Longreads

On the evening of December the thirty-first, two thousand & twelve, I was busy being a hermit and cooking dinner. Unlike the previous year, we’d decided to stay away from the hours-long…

Like every couple, my husband and I transitioned from the honeymoon stage to the reality stage, complete with arguments about toothpaste tubes and dishwasher loading.  Our ideas of what should…

A demonstrator shouting from a bus after she was detained by police in New Delhi in December. Thousands turned out to demand justice for a young woman who was raped and killed on a moving bus. NEW…

This article was commissioned by Bitcoin Weekly, which ultimately decided to not run it1; it is based on my experiences May-June 2011, and may be out-dated. “Trust, but verify.” The…

[Sci-fi, Fiction] A man comes home from a war transformed:

"Her husband’s hands came home on a Friday. Rebecca had received word of the attack, which had claimed the lives of seven other soldiers in his unit and reduced three others to similar, minimal fractions of themselves: One man missing above the waist, another missing below, a third neatly halved, like a bisected man on display in an anatomy lab.

"The Veteran’s Administration had told her it could have been worse. The notification officer had reminded her of Tatum, the neighbor’s daughter so completely expunged by her own moment under fire that only a strip of skin and muscle remained: A section of her thigh, about the size and shape of a cigarette pack, returned to her parents in a box and now living in their upstairs room, where it made a living proofreading articles on the internet. That’s no life, the notification officer said."

Every 22 minutes. The statistic of reported rapes in India. Ponder that. Once every 22 minutes. More frequently than you probably drink a glass of water. So ordinary, everyday. Everywhere. In homes,…

Taslima Nasreen recently wrote an article calling for the abolishment of prostitution: Sex Slavery Must be Abolished While Taslima Nasreen and I both share a concern for human rights and I have…

To many policymakers Gross National Happiness doesn't sound like a serious framework to measure progress by, says Swarna Rajagopalan. But isn’t it the welfare state alone which has the…

Medical school began with a series of “introduction to medicine” lectures. One of them was on communication, taught by the same professor who introduced us to medical ethics. In the…