A tale of two Mantos

by AJMAL HUSSEIN

Now that the Indian biopic Manto (2018, directed by Nandita Das) has been released in theaters (but banned in Pakistan by Pakistan Censor Board) and is available for streaming, the inevitable comparisons to the Pakistani biopic, also called Manto (2015, directed by Sarmad Sultan Khoosat) have become the topic du jour.

Both films are based on the life and work of Saadat Hasan Manto, a giant of Urdu literature whose trailblazing path was strewn with controversy and personal tragedy. In United India, he lived mostly in Bombay (now Mumbai) and spent his professional career shuttling between Bombay and Lahore. After partition of India, and the creation of Pakistan in 1947, he moved with his family to Lahore where he spent the last eight years of his life.

The ongoing animosity between India and Pakistan means that both countries begrudgingly own the writer, because it is hard to pin him down as either Indian or Pakistani. One can imagine Manto having the last laugh on this superficial conundrum because he always belonged to humanity.

The Pakistani version seems to be more mindful of this division than the Indian version, in terms of the portion of Manto’s life depicted. It only shows the writer’s life in Lahore, and does a poor job of that; there is hardly anything of Lahore to be seen in the film, specifically of the 1940s and 1950s.

This is an odd decision on the part of the filmmakers and indeed questionable, since filming in Lahore should not have been difficult. Manto’s house still stands in Laxmi Mansions, but it isn’t shown in the film. There is also a major anachronistic blunder in the scene where a modern-day Mercedes car is shown in the 1950s era. Period detail is an area where the Indian version excels.

Sarmad Khoosat, in addition to directing, plays the title role in his film, whereas Nawazuddin Siddiqui plays Manto in the Indian film. Siddiqui’s portrayal is nuanced and grounded, as befits an actor of his caliber. Khoosat puts in a game attempt, and is sometimes remarkably close to his Indian counterpart. However, he gets carried away in some scenes which reek of overacting. Also, his narration and diction are problematic at times.

Khoosat’s physical appearance is more in line with Manto’s Kashmiri ethnicity than Siddiqui’s. However, the former is much too bulky and healthier for the role whereas the latter is more suitably lean. Akbar Subhani, a Pakistani actor who has previously played Manto better (on television and theatre) than either of these two, is cast in a minor role in Khoosat’s film, and one feels it would have been a better casting choice to have him reprise the role.

The Indian version acknowledges the presence of other literary personalities and showbiz celebrities in Manto’s life, much more so than the Pakistani version. We get to see Ismat Chugtai, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Munshi Premchand, Ashok Kumar, Jaddan Bai, Nargis, K. Asif, etc. Manto’s best friend was an actor-singer called Shyam, and he is given much screen time here, but the actor playing him does not rise above amateur level.

The portrayal of Ashok Kumar is also rather wooden, which is a shame and unfortunate irony, considering the real life actor was an accomplished and hugely popular presence in Indian cinema.

The Pakistani version does make Noor Jehan, the legendary singer, actress and director a part of its story, whereas the Indian version completely ignores her. Saba Qamar brings glamour and spark to her depiction of Noor Jehan, but is a little too hammy.

Manto’s wife Safiya was a very supportive and soothing presence in his turbulent life, and so both movies give her character ample screen time. The actresses in both versions do justice to their respective portrayals of Safiya. The bit parts in both movies are a mixed bag, with some strong and some weak performances.

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Manto, review: Man to man, rediscovering the Urdu writer, who died a pauper, at 42

Before the film, the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) displayed categorises the language of the film as Hindi/Urdu. Saadat Hasan Manto wrote short stories and films in Urdu and there is some Hindi in the film, mainly spoken by others. Among the most controversial of Urdu writers, Manto has been the subject of rediscovery over the last decade or so for reasons unknown. Whatever the reasons, Nandita Das has made a compelling and eminently watchable biopic.

