A list of good reads

• BBC News asks: Is there really no such thing as Italian cuisine?
• Also in BBC News: the people who ‘see’ foreign languages in various colours, and whether this neurological condition can actually help in language learning. 
• Speaking of languages, Noema Magazine details the indigenous languages lost to climate change—from Sweden to Vanuatu.
• The Print provides a timeline on Hindu pilgrimages becoming mainstream, despite not being mentioned in the Vedas.
• New York Times (splainer gift link) wants to know why musicians, artists and writers alike are so obsessed with the colour blue.
• Financial Times (splainer gift link) traces the political rise of the anti-vax movement—in light of Robert Kennedy Jr. becoming the Trump administration’s health secretary.
• The Guardian reports on the slow death of Old Delhi’s once famous Urdu book bazaar—which is now making way for kebab shops.
• Also in The Guardian: was Dickens greater than Shakespeare? Academic Peter Conrad thinks yes!
• Aeon has an essay on the problem with parent intervention programmes in the Global South—a multibillion-dollar industry built on faulty assumptions about children’s still-developing brains.  
• The Mexican-made musical ‘Johanne Sacreblu’ has mercilessly parodied the Oscar-winning ‘Emilia Pérez’, to millions of views. The Atlantic (splainer gift link) observes this rise of the ‘anti-fan’.
• Variety lays out the prescience of Spike Jonze’s 2013 film ‘Her’—a reel world in which people fall in love with AI chatbots. 
• As part of its series on how beef colonised the Americas, Vox has an illuminating, illustrated read by the daughter of a cattle rancher. 
• Scroll takes us through legendary ornithologist Ravi Sankaran’s lifelong quest to save the grassland-dwelling lesser florican bird. 
• Good Food Movement has an enlightening feature—with video—on the central role of ‘makrei’ sticky rice in fostering love and labour within Manipur’s Tangkhul Naga tribe.
• This one’s for the cricket nerds—The Cricket Monthly has a wartime story of a British army man spreading the gospel of the game… in Somalia!