If you are in the mood for some thought-provoking hope-giving reading this weekend, I recommend Steven Pinker’s essay “The History of Violence“:
In the decade of Darfur and Iraq, and shortly after the century of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, the claim that violence has been diminishing may seem somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene. Yet recent studies that seek to quantify the historical ebb and flow of violence point to exactly that conclusion.
[Hat tip: Yuvaraj.]

[Repost of a July 2003 article.]
A head’s up from Rajesh Jain on an article Asia Times Online titled Why India’s Economy Lags Behind China’s got me thinking once again about popular misconceptions about development matters. Journalists are particularly susceptible to some of these. An example appears in the article.

Sramana Mitra looks beyond Bangalore. She writes: