• India’s 1950 Constitution was framed by Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel and drafted by BR Ambedkar. In the Mint, Sidin Vadukut considers what a Constitution framed by Mohandas Gandhi would instead have looked like.
  • Does the United States of America have a caste system, asks Subramanian Shankar in the Conversation.
  • Can a government cure loneliness? In the New Yorker, Rebecca Mead expresses skepticism at Britain’s new “minister of loneliness”.
  • In the era of commercial dating apps, is the easy availability of sex in the West dehumanising the experience, asks Joana Ramiro in the New Humanist.
  • In the Guardian, Jordan Kisner describes how how a new technology is changing the lives of people who cannot speak.
  • Misery over the US real estate sector hasn’t ended – 2.5 million homes are still worth less than their mortgages. Here’s the story of one Wall Street Journal reporter’s upside-down American dream.
  • Tech is actually starting to lose its war on journalism, argues Leonid Bershidsky in Bloomberg.      
  • Last-mile issues can make or break the promise of Aadhaar, argue Bindu Ananth and Beni Chugh in the Hindustan Times.
  • Spanish has a word for your child’s spouse’s parents and Hindi for for your elder brother’s wife, your younger brother’s wife, your wife’s sister’s husband, your father’s brother’s daughter, your mother’s sister’s husband. But English, on the other hand, is not particularly rich in familial words, writes Melissa Carlisle on the OxfordWords blog.
  • Pluralist democracy is the site of a tension between the ideals of freedom and equality, between Right and Left. However, the whittling down of state sovereignty in Europe due to neoliberalism means this is now a mock battle, argues Chantal Mouffe in Verso.
  • Unlike China, Southeast Asian countries do not have a problem with India’s rise, writes Kanti Bajpai in the Times of India.