Weekly Digest #1

This is the first entry in the series of articles I intend to write every week. Every week’s entry will contain snippets from the books I’m reading and some links to interesting articles, blog posts or tweets. I’ll try to keep the format similar to that of Shane Parish’s and James Clear’s…

Weekly Digest #15

There wouldn’t have been any cities without agriculture.

Or rather, there wouldn’t have been any cities if certain edible grasses didn’t evolve the way they did.

Even evolution evolves. About ten thousand years ago the world witnessed a second…

Weekly Digest #3

By most estimates, there are more microbes than human cells in our bodies. As astounding as it is, this has been the status-quo for hundreds of thousands of years. Some of these microbes help us in our day-to-day bodily function, like our gut microbiota. While others are benign and occupy space…

Weekly Digest #2

Idolatry does expire. Democratisation of previously suppressed facts can make villains out of heroes from the past. This makes people from different generations have widely divergent perceptions of figures such as Columbus or Churchill.

Weekly Digest #14

It’s always a pleasure to read Michael Pollan’s writings. His books primarily talk about our relationship with food, and how it has dramatically changed with industrialization. Through his most popular work, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, he followed the 3 food chains that sustain a modern American diet…

Weekly Digest #4

Nehru beautifully describes India, “like some ancient palimpsest on which layer upon layer of thought and reverie had been inscribed , and yet no succeeding layer had completely hidden or erased what had been written previously.”

Weekly Digest #8

In medicine, figuring out “whats’s wrong” is essential for demarcating the limits of “what’s right”.

Medicine, the sociologist Everett Hughes once observed wryly, perceives the world through “mirror writing.” Illness is used to define wellness. Abnormalcy marks the…

Weekly Digest #7

Finding a good book to read is not an easy task. Is there any way to make it simpler? Diving through books-of-the-year lists from certain websites or publications can sometimes help in finding them. Or maybe you can pick up books suggested by notable figures you admire or get a strong…

Weekly Digest #6

Life flourishes by reading between the lines.

The universe seeks equilibriums; it prefers to disperse energy, disrupt organization, and maximize chaos. Life is designed to combat these forces. We slow down reactions, concentrate matter, and organize chemicals into…

Weekly Digest #5

In the 21st century, it’s hard to believe knowlege to be anything but cumulative.

The idea of knowledge as cumulative — a ladder, or a tower of stones, rising higher and higher — existed only as one possibility among many. For several hundred years, scholars of scholarship…