rkkinra.bsky.social - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

In this week’s PEN Ten, we spoke to International Booker Award winner, Geetanjali Shree, about ‘Our City That Year,’ translated by Daisy Rockwell. Published 25 years after the original in Hindi, the book and the discussion are as timely as ever: pen.org/geentanjali-...

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Elementary school principals going where university presidents fear to tread...

submitted 2 days ago • 165 comments

Everyone wants there to be a grand scheme behind all of this but the terrible truth is that extremely stupid people are in charge and they have a fanatical devotion to wrong, childlike concepts of society and economics cooked up by right wing radio hosts in order to sell tainted dietary supplements

submitted 4 days ago • 1042 comments

Please don’t tell the new Thought Police that I’ve been secretly listening to “afternoon ragas” (gasp) after dark… dare I say, even, late at night! I know I will pay the price for this in the next life, but for now, just tryna do what feels groovy, even if it goes against the cosmic order 🤷🏽‍♂️

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Pollock and Appadurai expose the essentially oligarchical composition and function of US university boards (this is especially true of the ivies) www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

submitted 6 days ago • 1 comment

"If this country is to go on breaking, to go on becoming a darker, more repressive place than it was the day before, it will be shepherded in that direction by everyone who insists on equivocating."

submitted 9 days ago • 4 comments

Lamb licking a lion’s nose. Detail from a portrait of the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan by Bichitr, c.1630 in @chesterbeatty.bsky.social Lecture by @rkkinra.bsky.social at V&A used this pic to show importance of “suhl-i kul” (peace with all) in successive Mughal courts. To see the entire painting… 1/2

submitted 9 days ago • 2 comments

Like, what is so hard about just pointing me in the direction of Gloucester Road, mate?

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A Mughal historian’s prayer: dear lord, if you’re actually there, please deliver me from all future encounters with random English dudes whom I ask for directions and then proceed to expect me to explain “why India failed to industrialize” but Britain did

submitted 11 days ago • 0 comments

bought Poisoned Arrow by Ibn-e-Safi from @blaft.bsky.social randomly and it is a trip. If you like detective fiction that is slightly eccentric you will probably enjoy this. It's weird but not goofy. Out there murder plot with some off kilter characters.

submitted 13 days ago • 1 comment

My book The Making of Persianate Modernity is now available in paperback! There's a 20% discount - use the code HIST1225 at checkout.

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Absolutely obsessed with this late 19th century illustration of the Orion Nebula by Otto Boeddicker.

submitted 14 days ago • 63 comments

www.chronicle.com/article/what...

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I dare say the most Gen X evening ever: listening to the Violent Femmes while using my electric toothbrush, meanwhile musing about whether to stash some money in offshore accounts in case I need to leave the country on short notice IYKYK 🤷🏽‍♂️

submitted 18 days ago • 0 comments

The myth that vaccines cause autism is harmful to public health, not just because it lowers vaccination rates, but because it contributes to stigma and negative stereotypes about autism. My latest for @theguardian.com www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

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www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

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Even as he sits in a cell 1400 miles away from his home and his due-any-day-now pregnant wife, Mahmoud Khalil is thinking about the plight of others:

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I’m the Director of the Center for Historical Studies at Northwestern and also a gender historian. If I thought for a minute that our administration had cancelled this conference for political reasons I would be complaining, loudly. But this is not an accurate representation of what happened.

submitted 20 days ago • 18 comments

Hi, all--Northwestern didn't cancel on Big Berks. Please see below.

submitted 19 days ago • 2 comments

First flowers of the year spotted!

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20 years of bitching about woke humanities departments and the first thing they do is defund STEM

submitted 21 days ago • 72 comments

www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/a-m...

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“To the crowd, Walz was encouraging, saying their anger is justified. ‘The road to authoritarianism is littered with people telling you you’re overreacting,’ he said. ‘You’re not.’” www.yahoo.com/news/somethi...

submitted 23 days ago • 77 comments

“It’s an escalation of a kind that is unheard of,” said Joan Scott, a historian & member of the academic freedom committee of the AAUP. “Even during the McCarthy period in the United States, this was not done.” apnews.com/article/colu...

