Alien oceans, familiar chemistry: The mysterious case of Planet K2-18b

Scientists have detected molecules in the atmosphere of a distant exoplanet that, on Earth, are strongly linked to biological activity. The planet—K2-18b, located 124 light-years away in the constellation Leo—is classified as a "Hycean" world, potentially covered by a global ocean and enveloped in a hydrogen-rich atmosphere.

It is here that traces of dimethyl sulfide (DMS) and dimethyl disulfide (DMDS) have been tentatively identified. On Earth, these compounds are produced almost exclusively by living organisms, particularly marine microbes like phytoplankton.

These findings come from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which has already detected methane and carbon dioxide in K2-18b’s atmosphere. Now, the possible presence of DMS and DMDS has intensified speculation about the planet’s potential to host life.

Could we be approaching the first credible detection of alien life—or are these molecules the byproducts of unknown non-biological processes? Could what we classify as biosignatures on Earth arise differently in alien environments? And if life can emerge in the deep oceans of a planet orbiting a distant red dwarf star, how common might it be across the universe?

If confirmed, this would mark the strongest evidence yet of life beyond Earth. Given the vastness of the cosmos, it seems unlikely that Earth is unique. The Milky Way alone hosts hundreds of billions of stars, most with planetary systems. Beyond it lie countless galaxies, each with their own stars, moons, and planets—potentially trillions of worlds.

In a universe so expansive, dynamic, and ancient, the idea that life exists only here feels increasingly improbable. Perhaps life is not the exception, but the rule.

The Pfizer Papers: Unmasking the medical-industrial complex

Over the past century, human health and life expectancy have improved dramatically. The prevailing narrative—vigorously propagandized by the pharmaceutical industry—credits this progress primarily to the widespread use of medicines and vaccines. But is this claim justified? I believe it tells only a narrow, self-serving part of the story.

The real engine behind longer, healthier lives is not the pharmaceutical industry but the big transformation in living conditions. Today, people benefit from cleaner water, more nutritious food, better housing, enhanced hygiene, and more accessible education. Conflict-related deaths have declined. Public health infrastructure, law enforcement, and economic stability have improved in most parts of the world. These factors, not pills and injections, have laid the groundwork for better health outcomes on a global scale.

In fact, the over-reliance on pharmaceutical products may be doing more harm than good. Many of today’s chronic illnesses—such as heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and hypertension—can often be prevented or significantly managed through lifestyle changes rather than long-term medication. Those who maintain balanced diets, sleep well, exercise regularly, and avoid excessive medication often fare better than those who rely heavily on pharmaceutical interventions.

This argument is advanced forcefully in The Pfizer Papers: Pfizer's Crimes Against Humanity, edited by Naomi Wolf and Amy Kelly, with a foreword by Stephen K. Bannon. The book makes the convincing case that the global pharmaceutical industry, far from being a benevolent force, may be complicit in undermining public health, individual freedoms, and democratic governance.

Focusing on the COVID-19 pandemic, the authors allege a disturbing confluence of interests among Big Pharma, government regulatory bodies, mainstream media, and major social media platforms. According to the book, these actors worked in coordinated tandem—not merely to manage a public health emergency, but to shape a one-dimensional narrative, suppress dissent, and manipulate public perception. 

This alliance, the book argues, brainwashed large segments of the population into accepting extended lockdowns, masking mandates, and mass vaccination campaigns—despite growing evidence that these vaccines failed to prevent transmission and, in many cases, led to serious side effects.

This critique is particularly damning in the case of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine. The authors contend that both Pfizer and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) failed to conduct or disclose adequate safety testing. Despite possessing knowledge of serious adverse events, they proceeded with the vaccine rollout under the protective umbrella of the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act—legislation that grants pharmaceutical companies immunity from liability during public health emergencies.

This immunity, originally designed to enable swift crisis response, has effectively shielded corporations from legal consequences even when their products cause harm. The result, the authors argue, is a regulatory environment where corporate profit is prioritized over public safety, and where public trust is eroded by the very institutions meant to protect it.

