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Dilip Kumar, Improbable Tamil Anthologist

Dilip Kumar, Booksellers and Exporters, was the name of the Tamil literary bookstore he ran in Mylapore, Chennai. For over a quarter century, till 2016, research scholars and avid readers dropped in here to discuss books with the genial owner. He shipped books to the...

A Numismatist of Note

Here is how a several centuries-old coin may rewrite a key chapter in the history of ancient India: In 1851, a hoard of gold coins issued by kings from the Gupta dynasty was unearthed near the holy city of Varanasi, in northern India. The...

Curiosity Rover Driver

The first motorized vehicle that Vandi Verma ever operated was a tractor. “I must've been 11 years old at the time,” she told Science. During school vacations, she visited her grandparents, who lived in a village in central India. At their farm, her uncle let...

The Surveyor of Jungles

Priya Davidar grew up in picturesque Ooty, a town in southern India with the misty blue mountains of the Western Ghats, a biodiversity hotspot, as its backdrop. In the 1950s, the family lived in an isolated hillside bungalow, and the babysitter told the children ghost...

Pollinating His Own Science

Even a graduate student working on a pressing, real-world problem needs diversions. Noah Wilson-Rich went to the Topsfield agricultural fair, an annual event in Essex County, Massachusetts and was drawn to the Bee House with its observational hives. Local honey was on sale, and apiarists...

Freedom isn’t free

In the acknowledgements section of NW, her 2012 bestseller, Zadie Smith thanked a computer application called "Freedom" for "creating the time" she needed to finish the book. It may be the highest-profile printed acknowledgment of a computer program in a work of fiction—The New York...