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Analysis Op-eds Science

Pandemic: Science > politics?

set of medical syringes filled with medication on pink desk
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By Mukunth and Madhusudhan Raman

Former Union health secretary K. Sujatha Rao had a great piece in The Indian Express on January 14, whose takeaway she summarised in the following line:

Science, evidence and data analytics need to be the bedrock of the roll-out policy, not politics and scoring brownie points for electoral advantages.

However, we can’t help but be reminded of the difference between what should be and what will be. We all (at least those of us who have been on the same side since 2014) know what should be. But as we’ve seen with the National Registry of Citizens (NRC), the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) 2019 and most recently the farm laws, our present government doesn’t change its mind.

In the last example, the Supreme Court intervened to stay the laws’ implementation but the mediation committee it put together somehow wound up with most members being known to be sympathetic to the government’s position. So what will be, will be – and this is likely to be true vis-à-vis Covaxin as well.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has already guaranteed as much by determining to foot the cost of 5.5 million doses of Covaxin using the PM CARES fund, which lies beyond public oversight. The Central Drug Standards Control Organisation also played its part by pushing through Covaxin’s approval on terms no one has heard of – and which no one can therefore falsify.

However, this isn’t a pitch for a nihilist position. When Sujatha Rao writes that the government should prize science, evidence and data more than politics and elections, she is right – but we must also ask why. The government has clear incentives to prioritise politics. By thrusting Bharat Biotech – Covaxin’s maker – to the forefront, Modi can claim his ‘Atma Nirbhar’ and ‘Make in India’ schemes have been successful. Also, two important state elections are around the corner: West Bengal and Tamil Nadu.

These are issues that people, but especially ‘Middle Indians’, have an eye on and according to which they vote. The government has also said it is approving Covaxin because it is concerned with the ‘UK variant’. While no reason can be good enough to justify the use of a vaccine candidate in the population sans data from phase 3 clinical trials, the government has effectively set up Covaxin to be failure-proof: if it works, it works; if it doesn’t, it becomes the fault of the variant.

Taken together, Modi’s biggest mistake here is criminal negligence – for pushing Covaxin in the absence of efficacy data (which leads to a cascade of ethical dilemmas) – especially since there are fewer questions over Covaxin’s safety. And negligence is a difficult case to stick to this party or in fact to many people.

Granted, public-spirited science teachers, communicators and journalists can take it upon themselves (ourselves) to persuade readers as to why Covaxin’s approval is really bad – that though everything may turn out okay, it sets a terrible precedent for what this government is allowed to do, how such unchecked power may wreak deadly havoc in future crises, and ultimately that we become a people okay with settling for less, increasingly blind to the banal incrementalism of evil.

In fact, if the mainstream press manages to forget concerns about vaccine apartheid within the country, the dominant narrative as the vaccine roll-out is a few months in is going to be: “India is doing just fine, thank you very much.”

But while the Modi government’s actions may only be negligent – albeit criminally so – in the domains of public healthcare and ‘scientific temper’, they amount to something more egregious if we include the political dimensions of our present moment as well.

None of this means words like those of Sujatha Rao are unnecessary. We need to never forget what should be, and we need to keep protesting for our own sakes. (“Protests sometimes look like failures in the short term, but much of the power of protests is in their long-term effects, on both the protesters themselves and the rest of society.” – Zeynep Tufekci) If we don’t, this government might pretend even less than it currently does that it is following some rules or guidelines from time to time.

However, limiting our exhortations to insist at every turn that “science is more important than politics during a pandemic” risks playing down the importance and influence of political motivations altogether – as well as assuming that the state machinery will automatically give way to scientific ones when lives are at stake.

A politician’s principal responsibility is not to govern but to win elections; good governance is a means to this electoral end. And the way people have voted for many decades attests to the reality of this incentive. While this claim may not be palatable from a theoretical point of view, consider it empirically: the Indian government has seldom responded to national crises to the detriment of potential electoral gains. Examples of such crises include the 1962, 1971 and 1999 conflicts, the nuclear tests and economic liberalisation. During the Emergency, the government itself embodied this crisis.

More recently, numerous ministers and diplomats urged the India and Pakistan governments to find diplomatic solutions after the Pulwama attack and also after the questionable Balakot airstrike, in early 2019. In previous years, they had been preceded by the disagreeable events of Aadhaar implementation, demonetisation and the Goods and Services Tax. But Modi and his fellows won by a bigger margin in 2019 than they had five years earlier.

This happened partly because his success in elections rests on his impression as the Strongman of India, so his resolutions of choice involve flashy displays of strength and machismo.

Against this background: we need to admit political factors into the conversations we – rather, experts like health policymakers, heads of institutions, epidemiologists, healthcare workers, etc. – have from the beginning, instead of ruing the inevitable influence of politics later, so that we may anticipate it and take advantage of it.

For example, consider the conversation surrounding academic publishing. Academics perform most of the work that goes into publishing an academic paper (research, writing and reviewing). Publishing houses add only marginal value to journals – yet publishers charge exorbitant fees to access the results of publicly funded research once it is published. This is unfair, and many academics have said so.

However, the fact that publishing conglomerates are publicly traded companies whose primary responsibility is to generate profits for their shareholders finds little mention in conversations. In this case, the publishers’ profit-seeking motives are fundamental to the problem at hand – but are often disregarded in the first analysis (what should be) and subsequently bemoaned (what will be). For this to happen once is tragic; for it to repeat itself every few months is wasteful.

Similarly, the nationwide lockdown from March to July 2020 served a political purpose: it was a grand gesture, decisive, appealing to ‘Middle Indians’, in addition to supplying the government a pretext to disband protests against the CAA and the NRC. Just before the lockdown, the public conversation had been centred on what the government should be doing. However, most scientists and economists didn’t engage with the political dimension of this decision.

If we had, we may not have been side-tracked into conversations about weekend curfew versus night curfew, or cash transfers versus vouchers, etc. We would perhaps have recognised that our responsibility is not to operate within the parameters set by the government (“How effective was the lockdown?”) but instead recognise that the government’s decisions are politically motivated – so we can ask “Why lock down in the first place?”