It comes on the heels of a Pakistani biography made in 2015 and Mantostaan, which filmed four of his short stories in 2017: Thanda Gosht, Khol Do, Assignment and Aakhiri Salute. We did not get to see the Pakistani film while the Indian outing, directed by Rahat Kazmi, received mixed reactions. Manto was his surname, and not his pen-name, as some might think. He was born in 1912 in Ludhiana but the family had a home in Lahore, while they moved to Mumbai as well.

His parents and his infant son were buried in Mumbai, but he had migrated to Lahore after living for many years in Mumbai, a city he loved dearly. Facing hostilities against the Muslim community, he was forced to leave much against his wishes. Not that he was a devout Muslim—a confirmed alcoholic, his only claim to Islam might have been the numerals 786 (denoting Bismillah—in the name of God) that he wrote before starting any story, and the prayer visits he made to his mother’s grave. Manto hated his late father. Muslim scholars and clerics roundly condemned his writing, often finding them un-Islamic and obscene. He died in Lahore, in 1955, aged 42, mainly as a result of alcohol abuse. All this is chronicled in the present film.

Writer-director Nandita Das’s Manto is not a true biopic, for it does not tell us too much about the personal life of the man and his family. It begins when Manto is already an established writer in Mumbai’s film industry of the mid-1940s and takes us through to his death, a decade later. Along the way, we meet many of his friends and publishers, including Ismat Chughtai (also condemned for writing stories considered obscene, including one on lesbianism), Shyam Chaddha (popular hero Shyam, who died early, like Manto but before him, after falling of a horse during shooting), Ashok Kumar (the boss at Bombay Talkies, who pooh-poohed Manto’s fears when the latter told him about repeated threats to kill him and other Muslims employed at Bombay Talkies) and many more. Ismat stood by him and the two were tried by a court in Lahore, for publishing obscene material. She stood by him all through, when the poet laureate of Pakistan, Faiz Ahmed ‘Faiz’, a leading light of the Progressive Writers’ Association, refused to consider his obscene work as literature at all. (The film ends on Faiz’s poem, in a tribute of supreme irony).

From the Bombay (now Mumbai) of 1946, the action shifts to Lahore, in 1948, where Manto follows his wife Safia and daughter Nighi, who had left earlier, to attend a wedding. In this city of refugees, just an hour away from the Indian town of Amritsar, he is shunned and prosecuted, and finds very little work. His drinking increases with frustration, though some more his greatest works were written there, where he learnt about the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, an event that stunned him, just as partition itself had left deep scars on his psyche. These anxieties were developed into an all-time great short story, Toba Tek Singh, about madmen being exchanged between India and Pakistan, and a village which is in both Hindustan and Pakistan and, therefore, neither here nor there.

It was a sentence uttered in an unguarded moment by Shyam (remember Dillagi and the song ‘Too mera chand’ sung and picturised on him?), whose family had lost a member to the riots in Lahore and the rest of them had managed to escape to India, that finally made Manto decide to quit India. Shyam had said that he could have killed Manto in a fit of rage had he been around when the rioters attacked his family. Shyam used to nurse and humour Manto a lot. He did regret his statement, but the two met only once afterwards, when Shyam visited Lahore for a film’s release.

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So What Do We Do About Manto, Who Was Neither Indian Nor Pakistani?

by HARISHCHANDRA THORAT

In our quest to define Manto, we arrive at the same results as we have while getting to the bottom of our current political crises.

Saadat Hasan Manto was born in 1912 in a village in Ludhiana district, Punjab, then part of the British Empire. He lived in the cities of Amritsar and Aligarh for a while, before moving to Mumbai. After the partition, he migrated to Lahore in Pakistan. He died there, somewhat prematurely, in 1955.

The government of Pakistan posthumously awarded him the Nishaan-i-Imtiyaaz, a prestigious civil award, in 2012. Manto is, therefore, a transnational entity.

He is known as a Punjabi writer, even though he hasn’t written much in Punjabi. He wrote in Urdu, so he is an Urdu writer. It doesn’t seem like he took religion very seriously – he is still known as a Muslim writer. In his youth, he was a member of the Indian Progressive Writers association. The latter had a distinct leftward lean. So Manto could be called a Marxist writer too. 

