The first three chapters of my latest book are on the Amazon webpage. (Click on the ‘Look inside’ link.) The publisher’s webpage is here and you can also buy it from any major retailer. (Note: This will be the new top post for a while. Later posts are below.)
It is easy to focus on the day-to-day events in the US-Israeli attack on Iran, we should not forget that what is being attacked is much more than material things.
In an essay titled A Bitter Education in the New York Review of Books, the Indian writer Pankaj Mishra writes about the strong legacy of Persian culture that was cherished in India by intellectuals like Jawaharlal Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi, and Rabindranath Tagore, and that is now being squandered by the current Hindu nationalist prime minister Narendra Modi and the westernized classes of Iran and India as they genuflect to the western capitalist ethos.
Jawaharlal Nehru wrote in The Discovery of India that “among the many people and races who have come in contact with Indians and influenced India’s life and culture, the oldest and most persistent have been the Iranians.” It is the kind of historical fact readily verified by ordinary experience. My grandfather was more fluent in Persian than in any other language; I grew up using Persian words in everyday conversations, eating food that originated in Persia, and listening to music whose most widespread and enduring forms—qawwali and the ghazal—were refined by a medieval poet in Persian.
For nearly a millennium, Persian was the lingua franca of Asia: the language widely used by political and intellectual mandarins and necessary, too, for travelers such as Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta, who both deployed the language in China. Indeed, if Persian nationalism has maintained a profound sense of historical continuity transcending many different political regimes, it is because of its roots in the achievements of an expansive and long-lasting Persian civilization, or ecumene. Translated into many vernacular languages, the poetry and philosophy of Firdausi, Attar, Rumi, Hafez, Sa‘di, Nizami, Ibn Sina, and Nizam al-Mulk assumed a canonical authority across Asia. Rulers everywhere, whether Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist, adopted Persian ideologies of statecraft that, as Richard Eaton writes in India in the Persianate Age: 1000–1765 (2019), privileged “the notion of justice and connecting economy, morality and politics.”
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Even someone as deeply cynical as I am about the lack of morality of Trump and his willingness to do anything to further his personal interests find myself gagging that the suggestion that he would start a major war with Iran just to get the embarrassing Epstein story off the news focus. But there is no doubt that the result of the war has largely been that the demands for the full release of the files has been shunted to the back burner. So here is my measly attempt o bring it back to the front.
One of the big puzzles in the Epstein story has been how this one-time math and physics teacher at a private school without a college degree started the process by which he managed to acquire all the wealth that enabled him to live a luxurious predatory lifestyle that involved raping young women, while cavorting with a host of well-knowing people in the world of business, science, and the arts. I was not aware that back on December 16, 2025, the New York Times published a long story that traced his origins from the beginning and filled in many of the missing details. I will provide just the basic summary.
In his first two decades of business, we found that Epstein was less a financial genius than a prodigious manipulator and liar. Abundant conspiracy theories hold that Epstein worked for spy services or ran a lucrative blackmail operation, but we found a more prosaic explanation for how he built a fortune. A relentless scammer, he abused expense accounts, engineered inside deals and demonstrated a remarkable knack for separating seemingly sophisticated investors and businessmen from their money. He started small, testing his tactics and seeing what he could get away with. His early successes laid the foundation for more ambitious ploys down the road. Again and again, he proved willing to operate on the edge of criminality and burn bridges in his pursuit of wealth and power.
Rung by rung, Epstein climbed a social and financial ladder, often using young women as a potent form of currency. His girlfriends, lovers and even exes helped elevate his status inside a bank, got him hired to track down missing assets and gained him entree to prestigious organizations. And deliberately or not, some of them enabled him as he constructed a sex-trafficking operation that would later ensnare hundreds of teenage girls and young women.
As the US-Israeli war with Iran and Lebanon drags on, trying to figure out how it will end becomes harder. Trying to predict where wars will head is bad enough at the best of times, given their chaotic nature, but doing so with reckless leaders like Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, who seem to be willing to do anything for their own short-term benefit, can be seen as an exercise in futility.
On the surface, it would appear that since Iran is in a much weaker position militarily, it will be forced at some point to sue for peace under unfavorable conditions. At least that is what Trump’s rhetoric seems to indicate that he believes. He keeps saying that the US has already won or that the Iranians want to make a deal. But Iran has steadfastly refuted that latter claim. This may be because for the Iranian regime, this is an existential threat and hence they have no interest in agreeing to anything that does not keep them in power. So for them, dragging this thing out indefinitely, and inflicting any damage they can on the global economy by (say) attacking the oil infrastructure and closing the Strait of Hormuz is an acceptable price to pay and they will hold out until Trump offers them something that they can accept.
