gender-based discrimination

The importance of sensible politics to good science

Aug 12, 2022 5 min read

Stuart Ritchie writes a newsletter-blog that I quite like, called Science Fictions. On May 30, he published a post on this blog entitled 'Science is political - and that's a bad thing'. I…

Why are the Nobel Prizes still relevant?

Oct 16, 2019 6 min read

Culture Op-eds Science Abhijit Banerjee Albert Einstein Appa Rao Podile Booker Prize Brian Keating Caltech Chien-Shiung Wu CV Raman Esther Duflo Fermilab Göran Hansson gender-based discrimination Hindutva Hugo Award impact factor Isaac Asimov John B Goodenough late capitalism Lise Meitner Margaret Atwood nationalism Nature journal Nobel laureates Nobel Prize prestige bias Prime Minister Narendra Modi sexism The Big Bang Theory Vera Rubin

Note: A condensed version of this post has been published in The Wire. Around this time last week, the world had nine new Nobel Prize winners in the sciences (physics, chemistry and medicine), all bu…

The alleged politicisation of science

Sep 23, 2019 5 min read

Op-eds Science caste-based discrimination Chandrayaan 2 gender-based discrimination ISRO misogyny nationalism Paul Feyerabend politicisation politics privilege pseudoscience rationalism realpolitik religion scientism Tim Hunt

"Don't politicise X" has become the defence of choice for a class of scientists and public intellectuals in India whose class and caste privilege utterly blinds them to various inequitie…