Laleh Khalili

1 month ago | lrb.co.uk | Lionel Barber |Laleh Khalili

When​ I started developing software for the management consulting firms I worked for in the mid-1990s, we still had to connect to the World Wide Web on slow and clunky lines to access our coding work. The laptops we carried weighed at least five kilogrammes and couldn’t be used for actual programming.

1 month ago | theguardian.com | Stephen Reicher |Rafael Behr |Frances Ryan |Rachel Clarke |Sophie Mackintosh |Laleh Khalili | +5 more

The cost of pessimistic individualism was measured in tens of thousands of livesStephen ReicherProfessor of psychology at the University of St Andrews and a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the British AcademyGreat calamities often provoke reflections about the human condition. The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 led people to reconsider their relationship with God, and compelled Voltaire to viciously lampoon Leibniz’s notion that we live in the best of all possible worlds.

2 months ago | lrb.co.uk | Laleh Khalili

Since his re-election as president of the United States, Donald Trump has revived his plan to ‘buy’ Greenland from Denmark, and in his inaugural address threatened to ‘take back’ the Panama Canal. Around 5 per cent of global trade goes through the canal, 2400 miles south-east of the southern tip of Texas, and 74 per cent of the total volume of cargo is carried to or from the US (China is second at 21 per cent).

Oct 30, 2024 | lrb.co.uk | Darshana M. Baruah |Laleh Khalili

Shah S​ulaiman, the 17th-century Safavid monarch of Iran, liked to spend his time drinking wine with his many wives. He avoided war with the Ottoman Empire and was largely uninterested in the European powers. Like many potentates on the Indian Ocean rim, however, he was fascinated by the other kingdoms surrounding this vast watery realm. In 1685, he sent a diplomatic mission to Ayutthaya, the capital of Siam, where a number of Iranian merchants lived.

May 1, 2024 | lrb.co.uk | Grégory Salle |Laleh Khalili

According​ to a gushing photo-essay published in Life magazine in 1969, Prince Karim Aga Khan was an ‘outrageously wealthy young man, written off by many as a mere playboy’, who had proved his critics wrong with a display of business acumen – a vast real-estate venture in Sardinia. Sailing across the Mediterranean on one of his yachts, the Aga Khan had fallen in love with its wind-eroded granite shorelines, pink sandy coves and velvety green waters.