• What does Europe have against halal? In the Boston Review, John R Bowen explains how food is becoming a target for anti-Islam politics.
  • Are plants animals like any other? In Books and Ideas, Enrique Utria explores the ideas of the philosopher Florence Burgat.
  • In Fifty-Two, Mridula Chari asks why Indians are still starving 75 years after independence.
  • Truth, knowledge, justice – to understand how our loftiest abstractions earn their keep, trace them to their practical origin, argues Matthieu Queloz in Aeon.
  • Modi and Shah’s humiliating walk back on Kashmir is proof of their failed policy, argues Sushant Singh in the Wire.
  • Mainstream economics ignores the massive government interventions that “free market” capitalism requires, argue Robert Pollin and Garald Epstein in the Boston Review.
  • Becoming more left or right cannot save the Congress party, argues Asim Ali in the Telegraph.
  • Do cats know the meaning of life? In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Paul J. D’Ambrosio reviews philosopher John Gray’s Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life.
  • Why the popularity of AK47s provides important lessons for development: Ann Bernstien interviews developmental econonomist Lant Pritchett for South African policy thinktank CDE.
  • On this blog, econonomist Branko Milanovic reviews Yang Jisheng’s graphic history of the Cultural Revolution.