Moreover, the book suggests that social media companies played a pivotal role in enforcing this narrative. Posts questioning vaccine efficacy or highlighting side effects were systematically suppressed, deplatformed, or labeled as misinformation—even when they were backed by data or legitimate scientific concern. The suppression of alternative views and scientific debate, the book warns, marks a dangerous slide toward digital authoritarianism masquerading as public health advocacy.

To be clear, this is not an argument against all medicine or legitimate pharmaceutical intervention. But it is crucial to draw a line between genuine medical progress and a corporatized and bureaucratized health regime that equates public well-being with forcing people to consume certain medical products and locking down the global economy. 

At its core, The Pfizer Papers calls for a reckoning—a reexamination of the powerful nexus between corporate interests, government agencies, and information platforms. It raises questions about regulatory capture, media integrity, and the right of individuals to make informed medical decisions without coercion or censorship.

As citizens in a data-driven world, we have to fight for transparency, accountability, and independent oversight of those who shape public health policy. Real health is not manufactured in Big Pharma’s laboratories—it is achieved through clean air, honest governance, nutritious food, community resilience, and personal autonomy.

People, Power & the Politics of the Past: Between Zinn’s progressive vision and Harman’s Marxist doctrine

History, as the adage goes, is written by the victors. From imperial chronicles etched into stone to modern state-sponsored textbooks, the telling of the past has long been a prerogative of those who prevailed in the political and military arenas. The vanquished, when given voice at all, are often consigned to the footnotes of history — if not erased altogether.

Yet there exists a third, more elusive narrator in the grand chronicle of civilization: the ordinary person. The farmer whose grain fed empires, the weaver whose textiles clothed kings, the soldier who marched for causes he did not choose. Their lives shaped the world as profoundly as any monarch's edict, yet their stories remain the most underrepresented — rarely told in their own voice, often mediated through the lens of ideology.

In the last century, Marxist and leftist historians have positioned themselves as champions of the voiceless. They promised a historiography rooted in the lived experiences of the working class, the oppressed, and the colonized — a “history from below.” Yet the irony is striking: while seeking to subvert elite narratives, many of these works fall into their own hierarchy of abstraction. Revolutions are told through the speeches of Lenin, Mao, or Castro. Labor struggles are described in terms of party resolutions and strike statistics. The workers, ironically, remain nameless — symbolic placeholders in a broader ideological argument.

It is in this context that Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (1980) arrived like a thunderclap. With an opening salvo that declared, “I will try to tell the history of the United States as seen by the victims of the system,” Zinn set out not merely to revise American history, but to fundamentally reorient its vantage point. Gone were the paeans to founding fathers and frontier heroes. In their place stood the Cherokee driven from their land, the African slave resisting dehumanization, the Lowell mill girl writing poetry in defiance, the Vietnam War protester, the labor organizer, the civil rights marcher.

Zinn's narrative is not concerned with neutrality. He makes no pretensions of being above the fray. “There is no such thing as a pure fact, innocent of interpretation,” he reminds the reader. His allegiance is unapologetically with the oppressed. And yet, even as he shatters the myth of benevolent empire, Zinn occasionally erects new myths of his own — idealizing Indigenous societies or downplaying the internal contradictions of resistance movements. The risk, as some critics have noted, is that he sometimes replaces the great man theory of history with the “noble victim” theory — flattening complexity in service of moral clarity.

Nonetheless, Zinn’s achievement is profound. He reframes American history not as a march of progress, but as a contested terrain of power, violence, and defiance. His chapter titles alone — “Columbus, the Indians, and Human Progress,” “The Intimately Oppressed,” “Robber Barons and Rebels” — signal a deliberate inversion of traditional narrative frames. This was not merely a history book; it was a cultural intervention.

Following in Zinn’s footsteps, though on a far more ambitious scale, is Chris Harman’s A People’s History of the World (1999). Harman attempts the near-impossible: to tell the story of all human civilization — from hunter-gatherer tribes to the dawn of the 21st century — through the lens of class struggle. His is a world history stripped of kings and chronicles, peopled instead by those who toiled, rebelled, and resisted.

