I attended an event at the Bangalore International Centre yesterday, Anita Nair in conversation with Anil Ananthaswamy about narrative non-fiction. Anil spoke for 45-55 minutes about what it was like to write his first book,…
New York magazine has published an alphabetised list of the names of people that find mention in Jeffrey Epstein’s ‘black book’, a log book of sorts in which he kept track of the people he…
Say you’re in a dark room and there’s a flash. The light travels outward in all directions from the source, and the illumination seems to expand in a sphere. This is a visualisation of how…
ISRO just put out a call for a one-time space journalism award, named for Vikram Sarabhai, with a cash prize of Rs 5 lakh. Here’s the doc with all the details. Pay attention to (4),…
Note: This post was written before the Chandrayaan 2 launch, which happened at 2.43 pm IST today. We are celebrating the 50th anniversary of walking on the Moon and we are excited about landing on…
On June 24, the journal Nature Scientific Reports published a paper claiming that Earth’s surface was warming by more than what non-anthropogenic sources could account for because it was simply moving closer to the Sun.…
The following is a bulleted list of reasons why covering developments on the Indian spaceflight programme can be nerve-wracking. ISRO does not have a media engagement policy that lays out when it will communicate information…
I’m sure you’ve heard of the concept of false balance, which is based on the conviction that there are two sides to every story even when there aren’t or when it’s not clear to anyone…
I delivered my annual talk AMA at the NCBS science writing workshop yesterday. While the questions the students asked were mostly the same as last year (and the year before that), I also took the opportunity…
Why is good grammar important? In the Indian mainstream media at least, it appears that readers won’t penalise reporters and editors for imperfect use of grammar and punctuation. To be clear, they will notice –…
My reading habit has taken a hit this year. There has been more to do at work so I haven’t been able to find the time, but for the sake of keeping up the reading…
I have been a blogger since 2009. I started during the penultimate year of my undergraduate studies as a way to interrogate my own ideas and interpretations of the nonfiction books I started to read…