Author Archives: Editors

Top Ten Universities In Asia-By Mike Colagrassi

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Some of the world’s most prestigious universities aren’t in America.

  • China’s Tsinghua and Peking University are on par with Harvard and MIT.
  • These 10 universities consistently shuffle around for top tier status in Asian college rankings.
  • Universities in Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and China have churned out dozens of Nobel Laureates and other renowned figures.Asia possesses some of the most cutting-edge and finest universities in the world. While we’re all accustomed to the powerhouse and traditional American and U.K.-based universities, in the past 100 years Asia has seen a surge of growth.

    Leading the way in terms of advanced future research, while also partnering with established university systems around the world — Asia has become a destination for some of the world’s best and brightest.

    Tsinghua University is one of the most prestigious institutions in China. Leading a rigorous multidisciplinary system for the past three decades, it has gone through many iterations and changes since its creation in 1911.

    Known as one of the most elite schools in China, and referred to some as the “MIT of China,” the school prides itself on its strength in engineering and the sciences. Admitted students must have excellent scores on their national exams. Tsinghua consistently ranks in the top 30 of The World University Rankings.

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Explaining A Novel To Pakistani Intelligence-By Muhammad Hanif

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(Must read article by Muhammad Hanif. It is hard to decide whether to laugh or shake your head ! f. Sheikh)

Fear is a line in your head,” my dear friend Sabeen Mahmud used to say. “You have to decide which side you want to be on.” Mahmud paid the maximum price for her fearlessness. In 2015, she organized a public discussion in Karachi about the disappearances of political activists—she was an activist herself—knowing it was a subject the Pakistani media was afraid to touch. After leaving the event, she was shot dead. 

The assassin was sentenced to death after a summary trial, but the shot that killed Mahmud still reverberates: her murder marked the beginning of an unprecedented assault on freedom of speech in Pakistan. The Pakistani media is now enduring its darkest phase yet. Major General Asif Ghafoor, the head of the Pakistan Army’s public relations department, has been circulating the online profiles of journalists he judges to be involved in antistate activities. In a press conference last December, he issued a heartfelt plea: if journalists filed positive stories for just six months, Pakistan would become a great nation. Mostly, Pakistani journalists obliged. Writers who were once bold and boisterous, taking on military dictators and civilian rulers and extremist organizations, have now become patriotic—or have found themselves out of work. Without jobs, some of the country’s top columnists and prime-time TV journalists are learning to start their own YouTube channels. Others receive threats from anonymous entities claiming to represent the state intelligence services.

Against this backdrop, I was relieved when an inspector from an intelligence agency called me, introduced himself, and said that he wanted to debrief me about my recent visit to Bangladesh. (Relieved because the caller had a name, a number, and a purpose.) The occasion for the call was my participation in a literary festival in Dhaka for the launch of my new novel, Red Birds. Usually Pakistan’s intelligence agencies and their civilian cousins in radical organizations are more obsessed with managing the news cycle than monitoring the activities of fiction writers, but the inspector had received an inquiry from his higher-ups and wanted to meet me. After consulting some journalist colleagues, I agreed to meet him in a public place.

The inspector arrived with one of his senior colleagues. The encounter was part journalistic interview, part interrogation. How did I know the Dhaka festival director? Was she married? Could I find out? Was my own marriage arranged? Did I own my house? How many children and how old? To my surprise, they also wanted to talk about the book. They asked for a copy; I politely suggested that they buy it and put it on their expense account. Okay, they said, but can you please tell us what happens? Like many novelists, I find it difficult to sum up the plot of my story in a few sentences. I started haltingly, and they seemed to like the premise: an American pilot lands in a desert and is rescued by a refugee child. The refugee must be Afghan? they asked, and I nodded enthusiastically. For the next half hour my interrogators and I were writing this novel together. I realized that I was telling an entirely different story for their consumption: omitting certain things, embellishing other parts. I was determined not to reveal that at the heart of the novel is a boy who has gone missing, a case of enforced disappearance. (Six years ago I had reported on missing activists in Pakistan and was warned by friends not to go there. And then there was Sabeen Mahmud.) I made the story sound patriotic; I made it about the positive image of Pakistan. I don’t know if they believed any of it, but I was sure that they would never bother to read it. I was relieved, for once, not to receive any interest in my journalism. A lot of what I write would fail the patriotism test. 