Yet here, the promise of a “history from below” encounters a paradox of its own. Harman, a prominent member of the British Socialist Workers Party and editor of Socialist Review, wears his Marxist commitments on his sleeve. His prose, while passionate and erudite, lacks the narrative vigor that made Zinn's work so widely read beyond academic and activist circles. Where Zinn painted in vivid, human strokes, Harman often delivers polemic. The result is a book that, while ideologically rigorous, sometimes reads more like a manifesto than a story.

His chapter on the fall of the Roman Empire, for example, is not a meditation on cultural decline or moral decay but a critique of overreliance on slavery and the parasitic nature of aristocratic power. When writing about feudalism, he focuses not on chivalric myth or castle intrigue, but on the surplus labor extracted from serfs. These are valid and important perspectives — yet they are delivered with such theoretical density that the reader may struggle to connect emotionally with the people whose lives the book seeks to illuminate.

Moreover, in applying the Marxist framework universally — even to prehistoric and tribal societies — Harman occasionally stretches the materialist analysis to the point of distortion. Not all historical events can be adequately explained through the binary of exploitation and revolt. Human motivations are messier: shaped by religion, kinship, love, fear, accident. Harman’s strict ideological lens sometimes leaves no room for these subtler forces.

However, Harman is aware of history's recurring cycles of rebellion and repression. He writes, “Again and again, the mass of people have shown their capacity to fight for a new and better world. But again and again they have been diverted, betrayed or crushed.” This refrain is a recognition that the historical agency of the masses, while often stifled, is never fully extinguished.

The comparison between Zinn and Harman reveals more than just differences in style or scope. It illustrates the tension inherent in writing history from below. Can such a history ever be free of ideology? Should it be? Must a people’s historian choose between emotional resonance and analytical rigor, between storytelling and structure?

Perhaps the answer lies in synthesis. Zinn's emotive storytelling can inspire, but needs anchoring in nuanced analysis. Harman’s intellectual scaffolding is fine, but cries out for the warmth of lived detail. The future of “people’s history” may well depend on the union of both: a commitment to truth without romanticism, to justice without dogma, to narrative without myth.

In an age of resurgent nationalism, culture wars, and contested memory, the question “Who gets to tell history?” has never been more urgent. The people’s history project — flawed, unfinished, and vital — remains one of the most important intellectual tasks of our time. As Zinn once wrote: “To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, and kindness.”

The historian of the people must remember all of it.

Beyond Gandhi: Nirad C. Chaudhuri’s contrarian view of Indian nationalism

Is Nirad C. Chaudhuri's Autobiography of an Unknown Indian a paean to the West or a sharp critique of the East? The initial pages might lead one to the former conclusion, yet a deeper immersion exposes a far more enigmatic and compelling narrative. This is not simply the story of an individual, but a multifaceted exploration of an "unknown India"—a land struggling to articulate its identity within the complex and often corrosive embrace of colonialism.

The first impression one might glean from Chaudhuri's Autobiography of an Unknown Indian is of an Anglophile sensibility bordering on contempt for his native land. While this initial assessment is not entirely unfounded, it proves to be a superficial understanding upon more profound engagement. Chaudhuri's India, initially perceived as a stagnant morass of tradition and intellectual deficiency, emerges as the very subject of his intricate inquiry: an "unknown India" grappling to define itself in the crucible of colonial encounter.

This critique, though at times seemingly harsh, is not driven by mere negativity. Instead, it functions as a rigorous diagnostic tool, meticulously identifying the perceived ailments plaguing the Indian psyche and polity. Chaudhuri's purpose, it becomes evident, is to trace the arduous and often contradictory process through which Indians of his era wrestled with their "Indianness," a self-awareness born from the very recognition of these internal fractures. This perspective lends a compelling logic to his seemingly severe observations.

