1. The Bahujan Samaj Party-Samajwadi Party tie-up in Uttar Pradesh ahead of the upcoming elections should seriously challenge the Bharatiya Janata Party, at least based on the numbers. In the Hindustan Times, Roshan Kishore takes a look at the arithmetic, and for the Quint, Aditya Menon also breaks down the numbers.
  2. “Is it a mere coincidence that a bunch of films centre-staging the strengths of the ruling party and deriding the opposition, will roll out in the run-up to the 2019 Lok Sabha polls? Of course not. Does the establishment, reaching out to sympathetic producers and actors, encourage these projects, with invisible nods and nudges? Of course. Is Bollywood bending lower than ever before, to please the powers-that-be. Oh absolutely,” writes Shubhra Gupta in the Indian Express.
  3. Rohit Brijnath in Mint writes about Jasprit Bumrah, “who is too smart to be a stereotype, too evolved to be just another swearing, pointing, glaring fast bowler.”
  4. “If news reports and social media posts are an indication, there has been a shift in the popular opinion of [Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi] Vijayan, who, until a few years ago, represented – at least to a significant section of Kerala society – all that could be wrong with the CPI (M) and its bastion Kannur,” writes Jinoy Jose P in Blink.
  5. Yasir Abbas in the Hindu writes of the lost world of Urdu film magazines, which were not institutionally archived and, as a result, only survive in sporadic fragments.
  6. “One can hope that Savitribai Phule’s birth anniversary this month is a timely call to follow the lead given by Bahujan women in the fight for smashing Brahminical patriarchy – perhaps that poster makes more sense to you now?” asks Divya Kandakuri in Mint.
  7. Tommy Tomlinson writes an essay for the Atlantic on what it is like to be overweight in America.
  8. The head of astronomy at Harvard University makes the argument that Oumuamua, a mysterious object that came from outside the solar system, may have been evidence of an “outside force” or, in other words, aliens.
  9. On Motherboard, Joseph Cox writes about giving a bounty hunter $300 to locate a phone, unraveling a world of location data that is packaged and resold without few smartphone users aware of just how exposed they are.
  10. Kashmir Hill, writing for Gizmodo, tells the story of how the American military’s cartographers accidentally ruined the lives of the inhabitants of one house in South Africa.