Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the greatest romantic poets in Persian literature. Nizami Ganjavi (c1141–1209) is was born in the city of Ganja in what is now Azerbaijan and his popularity soon spread throughout the Persian-speaking lands and beyond. Nizami is best known for his Khamsa, a set of five epic poems that contains a famous retelling of the tragic love story of King Khosrow II (c570-628) and the Christian princess Shirin (unknown-628) and the legend of Layla and Majnun. Not only did he write romances: his poetry also displays a dazzling knowledge of philosophy, astronomy, botany and the life of Alexander the Great.

With

Christine van Ruymbeke Professor of Persian Literature and Culture at the University of Cambridge

Narguess Farzad Senior Lecturer in Persian Studies at SOAS, University of London

And

Dominic Parviz Brookshaw Professor of Persian Literature and Iranian Culture at the University of Oxford

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

Laurence Binyon, The Poems of Nizami (The Studio Limited, 1928)

Barbara Brend, Treasures of Herat: Two Manuscripts of the Khamsah of Nizami in the British Library (Gingko, 2020)

Barbara Brend, The Emperor Akbar’s Khamsa of Nizami (British Library, 1995)

J-C. Burgel and C. van Ruymbeke, A Key to the Treasure of the Hakim: Artistic and Humanistic Aspects of Nizami Ganjavi’s Khamsa (Leiden University Press, 2011)

Nizami Ganjavi (trans. P.J. Chelkowski), Mirror of the Invisible World: Tales from the Khamseh of Nizami (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1975)

Nizami Ganjavi (trans. Dick Davis), Layli and Majnun (Penguin Books, 2021)

Nizami Ganjavi (trans. Rudolf Gelpke), The Story of Layla and Majnun (first published 1966: Omega Publications, 1997)

Nizami Ganjavi (trans. Rudolf Gelpke), The Story of the Seven Princesses (Bruno Cassirer Ltd, 1976)

Nizami Ganjavi (trans. Julie Scott Meisami, The Haft Paykar: A Medieval Persian Romance (Oxford University Press, 1995)

Nizami Ganjavi (trans. Colin Turner), Layla and Majnun (Blake Publishing, 1997) Dominic Parviz Brookshaw, Hafiz and His Contemporaries: Poetry, Performance and Patronage in Fourteenth-Century Iran (Bloomsbury, 2019)

Julie Scott Meisami, Medieval Persian Court Poetry (Princeton University Press, 2014)

Asghar Seyed-Gohrab, Layli and Majnun: Love, Madness and Mystic Longing in Nizami’s Epic Romance (Brill, 2003)

Kamran Talattof, Jerome W. Clinton, and K. Allin Luther, The Poetry of Nizami Ganjavi: Knowledge, Love, and Rhetoric (Palgrave, 2000)

C. van Ruymbeke, Science and Poetry in Medieval Persia: The Botany of Nizami's Khamsa (Cambridge University Press, 2007)

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One development for 2025 that can be seen clearly in the crystal ball is improving trade ties between China and Europe. The reason this is a virtual certainty is Donald Trump is doing everything he can to convince the world that, under his leadership, the United States is an unreliable trading partner.

He already worked hard to establish this point in his first term when he arbitrarily slapped tariffs on various imports from Canada and the European Union. His ostensible rationale was national defense, but no one outside of Mar-a-Lago could take that one seriously. We worried that we may not be able to get steel from Canada if the US is engaged in a war with another country? Or maybe we’re worried we will be at war with Canada, and they will cut us off. 

But Trump is showing that the craziness will get even worse in his second term. Before even taking office Trump made strong demands that Canada and Mexico essentially do things they are already doing (block drug shipments and restrict the flow of immigrants) or he will slap 25 percent taxes on all the goods we import from them.

This is bizarre from many angles, but most notably because Trump’s proposed import taxes would be a flagrant violation of the trade agreement he negotiated with Mexico and Canada just four and a half years ago. If Trump can just toss into the garbage a trade deal with two of our closest allies — one that he widely trumpeted at the time — then what would be the value of any deal he would strike with European countries? Clearly Trump does not feel bound by his commitments and there is no one in the US political structure who can force Trump to adhere to agreements made by the government, even when it was Trump himself who made the deal.