Something which is important from the point of view of his cultural and literary identity – and which is a point of contemporary controversy and relevance- is that his family has roots in Kashmir. After being displaced from Kashmir, his ancestors moved to Punjab. Manto was proud of his Kashmiri roots. His family lovingly maintained the distinctiveness of Kashmiri culture. In a letter to Pandit Nehru, he does mention their shared connection to Kashmir.

‘To be Kashmiri is to be beautiful,’ he wrote. 

So what do we do about Manto? In which identity do we bracket him? If we call him Indian, he was Pakistani too. If we call him Punjabi, he was Kashmiri as well. His being ? leftist comes in the way of trying to capture his identity as a ‘Muslim’ writer, on the basis of his religion. Punjab, Kashmir, the alleys of Mumbai and being a Mohajir in Lahore; all these dichotomous ?aspects were united in his character. Manto, as a writer, can be connected to all of these things, but not to any one of them.

Contemporary politics does not get along with such complex identities – formed of elements which are often conflicting but complementary. It prefers to state questions of identity in a simplistic, crude, rigid and politically convenient ways. To it, identity is something without any ambiguities, an easily identified uniform. Such a uniform would allow, for example, to demarcate a writer into two categories – ‘ours’, or ‘theirs’. This is exactly what has happened to Manto. 

Recently, an English translation of one of Manto’s books came to my attention. The book is Why I Write. The translator and editor of this translation is Aakar Patel. It includes Manto’s discursive prose. Mr. Patel writes about Manto in the preface of the book.

The preface begins by stating that Saadat Hasan Manto was an Indian trapped in Pakistan. Mr. Patel next goes on to say that Manto’s ‘identity didn’t come from religion and it came only partially from geography. It came mainly from his belonging to our culture, about which he wrote with great skill.’ By ‘our’ culture, Mr. Patel of course means ‘Indian’ culture, which is, of course, different from ‘Pakistani’ culture. Patel concludes that Manto was a great Indian writer; he wrote in an Indian language, for an Indian audience and about the Indian experience. 

Mr. Patel unambiguously puts Manto’s writings in the category of Indian literature and in doing so, excludes the place of Pakistan in the formulation of the notion of Indian literature. Before Independence and Partition, about 70 years ago, there was no nation called Pakistan. So the difficult question of what to do about the literature from the region now in Pakistan, before the nation existed, whether to call it Indian or to call it Pakistani, does not seem to occur to Patel.

Does political partitioning lead to cultural partitioning too, if so, what exactly is its process, these questions too do not bother Mr. Patel.

He also forgets that a national identity is an artificial construct, not a natural one. His scheme of classification is simple – writings are either Indian or Pakistani.

The Wire for more

by KEVIN REED

Another devastating round of job cuts has just opened in the tech industry with the layoffs announced by Block and eBay, one in which corporate executives are openly and explicitly justifying mass sackings as the product of artificial intelligence and “new ways of working.”

On February 27, Block, formerly the financial services company Square, announced that it is eliminating more than 4,000 jobs—nearly 40 percent of its workforce—and cutting headcount from over 10,000 to just under 6,000.

Block CEO Jack Dorsey made a point of tying the destruction of jobs directly to AI, bragging that “the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company.”

Dorsey insisted that this was not a response to crisis, but a strategic “structural change,” writing to shareholders that Block is “ahead of the curve” and that “within the next year, I believe the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion and make similar structural changes.”

The company expects hundreds of millions of dollars in restructuring charges in the first quarter alone, with most of the layoffs completed by mid?year, meanwhile its stock price surged on the news and Wall Street celebrated the enormous cut to labor costs.

Almost simultaneously, eBay announced that it will cut approximately 800 positions, around 6 percent of its global workforce, in yet another restructuring aimed at “realigning” staffing with “long?term strategic priorities.”

This is the third round of job cuts since 2023 at the massive global online marketplace, coming just days after its $1.2 billion agreement to acquire Gen?Z–focused resale platform Depop, as part of a multi?year effort to “consistently” reduce headcount while ramping up AI investments across its marketplace and internal operations.

