A list of good reads

• If you’re looking for a great entertainment read, check out GQ’s big story that goes behind the scenes of Amazon’s ‘Wheel of Time’—which aims to put ‘Game of Thrones’ to shame.
• Shekhar Gupta in The Print lays out exactly what is wrong with our current drug laws—and why all of us should be worried about them.
• Samar Halarnkar’s column in Mint Lounge offers an informative riff on the foreign roots of the greatly beloved vada pav.
• A highly respected Harvard astronomer argues that the Big Bang—which marked the beginning of the universe—was engineered by aliens. MindMatters.ai offers a somewhat nerdy analysis of his case.
• Speaking of outer space, Gizmodo is disappointed that the adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy has turned into Star Wars-like fare.
• Shoaib Daniyal in Scroll offers an excellent analysis and historical context for the culture war that pits Urdu against Hindi.
• Two inspiring videos from BBC News: One, a four-year-old football whiz who has been recruited by Arsenal when he was in nursery; two, a young inventor from Tamil Nadu, Vinisha Umashanker, who has developed an eco-friendly ironing cart for presswalas.
• The Atlantic has a thought-provoking essay on social media that asks: Do we talk too much, too often and to too many people? If you spent just ten minutes on Twitter, the answer would be ‘yes’.
• The India Forum offers an eye-opening read on how marginalised communities learn English. It looks at a project to teach Santhal youth the language by getting them to tell stories on the internet using their phones.
• Manu Pillai has written in a couple of places about his new book that looks at Indian maharajas. But this essay in The India Forum offers a richer deep dive—and may even inspire you to buy his new book.
• Emily Ratajkowski has been making headlines for speaking out against the objectification of her body. Sarah Hagi in Gawker offers a thoughtful critique of Ratajkowski as a Black Muslim woman—and explains how not meeting the Western beauty ideal was actually good for her.
• Mint reports on the spate of new private members clubs in Mumbai.
• Two economists over at Substack explain why no one is lazy, and why the concept of ‘laziness’ is useless in economic theory.
• Andy Mukherjee in Bloomberg News takes aim at the RBI—which is busy making the Indian middle class very unhappy.
• Here are two important bits of reporting on how Pfizer and Moderna are busy exploiting developing countries to pad their bottomline. New York Times has an in-depth report on why they are refusing to share their technology. Democracy Now has a video interview with the author of a new report that reveals how Pfizer is bullying their governments.