This is the way Trump has always done business. He routinely reneged on his commitments and often refused to pay contractors after they had done work on his projects. Many contractors would insist on payment in advance from Trump because they knew they would have a tough time collecting after the fact.

If the US is not going to be a reliable trading partner for at least the next four years, and possibly many more years into the future, Europe would be wise to look elsewhere. And there is one obvious elsewhere: China.

China’s economy is in fact already considerably larger than the US economy and growing far more rapidly. This fact is obscured by the tendency in the US media to use exchange rate measures of GDP, rather than purchasing power parity (PPP) measures. 

An exchange rate measure simply takes a country’s GDP, measured in its own currency, and then converts it into dollars at the current exchange rate. By contrast, a PPP measure uses a common set of prices to assess the value of all the goods and services produced in each country. This would mean that we apply the same price for a car, a computer, and a haircut, in both the US and China. Economists would usually argue that for most purposes the PPP measure is more useful.

By this measure, China’s economy grew larger than the US economy roughly a decade ago. It is now almost 30 percent larger, and according to I.M.F. projections will be more than 40 percent larger by the end of the decade. It’s not clear why the U.S. media insists on using the exchange rate measure of GDP in reporting that routinely refers to China as the world’s second-largest economy, perhaps it’s just nationalistic chauvinism. In any case, that call reflects political biases not realities in the world.

The larger size of China’s economy makes it a more attractive trading partner in any case, but it is also more likely to stick to its commitments than the United States as long as Donald Trump is in charge. For this reason, we can be fairly certain that Europe will be looking to shore up its trade relations with China as Donald Trump puts on his clown show in Washington and Mar-a-Lago.

The post Best Bet for 2025: Stronger Trade Ties Between Europe and China appeared first on Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Devil's Chess Club is part of the American Exception podcast on Patreon [ www.patreon.com/americanexception ]. Subscribe for access to past and future episodes of American Exception and Devil's Chess Club! We are joined by Adnan Husain, a historian of both Medieval Europe and of the Middle East. Adnan is Associate Professor, Queen's National Scholar Graduate Chair, and Director of the School of Religion at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario. He is also the co-host of the Guerilla History podcast [ https://guerrillahistory.libsyn.com/ ]. We discuss a number of topics including the state of the Empire, the absence of an effectual Western Left, the state of the Middle East, and the determinants of US foreign policy. Special thanks to: * Dana Chavarria, production * Casey Moore, graphics * Michelle Boley, animated intro * Mock Orange, music

Another brutal defeat leaves the right angrier than ever, and both the successes and failures of the left drive them to even darker places as the question of who is in charge of the party becomes much murkier.

This episode draws from William H. Tucker’s The Funding of Scientific Racism, Joshua Green’s Devil’s Bargain, and Deva R. Woodley’s Reckoning. For a full list of sources, check our works cited doc here: www.chapotraphouse.com/seeking

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The US stock market is in "the mother of all bubbles", with the market capitalization of publicly traded companies at 206% of GDP. This is higher than the dot-com bubble of 2000, and even the peak of the crash of 1929. Meanwhile, just 25 companies make up over half of the weight of the S&P 500, and the Magnificent 7 Big Tech monopolies are 35% of the market cap of the index. However, the US economy was built upon this financial house of cards, and politicians are profiting from it. Ben Norton explains the dangers. VIDEO with charts here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rguHublkxCQ Topics 0:00 American exceptionalism 0:53 US stock market is over 60% of world 1:16 USA is 74% of MSCI World Index 2:10 Top 25 companies in world 3:29 Exorbitant privilege of US dollar 4:59 S&P 500 and Nasdaq indices 6:07 Magnificent 7 6:50 Just 25 companies make up 50.3% of S&P 500 8:26 Tesla is insanely overvalued 12:03 Big US companies are really financial firms 13:11 How to measure a bubble 14:15 Buffett Indicator (market cap to GDP) 15:57 Public & private equities to GDP 17:00 How the US government inflated the bubble 21:10 Richest 10% of Americans own 93% of stocks 22:23 Warren Buffett's warnings 23:56 Berkshire Hathaway dumps stocks 26:32 Jeff Bezos sells Amazon shares 27:22 Mark Zuckerberg sells Meta stocks 27:40 Elon Musk sold Tesla shares 28:08 The "greatest bubble in human history" 30:27 Alan Greenspan and "irrational exuberance" 31:16 Fears of "pent-up exuberance" 32:19 P/E ratios 33:41 Irrational investing 34:54 Donald Trump's tax cuts help the rich 37:54 Trump and Ronald Reagan 39:04 Trickle-down economics 41:16 Wall Street fills Trump's cabinet 42:02 Financialization of US economy 43:44 Will Trump reverse de-industrialization? 45:38 Real estate & homelessness 46:38 US dollar 47:34 Wall Street vs Main Street 49:06 Outro