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When I was around 13 years of age, our neighbors had five children, three of whom were close in age to me. They would invite me to play card games at their place and we played for money. It was not high stakes in any absolute sense but it was for me since all I had was just the little pocket money that my parents gave me. So I did have thrill (if you want to call it that) of fearing a real loss. It was exciting to gamble and I was quickly getting drawn in and looked forward to playing after school. But I would end up losing consistently. After a while, while I could not prove it, I became convinced that the siblings were cheating by colluding against me. They were Indians and would sometimes speak and sing in Hindi, a language that is not spoken in Sri Lanka and that I did not know, and I think that they were communicating with each other. Anyway, I got tired of losing in an unfair game and stopped playing with them after a while. It was my first taste of how the gambling system is usually rigged against you and I lost my taste for it and never got attracted to it again.
Gambling in sports in the US has an ugly history with players accused of adjusting their play in order to make money by getting particular results. This led to federal laws that banned it and for the longest time it was restricted to just in-person gambling in the state of Nevada, primarily Las Vegas. Professional sports leagues vigorously opposed any attempts to legalize it nationwide, arguing that it would lead to the death of sports due to suspicions of cheating. But in 2018, the US Supreme Court overturned the federal ban, saying that the constitution did not allow for this federal power and that it was up to the states to decide whether they wanted to allow gambling or not, and then it was off to the races, as states vied to attract gamblers.
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Trump is notorious for talking tough and making threats, taking impetuous actions, and then when he finds that he cannot carry out the threats or gets severe blowback, backtracking. Perhaps the most blatant example of this was with the tariffs which changed from day to day on his whim but he has also done that with things like saying he wants to take over Greenland, a bit of braggadocio that seems to have slipped into the memory hole when Denmark and other European countries presented a united front opposing the move. He does not even talks about it anymore.
As another example, take Trump’s threat to Iran on Saturday that if they did not open the Strait of Hormuz within 48 hours he would launch attacks on their oil infrastructure. This caused a sharp rise in oil prices and a massive drop in stock prices (one of the few things he cares about) and so he then said that thanks to Iran starting talks with the US, he was postponing the action.
Oil prices, which had been rising after Trump threatened over the weekend to strike Iranian infrastructure unless Iran opened the strait of Hormuz, dropped sharply. Brent crude, the international benchmark, fell 10% to $101 a barrel. The UK month-ahead gas prices fell 6% to 142p a therm.
The US president said on his social media platform Truth Social that the US and Iran had “very good and productive conversations” over the past two days regarding “a complete and total resolution of our hostilities in the Middle East”.
He said: “Based on the tenor and tone of these in-depth, detailed, and constructive conversations, which will continue throughout the week, I have instructed the Department of War to postpone any and all military strikes against Iranian power plants and energy infrastructure for a five-day period, subject to the success of the ongoing meetings and discussions.”
This caused stock prices to bounce back yesterday. (One thing I do not understand is why investors react to the words of Trump. He is such a liar and so erratic that it would seem pointless to make decisions based on what he says he will do in the future. And yet it appears that many of them do.)
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The invaluable investigative news source ProPublica has a highly disturbing article about how crank RFK Jr’s; health agenda, backed by Trump, risks unleashing waves of childhood plagues that we thought we had ended for good. Much news coverage has focused on measles but there are a whole lot of other diseases that risk becoming widespread as well. Some of them had been absent for so long that doctors had never seen cases and thus had trouble identifying them in the sick children brought to them. The diseases include diphtheria, rubella, and polio among others.
The article starts with a doctor puzzling over the symptoms displayed by an infant.
The baby’s life was in danger, and Ratner needed to figure out why. He worried the culprit was bacterial meningitis, an infection of the membranes that protect the brain.
What came back on her lab tests was something out of the history books.
The infant’s meningitis was caused by invasive Haemophilus influenzae type b, or Hib, a type of bacteria that used to kill nearly 1,000 children a year in the U.S. A shot introduced in the late 1980s was so effective that Ratner, a veteran pediatric infectious disease doctor, was among the generations of physicians who had never seen a case. But the baby’s parents, Ratner learned, had chosen not to vaccinate her.
Disheartened, he told his colleagues, “This should be a never event.”
It wasn’t. The following year, Ratner treated another infant with Hib, then another, each of them unvaccinated. Two went home, but one had to be discharged to a rehabilitation facility. That 5-month-old boy had huge black pupils that didn’t respond to light, and he needed a ventilator to breathe. Ratner and his colleagues noted an “absence of brain stem reflexes,” indicating severe damage.
