhism with pacifism and non-violence. Think of the many books on Buddhist meditation, the 14th Dalai Lama and his advocacy of non-violence, and the peace work of Buddhist activists such as the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh.
The Next List 2017
Microsoft will build computers even more sleek and beautiful than Apple’s. Robots will 3-D-print cool shoes that are personalised just for you. Neural networks will take over medical diagnostics, and Snapchat will try to take over the entire world. The women and men in these pages are the technical, creative, idealistic visionaries who are bringing the future to your doorstep. You might not recognize their names—they’re too busy working to court the spotlight—but you’ll soon hear about them a lot. They represent the best of what’s next.
Should You Feel Sad About The Demise Of The Handwritten Letter?
Much of what seems troublesome in digital culture today – the necessity of ‘personal brands’; the ubiquity of a politics of feeling; the transformation of sociality into unpaid labour; the unmarked blending of business contacts and ‘friends’ – much of this exaggerates letterish trends that for generations have worked to mix the private and the public while seeming to maintain the border between them.
Triumph Of The Thought Leader … And The Eclipse Of The Public Intellectual
Both Public Intellectuals and Thought Leaders engage in acts of intellectual creation, but their style and purpose are different. To adopt the language of Isaiah Berlin, Public Intellectuals are foxes who know many things, while Thought Leaders are hedgehogs who know one big thing. The former are skeptics, the latter are true believers. A Public Intellectual will tell you everything that is wrong with everyone else’s ideas. A Thought Leader will tell you everything that is right about his or her own idea.
Can You Judge A Book By Its Odour?
Cocoa, wood, rusks – every book has a distinctive smell. And each smell says something about how and when it was made, and where it has been.
How Magazines Created A New Culture Of Manhood
Through the 1930s and ‘40s, Esquire illustrations by Russian-American designer Count Alexis de Sakhnoffsky depicted rooms in offices and homes, as well as airplanes, cars, and motorboats, with streamlined curves. The aerodynamic lines suggested dynamic “masculine” efficiency and power, Osgerby writes, but their organic shapes also pointed to a “feminine” smoothing of sharp modernist design.
Will London Fall?
What happens next? No one really knows. Pro-Brexit Britons are happy, of course, even if headaches will follow. This is probably the noisiest and most complicated divorce in modern European history. London is still busy, the Tube is still packed and the pubs are still full. But it is a weird moment. The certainties that sustained a great city are no longer certain.
P.G. Wodehouse, Great American Humourist?
Should P.G. Wodehouse be considered an American humorist as well as a master of British farce? Based on his voluminous fiction, Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, KBE (1881-1975), known as “Plum” to his friends, certainly comes across as the quintessential Englishman.
This Day And That 