Devil's Chess Club is part of the American Exception podcast on Patreon [ www.patreon.com/americanexception ]. Subscribe for access to past and future episodes of American Exception and Devil's Chess Club! This special episode features Professor Jeffrey Sachs interviewing Aaron Good about 'American Exception: Empire and the Deep State'. The interview was for Professor Sachs' excellent podcast and video series, Book Club With Jeffrey Sachs [ https://bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org/ ]. We decided to make a DCC episode which includes the interview, along with extra material before and after the discussion in which I speak about Jeffrey Sachs and then, eventually, about the history and and scholarship behind the concept of the deep state. I encourage everyone to follow Book Club With Jeffrey Sachs [ https://bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org/ ]. The Professor is a great interviewer, and his choices of books and authors are excellent. They have a YouTube channel [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXvuOG33zLs&list=PLprXkx-4Du8LthJd7fLlSXeTmUxlZ9xyC&index=23 ] and they are on the major podcasting apps. Image: American Exception, by Abby Martin, graphics by Casey Moore--cover art for American Exception: Empire and the Deep State (Skyhorse Publishing: New York, 2022) by Aaron Good Special thanks to: * Dana Chavarria, production * Casey Moore, graphics * Michelle Boley, animated intro * Mock Orange, music

Back in 2019, we told you about an intriguing experiment to test a famous anthropological legend about an elderly Inuit man in the 1950s who fashioned a knife out of his own frozen feces. He used it to kill and skin a dog, using its rib cage as a makeshift sled to venture off into the Arctic. Metin Eren, an archaeologist at Kent State University, fashioned rudimentary blades out of his own frozen feces to test whether they could cut through pig hide, muscle, and tendon.

Sadly for the legend, the blades failed every test, but the study was colorful enough to snag Eren an Ig Nobel Prize the following year. And it's just one of the many fascinating projects routinely undertaken in his Experimental Archaeology Laboratory, where he and his team try to reverse-engineer all manner of ancient technologies, whether they involve stone tools, ceramics, metal, butchery, textiles, and so forth.

Eren's lab is quite prolific, publishing 15 to 20 papers a year. “The only thing we’re limited by is time,” he said. Many have colorful or quirky elements and hence tend to garner media attention, but Eren emphasizes that what he does is very much serious science, not entertainment. “I think sometimes people look at experimental archaeology and think it’s no different from LARPing,” Eren told Ars. “I have nothing against LARPers, but it’s very different. It’s not playtime. It’s hardcore science. Me making a stone tool is no different than a chemist pouring chemicals into a beaker. But that act alone is not the experiment. It might be the flashiest bit, but that's not the experimental process.”

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Danny welcomes back to the program Van Jackson, senior lecturer in international relations at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, to explore grand strategy and a progressive foreign policy to make a more just and stable world. They discuss where grand strategy falls in the fields of political science and international relations, dominant grand strategies like offshore balancing, neoliberal institutionalism, and anti-hegemonism, how these strategies relate to what's happening in DC, and more.

Grab a copy of Van's book Grand Strategies of the Left: The Foreign Policy of Progressive Worldmaking.

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Watch entire broadcast here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAp4XkI__fM We take questions from our audience in this special episode.

Every Irreal reader who’s paying even a little attention knows that this site is WordPress based. It’s been that way since 2011, and I’m pretty satisfied with it as a blogging platform. Still, it would be nice to have a bit more control and not have to suffer the occasional WordPress vagary.

The thing is, most of the static site solutions involve something like Hugo, which, as far as I know, is an excellent piece of software but is just another thing that I don’t have control over and doubtless comes with its own set of problems.

