This is the age of the start-up, not megaliths. Remember T-Rex did not survive evolution. It is unlikely that religions organised like T-Rexes – most of the Abrahamic religions fit this description – will survive an era of fast change. The T-Rex did evolve in the first place because the evolutionary pathway existed for it … Read more
Our preparedness for the effects of climate change is both mitigating global avg. surface temperature rise and better planning public spaces and improving the distribution/accessibility of resources.
A publication online that makes its money by displaying ads can be profitable even by publishing a slew of bad or offensive articles. That will drive the traffic too; people will share its content even if it’s to complain about it. It will also be trustworthy in that people can always trust to publish a predictable kind … Read more
A nasty review of P.V. Sindhu’s performance at the World Badminton Championships by Sandip Sarkar for the Hindustan Times: In the last one year, Sindhu has played 17 matches that stretched to the third game. She won 10 and lost seven. Six of those seven losses have come against players who were unseeded or seeded below her. A … Read more
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 the finest available authority on grammar, usage, and … Read more
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’s batch of aspiring science writers about the economics … Read more
Margaret Sullivan in the Washington Post on August 16: Does finding these powerful ways to frame the [Charlottesville] situation amount to abandoning journalistic impartiality? “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 … Read more
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 any service that requires the user to rely on the … Read more
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 smart and constantly vigilant. Put another way: … Read more
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’s back-end has been managed by what’s called the WP admin area. … Read more