When British philosopher Bertrand Russell observed that “mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty,” he may have been thinking of Srinivasa Ramanujan. A Tamil from southern India, he was a lowly clerk with a gift for numbers when he received a scholarship to Cambridge University. Arriving in Britain in 1914, on the eve […]
Horse racing is a rich man’s sport, and for centuries in Britain, it was the preserve of the landed gentry. So imagine what happens when the working-class inhabitants of a depressed coal mining village in Wales band together, raise a prize-winning steed and break class barriers in the process. In Dark Horse, a spirited documentary […]
Israel is haunted by the specter of Palestinian attack tunnels. During Operation Protective Edge, the 50-day Gaza war in the summer of 2014, the Israeli army found and destroyed 34 such tunnels, which the Palestinians regard as a strategic weapon in the face of Israel’s overwhelming military superiority. Israel’s search-and-destroy mission took place after the Israeli […]
Much to my surprise and delight, Netflix, the international streaming network, has acquired Pawn Sacrifice, a movie I missed at its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2014. I had looked forward to seeing Edward Zwick’s biopic about American chess prodigy Bobby Fischer, who, in 1972 in Reykjavik, defeated Soviet grandmaster Boris Spassky for […]
Few of the countries invaded and plundered by Germany during World War II endured a fate as terrible as that of Poland. Six million of its inhabitants — three million Christians and an equal number of Jews — perished during the course of the Nazi occupation. They were murdered, felled by starvation and disease, and killed […]
Donald Trump’s hostile takeover of the Republican Party constitutes one of the most astonishing and seismic events in modern American history. Trump, a property billionaire and reality TV celebrity, was regarded as the one of the least likely candidates to secure his party’s nomination when he entered the race as an underdog last June. Pundits […]
Civil wars in various parts of Africa and Asia have set off the mass movement of refugees to Europe in the past two decades. Jacques Audiard’s drama, Dheepan, which won the Palme d’Or prize at 2015 Cannes Film Festival and which opens in Canada on May 13, focuses on three Sri Lankans who escape to France as Sri Lanka’s […]
Israel and the Palestinians should create a new template to resolve their dispute, says Israeli analyst Yossi Alpher. Both sides, having failed to achieve peace through protracted negotiations, must build a new framework for bilateral talks. If they fail to do so, he warned, they will find themselves on a “slippery slope” toward a one-state […]
Abba Eban has been dead for 14 years but his name still resonates. Eban was unquestionably Israel’s most eloquent foreign minister, defending the Jewish state at the United Nations and other international forums. Hailed abroad as the Voice of Israel, he was regarded far less admirably at home. Although his contemporaries in Israel’s Labor Party […]
Benjamin Netanyahu is a big proponent of “economic peace” with the Palestinians. In 2009, shortly after becoming Israel’s prime minister for the second time, he talked about the need to develop the Palestinian economy in the West Bank, claiming that job creation would benefit both parties. He formed a special committee to improve the Palestinians’ […]