Op-eds
Arup Dasgupta's incisive article about ISRO's human spaceflight mission, published on The Wire Science yesterday, is drawing a lot of civil, critical engagement from our readers. While this is good news from the newsroom's perspective – civil engagement is always golden – I'd like
Life notes
There's a really yucky scene in the really yucky movie based on the half-yucky book Atlas Shrugged. A copper-mining tycoon who blew up his own mines says in a conversation with his railroad-tycoon friend, "They say money is the root of all evil. So I wanted to
Op-eds
The following notes are specifically about VijayRaghavan's post. My overall reaction to the stupidity on display at the ISC is recorded here. At a conference at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences in August 2018, K. VijayRaghavan said that the media pays disproportionate attention to the pseudoscience that goes
Op-eds
The Print should not have published its list of "intellectuals pick their successors" at all. Its editors knew that it had no women and were aware of how that was a problem. They also had to have known that the list was predominantly Hindu and upper-caste. But by
Op-eds
I can think of at least four different words newsrooms use to describe the bundles of content they work with: story, piece, article and copy (‘content’ itself isn’t one of them). With a few exceptions, all four labels are used interchangeably. ‘Copy’ is perhaps the most common, especially since
Op-eds
John Horgan asked 15 people – scientists, social psychologists, philosophers – one question, in a seemingly clever effort to mark the end of 2018: Unless you are too stoned or enlightened to care, you are probably dissatisfied with the world as it is. In that case, you should have a vision of
Op-eds
James English had a wonderful piece in Public Books recently, discussing how the Nobel Prize for literature: 1. Is a prize that has always struggled to be meaningful, given how its laureates are shortlisted, the capital that incentivises its exercise and the historical Eurocentric elitism of its adjudicators 2. Had
Op-eds
Jamie Farnes, a theoretical physicist at Oxford University, recently had a paper published that claimed the effects of dark matter and dark energy could be explained by replacing them with a fluid-like substance that was created spontaneously, had negative mass and disobeyed the general theory of relativity. As fantastic as
Op-eds
Dennis Overbye, one of the New York Times's star science writers (the other being Carl Zimmer), had a curious piece up November 19 about why "we should leave some mysteries alone" and what mysteries he would like to leave alone personally. He wrote, Jim Peebles, the
Op-eds
After its licentious article about Earth having a second moon, I thought National Geographic had published another subpar piece when I saw this headline: Small Nuclear War Could Reverse Global Warming for Years The headline is click-bait. The article itself is about how regional nuclear war, such as between two
Op-eds
BBC News Africa undertook an excellent investigation to reveal that a group of men who killed four unarmed civilians – two women and two children – in 2015 belonged to the Cameroonian military. Fourteen journalists worked on the story, together with Amnesty International, using Google Earth imagery, satellite images, social media, prior
Op-eds
Bora Zivkovic, the former 'blogfather' of the Scientific American blogs network, said it best: journalists are temporary experts. Reporters have typically got a few days to write something up on which scientists have been working for years, if not decades. They flit from paper to paper, lab to