Weekend reads

  1. Indrani Basu in the Huffington Post speaks to colleagues of Shantanu Bhowmik, a journalist who was beaten to death in Tripura, to paint a picture of the 28-year-old.
  2. One of India’s best-known nature researchers, Subramaniam Bhupathy, has been immortalised with a new species of frog being named after him, writes Arun Janardhan in Mint.
  3. As several of them get appointed to significant roles in government, Arshu John in the Caravan takes a look at the professional fortunes of the police officers, bureaucrats and investigators who were associated with the 2002 Godhra case.
  4. “There is a talk of radicalisation amongst the Rohingya; they are also being linked to terrorist threats. Let us for a moment suppose that there is some possibility of small sections being tempted in that direction,” writes Pratap Bhanu Mehta in the Indian Express. “It is precisely to isolate them that you need a more imaginative refugee policy.”
  5. It isn’t just South Indian languages being threatened by Hindi. Roshan Kishore writes in Mint of “the ongoing cultural violence inflicted by Hindi in its own backyard” that is causing people across North India to lose their mother tongues.
  6. “It is ironical that a man who coined the iconic term ‘the nation wants to know’ refuses to apologise for blatantly lying in front of an audience of young students who may have continued to believe his lie ever since he made this shameful speech, till the events of the last one week,” writes Jency Jacob in BoomLive.
  7. Brinda Suri in Blink writes about the joys of the dishes made out of scrapings at the bottom of the pan.
  8. “The trouble is Facebook’s business model is structurally identical whether advertisers are selling shoes, politics or fake diet pills, and whether they’re going after new moms, dog lovers or neo-Nazis. The algorithms don’t know the difference, and Facebook’s customers are not its users.,” writes Zeynep Tufekci in the New York Times. “Rather, as this latest incident should remind us, we are Facebook’s product. Our attention and eyeballs are sold to the highest bidders, whatever they may be peddling.”
  9. “It is often said that Trump has no real ideology, which is not true – is ideology is white supremacy, in all its truculent and sanctimonious power,” writes Ta-Nehisi Coates in the Atlantic.
  10. “I have written about climate change obliquely. But when I look around the world now and see the impacts that are actually unfolding around us in such profound and important ways, how is it possible that I have not paid enough attention to this? You know, people of my generation used to ask our parents, what did you do in World War II? And our children are going to say to us, how did you respond to this? I think the world of the arts and culture will not have a very convincing response.” Amitav Ghosh speaks to Steve Paulson on the paucity of art that engages with climate change in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

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