Etiqueta: Human

  • Practicing life

    Practicing life By Jorge Majfud Translated by John Catalinotto. John Jay College, New York. Not a few times I’ve heard that the disadvantage of learning a new language is that if it isn’t used, it is lost. This is technically inaccurate, since losing the ability to use knowledge does not necessarily mean that one has forgotten everything…

  • What good is literature? (II)

    ¿Para qué sirve la literatura? (II) (Spanish) À quoi sert la littérature ? (French) What good is literature? (II) Every so often a politician, a bureaucrat or a smart investor decides to strangulate the humanities with a cut in education, some culture ministry or simply downloading the full force of the market over the busy factories of prefabricated sensitivities.…

  • Study Points to Mother of All Mother Tongues

    By GAUTAM NAIK The world’s 6,000 or so modern languages may have all descended from a single ancestral tongue spoken by early African humans between 50,000 and 70,000 years ago, a new study suggests. The finding, published Thursday in the journal Science, could help explain how the first spoken language emerged, spread and contributed to the…

  • What good is literature, anyway?

    Jorge Majfud’s books at Amazon>>         ¿Para qué sirve la literatura? (I) (Spanish) À quoi sert la littérature ? (Spanish) What good is literature, anyway? I am sure that you have heard many times this loaded query: «Well, what good is literature, anyway?» almost always from a pragmatic businessman or, at worst, from…

  • Respect Without Rights: The Privatization of Morality

    Respeto sin derechos: la privatización de la moral (Spanish) Respect Without Rights: The Privatization of Morality Jorge Majfud Despite the violent reactions of the owners of the world, the humanist wave that radicalizes the recognition of fundamental equality among human beings will not stop.  But the price paid in the last seven centuries has been…