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Analysis Science

Poverty, psychology and pseudoscience

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From the abstract of ‘Why Do People Stay Poor? Evidence on Poverty Traps from Rural Bangladesh’, November 24, 2020:

There are two broad views as to why people stay poor. One emphasizes differences in fundamentals, such as ability, talent or motivation. The other, poverty traps view, differences in opportunities stemming from differences in wealth. We exploit a large-scale, randomized asset transfer and panel data on 6000 households over an 11 year period to test between these two views. The data supports the poverty traps view — we identify a threshold level of initial assets above which households accumulate assets, take on better occupations and grow out of poverty. The reverse happens for those below the threshold.

In the resulting worldview this ‘condition’ imposes on people, it’s tempting to see justification for the existence of pseudoscientific enterprises like astrology. Actually, a faith-based binary like ‘requiring faith’ v. ‘not requiring faith’ may be more appropriate here than a science-based binary (‘scientific’ v. ‘unscientific’), if only to emphasise the presence of faith here over the absence of scientific reasoning. So that is, while I can’t ascertain a causal relationship between conditions like the poverty trap and opaque practices like astrology, there’s enough of a correlation here to understand astrology et al as the means by which people rationalise their shared predicament – a predicament that refuses to be allayed by their own efforts.

For example, astrology could provide social, mental and moral incentives for individuals to believe – without having to know – that they were denied any opportunities because ‘their time isn’t right’ and/or that they will continue to luck out, while social realities instead of the alignment of their stars will ensure this is true in some measure. Such faith could also subdue or redirect individuals’ anger or sense of wrongdoing at forces beyond their control, creating ground for social conditions that tolerate oppression more than it ought to be.

Another observation this paper brings to mind is from the work of Sendhil Mullainathan, among others. Researchers from various fields have reported differences in the way poor people make decisions, compared to those who aren’t poor – as if they were less intelligent. However, this perception arises from a sort of cognitive John-Henryism: that is, just as disadvantaged members of society – like Black people in the US – can incur a physical toll imposed by the need to fight for their rights, poor people incur a cognitive toll brought on by the limited availability of resources and the short-lived nature of good fortune.

This doesn’t mean poor people become or are less intelligent, or anything nonsensical like that. Instead, it means poor people’s priorities are different – for example the need for discounts on products, and to maximise absolute savings over percentage savings – in a way that those who aren’t poor may not find optimal for their needs, and that more tasks compete for their attention when they are short on the resources required to execute all of them. As Alice Walton wrote for the Chicago Booth Review in 2018,

In the Wheel of Fortune–style game, the researchers [including Mullainathan] measured how cognitively fatigued the players became. Logic would predict that rich players would be more fatigued, since they were allowed more turns to make more guesses. Instead, the researchers observed that poor players, having received fewer tries to guess at the answers, were more fatigued, having put more effort into each guess.

In an Angry Birds–style game in which people tried to shoot targets, rich players were given more chances to train a virtual slingshot on a target. Poor players, given fewer attempts, spent longer lining up their shots, and many scored more points per shot than rich players. For all the extra shots rich players had, they didn’t do as well, proportionally. “It seems that to understand the psychology of scarcity, we must also appreciate the psychology of abundance. If scarcity can engage us too much, abundance might engage us too little,” the researchers write.

This toll subsequently compromises future choices, and effectively installs another barrier, or trap, in front of people trying to go from being poor in one resource – money, in poverty’s case – to being rich. Walton offers a few examples of policymakers building on these findings to devise better schemes and improve uptake.

In India, where sugarcane farmers are paid annually after the harvest, farmers’ attention scores were the equivalent of 10 IQ points higher than just before the harvest, when farmers were relatively poor, according to data from the 2013 Science study…

Offering subsidies or other incentives when people are more receptive to and have the spare capacity to consider them, such as after a harvest or a payday, may make a difference over the long run. One effort, in Tanzania, asked people to sign up for health insurance at cashpoint locations right after payday, and the timing led to a 20 percentage point increase in health-insurance use.

Introducing cognitive aids can help address the limited capacity for attention that may constrain people in poverty. In one study, it helped to show farmers research regarding the most productive ways to plant their crops. When poor, stressed, and in a scarcity mind-set, farmers had a harder time taking in the information. “This result has nothing to do with the intelligence of the farmers,” writes Bryan’s team. “A fact is only obvious if the observer has the spare attentional capacity to notice it.”

I wonder if the converse could also be true: that when homeopaths, phytotherapists, many Ayurveda practitioners and other quack healers offer dubious ways out of difficult healthcare situations, people who are short on attentional space could be likelier to buy into them in order to free up space for other tasks. If so, governments and activists may also need to consider fighting superstition and pseudoscience in healthcare by ensuring more legitimate outcomes – like visiting the local clinic or being able to procure a given drug – require as little cognitive bandwidth as possible.

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Life notes

Good luck with your Maggi

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You know when you’re cooking a packet of Maggi noodles in a saucepan, and you haven’t used enough water or don’t move the stuff soon enough from the pan to a plate once it’s done cooking, and you’re basically left with a hot lump of maida stuck to the bottom? That’s 2020. When you cook Maggi right, right up to mixing in a stick of butter at the end, you get a flavourful, well-lubricated, springy mass of strings that’s a pleasure to eat at the end of a long day. Once in a while you stick a fork into the plate and pull up a particularly long noodle, and you relish sucking it into your mouth from start to finish, with the masala dripping off at the end. That was probably many other years – when you had a strong sense of time moving from one event to the next, a sense of progression that helps you recall chronologies even long after you’ve forgotten what happened in March and what in September. For example, 2015 in my mind is cleanly divided into two parts – before May 11 and after May 11 – and memories of little personal accomplishments from that time are backgrounded by whether The Wire existed at the time. If it did, then I know the accomplishment happened after May 11. The Wire‘s birth effectively became an inflection in time that cut a little notch in the great noodle of 2015, a reference mark that created a before and an after. 2020 had none of this. It forsook all arrows of time; it wasn’t linear in any sense, not even non-linear in the sense of being exponential or logarithmic. It was practically anti-linear. Causality became a joke as the pandemic and its attendant restrictions on society fucked with the mind’s ability to tell one day apart from the next. So many of us beheld the world from our windows or balconies, although it wasn’t as if the world itself moved on without us. We weren’t there to world the world. Or maybe we were, but our collective grief at being imprisoned, literally and otherwise, seemed to be able to reshape our neighbourhoods, our surroundings, our shared cosmologies even and infused the fabrics of our every day with a cynical dye that we know won’t come off easily. Many of our lived experiences carried an awful symmetry like the circular one of a bangle, or a CD. How do you orient it? How do you say which way is up, or left, just by looking at it? You can’t. In the parlance of Euclidean geometry, 2020 was just as non-orientable. There was no before and after. Even our universe isn’t as bad: despite the maddening nature of the flatness problem, and the even more maddening fact of Earth’s asymptotically infinite loneliness, the universe is nearly flat. You’d have to travel trillions upon trillions of light-years in any direction before you have any chance of venturing into your past, and even then only because our instruments and our sciences aren’t accurate enough to assert, with complete certainty, that the universe is entirely flat and that your past will always lie in the causal history of your future. 2020 was, however, a singularity – an entrapment of reality within a glass bubble in which time flowed in an orbit around the centre, in perpetual free-fall and at the same time managing to get nowhere really. You can forget teasing out individual noodles from the hot lump on your plate because it’s really a black hole, probably something worse for shunning any of the mysteries that surround the microscopic structure of black holes in favour of maida, that great agent of constipation. As you stare at it, you could wait for its effects to evaporate; you could throw more crap into it in the hopes of destabilising it, like pushing yourself to the brink of nihilism that Thucydides noticed among the epidemic-stricken people of Athens more than two millennia ago; or you could figure out ingenious ways à la Penrose to get something good out of it. If you figure this out, please let the rest of us know. And until then, good luck with your Maggi.

