A seasonal despondency in journalism
My friend Dhiya has been writing and publishing one blog post every week for the last 87 weeks in a series she simply calls ‘dilettante’. The eighty-fifth edition focused on an issue I am currently…
August 2026
The bridge AI-writing builds
From ‘Why not normalise use of AI in writing?’, by Amit Kumar, assistant professor in the Institute for Development and Communication, Chandigarh, in The Hindu, August 29, 2026: Whose authority is being protected by that…
The mathematician and the oracle
On August 24, Levent Alpöge (@__alpoge__) posted on X.com that they had solved a maths problem with Claude’s help in a way that was contrary to a human proof of it, albeit a reputedly unsatisfactory…
AI shouldn’t distract journalism into a new trap
The following is a review of Journalism in the Age of AI: From Acceleration to Reimagination by Seth C. Lewis, Rodrigo Zamith, and Tomás Dodds, available here. The authors write, and I agree, that journalism…
What does science in India feel like?
Indian society has inhabited at least three distinct structures of feeling in relation to science since independence — and they are not as continuous as one might expect.