The ginormous, no good, really random post about stuff to read

Coming out of a long, long hiatus to basically clear out my tabs:

A very interesting article from LAT on how hip-hop is gaining ground in the Middle East.se are the kinds of trend stories that are so interesting to read and are for whatever reason not appearing in the Indian media. We’re so insular and so uninterested in this kind of article. It’s a shame.

10 easy steps to write a scary article about cyberattacks. I do think that the author is a bit unfair here, but certainly the media is guilty of many of the crimes he accuses us of. Heck, maybe I’ve been guilty of it too.

An excellent piece in World Affairs on Russia’s coming population crisis. It’s like the opposite of India’s problem, which is that we have too many young people under 35, which could be a bane or a boon.

The always excellent Rebecca Traister weighs in on a rather gross new reality show.

This is a new website I found, which is the best of the crowd.

A fascinating book by Carla Del Ponte, on her struggle to bring justice to the perpetrators of war crimes. She was so important in international justice (the idea) gaining credibility. She’s definitely one of my heroes.

The first chapter of an absolutely fascinating book on how we make decisions.

Joseph Nye weighs in on international relations scholarship and its increasing ivory-towered – ness. This is a real problem with any academia, and in India, IR and policy have very rarely informed each other. The ivory tower syndrome is perhaps at its worst here. Or maybe the problem is not that IR scholars are don’t influence foreign policy, it’s that only one kind of IR scholar influences Indian foreign policy, part of which is because IR instruction in India is loyal to one ideology only.

A really really cool article in Wired by J.J Abrams on the magic of mystery and how spoilers are evil. I’m a spoiler whore, but I appreciate what he’s trying to say here and I do understand that the experience can be frustrating for showrunners, authors etc etc. This almost made me like him again.

I love food writing, and this isn’t precisely that, but it’s close: a history of the fridge and how it has changed not only the food we eat but when and how we eat it.

Two excellent articles from the New York Review of Books: the war against women and what you can learn from Reinhold Neibuhr, one of my favourite authors/thinkers.

The WTF of the day:Google rents goats to replace lawnmowers. The PETA response and then Google's response are worth a read too.