1: Jaipur Literature Festival

Flubbed debate turns into $27M bonanza for Biden-Harris campaign The campaign previously said the single best hour of fundraising came immediately after Biden's debate against Trump
‘Kalki 2898 AD’ Scores Third-Highest Opening For An Indian Film



Vehement Dissent From Supreme Court’s Liberal Wing Laments Vast Expansion of Presidential Power The three Democratic appointees railed against the ruling that former President Donald J. Trump has some immunity for his official actions, declaring that their colleagues had made the president into “a king above the law.”

US BO: 'Kalki 2898 AD' Slides to all-time No 8
With 4 Words, Warren Buffett Explained Why He's Cutting Off the Gates Foundation and Taught a Lesson for Every LeaderBuffett will trust his three children to give away his fortune. The two met more than 30 years ago at a meeting that apparently neither wanted to attend. ........ Buffett served as a member of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation board until 2021 when he resigned shortly after the couple announced their divorce. ........ In 2006, Buffett pledged to give away 85 percent of his Berkshire stock, then worth about $37 billion, to charity. The bulk of that was to go to the foundation Gates started with his former wife, Melinda Gates. To date, those donations have totaled more than $43 billion. .......... Buffett says he will instead put his children, "whom I trust completely," in charge of deciding what happens to his money when he dies. ......... He highlighted that his confidence comes as they have matured and prepared for the role over the past 18 years. "They were not fully prepared for this awesome responsibility in 2006, but they are now," he said. ........ Buffett says that his will stipulates that "more than 99 percent of my estate is destined for philanthropic usage."



How the World Made the West by Josephine Quinn review – rethinking ‘civilisation’ A radical new history of the ancient world that challenges modern chauvinism ......... Like the railway and the telegraph, western civilisation was invented in the 19th century. .......... Carbon dating techniques applied to recent archaeological findings provide compelling evidence about just how “globalized” the Mediterranean already was, 4,000 years ago. ......... Polybius’s remark about the upstart Romans: “They are unusually willing to substitute their own customs for better practice from elsewhere.” .......... if there are no monolithic “civilisations”, there are still distinct “cultures”. ........ “Even liberal notions of ‘multiculturalism’,” she complains, “assume the existence, indeed value, of individual ‘cultures’ as a starting point.” ....... “that the earliest works of Greek literature preserve traces of encounters with a bigger world of song in other languages.” ......... “Like the Israelite Exodus from Egypt in the Hebrew Bible, the Iliad is a story about a joint expedition in the distant past that brought a people together as a community, told in a language they share.” It doesn’t seem intellectually criminal, then, to describe “a people brought together as a community”, with a shared language, as a “culture”. Perhaps the argument is not that cultures don’t exist but simply that they had to be invented; that they are socially constructed. Well, yes: how else could they come into being? ........ Quinn makes this point beautifully when discussing the “stories of warrior women in the Steppe” in the first millennium BC, which were long dismissed as fantasy by scholars. “There was no room in civilisational thinking for cultures run aggressively and successfully by women,” she observes. “In recent decades, however, more than one hundred women’s graves containing axes, swords and occasionally armour have come to light in Russia and Ukraine.” ........ Constantine, for example, is described as introducing “an Asian god” (the Christian one) into the Roman empire. Of classical Athens, she writes: “Like pederasty and public nudity, democracy was a distinctive local practice that worked to distinguish some Greek-speaking communities … ” Later, the Crusades, she argues, were not a “clash of civilizations” but rather took place in a world where “culture has no natural location”.