 

I learned this trick of weaving fiction around fact a decade ago. My first novel, A Case of Exploding Mangoes, grew out of my frustrated attempts to investigate the plane crash that killed General Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, Pakistan’s military dictator, and half a dozen top generals, along with the US ambassador to Pakistan. Thirty-one people died in total. There had been two official inquiries into the crash, and it was said that sabotage was involved, but no culprits were ever found. When I tried, years after the event, to talk to some of the players who were around at the time of the crash and to research the very little that had been written about it, I soon realized that I was not going to find out the truth. There were cover-ups to cover the cover-ups. It became obvious that nobody (including the Americans, who had lost a rising star in the State Department) was interested in finding out whodunit. They all seemed to be saying, Good riddance—now let’s get on with our lives. Failing to find any facts, I decided to solve the assassination through fiction; in the absence of an identified killer in real life, I came up with a character who raises his hand and says: I did it. As with many novels that start on a whim, this little conceit took on a life of its own. My novel borrowed the many bizarre conspiracy theories about the plane crash, embellished them, and added counterparts of my own invention. It included some political jokes and some real-life characters who were still in power. I threw in a mango-eating crow and a poison-tipped sword for good measure. I had assumed that if you said on the cover that the book was a work of fiction, people would read it as a work of fiction. But many readers in Pakistan have come to me and asked how I uncovered it all. It’s almost frightening to think that people read a work of fiction full of fantastical happenings as a piece of history. A retired spy chief once cornered me at a party and said, “Son, you have written a brilliant book, but who were your sources.

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Holdout for perfect partner or settle for good enough?

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(Interesting article by Aaron Be-Ze’ev for young ones looking for partner as well as for married ones! f.sheikh)

‘I want a man who’s kind and understanding. Is that too much to ask of a millionaire?’ 
Zsa Zsa Gabor, actress and socialite (1917-2016)

The search for ‘the one and only’ romantic partner, our second half who will love us forever and a day, and will light an eternal fire in our loving heart, has been a frustrating undertaking for many people. But why? Could the goal be unrealistic? Can we improve our strategy, and our chances, or should we give up the search?

The search for ‘The One’ can indeed feel futile. You might test what can feel like endless candidates and not find anyone you really like. You can travel great distances but never reach the Promised Land. Even when this land seems to be found, there is no lifetime guarantee, and the expiration date of this happy kingdom might be brief. Breakups, not long-term relationships, appear to be the norm. In many societies, about half of all marriages end in divorce, and lots of the remaining half have at some point seriously considered it.

In light of these difficulties, doubts have been raised concerning the value of this kind of search. One person might dismiss the quest altogether. ‘Done with trying to find a woman for life. Much easier to just hook up for a good short time. Avoid all the other personal drama!’ as one man told me. Another stops the search early, after finding profound love and connection when very young. ‘I’ve never regretted not ordering the fish when my steak arrived cooked and seasoned to my liking,’ said a woman who married her first lover. Yet others say they’ve found The One yet continue sampling what’s out there. ‘I want both – a long, profound love and a series of short, intense romantic-sexual experiences. Lust and profound love are both meaningful and satisfying for me,’ another woman explains.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the third option is preferable for most singles, at least in the United States: the eighth annual ‘Singles in America’ (2018) study from the dating site Match, supervised by the biological anthropologist Helen Fisher and the evolutionary biologist Justin Garcia, both of the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University in Bloomington, indicates that 69 per cent of today’s singles are looking for a serious, long, romantic relationship at the same time, nonetheless, as they are experiencing diverse, brief types of superficial, sexual relationships. For instance, many singles, especially women, have dated multiple people simultaneously. Most heterosexual singles would be open to a threesome, the report reveals, and one in four would have sex with a robot.

