How Shakespeare explains the Taliban

“Ban, ban, Ca-Caliban! / Has a new master. Get a new man.” Whenever I see the word “Taliban” I always think of The Tempest. Caliban sings those lines after Stephano gets him drunk and persuades him that exchanging Prospero for another master amounts to liberation. The rhyme may be accidental, but rhymes are rarely innocent once they lodge themselves in the mind. Cognitive psychologists Matthew McGlone and Jessica Tofighbakhsh have identified a “rhyme-as-reason” effect: formulations that rhyme are processed more fluently and can consequently acquire a spurious sense of truth or fitness. Sound, in other words, can tempt the mind into looking for a connection in meaning. The resemblance between the words “Caliban” and “Taliban” proves nothing logically. But it suggests a track where the echo