Epstein's friends from the 'Reality Club'
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…
A journey through Twitter and time, with the laws of physics
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 the…
An award that isn't
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), where it says…
The romance of us, as seen from the Moon
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 th…
Prestige journals and their prestigious mistakes
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 mo…
Why covering ISRO is a pain
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…
Firstpost's selfish journalism
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…
Diversifying into other beats
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 oppo…
The usefulness of good grammar
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 wi…
Update on the reading habit
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 habit, I have tried to complete at lea…
Blogging as a response to the times
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 a…
Why are we going to the Moon again?
At 2:51 am on July 15, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) will launch its Chandrayaan 2 mission on board a GSLV Mk III rocket from its spaceport in Sriharikota. The rocket will place its pa…