Vijee Venkatraman

Home > Articles by: Vijee Venkatraman

The Download with a map-and-compass guy

Harvard professor John Huth is an experimental particle physicist who was on the team that discovered the Higgs boson. He teaches an undergraduate course on primitive navigation at the university, and is the author of The Lost Art of Finding Our Way. The professor, whose...

Technological Indian

In recent years, India sent a space probe to orbit Mars; Indian-born engineers were named chief executives of two top technology firms in the world. For most of the 20th century, when the very idea of a high-tech India seemed improbable, the foundation was actually...

The Naming of Things

Recently, Amy Tan, author of The Joy Luck Club, was in the news because scientists named a tiny Australian leech after her. “I am thrilled to be immortalized as Chtonobdella tanae,” Tan said. “This humble leech has looped across a new scientific threshold—the first microscopic...

A Library in Jaffna

Shareeq is too young to remember much of the civil war years in Sri Lanka (1983-2009). But for another patron, 75-year-old Rajenthiran Selvanayagam, spending time at the library is a peaceful contrast to that era. He lost his wife to the war. His son went...

TripAdvisor vs Travel Books

Ethan Zuckerman used to be the director of the MIT Center for Civic Media. Before that, the Internet scholar co-founded GlobalVoicesOnline.org, a site to help guide readers through the maze of citizen journalism from several countries. He is the author of Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in...

The Download with An Old-Fashioned Novelist

Allegra Goodman is a novelist who lives in Cambridge, MA. She is married to David Karger, a professor at MIT. She is a mother of four. She uses a computer to write, but she prints out the draft, and edits by hand. Then, she types...