Chaudhuri's stance on India's future is neither overly optimistic nor despairingly pessimistic. He leaves the nation's destiny suspended, an "unknown" quantity whose trajectory remains uncertain. This ambiguity is not a failure of resolution but rather a logical consequence of his analysis. He posits that India's path forward is contingent on the agency of its people, unburdened by illusions of past glories or guarantees of future triumphs. His assertion that even national decline necessitates leadership is a particularly resonant and unsettling observation, highlighting his deep skepticism towards the prevailing political class, whom he perceives as mirroring the "petty mindedness" of the populace.

The structure of the autobiography, divided into four parts, builds Chaudhuri's argument. The initial exploration of his ancestral and maternal villages, culminating in the pivotal chapter "England," reveals the formative influence of a refracted, almost mythical understanding of the West. This "chiaroscuro of knowledge," with its intense highlights and profound shadows, created a lasting internal division, preventing a complete anchoring in the Indian soil. His poignant description of this bifurcated consciousness – the "plebeian world of his Indian life" versus "the world of his aristocratic English aspirations" – resonates with a profound sense of alienation.

His citation of Bankim Chandra Chatterji's satirical allegory, depicting Englishmen as tigers and Indians as discreetly hiding monkeys, and his observation of Gandhi's reliance on Western academic accolades when praising Nehru, serve as potent illustrations of the ingrained hierarchical perceptions of the time. These literary and anecdotal inclusions enrich the narrative, making his analysis more engaging and intellectually stimulating.

The second section delves into his formative years in the context of the Indian Renaissance, which Chaudhuri views as a promising but ultimately truncated movement. He lauds figures like Raja Rammohan Roy, Bankim Chandra Chatterji, and Swami Vivekananda, but crucially emphasizes their engagement with Western intellectualism as a catalyst for their effectiveness. His identification of the period between 1916 and 1918 as the onset of this cultural decay offers a specific, albeit debatable, point of historical analysis. His exploration of the complex and often contradictory Hindu attitudes towards Muslims during the rise of nationalism provides a sobering and historically significant insight, moving beyond simplistic narratives of unified resistance. The analogy of viewing Muslim peasants as akin to low-caste Hindu tenants or livestock is particularly stark and unsettling, revealing the deep-seated social hierarchies of the time.

The narrative shifts to Calcutta in the third part, offering a vivid and often visceral portrayal of the burgeoning metropolis. His description of the monsoon-ravaged city as "Venice with a vengeance" is a striking example of his literary flair, transforming a mundane observation into a memorable image. Even his account of the 1910 Hindu-Muslim riot, initially dismissed as "great fun" due to its relative lack of brutality compared to later events, subtly foreshadows the escalating communal tensions that would plague the nation. His recounting of his extensive reading, particularly in Western history (Stubbs, Green, Mommsen), underscores the intellectual framework that informs his observations. His candid admission of academic failure due to "diffuse and haphazard" reading and a lack of "will-power" adds a layer of personal vulnerability to his intellectual pursuits.

The final section reveals a man grappling with the harsh realities of life in Calcutta, a city he perceives as succumbing to "pathological megalopolitanism." His assertion that "Hindu society does not teach its youth to face life bravely" is a provocative and central tenet of his critique. While acknowledging his evident courage, it is tempting to attribute this resilience, in Chaudhuri's own estimation, to Western ideals rather than his native tradition, highlighting his enduring intellectual and emotional tether to England. His disdain for the "local English" juxtaposed with his yearning for "intimate personal contact with Englishmen" in England reveals a nuanced and somewhat paradoxical relationship with the colonizers. He critiques their mercantile spirit while simultaneously idealizing a more refined, intellectual English archetype.

Chaudhuri's perspective on the rise of Gandhian politics is particularly noteworthy for its deviation from conventional hagiography. His initial embrace of pre-Gandhi nationalism, driven by its potential to foster historical and political consciousness, gives way to disillusionment as Gandhi's influence grows. He argues that Gandhi "simplified Indian nationalism," stripping it of its intellectual and political depth and transforming it into a movement rooted in a "servus" morality – pure and lofty, yet ultimately born of subjugation and passivity. His description of the non-cooperation movement as a "monstrous abortion" is a powerful and controversial indictment of a pivotal moment in Indian history.

