Weekend reads

  1. To call for the overthrow of a stale and fearful social system is not sedition. It is democracy, says Neera Chandhoke in The Hindu after the Delhi police decided to chargesheet several Jawaharlal Nehru University students for sedition.   
  2. The Right To Education Amendment Bill, recently passed in Rajya Sabha, has again triggered the periodic debate between anti-detentionists – votaries of No-Detention Policy – and detentionists, writes Rohit Dhankar in Indian Express. 
  3. The devastating earthquake that struck Nepal in 2015 may not have released all the tectonic tension in the Himalayas. The region could witness a deadlier temblor soon, reports Maya Wei Haas in National Geographic. 
  4.   In a democratic system governed by rule of law where non-arbitrariness is an essential attribute, no single individual in the constitutional scheme of this country, whether the Chief Justice of India or the Prime Minister has absolute discretion, argues senior lawyer CS Vaidhyanathan in Livelaw. 
  5. In this piece on Longreads, Dorothy Butler Gilliam remembers how exciting it was to integrate The Washington Post, but also how lonely – and often attacked – she felt as the first black woman reporter in the newsroom. 
  6. In this interview to Indian Express, ISRO chief Dr K Sivan talks on why the human space flight programme is important for science. He says humanoids cannot do the entire job because in some places the decision-making process can be carried out by humans alone. 
  7.   Brexit is just the vehicle by which a fractured state has come to realise that its politics are no longer fit for purpose, writes Fintan O’ Toole in Guardian on the crisis the United Kingdom is currently facing.   
  8. In Gizmodo, Kashmir Hill reports on how cartographers for the United States, who made designations on maps and in databases without thinking about the real-world places and people they represented, inadvertently created a house of horrors in South Africa. 
  9.   After many false springs and discouraging backlashes, we are finally experiencing a revolutionary assertion of women’s power that is transforming the US Congress, argues Maureen Dowd on the rise of a new generation of women legislators in the Democratic party.  
  10. In a three-cornered race in a first-past-the-post system such as India’s, the regional parties will stay relevant only if there isn’t too much gap between the other two groupings or parties – in terms of seat share, and strike rate. In 2014, there was, says this piece on Hindustan Times.