It is likely that these attitudes will continue after meeting the person who seems to be The One. In a 1996 study of sexual exclusivity among dating, cohabiting and married women, the sociologist Renata Forste at Brigham Young University in Utah and the public-health scientist Koray Tanfer in Seattle found that, if a woman has a history of multiple sex partners, the likelihood of her having a secondary sex partner during a current relationship greatly increases. It seems that personality tendencies and sexual habits are the main factors here. These findings do not reject the value of the search for The One, but rather suggests that this person, once found, might not be all alone.

Despite these kinds of caveats, when it comes of finding The One, strategy counts, starting with the very definition of ‘perfect’. One dictionary definition is flawless: being entirely without fault or defect. The other is most suitable: being as good as possible, and completely appropriate. While the first meaning focuses on eliminating the negative, the second centres on finding as much positive as one can.

Clearly, the search for the flawless person is an exercise in utter futility. Through this lens, the beloved is seen as a kind of icon, without relation to the partner. Here, one looks at qualities that stand on their own, such as intelligence, appearance, humour or wealth. This sort of measure has two advantages – it is easy to use, and most people would agree about the assessments. It’s an approach that takes a static view, in which romantic love is essentially fixed – and that’s something we know doesn’t work well in the real world.

On the other hand, looking for the most suitable person under a given set of circumstances might allow you to build an intimate connection, and could yield a flourishing partnership. This view emphasises the uniqueness of the relationship; it sees the beloved’s most important qualities in relationship to the partner, and offers a dynamic kind of romantic love over time. Such love involves intrinsic development that includes bringing out the best in each other. The suitability scale is much more complex, since it depends on personal and environmental factors about which we do not have full knowledge.

The view is supported by the philosopher Iddo Landau of the University of Haifa in Israel and the author of Finding Meaning in an Imperfect World(2017). He distinguishes between two life strategies: aspiring to be the best, and aspiring to improve. The first can lead us down an endless, unproductive path of frustrated competition, while the second brings meaningful development over time. The same type of distinction applies to romantic love. If romantic meaning mainly concerns achieving the best, lovers will always be restless, consumed with concern about missing the perfect person, or perhaps the younger, the richer or the more beautiful one. If, however, romantic flourishing mainly involves improvement, achieving it lies much more in our hands.

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Social Media & Constructive National Discussion On Issues

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(Great article in Quartz on how social media can play an important role in national ,and even global, constructive discussion on pressing issues by better moderating the Trending News and separating real from conspiratorial manipulated content. The good news is that the social media has the tools to do it by adjusting its algorithms and flagging questionable content. f. sheikh)

 

This week Jürgen Habermas, one of the world’s most famous living philosophers, turned 90. A week before, Congress hosted yet another hearing investigating tech platforms Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple.

What does one event have to do with the other?

In 2006, long before social media echo chambers were a worldwide phenomenon, Habermas warned that “the rise of millions of fragmented chat rooms across the world” would lead to “a huge number of isolated issue publics”—micro public spheres that threaten the shared national conversations that are essential to democracy.

Habermas’s philosophies and the antitrust investigations both point to a fundamental issue we face today: the concept of a public sphere, and what tech companies and the government can and should do to protect democracy.

Facebook, like Twitter and Google, represents the modern version of the public sphere that Habermas and other democracy theorists have called for. With more of our lives lived online, we’ve stopped prioritizing physical spaces, and therefore lost shared spaces spaces for public discourse.

The internet has largely satisfied a human desire for connection, but it doesn’t necessarily cultivate a democratic exchange of information.

Democratic discourse depends on a shared understanding of what matters, what the facts are, and which sources and speakers are reliable.

Trend setting

Before its untimely dismissal, Facebook’s “Trending” feature lived in the small white box on the upper right-hand corner of your home page, allegedly listing the news stories most widely shared and discussed across Facebook’s ecosystem.

Although problematic in its application, this tool had the potential for an entirely citizen-driven solution to an age-old problem of the public sphere: determining what issues deserve our attention, and how much of it.

Features like Trending in theory help support and maintain the social media space as a venue for public conversation in democratic discourse—if platforms can stick to implementing them the way they were initially advertised.

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