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.