Local reports are saying that managers, researchers, data scientists and software engineers are being hit heavily and that the restructuring is directed squarely at the core technical and professional layers whose work is being increasingly automated or offshored.

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An anti-gender crusade is sweeping across Latin America: the far right, religious fundamentalists, and transnational networks are mobilising to roll back feminist gains to consolidate political power.

The works in this dossier include illustrations and excerpts from longer comics – snapshots of scenes of struggle, care work, invisible labour, militancy, and instances of ‘putting one’s body on the line’ (poner el cuerpo). The creators of these works are Latin American women and members of the LGBTQIA+ community who seek to defend and tell their own stories in the face of the far right’s many-pronged agenda in the region.

The selection was made in collaboration with Feminismo Gráfico (Graphic Feminism), a collective dedicated to compiling, recovering, and showcasing Argentinian women creators of comics and graphic humour from the early twentieth century to the present. Feminismo Gráfico builds a critical genealogy of the comics medium from a feminist perspective, contesting meanings in a popular language that has long been undervalued and centring the experiences of women and dissident genders and sexualities. Visit their archive at feminismografico.com.

Introduction

Since 2016, marches against sexual and gender diversity¹ have swept across Latin America. They feature women dressed in pink and men in blue to underscore traditional gender roles. The marches have been accompanied by a strong social media presence, with hashtags such as #NoALaIdeologíaDeGénero (‘No to gender ideology’), #ConMisHijosNoTeMetas (‘Don’t mess with my children’), #AMisHijosLosEducoYo (‘I will educate my children’), and #ConLosNiñosNo (‘Not with children’).

These campaigns, which have their roots in the United States in the 1970s and reemerged in the twenty-first century, are part of an anti-gender, anti-feminist wave driven by Christian fundamentalism. This wave has swept across Catholic-majority countries in Western Europe such as Spain and Italy; across Eastern Europe, from Croatia and Hungary to Poland and Slovenia; and beyond Europe, from Australia to Sub-Saharan Africa. In many countries, efforts to sabotage comprehensive sex education and restrict access to contraceptives and safe abortion are widespread (for instance, more than half of the countries in Sub-Saharan Africa criminalise sexual and gender diversity).² Alongside this conservative wave, Latin America experienced an intense transnational cycle of feminist mobilisation (2015–2019). This cycle of feminist mobilisation also strained the limits of state institutions and often outpaced the agendas of the region’s progressive governments, pressing demands that went further than those governments were willing or able to pursue.

Today’s far right is international and ascendant, from the Philippines and Hungary to India and Argentina. In this dossier, we examine how, in Latin America, its tentacles intertwine with those of global, regional, and local ultraconservative organisations – both religious and secular – to promote an agenda against the rights of women and sexually and gender-diverse people. Our main lens for analysing how this agenda operates in different countries is The Con Mis Hijos No Te Metas (‘Don’t Mess with My Children’) campaign, which is active across most of the region. We look at six Latin American countries to show how this campaign operated between 2016 and 2025: Peru, where it originated; Ecuador, where it was first exported and took hold under an economically and politically progressive government; Argentina, home to the strongest feminist movements in the region, where major legal and institutional advances have been achieved for the rights of women and sexually and gender-diverse people; Chile, where the massive popular uprising of 2019 failed to consolidate broad gains even as the feminist movement managed to achieve some; and El Salvador, among the most conservative countries on sexual and reproductive rights. El Salvador shares with Brazil – also analysed here – a strong presence of evangelical fundamentalist movements and the fact that, although the Con Mis Hijos No Te Metas campaign has played a limited role, other mechanisms and closely related campaigns have.