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NEW: Family of Mahmoud Khalil just released footage of his arrest “Stop resisting” “He’s not resisting” Agents seen continuing to ignore Mahmoud’s wife as she asks basic questions

submitted 23 days ago • 719 comments

American politics makes a lot more sense when you realize that the GOP is afraid of pissing off the GOP base, and the Dems are afraid of pissing off the GOP base, but neither party is afraid of pissing off the Dem base.

submitted 23 days ago • 1367 comments

listening to “enter the wu-tang” and one think i like about this record — especially as i’ve gotten older — is how charming it is. it feels like a garage rock record and in a lot of ways that’s exactly what it is. it’s lo-fi, energetic and brimming with enthusiasm.

submitted 25 days ago • 157 comments

New film highlights India’s police brutality and caste violence www.channel4.com/news/new-fil...

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Tim Walz: www.newyorker.com/podcast/the-...

submitted 26 days ago • 144 comments

All the desi tech bros (and others) who align themselves with these assholes thinking that the racism doesn’t apply to them should please be sure to read the quote to the end

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The Ottoman sultan Bayezid II (1447-1512) had 28 copies of works by the Indo-Persian poet Amir Khusraw in his library

submitted 27 days ago • 1 comment

The Routledge Handbook of Persian Literary Translation, eds. Pouneh Shabani-Jadidi, Patricia J. Higgins, and Michelle Quay - now out in paperback. I have a chapter in here, "Saʿdi's Gulistan in British India: A Provocation" (link in next post) www.routledge.com/The-Routledg...

submitted 28 days ago • 2 comments

It is far too fucking late to comply in advance, so just do the best you can to not comply.

submitted 28 days ago • 2 comments

Are universities going to start speaking up? Because if they think Trump pulling back federal dollars is an existential threat, they should see what happens when no international students want to come here for fear of ending up in a MAGA concentration camp.

submitted 28 days ago • 50 comments

This "immediate cancellation" violates the law. If the Admin thinks Columbia has violated Title VI by being deliberately indifferent to antisemitic harassment, it has to give Columbia a chance for a hearing first, make findings on the record, & wait 30 days. www.nytimes.com/live/2025/03...

submitted 30 days ago • 118 comments

The Nation called it The Klan Act.

submitted 31 days ago • 34 comments

Lol "Gulf of Mexico"

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Bravo!

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Potential revised Muslim Ban coming. @aaup.bsky.social

submitted 31 days ago • 10 comments

I pitched Hind Rajab’s story to the BBC while she was still alive. I will never stop fighting for the newsroom conditions in which her story would have been told long before she was killed by Israel. We’d have seen immediate wall to wall coverage of a 5-year-old white girl.

submitted 31 days ago • 4 comments

New from @empirepoduk.bsky.social THE VICEROY, THE MERCHANT AND THE GREAT IMPERIAL PSYCHOPATH: The Story of How in India the Irish Transformed from Colonised to Colonisers linktr.ee/empirepoduk

submitted 30 days ago • 3 comments

Just got an email from the Fulbright Association. As of right now, funding has been cut off to 12,500 US citizens currently abroad and and more than 7,400 foreigner scholars and students in the United States

submitted 30 days ago • 219 comments

Is it just me, or do the 1970s suddenly feel so very long ago….?

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They adopted a posture of total submission and it bought them precisely nothing. A lesson for the Trump era www.nytimes.com/live/2025/03...

submitted 30 days ago • 113 comments

hey, can one of the reasonable centrist writers condescendingly explain to me again that it is overblown to call these people segregationists?

submitted 31 days ago • 321 comments

At least Columbia would have retained their dignity if they didn't side with genocide and do what they did to their students. They still didn't escape the wrath of the orange man but they can't say they were on the right side of history.

submitted 30 days ago • 2 comments

Well, let’s hope not 👹

submitted 30 days ago • 0 comments