Laleh Khalili

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

You may remember​ Palantir as the company that was given access to all of NHS England’s data in November 2023, in order to create a Federated Data Platform. The cost was £330 million – the largest NHS technology contract to date. Palantir’s first sales pitch to a UK agency came much earlier, in 2008, when its representatives gave a demo to an enthusiastic audience at GCHQ.

Mar 12, 2025 | 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.

Mar 1, 2025 | 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.

Jan 26, 2025 | 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.