Rajeev Kinra

Losing India’s Guardian Angels - The American Prospect USAID funding supported efforts to eradicate tuberculosis in India, one of the country’s deadliest diseases. Now, that money and support is gone.

The impact of the destruction of USAID is so wide-ranging. We got a field report from one of the poorest states in India, where foreign aid funded "TB champions" who educate and assist tuberculosis patients. Without their help, advocates expect a 36% increase in cases & 68% rise in deaths from TB.

I Need AI to Write Better Lesson Plans So My Students Stop Using AI to Write Their Papers I care deeply about my students’ learning, but with all the new technologies available to help them cut corners, I worry that they’re not doing the...

"I’ve concluded that instead of teaching students to read and write, I should be teaching them how to prompt AI better. If only I’d had a better education in AI prompt writing, I’d be able to get AI to create more AI-proof teaching materials for me."

Explore live radio by rotating the globe Explore live radio by rotating the globe.

I'm no purist when it comes to participating in things we all know are bad. I try to reduce my harm but I'm an honest hypocrite.
I won't judge you for still using Spotify, just try this rad alternative. I'm listening to music from Dar es Salaam. Where will you listen to? radio.garden/listen/furah...

One of my former students with some good info for those who partake

Putting this here again as a reminder … six weeks away from the submission deadline! Please circulate!!

RIP Jimmy Cliff 🙏

How Universities Used Counterterror Intelligence-Sharing Hubs to Surveil Pro-Palestine Students Internal university communications reveal how a network established for post-9/11 intelligence sharing was turned on students protesting genocide.

Well this is very bad.

Walking Lahore, Watching the World - Public Books The new mosque's central dome dominates the town's skyline, but competes with an 80-metre-high replica Eiffel Tower, and a scale reproduction of Trafalgar Square.

New at PB: In a review of Disrupted City by Manan Ahmed Asif (@thenewpress.bsky.social) Chris Moffat describes Asif's quest to walk Lahore—a city that has transformed from one of gardens to one of concrete and walls, a “series of segregations."

Blow for OpenAI in Germany as court rules song lyrics used illegally A German court ruled on Tuesday that OpenAI violated copyright on nine popular songs in a lawsuit that marked another attempt to prevent the free use of artists' content online. The Munich Regional Co...

Open AI loses copyright case in Germany.

Judge Elke Schwager summarized the case saying that if you want to build something and need components, "then you purchase them and do not use the property of others."

Well deserved!

Indian Temptations ‘I understand that there is a temptation to bring everything in India, whether it’s literature, music or art, around to its relationship to nationalism. But as my friends in the art world have always ...

Some zingers but more insights in this Granta interview of historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam 🗃️

You know a country by its values. By what a country values. And it turns out that what a country values can change over time. Sometimes, though, there’s a sort of cognitive delay between the country you think you are in, and the country you’ve actually become. For example, you can keep selling yourself, to foreigners, as the country of William Shakespeare and Jane Austen, and luring busloads of tourists to Stratford-upon-Avon and Bath, and put a statue of George Orwell in front of the BBC, and imagine yourself a cultured and literate nation, which the rest of the world admires for its devotion to the written word – but if you then chronically underfund your cultural institutions, and treat your cultural workers with contempt, many people will suspect you of being full of it. And as the decades pass – and fewer and fewer Shakespeares and Austens and Orwells emerge from your little island – even more people will begin to suspect that in truth you do not value culture at all, and are in fact running a giant heritage museum in which the only cultural workers you respect are the dead ones.

Great piece by Zadie Smith. When the right talks about classics or "Western" culture, these works are only important to the extent that it demonstrates their superiority, they have no interest in art in and of itself beyond that www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Artificial Intelligence: A Warning for History Does A.I. have the potential to simplify, and ultimately impoverish, our study of the past? Gordon McKelvie considers the recent explosion in A.I. and what it means for historians facing the current H...

"Historical analysis is fundamentally different and more complex than producing a mass of visualizations and statistics that are the lifeblood of many A.I. programmes."

Gordon McKelvie @gordonmckelvie.bsky.social on the problematic use of A.I. within historical research.

#NorthernLights in north Chicago tonight

40 years ago we’d have congressional hearings falsely accusing metal bands of putting backwards messages in their songs that told kids to kill themselves & now we have a planet-killing chatbot that’s all like “bet you won’t commit suicide chickenshit bitch” & the government is like here’s $5 billion

Fedora man unmasked: Meet the teen behind the Louvre mystery photo Fifteen-year-old Pedro Elias Garzon Delvaux has become an internet sensation after an Associated Press photo captured him outside the Louvre on the day of a crown jewels heist.