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Life notes

Ending 2020

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My blogging took a hit this year – as did everything for everyone. I couldn’t publish nearly as much as I’d have liked. While the average post length was the highest it’s ever been – 989 words – and audience engagement was through the roof, I had to just forget many ideas for posts I’d had because I lacked the time and more importantly any creative energy to produce them. Since around May, I felt like writing only on the weekends, and only if an idea or an insight crossed a threshold of interestingness that for some reason kept climbing higher.

YearPostsWords
201211981,710
20139671,096
2014163117,302
2015209181,233
20166455,206
2017135114,737
2018184145,530
2019169136,241
2020113111,752

That said, I have two takeaways from blogging this year. The first is a minor one – that I’ve published 1,200 posts in all now. I don’t think of this number except at the end of every year; its bigness feels reassuring, and reminds me when I’m down that I haven’t entirely wasted my time.

The other takeaway is that it’s certainly becoming harder to get through to The Other Side, as their louder commentators clamber further down their rabbit hole, and further persist with argumentative tactics guided not by reason or even the pursuit of common ground but by the need to uphold Hindutva at all times. And as they’ve dug their heels in, I’ve found I’ve been doing the same thing, although not deliberately. I’ve used the first person to refer to positions and the provenance of argumentative tacks more in 2020 than in any other year, and I’ve also been less and less inclined to spell my position – as if I’ve become sub-consciously aware that I’m no longer speaking out to change minds as much as to harden the stances of those who have already expressed solidarity.

I’m not entirely happy with this shift, this closing of the gates – even if it sounds more productive, as the engagement data also attests – because I don’t know whether when all this tides over, and it will tide over, I will be capable of reopening the gates as swiftly as I might need to. Granted, keeping the gates open even a little bit now – i.e. attempting to reason every now and then with those who aren’t amenable to reason – could prove injurious, but I remain convinced for now that it’s the smaller price to pay. And this is why I think the continuously rising threshold of interestingness is a coping mechanism of sorts, an internally supplied resistance to the hardening of the exterior.

I’m excited to find out where blogging, writing, reporting, editing, publishing in 2021 will take me – will take us all, in fact.

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Science

“Enough science.”

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Edit, 6.04 pm, December 15, 2020: A reader pointed out to me that The Guardian may in fact have been joking, and it has been known to be flippant on occasion. If this is really the case, I pronounce myself half-embarrassed for having been unable to spot a joke. But only half because it seems like a terrible joke, considering how proximate the real and the surreal having increasingly been, and because I still suspect it isn’t a joke. The astrologer in question is real, so to speak, and I doubt The Guardian wishes to ridicule her so.

From ‘How to watch the Jupiter and Saturn ‘great conjunction’ of 2020′, The Guardian, December 15, 2020:

I don’t know why The Guardian would print something like this. Beyond the shock of finding astrology – especially non-self-deprecating astrology – in the science section, it is outright bizarre for a question in an FAQ in this section to begin with the words ‘Enough science’.

To my mind The Guardian seems guilty of indulging the false balance that science and astrology are equally relevant and useful the same way the New York Times deemed that Democrats and Republicans in the US made equal amounts of sense in 2020 – by failing to find the courage to recognise that one side just wants to be stupid and/or reckless.

But while the New York Times did it for some principle it later discovered might have been wrong, what might The Guardian‘s excuse be? Revenue? I mean, not only has the astrologer taken the great opportunity she has to claim that there are bound to be astrological implications for everything, the astrology being quoted has also been accommodated under a question that suggests science and astrology are on equally legitimate footing.

This view harms science in the well-known way by empowering astrologists and in turn disempowering the tenets of reason and falsifiability – and in a less-known way by casting science in opposition to astrology instead of broaching the idea that science in fact complements the arts and the humanities. Put differently, the question also consigns science to being an oppositional, confrontational, negatory entity instead of allowing it a more amicable identity, as a human enterprise capable of coexisting with many other human enterprises.

For example, why couldn’t the question have been: “With the science, what opportunities might I have as a photographer?”, “With the science, what opportunities might I have as a poet seeking inspiration?” or even “Enough science. Break out the history.” In fact, if with its dogmatism astrology discourages deliberative decision-making and with its determinism suppresses any motivation one might have to remake one’s fate, it stands truly apart from the other things humans do that might serve to uplift them, and make them a better people. It is hard to imagine there is a reason here to celebrate astrology – except capital.

If revenue was really the reason The Guardian printed the astrology question, I admit none of these alternatives would make sense because there is no money in the arts and the humanities. I hope the newspaper will explain as to why this happened, and in the meantime, I think we could consider this a teaching moment on the fleeting yet consequential ways in which capital can shape the public understanding of science.

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Analysis Tech

The overlay bias

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I’m not very fond of some highly popular pieces of writing (I won’t name them because I’m nervous about backlash from authors and/or their supporters) because a part of their popularity is undeniably rooted in technological ‘solutions’ that asymmetrically promote work published in the solution’s country of origin.