The U.S. government took a half century to build a vaccination system that shielded children from such a fate. Its success depended on two fundamental pillars: parents trusting in vaccines and children having access to them. Both are now in peril, thanks in no small part to the man steering America’s health policy.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who founded an antivaccine group and once likened the immunization of children to a holocaust, is transforming a government that long championed the lifesaving benefits of shots into one that spreads doubts about their safety here and abroad.
Two days ago, I linked to the amusing 12-minute short film Jane Austen’s Period Drama that was nominated for this year’s Oscar but did not win.
When it comes to the arts in any form, I am definitely low-brow. High art leaves me mystified and this was confirmed yet again when I later watched the co-winner of this year’s short film category called Two People Exchanging Saliva. From the beginning I was aware that I was in the Ocean of Deep Metaphor and that I was hopelessly out of my depth. As I watched it, trying to figure out the message, I thought to myself “There is a message here but I am so not getting it”. I was utterly baffled.
Watch for yourself.
After the film, I looked it up and even after reading about what the underlying message was, I still did not get it. I am that bad.
I wonder what the term is that signifies the opposite of avante garde when referring to the arts, because that is the label that would definitely would fit me.
It appears that the Trump administration does not do even the most cursory examination of someone’s past before appointing them to important offices in the government. Otherwise how can you explain how a nutjob like Gregg Phillips was made head of the the office of response and recovery at FEMA, the federal agency tasked with responding to natural disasters and other emergencies?
Gregg Phillips, who in December was appointed to lead Fema’s office of response and recovery, has spoken on “multiple podcasts” about being teleported against his will, CNN reported on Friday.
On a January 2025 podcast appearance, Phillips claimed that his car was “lifted up” while he was driving and transported 40 miles away into a ditch near a church. And in another instance on the same episode, Phillips said he was teleported 50 miles away to a Waffle House in Rome, Georgia, CNN detailed in a deep dive into Phillips’ past public statements.
“I was with my boys one time, and I was telling them I was gonna go to Waffle House and get Waffle House. And I ended up at a Waffle House – this was in Georgia, and I end up at a Waffle House like 50 miles away from where I was,” Phillips said on the podcast Onward, co-hosted by rightwing activist Catherine Engelbrecht.
Phillips added: “And they said, ‘where are you?’ and I said, ‘A Waffle House.’ And: ‘a Waffle House where?’ And I said: ‘Waffle House in Rome, Georgia.’ And they said: “‘That’s not possible, you just left here a moment ago.’ But it was possible. It was real.”
This 12-minute 2026 Oscar-nominated short film satirizes the period drama in more ways than one.
In the UK, Nigel Farage is under fire for having made Cameo videos that featured him making controversial statements.
The Guardian’s unearthing of Farage’s videos has raised questions about his relationship with the far right and who he is willing to take money from. Farage charged £155 for one video he made in 2025 for a man he was told had received a 16-month sentence for his involvement in a far-right riot. Despite knowing that the man had been convicted over his role in the disorder, the Reform leader recorded a supportive message for him, telling the man “I’m with you”.
…Farage was paid £141 for another video in which he promoted an event by a Canadian neo-Nazi group, which used the clip in propaganda alongside fascist salutes and antisemitic imagery. Farage called the event “the best thing that ever happened”. The video was removed from Cameo’s website after the Guardian’s story.
As a result of the revelations, his account says that he no longer is accepting any offers.
Cameo is a site that enables you to pay for celebrities to make personalized videos where they say things that you want them to say, if they are willing to do so. The usual requests are as gifts to friends to wish them on their birthdays or anniversaries or similar things. But clearly some are pushing other agendas.
I can understand why minor celebrities might sign up to do them, since it provides some easy money as a side hustle. If there are suckers out there willing to pay for people to utter some words, there will be those who are willing to oblige. What I can’t understand is the appeal for the buyer of the message and the intended recipient. Would the person you are seeking to impress really be flattered by getting a personalized message from some has-been B or C lister who was paid to give it and has absolutely no idea who you are and does not give a damn about you?
I can sort of understand if you knew the celebrity personally and they recorded the video as a favor to you. Then the recipient may be impressed that you knew them well-enough that they would do this for you. So this would be of benefit to you,
But otherwise it seems really tacky to me.
I guess I just don’t understand the thrill that some people feel when a sort-of celebrity mentions their name, even if they had to be paid to do so.