Loving today's news that the mysterious "fedora man" outside the Louvre heist was actually a 15-year-old museum visitor who dresses like a 1940s French detective all the time, just because. apnews.com/article/louv...

An U.S. citizen of Indian descent being questioned about Zohran Mamdani (as if there is something wrong with knowing who the mayor-elect of NYC is) by masked men.

The Shutdown of U.S.A.I.D. Has Already Killed Hundreds of Thousands The short documentary “Rovina’s Choice” tells the story of what goes when aid goes.

One analytical model shows that, as of November 5th, the dismantling of U.S.A.I.D. has already caused the deaths of 600,000 people, two-thirds of them children. https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/jUzNSc

A photo of the Norman Rockwell painting, "The Problem We All Live With," which shows a small Black girl in a white dress walking to school surrounded by signs of racism. Text added to the image reads: "Opinion by The Rockwell family: We’re Norman Rockwell’s family. Trump’s DHS has shamefully misused his work."

"If Norman Rockwell were alive today, he would be devastated to see ... that his own work has been marshalled for the cause of persecution toward immigrant communities and people of color," writes the family of late artist Norman Rockwell. bit.ly/47P4SQz

Why was Orwell’s wife, Eileen, written out of his story when she co-wrote Animal Farm? As a writer who was so ahead of his time on imperialism and totalitarianism, why did Orwell fail when it came to his attitudes to women?
linktr.ee/empirepoduk

If New York City Is No Longer Going to Be an Unaffordable Police State Run by Crooks, I’m Taking My Hard-Earned Sex-Pest Dollars Elsewhere “New York millionaires are plotting their exit from the city after the election of Zohran Mamdani, the socialist who plans to increase the taxes of...

"Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer a city where everyday residents have to work three jobs and are under constant threat of eviction. Anything short of an excruciating existence for the working class just doesn’t cut it for me."

Genocide and the Limits of History in Gaza This essay, parts of which were initially delivered at the annual Indigenous art gathering aabaakwad in December 2024 at the University of Toronto, offers three contributions to the historiography ...

One of the most important articles you will read this year. Esmat Elhalaby, "Genocide and the Limits of History in Gaza," Journal of Palestine Studies. @esmat.bsky.social 🗃️

I’ll never get over the look on my dog’s face when I pick up his poop and throw it in the garbage, like, “bro why u do that I left it there ON PURPOSE” 😂

Hi, It’s Me, Wikipedia, and I Am Ready for Your Apology “Wikipedia, the constantly changing knowledge base created by a global free-for-all of anonymous users, now stands as the leading force for the dum...

Once again, @mcsweeneys.net does not miss.

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"In 2004, you saw some college guy using me and thought, 'What a lazy cheater.'

Now you’d think, 'At least he’s not asking Gemini.'

In a few years, you’ll say, 'Wow, look, a human being who can read.'"

Cheating with an LLM is the easiest thing in the world for a student to do, but it creates a massive, laborious headache for a prof, if you intend to take it seriously. There’s meetings, emails, discussions, moral dilemmas. It’s just incredibly burdensome, on top of everything else right now.

RIP to David Bellos whose book Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything massively contributed to me wanting to become a literary translator. When I was writing my own book about translation, I kept in mind how funny and accessible his book was.

Globally Renowned Scholar of Hindi Deported from Delhi Airport Despite Valid Visa Francesa Orsini is perhaps the fourth foreign scholar with a valid visa to be denied entry in recent years.

India's denial of entry to Prof Francesca Orsini is another marker in the grave threats to academic freedom globally.

More people at the Evanston #NoKings protest than are gonna go to the Northwestern football game lol

Why This Essay Could Cause the University of Virginia to Shut Down How Linda McMahon’s latest “compact” would do deep and permanent harm to American higher education

The “compact” for higher ed is an unserious document written by unserious people from a position of spectacular ignorance. No one should take it seriously. Sadly, my bosses are taking it seriously.

newrepublic.com/article/2013...

Attention translators and friends and lovers of translators! The 2026 Humanities in Translation (Hit!) Prize Competition is now open. Deadline Jan. 16.

nupress.northwestern.edu/humanities-i...