aljazeera (2025-01-11). Why is India courting the Taliban now? aljazeera.com Meeting between India's foreign secretary and the Taliban this week has prompted speculation.

Jonah Raskin (2025-01-10). Wanna-be Revolutionaries and Their Foes: Notes on Rachel Kushner's Creation Lake. counterpunch.org Almost all novels, from Cervantes' Don Quixote and Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility to One Hundred Years of Solitude and today's mass market best sellers, are political whether the author intends them to be political or not. Some, like Gore Vidal's Burr and Lincoln, are more overtly political than others. As literary critics have long noted, novels tend to evade the conscious control of writers,