The ornithologist on a life spent studying birds, his association with Dr Sálim Ali, and the urgent need to protect India’s grasslands and wetlands.

Tahmima Anam’s new novel is a short and succinct cautionary tale about the wages of exploitation, whether of women or of the environment.

The 2026 International Booker shortlisted novel is a restrained saga that approaches complex questions with remarkable subtlety.

Stories on the color orange, the data center rush, a local hero, the AI labor takeover, and a boy dinner subreddit.

For a novel centred on the Great Irish Famine of Ireland, Maggie O’Farrell’s Land is surprisingly insulated from pain.  

Veteran diplomat Rajiv Dogra’s new book argues that the well-being of a nation depends on the quality of its leadership, and that expansion carries within itself the seeds of exhaustion that eventually bring empires down.

Using the 20th century as a case in point, the book shows how authoritarianism can take hold of a society, grow, and sustain itself. 

For Oakland Review of Books, Stephanie Uchino-Beach writes about getting laid off at an education tech company that transformed into an “AI-first outfit.” As as customer success manager, she acted as a liaison to district administrators, school principals, and teachers. While AI could automate some of her tasks, what about the core responsibilities of her CSM role: building real relationships and understanding an educator’s needs? An AI sees data points, not people. This is a sobering read from a former tech worker living in the Bay Area, and an edtech company that has gone all in on AI and forgotten about its mission.

Before I went to work for Silicon Valley, I was a lot of things. A few jobs before this last one, I was an elementary school teacher in Chicago, helping kids learn to read, creating units, planning lessons, and buying supplies with my own money on the weekends, like countless other teachers around the country. I grew up on the Peninsula, and I made the move into Customer Success to get a job that would let me move home. Tech was never my dream; it was a means to an end. My dad studied computer science and still works in tech to this day and enjoys it, so it seemed like a satisfying and fruitful career was plausible. I figured that once I broke in, all my problems would be solved: I could get a house, have a kid, and fulfill every middle-class dream that had always felt slightly out of reach for a millennial like myself. 

And yet, job after job, I consistently left feeling unsatisfied. Unsatisfied by how I wasn’t growing and wasn’t developing my skills. Unsatisfied with poor managers who were just in the right place at the right time to be promoted but so often lacked the skills to provide the same success for their employees. Unsatisfied with how the products I worked on could do wrong by the communities we sold them to, even though every company said they were “mission-driven” and “put our customers first.” 

David Shulman links West Bank resistance to Gandhian satyagraha, showing how despair turns moral duty into free speech under Israeli occupation.

Kala Krishnan’s poems in this heart-touching collection are an exercise in mapping love.

The collection of 10 essays on Shrilal Shukla’s magnum opus expertly makes a case for reading the novel as a window to our lived reality.

Christians need to think more seriously about how to prepare the next generation of believers to handle the intellectual challenges of the university environment (and beyond). We need to do more than prepare them morally and practically; we need to train their minds to engage effectively with an unbelieving world…Ultimately, it will require a macroshift... Continue Reading

“The liberalization of euthanasia laws not only offends the West’s pre-modern moral and religious traditions but also cannot be justified on the uniquely modern idea that euthanasia is a rational means of enhancing the individual’s willful control over his body and life. The deeper problem, however, is that this development is best understood as an... Continue Reading

Complicating the familiar claim that coal powers development, Matthew Shutzer’s history of coal extraction in India reveals how national abundance was built on rural dispossession.

The View From Here and Hyphen represent an irrepressible impulse in India’s literary cultures to give voice to the human imagination, and reject the silence imposed by authoritarian states.

A novel that won the Assamese Sahitya Akademi Award, a book that unpacks an important conversation around race, colonialism and international relations, and much more.

There are people trying to perform day after day— Christian leaders trying to preach a wonderful sermon every week, parents trying to produce lovely children, workers putting in long hours at work—all in a desperate attempt to prove themselves. Some weeks they feel like they’ve pulled it off; other weeks it seems so fragile—as though... Continue Reading

He is the only being who does not depend on anything outside of himself for complete joy: God “blessed forever,” as Paul puts it (Rom. 9:5). Deep happiness and rich delight also characterize God’s relationship with his people, including you. Many of us find that hard to accept because we don’t feel delightful in the... Continue Reading

Justin Peters has since reflected on the book, and he wrote this two days ago on his Facebook page, ‘​​I’m not convinced Lawson actually wrote it. Perhaps he did, but I’m not sure.’ He added, ‘If Steve really is behind the book, he had AI write it. This is classic AI. Through various circumstances, I’ve... Continue Reading

Originally published in 1990, Jean Said Makdisi’s Beirut Fragments asks a question that remains painfully relevant: what happens when political violence becomes part of ordinary life?