What will Ashok Khemka find next?
Ashok Khemka, the senior IAS officer famous for having exposed numerous instances of government corruption, perhaps most prominently the DLF land-grab scam, has been transferred again. This time, he h…
Op-eds
182 posts
A critique of Gaganyaan
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…
Driving down the moderated way
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…
Beating pseudoscience at the ISC
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 Scie…
The Print's list
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…
Journalism's 'stories'
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…
White-opia
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, yo…
Nobel Prizes and traditionalism
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 sho…
On cosmology's scicomm disaster
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-lik…
Of socks in black-holes and wasted stone tablets
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 wh…
Engineering a way out of global warming
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 Warmin…
A fair trial
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. Fourte…