Sanjay Sipahimalani

People are underestimating the metaphorical implications of this horrific act.

TIL that Isaac Asimov was a big Sherlock Holmes fan, and wrote limericks for each of the canonical stories. Here’s one on ‘Silver Blaze’, which contains the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.

“They have rum in some sort of rum place. It seems like a rum place.” The sort of prose you come across in a Booker-longlisted novel.

(Admittedly, there are reasons for this stylistic flatness, but it gets very mannered very soon.)

A tip for Indian municipal corporations.

(By Drew Dernavich.)

Via theguiltyfeminist/Insta

Quite agree with the marketing professor quoted in the piece below: “You can either say this was ignorance, or this was laziness, or say that this is intentional. Either one of the three aren’t good.”

And then they wonder why people aren’t reading anymore.

Want to Understand Global Inequality? Visit the Dump. Alexander Clapp’s Waste Wars, a world-spanning inquiry into the politics of garbage, makes a case that everything that is wrong with capitalism is embodied in our trash.

Alexander Clapp spent years crisscrossing the globe to follow the international trash trade. His book shows how “garbage is not just an intractable problem of modern capitalism but also an encapsulation of…global inequities”.

www.thenation.com/article/cult...

On Kiran Desai’s Booker-longlisted ‘The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny’, a novel that reportedly took 20 years to write. (Don’t like the title, though: too blunt, too literal.)

J. M. Coetzee’s “Disgrace” @ 25: A Roundtable - Public Books What freshly nuanced perspectives might we bring to the violent late 20th-century history Coetzee describes?

Twenty-five years later, revisiting J.M. Coetzee’s ‘Disgrace’, his most widely-read novel.

www.publicbooks.org/j-m-coetzees...

By Tommy Siegel.

The 2025 Cundill History Prize Longlist | Cundill Prize The jurors have chosen 15 exceptional titles to be longlisted for the 2025 Cundill History Prize.

The 2025 Cundill History Prize Longlist, including Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s ‘Across the Green Sea: Histories from the Western Indian Ocean, 1440–1640’ and Manan Ahmed Asif’s ‘Disrupted City: Walking the Pathways of Memory and History in Lahore’

www.cundillprize.com/news/the-202...

Another blockbuster on the way.

Ladies, villains, or lolitas: How to spot a cliché about women in film In ‘Ladies, Villains and Lolitas,’ film analyst Sandra Miret dissects the cinema that shaped us with a feminist perspective, dismantling stereotypes, clichés and notable absences to make us more criti...

Ladies, villains, Lolitas: “how easy it is for people to limit cinema to mere entertainment, when it has been a faithful companion and perpetrator of the patriarchal system and rape culture.”

english.elpais.com/culture/2025...

Study shows that reporting on public officials, religious matters, and protests were the three most common reasons for which journalists in India faced criminal
charges.

Really liked this immersive novel of art, love, and creativity. Now the Waterstones debut fiction prize winner.

Via @arablit/Insta

What to even say.

Ideological hegemony?

“One must translate the work, not the words on the page.” They are not the same, writes Gary Saul Morson. (With an accompanying list of “strong translations” of Russian classics.)

hedgehogreview.com/issues/lesso...

Speaking Reassurance to Power, by Pankaj Mishra

“The writers crying ‘Je suis Charlie’ in 2015 have not made themselves heard saying ‘Je suis Refaat’.” Pankaj Mishra on the pusillanimity of the American literary-intellectual elite.

harpers.org/archive/2025...

By journalist and illustrator Mona Chalabi.

How economics teaching became the Aeroflot of ideas The discipline is failing students by ignoring the biggest social, political and ecological challenges facing the world today

Ha-Joon Chang: The dominance of neoclassical economics in our university curricula has created a world where we are told there is no alternative—only technical adjustments to a system that is fundamentally fair, rational and efficient. But this is fiction.

www.ft.com/content/9aab...

The African Literature Ecosystem Used to Be Unstoppable. What Went Wrong? | OkayAfrica ​The late 2000s to late 2010s were an era of vibrant publications, literary prizes, and the emergence of incredible literary talents. All that has been replaced with a loss of community and dwindling ...

The African literary ecosystem is experiencing a drawn-out lull, what Kenyan writer and editor Troy Onyango describes as "the silent era." (Via the Literary Saloon.)

www.okayafrica.com/african-lite...

News in India is being erased from the internet - Index on Censorship Journalism critical of the government is vanishing from digital archives, years after it has been published

404 journalism: “Many reporters and editors based in India say media outlets are deliberately erasing or hiding their work amid what they describe as growing pressure from the Indian government to limit reporting critical of its policies.”

www.indexoncensorship.org/2025/07/news...

“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”

- Goethe, ‘Elective Affinities’

The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality Airplane seats are getting smaller and smaller, clothes are unrecognizable after the second wash, and machines now answer our calls. Quality and care for craftsmanship seem to be things of the past

Is everything getting worse?

english.elpais.com/culture/2025...