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The New Breed

BEFORE dawn, a Roomba sweeps the floor in my home in Boston. Suckubus (as we call it) can get tangled up with shoelaces or carpet tassels and need rescuing. At the local grocery store, a robot called Marty patrols looking for spills, summoning employees loudly...

Cat in the Agraharam

The wealth of contemporary Tamil literature has always been just out of reach for readers like me who speak the mother tongue well enough but tend to stumble over the printed word. But you don't need Tamil roots to appreciate this new collection of translated...

Coded Bias

IN HER first semester as a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab, Joy Buolamwini encountered a peculiar problem. Commercial face-recognition software, which detected her light-skinned classmates just fine, couldn’t “see” her face. Until, that is, she donned a white plastic mask in frustration. Coded Bias is...

Girl, Decoded

As she sat in a taxi headed to Cairo International Airport in September 2001, Rana el Kaliouby remembers thinking, “Am I really going through with this?” A married woman and hijab-wearing Muslim, she would be on her own for the next 3 years, pursuing her...

The Alladi Diary

On a balmy winter’s day in 1954, Paul Dirac a Nobel Laureate in physics gave a general lecture at the Senate House in the University of Madras. The hall was packed. Outside, people sat in their cars, as if they were at a drive-in cinema,...

Chemistry was their life

Suggest to a present-day high school student in Bangalore who is interested in chemistry that she should not have the same professional ambitions as a boy in her class and she will likely laugh right in your face. Today, in most countries of the world,...