The unclosed clause and other things about commas
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 w…
VM
1664 posts
Talking scicomm at NCBS – II
3 min read
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…
False equivalency
4 min read
Margaret Sullivan in the Washington Post on August 16: “The whole doctrine of objectivity in journalism has become part of the [media’s] problem,” Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York Univer…
Good service shouldn't necessitate support
1 min read
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 resolv…
A for-publishers stack and the symmetry of globalisation
2 min read
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…
A blogging problem, contd.
3 min read
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 mentio…
ASI's note to Financial Exp. over eclipse article is naïve
3 min read
The public outreach arm of the Astronomical Society of India has written to the Financial Express expressing concern over their August 7 article, which advised people to fast during a lunar eclipse. T…
A blogging problem
4 min read
Since June 2017, I've amassed 14 domains, accounts on four VPS providers, provisioned scores of servers, initiated a zillion sites and moved my own blog around from one domain and platform to the…
A misremembering
6 min read
Two Indian scientists who passed away recently – Yash Pal and Pushpa Mittra Bhargava – spent a large part of their lives ensuring that lay people had access to bona fide scientific material and that o…
Blogging with Gitlab
2 min read
About a week ago, I figured out how to use Hugo, first with Caddy and then with Dropbox and Gitlab. Hugo + Gitlab in particular is an amazing combo because it's so easy to set up and run with: 1…
What Ghost v1.0 says about its future plans
3 min read
I've just checked out the Ghost 1.0 CMS. The upgrade from v. 0.11.9 happened last evening and since then I've been crawling through the new UI on the front- and back-ends. The back-end has alw…
'The stories that define us'
2 min read
A postscript to the opinions v. reportage question, and why I'm not a fan of a label saying 'Opinion' atop oped pieces on a news website: Many consider the opposite of balance to be imbal…