Why scientists should read more
The amount of communicative effort to describe the fact of a ball being thrown is vanishingly low. It's as simple as saying, "X threw the ball." It takes a bit more effort to describe ho…
mainstream media
6 posts
Caste, and science's notability threshold
A webinar by The Life of Science on the construct of the 'scientific genius' just concluded, with Gita Chadha and Shalini Mahadev, a PhD scholar at HCU, as panellists. It was an hour long and…
In conversation with Sree Srinivasan
On May 1, I was hosted on a webinar by the American journalist Sree Srinivasan, along with Anna Isaac of The News Minute and Arunabh Saikia of Scroll.in. As part of his daily show on the COVID-19 cris…
Some empathy for Treebeard's privilege
There's a line from The Two Towers (2002) that's really stayed with me: I'm on nobody's side because nobody is on my side. It's spoken by Treebeard, the Ent, to one of Meriadoc/P…
How infographics can lose the plot
if you don't force designers to follow best practices when making an infographic, you'll be setting a lower bar that will soon turn around and assault you with all kinds of charts conceived to hide what the numbers are really saying.…
No country for new journalism
Through an oped in Nieman Lab, Ken Doctor makes a timely case for explanatory - or explainer - journalism being far from a passing fad. Across the many factors that he argues contribute to its rise and persistence in western markets, there is evidence that he believes explainer journalism's historic…