Editor’s note: We sadly will not be able to offer our recommendations for weekend viewing due to a depleted team. But we will be back in business the coming Friday.

A list of good reads

• Tim Culpan and Andy Mukherjee in Bloomberg News explain why the Tek Fog app—which was the subject of a Wire investigation—ought to be the cause for great alarm.
• People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI) offers an eye-opening report on why the poorest women in Varanasi district have so many children.
• BBC Future looks at the medieval habit of sleeping in two shifts—once in the evening and then again in the morning. So why did we abandon this perfectly good routine?
• Eater takes a trip to the Food on Demand conference in Las Vegas—and lays out the price of a future in which customers never have to wait.
• BBC News profiles activist Sudha Bharadwaj and the three years she spent in prison—as an accused in the Elgar Parishad case (explained here). 
• The Indian Express has a moving story of Salil Tripathi—who lost his job as a hotel manager to the pandemic and became a delivery person for Zomato—only to die in a road accident while he was on the job. FYI: The story sparked a wave of support for his bereaved family. And Zomato has now announced compensation for his family.
• CNN Traveller offers a wonderful guided tour of Kolkata’s first burial ground, Park Street Cemetery.
• Amit Varma’s India Uncut newsletter entertainingly explains the common mistakes we make in attributing causality—using his college mate’s masturbation habits as a hilarious analogy.
• Mongabay reports on the wonderful effort by the indigenous community in Arunachal Pradesh to conserve orchids at the Sessa Sanctuary. 
• Also in Mongabay: a report on the first dugong conservation reserve in the country—located in Tamil Nadu. 
• Feminism in India has an excellent read on how gender and the female gaze plays out in K-dramas. 
• New York Times has a brilliant real-life love story of David and Anne—and how they have come to enjoy sex more than ever in their 70s.
• Vanity Fair isn’t sold on the latest ‘Scream’ sequel, saying it is its “own worst enemy.”
• BBC News asks an important question that every Indian mobile user ought to ask: Has Vodafone just given up on India?
• Katharine Smyth in The Atlantic ponders the hardest task of one’s midlife: making new friends.
• Shrabonti Bagchi in Mint looks at the invisible adivasis of Jamshedpur—a company town associated always with the entrepreneurial power of the Tatas.
• Radhika Ramaseshan offers an incisive analysis of how and why BJP’s carefully crafted electoral alliance is falling apart in Uttar Pradesh.
• Everyone agrees that the first ever transplant of a pig’s heart into a human is great cause for celebration. But what are the ethical issues it raises? BBC News breaks down three: patient safety, animal rights and religious concerns. 
• Related good listen: Hosts of the Radiolab podcast offer a behind-the-scenes look at the second-ever pig kidney transplant into a human. (h/t founding member Kruthika Ravi Kumar)
• Good watch: Founding member Amruta Ghanekar highly recommends re-watching Anand Patwardhan’s arresting 1992 documentary ‘Ram Ke Naam’—which unpackages the Vishwa Hindu Parishad’s campaign to build the Ram Mandir.