My favourite example is Pocket, the app that allows users to save copies of articles to read later, offline if required. Not long ago, Pocket introduced an extension for the Google Chrome browser (which counts hundreds of millions of users) such that every time you opened a new tab, it would show you three articles lots of other Pocket users have read and liked. It’s fairly brainless, ergo presumably non-malicious, and you’d expect the results to be distributed equally from among magazines, journals, etc. published around the world.

However, nine times out of ten – but often more – I’d find articles by NYT, The Atlantic, The Baffler, etc. there. I was reluctant to blame Pocket at first, considering their algorithm seemed too simple, but then I realised Pocket was just the last in a long line of other apps and algorithms that simply amplified existing biases.

Before Pocket, for example, there might have been Twitter, Facebook or some other platform that allowed stories from some domains (nytimes.com, thebaffler.com, etc.) to persist for longer on users’ feeds because they were more easily perceived to be legitimate than articles from other sources, say, a Venezuelan newspaper, a Kenyan blog, a Pakistani magazine or a Vietnamese journal. Or there might have been Nuzzle, which auto-compiles a digest of articles that others your friends on the social media have shared most – likely unmindful of the fact that people quite often share headlines, or domains they’d like to be known to be reading, instead of the articles themselves.

This is a social magnification like the biological magnification in nature, whereby toxic substances pile up in greater quantities in the gizzards of animals higher up in the food chain. Here, perceptions of legitimacy and quality accumulate in greater quantities in the feeds and timelines of people who consume, or even glance through, the most information. And this way, a general consciousness of what’s considered desirable erects itself without anything drastic, with just the more fleeting and mindless actions of millions of people, into a giant wheel of information distribution that constantly feeds itself its own momentum.

As the wheel turns, and The Atlantic publishes an article, it doesn’t just publish a good article that draws hundreds of thousands of readers. It also rides a wheel set in motion by American readers, American companies, American developers, American interests and American dollars, with a dollop of historical imperialism, that quietly but surely brings the world a good article plus a good-natured reminder that The Atlantic is good and that readers needn’t go looking for anything else because The Atlantic has them covered.

As I wondered in 2017, and still do: “Will my peers in India have been farther along in their careers had there been an equally influential Indian for-publishers tech stack?” Then again, how much is one more amplifier, Pocket or anything else, going to change?

I went into this tirade because of this Twitter thread, which describes a similar issue with arXiv – the popular preprint repo for physical sciences, computer science and applied mathematics papers (don’t @ me to quibble over arXiv’s actual remit). As the tweeter Jia-Bin Huang writes, the manuscripts that were uploaded last – i.e. most recently – to arXiv are displayed on top of the output stack, and what’s displayed on top of the stack gets more citations and readership.

This is a very simple algorithm, quite like Pocket’s algorithm, but in both cases they’re algorithms overlaid on existing bias-amplifying architectures. In a sense, they’re akin to the people who might stand by and watch a lynching, neither egging the perpetrators on nor stopping them. If the metaphor is brutal, remember that the effects on any publication or scientist that can’t infiltrate or ‘hack’ social biases are brutal as well. While their contents and their ideas might deserve international readership, these publications and scientists will need to spend more – energy, resources, effort – to grab international attention again and again.

The example Jia-Bin Huang cites is of scientists in Asia, who – unlike their American counterparts – can’t upload a paper on arXiv just before the deadline so that their papers sit on top of the stack because 2 pm in New York is 3 am in Taipei.

As some replies to the thread indicated, the people maintaining arXiv can easily solve the problem by waiting for the deadline to pass, then randomising the order of papers displayed in its email blast – but as Jia-Bin Huang notes, doing that would mean negating the just-in-time advantage that arXiv’s American users enjoy. So here we are.

It isn’t hard to see how we can extend the same suggestion to the world’s Pockets and Nuzzles. Pick your millions of users’ thousand most-read articles, mix up their order – even weigh down popular American publishers if necessary – and finally advertise the first ten items from this list. But ultimately, until technological solutions actively negate the biases they overlie, Pocket will lie on the same spectrum as the tools that produce the biases. I admit fact-checking in this paradigm could be labour-intensive, as could relevance-checking vis-à-vis arXiv, but I also think the latter would be better problems to solve.

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Analysis Op-eds Science

Science prizes, wealth location and social signals

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One count on which I almost always find myself to be an outlier in India is my opinion that the Nobel Prizes and their derivatives belong in the gutter. But while many people in other countries share this opinion of the Nobel Prizes, and often put their weight behind advancing this view, there are very few people who focus on similar issues with Indian prizes.

For example, I just sent my colleagues at The Wire a note suggesting that we desist where and when possible to play up notions like eminence, vis-à-vis scientists, and not associate anything but the quality of one’s work with their success. My concern had been prompted by a PTI copy advertising the fact that scientists, “including from MIT, Stanford University and Harvard University in the US”, had been awarded the 2020 Infosys Prizes.

My congratulations to the laureates for doing good work, irrespective of what they’ve won for it – but let’s consider what we’re celebrating here, really. We’re talking about a jury of well-known scholars coming together to consider a list of 200+ nominations and somehow picking only a half-dozen ‘winners’, and to those winners awarding a pure gold medal, a certificate and $100,000, or around Rs 74 lakh.

Most mediapersons pay attention to the Infosys Prizes because of the substantial purse, and when we do pay attention, what are we looking at? We’re looking at a lot of money going to a group of people who already have a good job and access to funds, especially in the name of a job well done that quite likely happened in the first place by virtue of having a good job and access to funds. The Infosys Prizes are in effect heaping more privilege on already privileged scientists.

Consider this year’s laureates, for example. Three of them – Hari Balakrishnan, Sourav Chatterjee and Raj Chetty – have full-time jobs at three of the world’s most well-endowed universities. Rajan Sankaranarayanan is a chief scientist at CCMB Hyderabad and runs his own lab. The sole female laureate this year, historian Prachi Deshpande, is at CSSS Kolkata and used to teach at the University of California, Berkeley. Arindam Ghosh is an associate professor at IISc Bangalore, again with his own lab. I can’t comment on the relative fortunes of Sankaranarayanan, Deshpande and Ghosh (although at least one other person from CCMB and six others from IISc have won Infosys Prizes, speaking to the localisation of resources and opportunities). But these are all scholars who have, as some might say, settled – scholars who have been able to sidestep or surmount, as the case may be, the numerous barriers to finding success and renown as an Indian scientist.

The case of Balakrishnan seems particularly curious (vis-à-vis the prize-giving entity, not Balakrishnan or any of the other laureates): he is a chair professor at MIT and the CTO at a six-person startup with $500 million in funding.

