The Blog
Yale, Calico, Cotton Mather etc.
--- In 1687, the city of Madras — today’s Chennai — was in the grip of a devastating famine. The rice crop had failed. British East India Company records from Fort St. George, the white‑walled coastal fortress that served as the Company’s headquarters...
Read MoreDrishyam vs The Devotion of Suspect X
Jeethu Joseph swapped bleak brilliance for emotional intelligence — and created a thriller India couldn’t stop remaking. Every serious movie buff who loved Drishyam has heard the rumor: its plot echoes The Devotion of Suspect X. To my mind, the more interesting question is what...
Read MoreContemporary Tamil Literature 101
The sun can set as late as 8.26 PM in the Boston summer. That evening my mind refused to wind down well after the darkness had set in. The pandemic had upended so many lives in so many ways – a slightly disrupted circadian rhythm...
Read MoreWhy Pregnant Women Don’t Just Topple Over
Yesterday, I ran into my professor and we talked about what else but the local IgNobel ceremony -- an annual event for us here in Cambridge, MA for 34 years -- which will be moving to Europe this fall. My professor mentioned that her husband's...
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Non-Pooped on Statues
April 3, 2004 Fending off annoying birds Asami Nagai / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer When Kanazawa University chemist Yukio Hirose accepted the Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry at Harvard in 2003, he surprised the audience by thanking the pigeons and crows of his hometown. His...
Read MoreThe Cantab Lounge
By Joshua Miller Assistant Metro Editor, Boston Globe A live music and cheap beer kind of summer Thursday. It was after dark and I was standing in a packed Cambridge dive bar. Not any dive bar, mind you. It was the Cantab Lounge, an 87-year-old...
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