Monthly Muse: 7/2026
Recapitulation, contemplation, provocation
Monthly Musings are published during the last week of every month. In each Monthly Muse, I recap content from the past month of Handful of Earth, offer some freewheeling reflections, and share a passage that I’ve found especially thought-provoking.
Here’s the July 2026 Monthly Muse.
Recapitulation
Contemplation
Two of my articles were recently published in outlets outside of Substack. I pitched them to these publications since they didn’t exactly fit at Handful of Earth, but you may still find one or both of them to be of interest.
The first is entitled “Jazz Yatra, The Cold War, And the Utopian Vision Of “Indo-Euro-Afro-American Music” and was published in the international relations magazine, India’s World. It is available in the hard copy of the June issue (Volume 2, Issue 6) as well as online here. The article was later picked up by Scroll and published online with the title,“How India’s Long-running Jazz Yatra Festival Challenged the Ideological Divisions of the Cold War.”
The second piece is an op-ed published at Asia Times entitled “Trump’s Fulbright Cuts Mark End of a Soft Power Era.” You can read it here.
Provocation
“However strange this may seem to us, who have so distorted education, full liberty of study, that is, the permission given to the pupil to come to study when he wishes, is a conditio sine qua non of every fruitful instruction, just as it is a conditio sine qua non of nutrition that he who feeds should feel like eating. The only difference is this, that in material matters the harmfulness of a departure from freedom will show itself at once,—there will at once be vomiting or disorder of the stomach,—while in spiritual matters the harmful consequences will not appear so soon, maybe only in years.”
—Leo Tolstoy, “Thoughts on Education and Instruction”