The Tricontinental for more

by BAINDU KALLON & CHINEDU CHUKWUDINMA

To mark the 84th anniversary of the birth of Afro-Guyanese Marxist historian and revolutionary Walter Rodney (23 March 1942), we share an article from ROAPE’s special issue 186 on Frantz Fanon that examines the shifting imprint of The Wretched of the Earth on Rodney’s evolving anti-imperialist politics. Drawing on material from the Walter Rodney Papers and beyond, Chinedu Chukwudinma and Baindu Kallon argue that Rodney’s changing engagement with Fanon reveals key patterns and nuances about his political development on questions of class as the strategy and tactics of liberation. They contend that while Rodney initially embraced Fanon’s ideas, he gradually refined, challenged and at times rejected them as he grappled with the failed promises of post-independence Jamaica and Tanzania.

Introduction

In June 1974, a severe bout of malaria confined Afro-Guyanese historian Walter Rodney to a bed at Muhimbili National Hospital in Dar es Salaam. As he lay ill in his mid-thirties, Rodney was perhaps haunted by the memory of Frantz Fanon’s premature death from cancer at the age of 36. That fate loomed large in the imagination of the comrades who stood by his bedside. Horace Campbell later recalled that when a European doctor proposed transferring him to Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, DC – where Fanon had died 13 years earlier – Rodney’s comrades protested. They eventually secured his release into the care of a fellow activist, under whom he recovered (Campbell 1974, 178–179).

The spectre of Fanon in Rodney’s life extended far beyond mortality. Though born 17 years apart, both men traced remarkably similar paths: descendants of enslaved Africans from the Caribbean who saw Africa’s liberation as essential to their own. Each moved from intellectual critique to revolutionary organisation: Fanon as an activist in Algeria’s National Liberation Front, and Rodney as a Marxist leader of Guyana’s Working People’s Alliance (Lewis 1998; Boukari-Yabara 2018; Zeilig 2021, 2022).

This article examines how Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961), though written on the eve of African independence, inspired Rodney to reflect on questions of strategy and class in the anti-imperialist struggles of postcolonial Africa and the Caribbean from 1968 to 1978. Drawing on material from the Walter Rodney Papers (WRP) and beyond, it argues that Rodney’s shifting engagement with Fanon’s work illuminates important patterns and subtleties in his political development. While Rodney initially embraced many of Fanon’s ideas, he gradually refined, challenged and at times rejected them. Recognising their limits amid the pitfalls of anti-imperialist struggles, he turned to Marxist theory as a more powerful guide to revolution.

Roape for more

by JASON KOEBLER

Kenyan workers are still the underpaid labor behind A.I. training, moderation, and sex chatbots. The Data Labelers Association is fighting back.

Originally published in 404 Media.

Every day, Michael Geoffrey Asia spent eight consecutive hours at his laptop in Kenya staring at porn, annotating what was happening in every frame for an AI data labeling company. When he was done with his shift, he started his second job as the human labor behind AI sex bots, sexting with real lonely people he suspected were in the United States. His boss was an algorithm that told him to flit in and out of different personas.

“It required a lot of creativity and fast thinking. Because if I’m talking to a man, I’m supposed to act like a woman. If I’m talking to a woman, I need to act like a man. If I’m talking to a gay person, I need to act like a gay person,” he told me at a coworking space I met him at in Nairobi. After doing this for months, he, like other data labelers, developed insomnia, PTSD, and had trouble having sex. 

“It got to a point where my body couldn’t function. Where I saw someone naked, I don’t even feel it. And I have a wife, who expects a lot from you, a young family, she expects a lot from you intimately. But you can’t, like, do it,” Asia said. “It fractured a lot of things for me. My body is like, not functioning at all.”

Asia eventually hit a breaking point and stopped working for AI companies. He is now the secretary general of a Kenyan organization called the Data Labelers Association (DLA) and the author of “The Emotional Labor Behind AI Intimacy,” a testimony of his time working as the real human labor behind AI sex bots. As part of the DLA, Asia has been working to organize workers to fight for better pay, better mental health services, an end to draconian non-disclosure agreements, and better benefits for a workforce that often earns just a few dollars a day. Data labelers train, refine, and moderate the outputs of AI tools made by the largest companies in the world, yet they are wildly underpaid and haven’t benefitted from the runaway valuations of AI companies. 