As an offshoot of what I said earlier, it is not unjust to reward people who have done good work – but too often we do so to the exclusion of those who lack the opportunities to begin doing good work in the first place. For example, instead of Balakrishnan, Chatterjee and Chetty, the prizes could have been awarded to three accomplished scientists working in India. And I argue that we need to reapply this criterion and select even other laureates who are yet to settle, so that we may ultimately expand the possibility of there being more successful scientists in future. Ultimately, we do need more successful scientists, not more laureates.

Of course, it isn’t implicitly wrong for any individual or entity to gift a large sum of money to anyone or any other entity (but perhaps it is bad in some cases). The wrongness arises when the money becomes part of a deleterious idea – such as that excellent scientists are men and/or that they succeeded by working alone. Thanks to their reputation, the Nobel Prizes are the foremost examples of this problem. As I wrote in The Wire recently:

That the prizes’ prestige is a construct, and not an innate attribute, matters because constructs represent intent. The construct of prestige or reputation surrounding the Nobel Prizes exists by reinforcing the beliefs and myths that some experts (in the relevant topics) held in order to maintain their privileges, to secrete away their power and perpetuate the status quo. That is, their intention here was to preserve the idea, and even glamourise it by attaching a purse of SEK 10 million (Rs 8.24 crore) with each Nobel Prize (no strings attached), that individuals make inventions and discoveries, and that men were always better at science than women, and more so than people of other genders.

The Infosys Prizes, as also the S.S. Bhatnagar Prize and the Swarnajayanti Fellowships in India, are different only in scale, not in spirit. They seem disinterested in addressing any of the issues, and seem keener on getting media attention. (By making this point, I hope I’m being clear that the media’s attitude towards the constitution of ‘news’ is also part of the problem.)

This year’s Infosys Prize laureates include only one woman; in all, 22% of laureates are women, fewer still if the social sciences are left out. And the prizes have only ever been awarded to individuals. This is disappointing because the prizes can do so much more by virtue, again, of the amount of money in play.

For example, the prize-giving foundation could give ‘senior’ laureates a citation, a certificate, etc., and split the purse into smaller chunks and award each one to promising young scientists, or those who are likely to have a hard time breaching science’s ‘in’ groups without good fortune. This could help separate the prizes’ extant wealth- and virtue-signalling from the distinction-signalling – as well as greatly expand some of the foundation’s other initiatives that directly help students.

I recently wrote with regard to the announcement of this year’s Swarnajayanti Fellowships, in mid-November, that resource constraints encourage us to think that only a few people can be selected for an award every time that award is given out. This in turn leads to the question about which candidates should be left out from the final pool of winners. And this question is to begin with singly misguided, becoming doubly misguided when it is used as a defence against questions about why so few women are awarded important recognitions, and triply misguided when the resource constraints are made-up, a fiction of funders and administrators to retain power.

Instead, we must demand more material wealth and supply it at the springboards of where young and/or struggling scientists take off. These scientists plus some other groups (incl. those from marginalised sections of society, those who need to learn the English language, even those who promise to stay in India for a decade, etc.) are in my view the only ‘segments’ that have justifiable need for not-insubstantial sums of money. Beyond this point, we can be generous with immaterial rewards for those who do good work and may no longer need the money.

Categories
Science

The thing about π

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Consider the following setup, from the game ‘Factorio’, the game about factory management and automation:

There are two factories visible in this image – the two rectangular, green-walled buildings. Take the one on the left: it’s manufacturing electric furnaces, with steel plates, stone bricks and advanced circuits as ingredients. These three resources are visible on conveyor belts leading up to the factory (top, left, bottom resp.), terminated by blue and green inserters that move the objects from the belts to the factory floor.

In order to maintain a steady supply of electric furnaces, I need to keep the ‘resource pressure’ up. Think of it like a strong wind blowing against your window: even if you opened the window just a little, there’s enough air pressing on that side of the wall for a lot of it to flow into your room. Similarly, I need to make sure sufficient quantities of steel, stone bricks and advanced circuits are available whenever the factory needs it. And within Factorio, as in the real world I imagine, maintaining this resource pressure isn’t easy.

Even if we assume that all the raw materials for these ingredients are available in infinite quantities, the time taken to transport each resource, manufacture the required parts and then move them to the factory takes a different amount of time. And in the factory itself, each electric furnace consumes different quantities of each ingredient: 10 steel plates, 10 stone bricks and five advanced circuits). As a result, for example, if I maintain all three resources with equal pressure on the factory, I will still run out of steel plates and stone bricks faster than I will run out of advanced circuits.

In fact, I will run out of steel plates first because its crafting time is 32 seconds, versus 3.2 seconds for one stone brick. So the proper pressure to maintain here is P for advanced circuits, 2P for stone bricks and 20P for steel plates. (I’m ignoring the crafting time for advanced circuits to keep the example simple.) If I don’t keep up these proportions, I won’t have a steady supply of electric furnaces. Instead, I’ll run out of steel plates first, and by the time more plates are available, stone bricks will have run out, and by the time stone bricks are available, advanced circuits will have run out. And so on and on in a continuous cycle.

The concept of orbital resonance is somewhat similar. Did you know that for everyone two orbits Pluto completes around the Sun, Neptune completes three? This is the 2:3 resonance. And it’s comparable to the Factorio example in that the ratio between the two periodic activities – Neptune’s and Pluto’s revolution and the rate of repetitive consumption of stone bricks and advanced circuits – is a rational number. ‘Rational’ here means the number can be expressed as the ratio of two integers.

Animation of planets in a 2:1 resonance. Credit: Amitchell125/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
Animation of planets in a 2:1 resonance. Credit: Amitchell125/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

With Pluto and Neptune, it’s 2/3 of course, but in a more intuitive sense, the implication is that if you wait for long enough, you will be able to count off the number of times the orbital resonance plays out – i.e. the number of times both planets are back to their starting positions at the same time, which would be once every two Plutonian revolutions or once every three Neptunian revolutions.

Similarly, the resource-pressure resonance plays out once every 10 stone bricks or once every five advanced circuits are consumed.

This meta-periodicity, a term I’m using here to refer to the combined periodicity of two separately periodic motions, allows us a unique opportunity to understand how bizarre the number known as π (pi) is. π is an irrational number: there’s no way to express it as the ratio of two integers. (The following portion also applies to e and other irrational numbers.)

