Monthly Archives: June 2018

It had to come to this at some point, and here we are finally. To undertake a challenge to write one blog post a day – when I’ve mentioned to my friends and colleagues that I’m doing this, all of … Continue reading →

There’s a report in Science dated June 8 with the headline ‘Middleweight black holes found at last’. The abstract describes an effort by an “international team” of astronomers to find intermediate-class black holes, which weigh more than tens of solar … Continue reading →

There were two developments in the news last week that were very important but at the same time didn’t get mainstream attention: Microsoft acquiring GitHub and the LHC collaboration’s measurement of the strength of the Higgs boson/top quark interaction. Before … Continue reading →

Until a few hours ago, I thought Harry S. Truman had been one of the worst-performing American presidents of all time. I was wrong. I’d spotted an infographic on Twitter, drawn up by FiveThirtyEight and talking about how Donald Trump … Continue reading →

Whenever I think of world-building – as in the fantasy exercise where you build out the lay of the land, and then the land itself where you’re going to situate your story – the first thing that comes to mind, … Continue reading →

In the morning, I had managed to read a few pages of Karunanidhi: A Life in Politics, a new book by Sandhya Ravishankar about the DMK supremo, and noticed that even though it’s a journalist’s book, and even though Mukund … Continue reading →

On average, people don’t read as many books as they used to before because what we want to read has become available in more forms. We read articles on the web, tweets and posts on the social media, emails, WhatsApp … Continue reading →

The National Council of Science and Technology Communication, under the Department of Science and Technology (DST), has floated a new initiative to promote science communication by researchers, particularly PhD students and postdoctoral fellows. It’s being called the ‘Augmenting Writing Skills for … Continue reading →

Puja Mehra wrote an excellent breakdown of the Narendra Modi government’s economic performance of the last four years, the duration for which it has been in office. You should read it if you’re interested in this sort of thing (and … Continue reading →