Last month, the DLA held one of its largest events at the Nairobi Arboretum, sign up new members, and to help them tell their stories.  

Every day, Michael Geoffrey Asia spent eight consecutive hours at his laptop in Kenya staring at porn, annotating what was happening in every frame for an AI data labeling company. When he was done with his shift, he started his second job as the human labor behind AI sex bots, sexting with real lonely people he suspected were in the United States. His boss was an algorithm that told him to flit in and out of different personas.

“It required a lot of creativity and fast thinking. Because if I’m talking to a man, I’m supposed to act like a woman. If I’m talking to a woman, I need to act like a man. If I’m talking to a gay person, I need to act like a gay person,” he told me at a coworking space I met him at in Nairobi. After doing this for months, he, like other data labelers, developed insomnia, PTSD, and had trouble having sex. 

“It got to a point where my body couldn’t function. Where I saw someone naked, I don’t even feel it. And I have a wife, who expects a lot from you, a young family, she expects a lot from you intimately. But you can’t, like, do it,” Asia said. “It fractured a lot of things for me. My body is like, not functioning at all.”

Asia eventually hit a breaking point and stopped working for AI companies. He is now the secretary general of a Kenyan organization called the Data Labelers Association (DLA) and the author of “The Emotional Labor Behind AI Intimacy,” a testimony of his time working as the real human labor behind AI sex bots. As part of the DLA, Asia has been working to organize workers to fight for better pay, better mental health services, an end to draconian non-disclosure agreements, and better benefits for a workforce that often earns just a few dollars a day. Data labelers train, refine, and moderate the outputs of AI tools made by the largest companies in the world, yet they are wildly underpaid and haven’t benefitted from the runaway valuations of AI companies. 

Last month, the DLA held one of its largest events at the Nairobi Arboretum, sign up new members, and to help them tell their stories.  

Black Agenda Report for more

Epstein’s Ties to Israeli Intelligence

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Epstein files: Western media must stop burying the Israel connection

by MOHAMAD ELMASRY

Since the release late last month of millions more files in the Jeffrey Epstein saga, western media outlets have provided nonstop coverage. Yet despite an extensive focus on the disgraced financier’s relationships with powerful figures, his links to Israeli political and intelligence circles have been largely ignored, marking a conspicuous omission.

Searches across online news archives turn up thousands of recent stories on legitimate issues of public concern, highlighting victims of Epstein’s abuse and the alleged involvement of prominent persons and groups in that abuse. 

The New York Times, PBS, NBC and CNN, among other notable outlets, have drawn from the files to publish exhaustive accounts of powerful men with ties to Epstein.

In addition to naming business, academic and sports figures, much reporting has focused on political figures, such as US President Donald Trump, former Norwegian Prime Minister Thorbjorn Jagland, and the UK’s Prince Andrew and politician Peter Mandelson.

Media coverage has also emphasised Epstein’s relationships with foreign countries, with Reuters and the Washington Post running stories about his alleged ties to Russia. Other pieces have documented Epstein’s purported links to Norway and Slovakia. 

MEE for more

The criminal elite exposed in the Epstein files are burying the truth

by JONATHAN COOK

If you struggle to cope with the endless pressure to communicate in an ever-more connected world, spare a thought for the late serial paedophile Jeffrey Epstein. 

The flood of three million documents released by the US Department of Justice over the weekend confirm that Epstein spent an inordinate amount of time corresponding with the huge network of powerful acquaintances he had developed. 

Emailing alone looks to have been almost a full-time job for him – and in a real sense, it was.

The personal attention he devoted to billionaires, royalty, political leaders, statesmen, celebrities, academics and media elites was how he kept himself at the heart of this vast network of power. 

His address book was a who’s who of those who shape our sense of how the world ought to be run. But it was also critical to how he drew some of these same powerful figures deeper into his orbit, and into a world of debauched and exploitative private parties in New York and on his Caribbean island. 

MEE for more

by SADIAH QURESHI

Technologies of preserving and reviving organisms are already redefining the meaning of life, death, and extinction itself

In 2003, a unique baby goat lived and died. In doing so, she might be regarded as the first species to have endured the indignity of going extinct twice.