In ‘Factorio’, all resources are integral, which means there can only be 1, 2, 3, … stone bricks, and never 1.5, 2.25, 3.75, etc.; the same constraint applies to advanced circuits as well. So there is no way for me – no matter how I align my resource extraction and processing chains – to ensure that for every advanced circuit, an integer-times-π number of stone bricks are consumed as well. I can alter the length of the supply lines, increase or decrease the ‘normal’ processing time, even use faster/slower conveyor belts and inserters for different ingredients, but I will never succeed. So long as the quantities in play remain integers, there’s no way for me to achieve a resonance such that the ratio of its terms is π.

This is what makes π so beautiful and maddening at once. It exists on terms that no two integers can recreate by themselves.

There’s another way to look at it. Say two planets begin orbiting their common host star from the 12 o’clock position in their respective orbits. If they are in a π:1 resonance, they will never be exactly at the 12 o’clock at the same time ever again. It doesn’t matter if you wait a century, an epoch or forever.

This example offers to my mind an uncommon opportunity to understand the difference between attributes of π and ∞. There’s the oft-quoted and frankly too prosaic statement that π’s decimal places extend infinitely. I prefer the more poetic: that efforts using simple mathematical combinations of integers will never create π. Even if a combination operates recursively, and each cycle produces a closer approximation of π, it can run for ∞ time and still not get here.

Like there’s an immutable barrier between two forms of unattainability.

Categories
Scicomm

A Q&A about my job and science journalism

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A couple weeks ago, some students from a university in South India got in touch to ask a few questions about my job and about science communication. The correspondence was entirely over email, and I’m pasting it in full below (with permission). I’ve edited a few parts in one of two ways – to make myself clearer or to hide sensitive information – and removed one question because its purpose was clarificatory.

1) What does your role as a science editor look like day to day?

My day as science editor begins at around 7 am. I start off by catching up on the day’s headlines and other news, especially all the major newspapers and social media channels. I also handle a part of The Wire Science‘s social media presence, so I schedule some posts in the first hour.

Then, from 8 am onwards, I begin going through the publishing schedule – which is a document I prepare on the previous evening, listing all the articles that writers are expected to file on that day, as well as what I need to edit/publish and in which position on the homepage. At 9.30 am, my colleagues and I get on a conference call to discuss the day’s top stories and to hear from our reporters on which stories they will be pursuing that day (and any stories we might be chasing ourselves). The call lasts for about an hour.

From 10.30-11 am onwards, I edit articles, reply to emails, commission new articles, discuss potential story ideas with some reporters, scientists and my colleagues, check on the news cycle every now and then, make sure the site is running smoothly, discuss changes or tweaks to be made to the front-end with our tech team, and keep an eye on my finances (how much I’ve commissioned for, who I need to pay, payment deadlines, pending allocations, etc.).

All of this ends at about 4.30 pm. I close my laptop at that point but I continue to have work until 6 pm or so, mostly in the form of emails and maybe some calls. The last thing I do is prepare the publishing schedule for the next day. Then I shut shop.

2) With leading global newspapers restructuring the copy desk, what are the changes the Indian newspapers have made in the copy desk after the internet boom?

I’m not entirely familiar with the most recent changes because I stopped working with a print establishment six years ago. When I was part of the editorial team at The Hindu, the most significant change related to the advent of the internet had less to do with the copy desk per se and more to do with the business model. At least the latter seemed more pressing to me.

But this said, in my view there is a noticeable difference between how one might write for a newspaper and for the web. So a more efficient copy-editing team has to be able to handle both styles, as well as be able to edit copy to optimise for audience engagement and readability both online and offline.

3) Indian publications are infamous for mistakes in the copy. Is this a result of competition for breaking news or a lack of knack for editing?

This is a question I have been asking myself since I started working. I think a part of the answer you’re looking for lies in the first statement of your question. Indian copy-editors are “infamous for mistakes” – but mistakes according to whom?

The English language came to India in different ways, it is not homegrown. British colonists brought English to India, so English took root in India as the language of administration. English is the de facto language worldwide for the conduct of science, so scientists have to learn it. Similarly, there are other ways in which the use of English has been rendered useful and important and necessary. English wasn’t all these things in and of itself, not without its colonial underpinnings.

So today, in India, English is – among other things – the language you learn to be employable, especially with MNCs or such. And because of its historical relationships, English is taught only in certain schools, schools that typically have mostly students from upper-caste/upper-class families. English is also spoken only by certain groups of people who may wish to secret it as a class symbol, etc. I’m speaking very broadly here. My point is that English is reserved typically for people who can afford it, both financially and socio-culturally. Not everyone speaks ‘good’ English (as defined by one particular lexicon or whatever) nor can they be expected to.

So what you may see as mistakes in the copy may just be a product of people not being fluent in English, and composing sentences in ways other than you might as a result. India has a contested relationship with English and that should only be expected at the level of newsrooms as well.

However, if your question had to do with carelessness among copy-editors – I don’t know if that is a very general problem (nor do I know what the issues might be in a newsroom publishing in an Indian language). Yes, in many establishments, the management doesn’t pay as much attention to the quality of writing as it should, perhaps in an effort to cut costs. And in such cases, there is a significant quality cost.

But again, we should ask ourselves as to whom that affects. If a poorly edited article is impossible to read or uses words and ideas carelessly, or twists facts, that is just bad. But if a poorly composed article is able to get its points across without misrepresenting anyone, whom does that affect? No one, in my opinion, so that is okay. (It could also be the case that the person whose work you’re editing sees the way they write as a political act of sorts, and if you think such an issue might be in play, it becomes important to discuss it with them.)

Of course, the matter of getting one’s point across is very subjective, and as a news organisation we must ensure the article is edited to the extent that there can be no confusion whatsoever – and edited that much more carefully if it’s about sensitive issues, like the results of a scientific study. And at the same time we must also stick to a word limit and think about audience engagement.

My job as the editor is to ensure that people are understood, but in order to help them be understood better and better, I must be aware of my own privileges and keep subtracting them from the editorial equation (in my personal case: my proficiency with the English language, which includes many Americanisms and Britishisms). I can’t impose my voice on my writers in the name of helping them. So there is a fine line here that editors need to tread carefully.

4) What are the key points that a science editor should keep in mind while dealing with copy?

