Weekend Reads

  • A new ally on board, a plane for Singhvi, an app to record phone calls: In the Indian Express, Manoj CG details how Congress fought back from loss in Karnataka.
  • In the Indian Express, Sweety Kumari fleshes out the life of an Opposition candidate in the recently concluded West Bengal panchayat polls.
  • The real failings of the Modi government are not about the economy but with the undermining of key institutions and damaging to the social fabric, writes TN Ninan for the Print.
  • To be a great power, India’s political weaknesses need to be redressed, writes Dhruva Jaishankar in the Hindustan Times.
  • Narendra Modi’s clever politics will dent his clean image, writes SA Aiyer in TheTimes of India.
  • The meme, once defined as a small unit of culture, is an underrated invention of the digital era. Thousands of meme makers in India are turning it into a potent – and, at times, inflammatory – social media language. Jinoy Jose P explores the phenomenon in the Hindu Business Line.
  • In the days of the Raj, summer presented an annual excuse for India’s princely elite to seek a leave of absence from the privileged drudgery that was life in their capitals, writes Manu S Pillai in Mint.
  • It’s time for technology to serve all humankind with unconditional basic income, writes Scott Santens on the Basic Income blog.
  • With the death of Stephen Hawking and the discussion it produced on black holes it was a little surprising that there was little or no mention of the man who created the subject, J. Robert Oppenheimer, writes Jeremy Bernstein in the London Review of Books.
  • In Evonomics, Steve Roth writes on how welfare and redistribution saves capitalism from itself.
  • William Trevor was the literary heir of Chekhov, Maupassant and James Joyce: and one of the great contemporary chroniclers of the human condition, writes Jon Banville in the New Statesman.