James Dyer is a Hugo user but, like me, would like to have a process that is completely Emacs centric. Therefore, he has been running an experiment in using Org-publish as the basis of his blog publishing workflow without depending on any external software. Right now, he’s considering this a backup to his Hugo-based system and his workflow includes importing the posts from the Hugo workflow to the Org-publish one. If the experiment is a success, he will be able to replace his Hugo workflow to one that is entirely Emacs based.

If you’re interested in having a static blog site, take a look at Dyer’s post for some good ideas for a starting point. Emacs really can handle the whole process as Dyer shows.

Devil's Chess Club is part of the American Exception podcast on Patreon [ www.patreon.com/americanexception ]. Subscribe for access to past and future episodes of American Exception and Devil's Chess Club! To discuss the cataclysmic fall of the Syrian government, we are joined again by Lawrence Wilkerson. He is a retired United States Army Colonel and former chief of staff to United States Secretary of State Colin Powell. Special thanks to: * Dana Chavarria, production * Casey Moore, graphics * Michelle Boley, animated intro * Mock Orange, music

Heya, it's the holiday season so Nick and Ciarán have on the Wine Queens (Josie Parkinson and Kate Cheka) to talk about the Netflix Christmas movies Hot Frosty (2024) and The Royal Treatment (2022). Part 2 is available now but only on Patreon.com/cornerspaeti

We'll be off for a week and back to you in the new year.

To you and yours, we wish you a very merry cum.

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The team look at the week's news and, while trying understand how rebels took Syria so quickly, a military strategist helps us to take the Warwickshire stronghold of Nuneaton. Plus Rupert the Jorkiepoo helps solve the prison overcrowding crisis.

From The Skewer’s Jon Holmes comes The Naked Week, a fresh way of dressing the week’s news in the altogether and parading it around for everyone to laugh at. Host Andrew Hunter Murray (No Such Thing As A Fish, QI Elf, Private Eye) and chief correspondent Amy Hoggart strip away the curtain and dive into not only the big stories, but also the way in which the news is packaged and presented.

From award-winning writers and a crack team of contemporary satirists - and recorded in front of a live audience - The Naked Week delivers a topical news nude straight to your ears.

Written by: Jon Holmes Katie Sayer Sarah Dempster Gareth Ceredig Jason Hazeley Adam Macqueen Louis Mian

Partial Nakedness: March Haynes Karl Minns

Production Team: Laura Grimshaw, Tony Churnside, Jerry Peal, Katie Sayer, Phoebe Butler.

Produced and Directed by Jon Holmes Executive Producer: Philip Abrams

An unusual production for BBC Radio 4

We interrogate how many milestones make a mission, look at how some MPs fund their offices and with all the Gregg Wallace unpleasantness we put a crisis management expert under pressure to give celebrities tips on how to apologise.

Host Andrew Hunter Murray, Chief Correspondent Amy Hoggart, The Skewer's Jon Holmes and The Naked Week team deliver a topical news-nude straight to your ears.

The Naked Week team strip away the curtain and dive into not only the big stories, but also the way in which the news is packaged and presented.

Written by: Jon Holmes Katie Sayer Sarah Dempster Gareth Ceredig Jason Hazeley Adam Macqueen Louis Mian

Additional material: Marc Haynes Cornelius Mendez

Guests this week: Jordan Greenaway Dr Beth Malory

Production Team: Laura Grimshaw, Tony Churnside, Jerry Peal, Katie Sayer, Phoebe Butler

Produced and Directed by Jon Holmes Executive Producer: Philip Abrams

An unusual production for BBC Radio 4

The team look at the week's news and pull back the curtain on the dark arts of lobbying. Plus, to draw attention to climate change, an art critic throws Michelangelo's David at a pyramid of tomato soup tins. It's like Just Stop Oil's tactics, but in reverse.

The Skewer’s Jon Holmes comes The Naked Week, a fresh way of dressing the week’s news in the altogether and parading it around for everyone to laugh at. Host Andrew Hunter Murray and chief correspondent Amy Hoggart strip away the curtain and dive into not only the big stories, but also the way the news is packaged and presented.