Aside from the points I raised in my previous answer, there are some issues that are specific to being a good science editor. I don’t claim to be good (that is for others to say) – but based on what I have seen in the pages of other publications, I would only say that not every editor can be a science editor without some specific training first. This is because there are some things that are specific to science as an enterprise, as a social affair, that are not immediately apparent to people who don’t have a background in science.

For example, the most common issue I see is in the way scientific papers are reported – as if they are the last word on that topic. Many people, including many journalists, seem to think that if a scientific study has found coffee cures cancer, then it must be that coffee cures cancer, period. But every scientific paper is limited by the context in which the experiment was conducted, by the limits of what we already know, etc.

I have heard some people define science as a pursuit of the truth but in reality it’s a sort of opposite – science is a way to subtract uncertainty. Imagine shining a torch within a room as you’re looking for something, except the torch can only find things that you don’t want, so you can throw them away. Then you turn on the lights. Papers are frequently wrong and/or are updated to yield new results. This seldom makes the previous paper directly fraudulent or wrong; it’s just the way science works. And this perspective on science can help you think through what a science editor’s job is as well.

Another thing that’s important to know is that science progresses in incremental fashion and that the more sensational results are either extremely unlikely or simply misunderstood.

If you are keen on plumbing deeper depths, you could also consider questions about where authority comes from and how it is constructed in a narrative, the importance of indeterminate knowledge-states, the pros and cons of scientism, what constitutes scientific knowledge, how scientific publishing works, etc.

A science editor has to know all these things and ensure that in the process of running a newsroom or editing a publication, they don’t misuse, misconstrue or misrepresent scientific work and scientists. And in this process, I think it’s important for a science editor to not be considered to be subservient to the interests of science or scientists. Editors have their own goals, and more broadly speaking science communication in all forms needs to be seen and addressed in its own right – as an entity that doesn’t owe anything to science or scientists, per se.

5) In a country where press freedom is often sacrificed, how does one deal with political pieces, especially when there is proof against a matter concerning the government?

I’m not sure what you mean by “proof against a matter concerning the government.” But in my view, the likelihood of different outcomes depends on the business model. If, for example, you the publisher make a lot of money from a hotshot industrialist and his company, then obviously you are going to tread carefully when handling stories about that person or the company. How you make your money dictates who you are ultimately answerable to. If you make your money by selling newspapers to your readers, or collecting donations from them like The Wire does, you are answerable to your readers.

In this case, if we are handling a story in which the government is implicated in a bad way, we will do our due diligence and publish the story. This ‘due diligence’ is important: you need to be sure you have the requisite proof, that all parts of the story are reliable and verifiable, that you have documentary evidence of your claims, and that you have given the implicated party a chance to defend themselves (e.g. by being quoted in the story).

This said, absolute press freedom is not so simple to achieve. It doesn’t just need brave editors and reporters. It also needs institutions that will protect journalists’ rights and freedoms, and also shield them reliably from harm or malice. If the courts are not likely to uphold a journalist’s rights or if the police refuse proper protection when the threat of physical violence is apparent, blaming journalists for “sacrificing” press freedom is ignorant. There is a risk-benefit analysis worth having here, if only to remember that while the benefit of a free press is immense, the risks shouldn’t be taken lightly.

6) Research papers are lengthy and editors have deadlines. How do you make sure to communicate information with the right context for a wider audience?

Often the quickest way to achieve this is to pick your paper and take it to an independent scientist working in the same field. These independent comments are important for the story. But specific to your question, these scientists – if they have the time and are so inclined – can often also help you understand the paper’s contents properly, and point out potential issues, flaws, caveats, etc. These inputs can help you compose your story faster.

I would also say that if you are an editor looking for an article on a newly published research paper, you would be better off commissioning a reporter who is familiar, to whatever extent, with that topic. Obviously if you assign a business reporter to cover a paper about nanofluidic biosensors, the end result is going to be somewhere between iffy and disastrous. So to make sure the story has got its context right, I would begin by assigning the right reporter and making sure they’ve got comments from independent scientists in their copy.

7) What are some of the major challenges faced by science communicators and reporters in India?

This is a very important question, and I can’t hope to answer it concisely or even completely. In January this year, the office of the Principal Scientific Advisor to the Government of India organised a meeting with a couple dozen science journalists and communicators from around India. I was one of the attendees. Many of the issues we discussed, which would also be answers to your question, are described here.

If, for the purpose of your assignment, you would like me to pick one – I would go with the fact that science journalism, and science communication more broadly, is not widely acknowledged as an enterprise in its own right. As a result, many people don’t see the value in what science journalists do. A second and closely related issue is that scientists often don’t respond on time, even if they respond at all. I’m not sure of the extent to which this is an etiquette issue. But by calling it an etiquette issue, I also don’t want to overlook the possibility that some scientists don’t respond because they don’t think science journalism is important.

I was invited to attend the Young Investigators’ Meeting in Guwahati in March 2019. There, I met a big bunch of young scientists who really didn’t know why science journalism exists or what its purpose is. One of them seemed to think that since scientific papers pass through peer review and are published in journals, science journalists are wasting their time by attempting to discuss the contents of those papers with a general audience. This is an unnecessary barrier to my work – but it persists, so I must constantly work around or over it.

8) What are the consequences if a research paper has been misreported?

The consequence depends on the type and scope of misreporting. If you have consulted an independent scientist in the course of your reporting, you give yourself a good chance of avoiding reporting mistakes.

But of course mistakes do slip through. And with an online publication such as The Wire – if a published article is found to have a mistake, we usually correct the mistake once it has been pointed out to us, along with a clarification at the bottom of the article acknowledging the issue and recording the time at which the change was made. If you write an article that is printed and is later found to have a mistake, the newspaper will typically issue an erratum (a small note correcting a mistake) the next day.

If an article is found to have a really glaring mistake after it is published – and I mean an absolute howler – the article could be taken down or retracted from the newspaper’s record along with an explanation. But this rarely happens.

9) In many ways, copy editing disconnects you from your voice. Does it hamper your creativity as a writer?

It’s hard to find room for one’s voice in a news publication. About nine-tenths of the time, each of us is working on a news copy, in which a voice is neither expected nor can add much value of its own. This said, when there is room to express oneself more, to write in one’s voice, so to speak, copy-editing doesn’t have to remove it entirely.

