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A nasty review of P.V. Sindhu's performance at the World Badminton Championships by Sandip Sarkar for the Hindustan Times: Take Spain’s Carolina Marin for example. Just two years older than Sindhu, Marin comes from a country with no recognisable heritage in badminton. But she won gold
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The Baffler carried a fantastic critique of The New Yorker's use of commas by Kyle Paoletta on August 23. Excerpt: The magazine’s paper subscription slips have long carried a tagline: “The best writing, anywhere.” It follows that the source of the best writing, anywhere, must also be
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I was invited to speak to the students of the annual science writing workshop conducted at the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bangalore, for the second year (first year talk's notes here). Some interesting things we discussed: 1. Business of journalism: There were more questions from this year&
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Margaret Sullivan in the Washington Post on August 16: “The whole doctrine of objectivity in journalism has become part of the [media’s] problem,” Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University, said this week in a talk at the Chautauqua Institution in Western New York. He believes that
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There's a difference between a service coming with excellent support and a service with excellent support that you rarely have to access. The latter would be any service where issues can be resolved by the user's own agency when they do arise. The former would be
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Journalism as the fourth estate has been noticeably empowered in the Information Age, with technologies like the WWW, broadband connectivity and smartphones in (almost) everyone's pockets. However, the opportunities to responsibly exercise the resulting power have been coming at a disproportionately greater cost: to be constantly fast, constantly
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Over the last three days, I'd been having a strange issue with WordPress. If you read a post I published yesterday that briefly discussed WordPress's pros and cons, you might remember I mentioned that WordPress 4.x seems to be having an identity problem. WordPress'
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The public outreach arm of the Astronomical Society of India has written to the Financial Express expressing concern over their August 7 article, which advised people to fast during a lunar eclipse. The ASI called the article "anti-science", requested that FE print a clarification and finally give them
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Since June 2017, I've amassed 14 domains, accounts on four VPS providers, provisioned scores of servers, initiated a zillion sites and moved my own blog around from one domain and platform to the next at least half-dozen times. I rationalised each of these decisions in different ways: * "
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Two Indian scientists who passed away recently – Yash Pal and Pushpa Mittra Bhargava – spent a large part of their lives ensuring that lay people had access to bona fide scientific material and that our appreciation of science, and nature, stemmed from a realistic understanding of its inherent beauty. When they
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About a week ago, I figured out how to use Hugo, first with Caddy and then with Dropbox and Gitlab. Hugo + Gitlab in particular is an amazing combo because it's so easy to set up and run with: 1. Create an account on Gitlab 2. Fork this repo:
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I've just checked out the Ghost 1.0 CMS. The upgrade from v. 0.11.9 happened last evening and since then I've been crawling through the new UI on the front- and back-ends. The back-end has always looked quite polished on Ghost but now it&