From award-winning writers and a crack team of contemporary satirists - and recorded in front of a live audience - The Naked Week delivers a topical news nude straight to your ears.

Written by: Jon Holmes Katie Sayer Sarah Dempster Gareth Ceredig Jason Hazeley Adam Macqueen Louis Mian

Additional material: Marc Haynes Cornelius Mendez

Guests this week: Verity Babbs Professor Mark Miodownik

Production Team: Laura Grimshaw, Tony Churnside, Jerry Peal, Katie Sayer, Phoebe Butler.

Produced and Directed by Jon Holmes Executive Producer: Philip Abrams

An unusual production for BBC Radio 4

Bill Bailey stars as Guy Starling, a middle aged man who, after 45 years, and for reasons quite unknown to him, is suddenly revisited by his imaginary childhood friend, Hennikay.

When Guy’s great business idea – developing a phone-based app designed to stop people using phone based apps – unsurprisingly fails, he needs to find a job. And so he attends a sales seminar with Shining Path, who are apparently, "the number one providers of after-life finance packages in the UK".

However, his attention is constantly derailed by the constant chatter of Hennikay, his imaginary childhood friend, who is still determinedly living in his head. And if that wasn’t enough, he also has to cope with Tony, his old boss, who is also there, competing with him to land a job.

But try as he might, Guy really can’t get enthused by the idea of a career selling pre-paid funeral plans to the people of Maidstone. Was this what he thought his life was going to be, when he and Hennikay were young together, way back in 1976?

Acclaimed comedian - and Strictly Come Dancing champion - Bill Bailey leads a series cast which includes Tony Gardner and Elizabeth Carling in this warm, funny look at childhood, adulthood and some of the follies of modern life, where a man with a confused child in his head might just be the sanest person in the room.

Written by David Spicer

Guy: Bill Bailey Hennikay: Max Lester Tony: Tony Gardner Stacia: Rebecca Boey

Producer: Liz Anstee A CPL production for BBC Radio 4

Krystal and Saagar discuss Jimmy Carter passes away, Trump backs Elon in H1B war, Ro Khanna responds to Laura Loomer call out, Theo Von says TikTok is being banned for Israel, IDF abducts doctor in final hospital destruction, Tim Dillon mocks United CEO on Netflix, Biden says he would have won.

 

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Democracy Now! 2024-12-30 Monday

• Headlines for December 30, 2024
• "A Genocidal Project": Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah on Israel's Destruction of Gaza Health System
• "Total Moral, Ethical Failure": Holocaust Scholar Omer Bartov on Israel's Genocide in Gaza
• Jimmy Carter Dead at 100: Fmr. Pres. Urged "Peace Not Apartheid" in 2007 DN! Interview on Palestine

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Democracy Now! 2024-12-27 Friday

• Headlines for December 27, 2024
• Gideon Levy on Israel's "Moral Blindness": Gaza Babies Freeze; Strikes Kill Medical Workers, Reporters
• "We're Not for Sale": Greenlandic Member of Danish Parliament Responds to Trump's Vow to Buy Island
• Imperialist Fantasy: Historian Greg Grandin on Trump Threat to Retake Panama Canal, Invade Mexico
• Big Tech Backs Trump to Cut Taxes, Boost Crypto, Replace Workers with AI: Tech Investor Roger McNamee

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Matt, Daniel and Producer Adam share three Patreon favorites: Asa Winstanley (The Electronic Intifada), Efrim Menuck (Godspeed You! Black Emperor), and Noah Kulwin (Blowback).

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James Li and Spencer Snyder discuss disaster relief corruption, TikTok ban, and why voters reject Dems while accepting progressive ballot measures.

 

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For our final news episode of the year, we give Felix a little Christmas gift and let him go in on some actual fighter jet news. Then, just as the year grows old, we look at the increasingly aging & dying members of our government, from representatives found in dementia homes and seen yelling at reporters as they’re wheelchaired in for votes, to confirmation that Biden has been out to lunch basically his entire term. And finally, a poem from Matt to President Biden. Get bonus content on Patreon

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After a generational collapse, the various factions of the right find themselves scrambling to pick up the pieces of the wreckage they wrought. They decide to break from the establishment Republican Party to pursue new strategies involving new technologies—one that’s short-term successes would be matched by its long-term consequences.