Working with voices is a tricky thing. When writers pitch or write articles in which their voices are likely to show up, I always ask them beforehand as to what they intend to express. This intention is important because it helps me edit the article accordingly (or decide whether to edit it at all). The writer’s voice is part of this negotiation. Like I said before, my job as the editor is to make sure my writers convey their points clearly and effectively. And if I find that their voice conflicts with the message or vice versa, I will discuss it with them. It’s a very contested process and I don’t know if there is a black-and-white answer to your question.

It’s always possible, of course, if you’re working with a bad editor and they just remodel your work to suit their needs without checking with you. But short of that, it’s a negotiation.

Categories
Culture

Tech bloggers and the poverty of style

Photo by Suzy Hazelwood on Pexels.com

I created my writing habit by performing it over a decade (and still continuing). When I first started blogging in 2008, I told myself I would write at least 2,000 words a week. By some conspiracy of circumstances, but particularly my voracious reading habit at the time, I found this target to be quite easy. So it quickly became 5,000, and then 10,000. I kept this pace up well into 2011, when it slowed because I was studying to become a journalist and many of the words I had, to write, were published in places other than my blog. The pace has been more or less the same since then; these days, I manage about 1,000-2,000 words a week.

At first, I wrote because I wanted to write something. But once it became a habit, writing became one of my ways of knowing, and a core feature of my entire learning process irrespective of the sphere in which it happened. These days, if I don’t write something, I probably won’t remember it and much less learn it. How I think about writing – the process, beginnings and endings, ordering paragraphs, fixing the lengths of sentences, etc. – has also helped me become a better editor (I think; I know I still have a long way to go), especially in terms of quickly assessing what could be subpar about an article and what the author needs to do to fix it.

But this said, writing is really an art, mostly because there’s no one correct way to do it. An author can craft the same sentence differently to convey different meanings, couched in different spirits; the complement is true, too: an author can convey the same meaning through different sentences. In my view, the ergodicity of writing is constrained only by the language of choice, although a skilled author can still transcend these limitations by combining words and ideas to make better use of the way people think, make memories and perceive meaning.

This is why I resent a trend among some bloggers – especially people working with Big Tech – to adopt a style of writing that they believe is ‘designed’ to make communication effective. (I call this the ‘Gladwellian style’ because it only reminds me of how Malcolm Gladwell writes: to say what the author is going to say, then to say it, and then to remind the reader of what the author just said.)

I work in news and I can understand the importance of following a simple set of rules to communicate one’s point as losslessly as possible. But the news space is a well-defined subset of communication more broadly, and in this space, finding at least one way to make your point – and then in fact doing so – is more important than exploring ways to communicate differently, with different effects.

Many tech bloggers undermine this possibility when they seem to address writing as a science, with a small and finite number of ways to get it right, thus proscribing opportunities to do more than just get one’s point across, with various effects. Writing in their hands is on one hand celebrated as an understated skill that more engineers must master but on the other is almost always wielded as a means to a common end. (Medium is chock-full of such articles.)

There’s none of the wildness writing is capable of – no variety of voices or no quirky styles on display that an organic and anarchic evolution of the writing habit can so easily produce. Most of it is one contiguous monotonous tonescape, interspersed every now and then with quotes by famous white writers saying something snarky about writing being hard. (Examples here and here.) This uniformity is also reflected in the choice of fonts: except for Medium, almost every blog by a tech person who isn’t sticking to tech uses sans-serif fonts.

Granted, it’s possible that many of these ‘writers’ have nothing interesting to say, which in turn might make anything but a sombre style seem excessive. It’s also possible some of them are just doing what Silicon Valley tech-bros often do in general: rediscover existing concepts like coherence and clarity, and write about them as if people didn’t know them before. We’ve already seen this with everything from household technology to history. It’s also probably silly to expect the readers of a tech blog to go there looking for anything other than what a fellow techie has to say.

But I’m uncomfortable with the fact that writing as a habit and writing as an art often lead limited lives in the tech blogging space – so much so that I’m even tempted to diagnose Silicon Valley’s employees’ relationship with writing in terms of the issues we associate with the Silicon Valley culture itself, or even the products they produce.

Categories
Culture Science

The forgotten first lives of India’s fauna

Two juvenile purple frogs rest on wet soil dotted with tiny green leaves.
Juvenile purple frogs somewhere in the Western Ghats, 2017. Photo: Nihaljabinedk/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

Prof. Biju said the Rohanixalus is the 20th recognised genus of the family Rhacophoridae that comprises 422 known Old World tree frog species found in Asia and Africa. He said there are eight frog species in this genus Rohanixalus, which are known to inhabit forested as well as human-dominated landscapes right from the northeast, the Andaman islands, Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, up to southern China.

“Our discovery of a treefrog member from Andaman Islands is unexpected and again highlights the importance of dedicated faunal surveys and explorations for proper documentation of biodiversity in a mega diverse country like India. This finding also uncovers an interesting new distribution pattern of tree frogs that provides evidence for faunal exchange between Andamans and the Indo-Burma region,” Prof. Biju said.

‘New genus of tree frog discovered, found in Andamans and Northeast India’, The Hindu, November 12, 2020

When researchers make ‘discoveries’ like this – and they make many every year because India encompasses some of the world’s major “biodiversity hotspots” – I always think about whether people living in the same general area as these creatures might already know of their existence, and have different names and identities for them separate from what the scientific literature will now call it. And if this knowledge does exist – if someone already knew about it – and if they have a knowledge-organising system of their own (that is not science) – which could be easily true if they are members of the many tribes of India (the Adivasi) – then the scientific rediscovery of these species somehow creates a moment in history where the latter knowledge, more traditional and almost certainly far older and therefore more knowing, becomes a bit more forgotten by virtue of being treated as if it didn’t exist. The creatures have now been ‘discovered’ by the methods of science and therefore they have been found for the first time (and not ‘rediscovered’). These frogs for example are now temporary subjects of our celebration of the wonder that is science, even as the human knowledge of their existence that ‘lived’ earlier, in the form of tribal words, sounds, smells, experiences and memories, is not part of the conversation whatsoever in this moment – like the frogs have been snatched out of the context in which they have lived all this time, into a different world, a new world that gives them new names and new purposes. The ‘old world’, the first world, continues its quiet subterranean existence, like an entire universe that’s been kept out of sight, or in our collective blindspot, offering up the resources we need for our second world – land, wood, medicines, frogs, lizards, snakes, birds, vacations, wonder – while battling ecological despair and the end of the first.

Featured image: Juvenile purple frogs somewhere in the Western Ghats, 2017. Credit: Nihaljabinedk/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.