The Pyrenean ibex, also known as the bucardo, was once native to the mountainous regions of Spain. By the mid-20th century, hunting had severely depleted populations. By 1999, only one survived, named Celia. When she died a year later, the bucardo was declared extinct.

While she was alive, tissue samples from Celia’s ear were collected, and frozen in liquid nitrogen. Encouraged by previously successful techniques for cloning animals, a team of Spanish, French and Belgian scientists hoped to bring back the bucardo. They cultured the harvested cells to isolate bucardo DNA, and transferred cloned genomes to domestic goat eggs with the nuclei removed. A total of 208 embryos were transferred to surrogate mothers: either Spanish ibex (a still-living, related species) or hybrids of Spanish ibex and domestic goats. Seven pregnancies resulted, but only one goat carried to full term. That goat gave birth to a bucardo kid by caesarean section.

The tiny Pyrenean ibex was genetically identical to the last living bucardo, making her a direct clone. But while the kid appeared healthy until birth, she never took a breath. The desperate team tried to help her breathe, but she was declared dead within a few minutes. An autopsy on her miniature body identified a defective lung.

The story of the cloned bucardo kid can be told in many ways. Was this a rare double-extinction? Perhaps. More cautiously, we might suggest that the experiment was never a successful de-extinction at all, because the kid was never able to perform the same ecological function as the lost species. But there is also a more provocative telling: that neither happened, because the bucardo never went extinct in the first place.

In recent years, some advocates of de-extinction technologies have argued that if an animal’s tissues and cultured cells persist in a state of cryopreservation, it is not extinct, but ‘evolutionarily torpid’. In other words, the death of the last living animal is not an ending, merely a pause.

This reframing isn’t merely semantic – it reshapes the meaning of conservation. If frozen cells forestall extinction, when do we declare a species lost? And if genetic material assuages our guilt that a ‘way of being’ survives, why invest in protecting living animals? The question cuts deeper: what distinguishes being alive from existing as dormant genetic material?

Aeon for more

by STEPHEN CHEN

Each March, many of the country’s most selective colleges and universities release their admissions decisions, reviving debates over the roles of race, wealth and privilege – and putting Americans’ cultural obsession with rankings back in the spotlight.

Meanwhile, a more personal set of questions will emerge in many homes and schools. Who got into a “better” school, and why? And for those who didn’t, what to do with a dream school deferred? What’s missing are more fundamental questions about the costs of striving for status and how to know when to stop.

From my former life as a college counselor to my current one as a psychology professor, I’ve spent more than two decades working with Asian American families, the demographic group that often finds itself at the center of college admissions debates. I listen as they grapple with questions of race, social status and who makes it in the U.S. and why. I’ve also seen firsthand, both inside and outside of the research lab, how some students’ never-ending quest for achievement takes a toll on their mental health.

Americans’ frenzy over college admissions may be a relatively modern affliction, but striving for status is timeless and universal, and it can benefit from the wisdom of ancient texts. This is why, in my team’s research with Asian American families, we bring the Chinese philosopher Laozi into the conversation. Through the Daodejing, one of the central texts of Daoism, Laozi offers perspectives from a tumultuous period of status-striving in Chinese history – and shifts our focus from comparison and competition to contentment.

The ‘success frame’

In interviews with Asian American parents, children and teens over the past 10 years, I hear echoes of what sociologists Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou call the “Asian American success frame”: success defined by elite educational credentials, graduate degrees and select occupations. Their research shows how the success frame is endorsed by Asian Americans across different ethnic groups, generations and socioeconomic brackets.

My team’s ongoing interviews, in turn, provide a window into how that idea of success is promoted. One mother told her 11-year-old son her wish is for him not to pursue an M.D. or a Ph.D., but both. Another parent of a 16-year-old with college applications on the horizon discouraged her from applying to state schools, because she had heard that some job recruiters consider only Ivy League resumes.