This episode draws from Lee Fang’s The Machine, Theda Skockpol’s The Tea Party and the Remaking of American Conservatism, Claire Bond Potter’s Political Junkies, Gabriel Sherman’s The Loudest Voice in the Room, and Matthew Lysiak’s The Drudge Revolution. For a full list of sources, check our works cited doc here: www.chapotraphouse.com/seeking

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Python is one of my programming languages I’m using for both work and home life – no doubt, I’d want to use Emacs as an IDE for Python programming. There is a certain set of features we’d expect to have in any IDE: 1) code completion, 2) code navigation, 3) error checking.

Thanks to the fact that both eglot, the Emacs client for the Language Server Protocol (LSP), and tree-sitter, a powerful parsing library, are now – since version 29 – the parts of Emacs, It should not be too hard to construct a lightweight and fast Python IDE.

It’s Christmas, a day that we at the Irreal Bunker celebrate in large part by being slothful. Therefore, today’s offering is a quickie. On the other hand, since it is Christmas, you can also think of this post as a Christmas gift.

Over at the Emacs subreddit, ArcanistCheshire tells us that building Emacs with the Lucid toolkit resulted in an impressive Emacs speedup. This is seconded by Karthink, someone who has shown he knows what he’s talking about.

Sadly, if you’re a macOS user this gift is not for you. It’s only for users of X-windows and even then there are some restrictions. Take a look at the post for the details.

Even if you are a macOS Emacs user, you can take heart because being an Emacs user is a gift all by itself. Merry Christmas

Featuring Bassam Haddad on the historical and geopolitical origins of Assad’s rise and fall — and what might happen next. We think through the contradictions: honoring the joy felt by Syrians at Assad’s ouster while simultaneously taking stock of a truly bad geopolitical outcome.

Want to learn more? Listen to “Thawra,” our series on the 20th-century political history of the Arab East thedigradio.com/Thawra

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The Dig goes deep into politics everywhere, from labor struggles and political economy to imperialism and immigration. Hosted by Daniel Denvir.

Danny and Derek speak with Brandon Wolfe-Hunnicutt, associate professor of history at California State University, Stanislaus, for the first episode in our series on his book The Paranoid Style in American Diplomacy: Oil and Arab Nationalism in Iraq. In this episode, they lay the groundwork of 20th century Iraq, covering the Hashemite monarchy, sectarianism and the country and the role of Western actors, the Iraqi Petroleum Company, the origins of the communist movement in Iraq, Rashid Ali and anti-British movements, and more until World War II.

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Today I have a short Elisp trick, probably slightly more interesting than useful, but still. A long time ago I wrote about some debugging capabilities of Emacs Lisp. The feature mentioned in the last of these posts, debug-on-variable-change, allows to invoke the debugger whenever some Elisp code changes the value of a variable (with a few minor limitations). What I didn’t mention then is that you can actually do things other than start the Emacs debugger when a variable’s value changes.

Marie K. Ekeberg has a holiday gift for Emacs users: a list of 24 Emacs packages that you can try during the holidays. The list is interesting in that it doesn’t really have a theme other than that they’re packages that Ekeberg finds useful or interesting. Some of them are builtin, some of them are in MELPA / Gnu Elpa, and some of them aren’t in any ELPA repository.

Some like Org-mode, Windmove, Magit, EXWM, Multiple cursors, and vterm will be familiar to most Emacs users but some may be new—at least they are to me. The first on the list is Try. Mike Zamansky often used it in his Emacs videos to try out a package without actually installing it. If you want to sample some of the offerings from the list, installing Try first is a good idea because it lets you experiment with a package without having to commit to it.

Another very useful package is undo-tree. It’s a little hard to get used to but it really will improve those times when you have to undo some text. It also rationalizes “redo”. That alone is worth installing it for.

One package that I haven’t tried but that looks interesting is focus. The idea is that text outside some configurable region get grayed out. I’m not sure it would work for me but it does look interesting. It provides a perfect example of why you should install Try: you can experiment with it and if you don’t like what you see, it will disappear the next time you start Emacs.

The list is worth taking a look at You may find something that will fit in with your workflow.