The concluding melancholic note, "My low spirts were apostle. There seemed to be no cure for them," underscores the profound sense of alienation that permeates the autobiography. By acknowledging in interviews that his work transcends mere personal narrative to encompass the history of a nation, Chaudhuri reaffirms the broader scope of his project, a point explicitly stated in his preface regarding the "struggle of a civilisation with hostile environment.”

Autobiography of an Unknown Indian is far more than a personal memoir. It is a rigorous, often contrarian, and deeply intellectual engagement with the complexities of pre-independence India, viewed through the intensely personal yet acutely analytical lens of Nirad C. Chaudhuri. His unflinching critique, while potentially unsettling, serves as a valuable, if contentious, contribution to the understanding of Indian identity, consciousness, and the enduring legacy of colonialism. The book remains a dynamic and thought-provoking work, demanding careful consideration of its multifaceted arguments and the enduring enigma of the "unknown India" it seeks to illuminate.

Communist heart of capitalism: How corporate power mirrors communist structures

Common discourse often presents capitalism and communism as fundamentally opposed ideologies. Capitalism is celebrated for its free markets, individual liberties, and democratic values, while communism is criticized for state control, repression, and inefficiency. However, a closer look at the workings of modern capitalism—specifically through the lens of multinational corporations—reveals striking similarities to the very communist systems it stands against.

At the core of today's capitalist economy are the multinational corporations, which wield economic clout rivaling that of many nations. These corporate giants operate under hierarchical structures that closely resemble the centralized control found in communist regimes. At the pinnacle of this hierarchy is the board of directors and top executives, a governing body that functions similarly to the politburo in a communist state.

In both systems, ultimate authority resides in an elite group. Just as the politburo maintains significant power with little accountability to the populace, corporate boards and executives exert near-absolute control over their organizations. Critical decisions regarding strategy, resource allocation, and corporate direction flow from this inner circle, leaving the majority of employees—much like average citizens in a communist society—without any meaningful input. 

Workers are primarily tasked with executing directives from above, underscoring a lack of agency that echoes the limited autonomy experienced in authoritarian regimes.

Moreover, the relentless pursuit of expansion, a hallmark of communist nations seeking global influence, is equally evident in the mission of multinational corporations. These entities strive tirelessly for growth, seeking new markets and resources across the globe, often bolstered by alliances with powerful states, particularly the United States. This urge for expansion reflects a deeper drive for control and influence, reminiscent of the ideological ambitions found in communist systems.

The notion that capitalism thrives on free markets and democratic principles is further complicated by the reality of corporate power. Instead of fostering genuine market competition, advanced stages of capitalism seem to prioritize corporate supremacy, often at the expense of local communities and environmental integrity. 

The geopolitical and military might of nations—such as the United States—frequently supports corporate interests by creating favorable conditions for expansion, ensuring that companies have access to vital resources and markets. This symbiotic relationship blurs the line between corporate capitalism and state power, suggesting that corporate interests may dominate the global landscape more than ever.

The consequences of this corporate-driven globalization are multifaceted and often contradict the ideal of shared capitalist prosperity. While corporations and their home governments may thrive, countless communities worldwide grapple with exploitation, environmental degradation, and a diminishing sense of autonomy. The freedom that corporations possess to operate globally does not necessarily equate to freedom or well-being for the local populations impacted by their actions. 

While traditional narratives frame capitalism and communism as diametrically opposed, the internal organization and global ambitions of large corporations reveal a distinct "communist" character. 

The centralized authority of corporate "politburos," the limited agency of the workforce, and the relentless drive for expansion all mirror the power structures and behaviors typically associated with communist regimes. This perspective challenges the conventional understanding of capitalism and raises critical questions about the true beneficiaries of a system increasingly dominated by powerful, internally authoritarian entities. It compels us to reevaluate the intersections of power, autonomy, and the ethical implications of corporate globalization.