The Conversation for more

by CINZIA ARRUZZA

Nancy Holmstrom’s From a Marxist-Feminist Point of View: Essays on Freedom, Rationality and Human Nature is a collection of essays written across several decades by a philosopher whose commitment to theoretically and politically integrating Marxism and feminism has remained unfashionably steady across half a century of shifting intellectual trends. Emerita Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University-Newark, Holmstrom has spent her career doing what analytic philosophy in its mainstream forms has largely refused to do: taking the political and economic structures that condition human life seriously and asking what philosophy—rigorously practiced—has to say about them. The book announces its ambition plainly. As Holmstrom writes in her introduction, the essays integrate her intellectual work with “the values I have been committed to all my life: freedom, justice and equality.”¹ What distinguishes this collection is that the integration is genuine. In Holmstrom’s case, the political commitments are not context for the philosophical work—they are its content.

The volume is organized into four thematic parts—“Modes of Production,” “Rationality,” “Freedom,” and “Human Nature/Women’s Nature”—unified by a sustained engagement with Marx’s concept of the mode of production and a normative commitment to freedom, equality, and social justice. Holmstrom is explicit that the sections are not independent but represent different theoretical angles on the same underlying question: how does capitalism structure social life, subjectivity, gender, and the horizon of emancipation? Together they constitute a systematic Marxist Feminist perspective.

Spectre Journal for more

by MOHAMMED HANIF

ON THE NIGHT OF THE HANGING

Every thing is as calm and orderly as it should be in a jail devoted to the safety and care of one very important man. All prisoners but one are asleep in their cells, restless, dreaming of their victims or their loved ones, which in most cases are the same people.

The Rawalpindi sky is clear and full of stars; all the talk about omens is rubbish: there are no meteor showers, no storms brewing on the horizon, the sky is not going to shed tears of blood, the earth is not about to split open and swallow its wretched inhabitants and their grief.

The man who is awake has asked for a safety razor, claiming that he doesn’t want to look like a mullah in death. After consultations with superiors, the jail superintendent has sent for a barber, who shaves the man gently, making sure to clear the fuzz from his earlobes. The man asks for a cigar and the jail superintendent doesn’t need to ask for his superiors’ permission. No man who is about to be hanged in three hours and forty-five minutes has ever tried to kill himself with a Montecristo.

The jailer makes sure to light it himself; the man chews on his cigar, takes two deep puffs and regrets it, thinking maybe he should have quit when he had the time. The man asks for his Shalimar perfume, sprays himself and lies down on the floor. A mosquito buzzes near his ear. On any other night he might have called in the jailer and given him a dressing-down for infesting his prison cell with poisonous insects, might have accused him of being a tool of the White Elephant, his favourite invective for the United States of America, but tonight he just shoos the mosquito away half-heartedly, listening to the rising and fading whirr of its wings. He is grateful for the company.

Everyone agrees on the above events. Those who wanted to hang him, those who wanted to save him, those who wanted a martyr in the early morning whose blood could help them bring about a revolution, even those who were indifferent, all agree up to this point that the man lay down on the floor, pulled a sheet over himself and stayed still, dress-rehearsing being dead.

The latest novel by Mohammed Hanif is set in the immediate aftermath of the hanging of former prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto but revolves around an eclectic cast of characters, including a disillusioned socialist who runs an English tuition centre for the children of peasants in OK Town, his childhood friend who is a mosque imam and who provides him space in his compound, the on-the-run young daughter of a former comrade and an ambitious young army captain deputed to gather intelligence against the martial law regime’s foes. Eos presents, with permission, excerpts from Rebel English Academy, published recently by Maktaba-i-Danyal in Pakistan…

Although everything was still and orderly in and around the cell where an about-to-be hanged man practised his death pose, there was activity, quite a lot of activity, around the country in some crucial spots. Many would later say, especially journalists and diplomats who made a living out of exaggeration, that it was the longest night of their lives, that they knew something historic, something catastrophic was about to happen. But only those who had been woken up without warning with a degree of rudeness would remember this night when their own time came.

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