Op-eds
In my latest op-ed for The Wire, where I defended the criticisms of some people who called the EHT's black hole picture too blurry, there are two lines that aren't entirely true. This post attempts to clarify its underlying science as well as to defend it
Op-eds
<!-- wp:paragraph --> On April 1, a few days after India successfully completed its ‘Mission Shakti’ ASAT test, an editorial in the RSS mouthpiece Organiser read: In the initial days, scientists had to fight hard to prove their mettle and significance of the research they were undertaking.
Op-eds
For as long as there were two political groups at loggerheads with each other, there has been an aspiration to be – or remain – on friendly terms with someone on the other side. “Don’t let politics get in the way of a friendship,” they said, and it was useful advice.
Life notes
Deadly air exposes rich-poor divide, Channel News Asia, March 21, 2019: Delhi's affluent, who are often better informed about the dangers of pollution, increasingly expect the same safety measures they have in place at home, to be available when they are out. High-end eateries, bars and cinemas are
Op-eds
Ashok Khemka, the senior IAS officer famous for having exposed numerous instances of government corruption, perhaps most prominently the DLF land-grab scam, has been transferred again. This time, he had voiced concerns over the Haryana government’s plans to ‘develop’ the Aravalli hills through what it called ‘consolidation projects’. That
Op-eds
Arup Dasgupta's incisive article about ISRO's human spaceflight mission, published on The Wire Science yesterday, is drawing a lot of civil, critical engagement from our readers. While this is good news from the newsroom's perspective – civil engagement is always golden – I'd like
Life notes
There's a really yucky scene in the really yucky movie based on the half-yucky book Atlas Shrugged. A copper-mining tycoon who blew up his own mines says in a conversation with his railroad-tycoon friend, "They say money is the root of all evil. So I wanted to
Op-eds
The following notes are specifically about VijayRaghavan's post. My overall reaction to the stupidity on display at the ISC is recorded here. At a conference at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences in August 2018, K. VijayRaghavan said that the media pays disproportionate attention to the pseudoscience that goes
Op-eds
The Print should not have published its list of "intellectuals pick their successors" at all. Its editors knew that it had no women and were aware of how that was a problem. They also had to have known that the list was predominantly Hindu and upper-caste. But by
Op-eds
I can think of at least four different words newsrooms use to describe the bundles of content they work with: story, piece, article and copy (‘content’ itself isn’t one of them). With a few exceptions, all four labels are used interchangeably. ‘Copy’ is perhaps the most common, especially since
Op-eds
John Horgan asked 15 people – scientists, social psychologists, philosophers – one question, in a seemingly clever effort to mark the end of 2018: Unless you are too stoned or enlightened to care, you are probably dissatisfied with the world as it is. In that case, you should have a vision of
Op-eds
James English had a wonderful piece in Public Books recently, discussing how the Nobel Prize for literature: 1. Is a prize that has always struggled to be meaningful, given how its laureates are shortlisted, the capital that incentivises its exercise and the historical Eurocentric elitism of its adjudicators 2. Had