Category: Life

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Book: Nationalism by Tagore

I just finished reading Nationalism by Tagore. The book has three essays which talk about Nationalism in the West, Nationalism in Japan, Nationalism in India and ends with a poem called The Sunset of the Century. First two essays are based on lectures delivered in USA and Japan. The third essay on India...

3

Data Journalism: Lie With Bad Sample Surveys

A 1954 book “How to Lie with Statistics” by Darrel Huff should be made a compulsory reading for anyone who wants to do data based journalism. The book is very small and talks about the ways data is used to lie aka statisticulation. In 2016, 62 years later, we still see the same...

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Book: Writing the Book

I follow Nieman Reports and NiemanLab to know everything that’s happening in digital journalism world. Very recently I found out that they publish books. So I picked Writing the Book, How to Craft Narratives, from Concept to Content as my first read. It’s an anthology of essays written by journalists on how they...

4

Tracking Happiness

A friend of mine Anu has this popular question to ask when she meets us “What am I proud of and grateful for?”. It’s an interesting question. While answering it last time, I realized its a proxy question for asking how happy am I. I don’t know what Anu thinks but I will...

1

Book: Free Thought and Official Propaganda

Delivered as a speech as part of Conway Memorial Lectures at South Place Institute on 24 March 1922. This essay by Bertrand Russell a British philosopher, logician, essayist and social critic is very relevant even today. In this essay/speech Russel talks about the challenges for free-thought and free-speech in the context of raising...

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Obsessed with Einstein

For a long time I was scared to read Einstein. Most of my physics reading was Richard Feynman’s essays. I think its more to do with his life and character than the physics itself. If I remember properly I read A Brief History of Time when I was in college. That’s the closest...