Tag: The New York Times

The universe’s shape and its oldest light

The 3-torus is a strange and wonderful shape. We can’t readily visualise it because it has a complicated structure, but there’s a way. Imagine you’re standing inside a cube in which light is moving from the left face towards the right face. If the two faces are opaque, the right face will absorb the light, say, and that will be that. But say the two faces are not opaque. Instead, if the light passes through the right face and reemerges from the left face — as if it entered a portal and emerged on the other side — you’ll be standing inside a 3-torus.

If you look in front of you or behind you, you’ll see a series of cubes: they’re all the same cube (the one in which you’re standing) illuminated by the light, which is simply flowing in a closed loop through a single cube. In the early 1980s, physicists proposed that our universe could have the shape of a 3-torus at the largest scale. “There’s a hint in the data that if you traveled far and fast in the direction of the constellation Virgo, you’d return to Earth from the opposite direction,” a 2003 The New York Times article quoted cosmologist Max Tegmark as saying. The idea is funky but it’s possible. Scientists believe our universe’s geometry was determined by quantum processes that happened just after the Big Bang, but they’re not yet sure what that geometry really is. For now, the data are not inconsistent with a 3-torus, according to a paper a team of scientists calling themselves the COMPACT collaboration published in April 2024.

Scientists try to determine the shape of the universe just the way you would have standing inside the 3-torus: using light, and what it’s revealing ahead and behind you. Light passing through a 3-torus would be in a closed loop, which means the visual information it encodes should be repeated: that is, you would’ve seen the same cube repeated ad infinitum, sort of (but not exactly) like when you stand between two mirrors and see endless repetition of the space you’re in on either side. Scientists check for similar patterns that are repeated through the universe. They haven’t found such patterns so far — but there’s a catch. The distance light has travelled matters.

Say the cube you’re standing in is 1 km wide. The light will cross this distance in one-trillionth of a second. If it is 777 billion km wide, the light will take a month. And it will take a full year if the cube is 9.5 trillion km wide. We’re talking about whether the universe could be a 3-torus, and the universe was created 13.8 billion years ago. In this time, light can travel a distance of more than 100 sextillion km. If the width of the cube is less than this distance, we might have seen repeating patterns if the universe is shaped like a 3-torus. But if the cube is even wider, the light wouldn’t have finished crossing it even once since the universe was born, therefore no repeating patterns — yet the possibility of the universe being 3-torus-shaped remains. We just need to wait for the light to finish crossing it once.

Since we can learn so much about the universe’s geometry by studying light, and light that’s travelled the longest would be most useful, scientists are very interested in light ‘left over’ from the Big Bang. Yes, this light is still hanging around, and it’s measurably different from all the other light. Scientists call it the cosmic microwave background (CMB), a.k.a. ‘relic radiation’. It’s left over from a cosmic event that happened just 370,000 years after the Big Bang. We need to subtract the distance light could have travelled in this time from the 100 sextillion km figure (I’m tired of looking at zeroes; you can give it a shot if you like) to find the maximum distance the CMB could have travelled.

In its April paper, the COMPACT collaboration considered data about the universe that astrophysicists have collected using ground and space telescopes over the years — including about the CMB — and with that have checked whether the possibility still exists that our universe could be shaped like three types of a 3-torus. The first type is the one I’ve considered in this post, and they’ve concluded (as expected) that if the cube is less wide than the distance light could’ve travelled since the universe was born, our universe can’t be shaped like this particular 3-torus. The reason is that the data astrophysicists have put together doesn’t contain signs of repeating patterns.

(Update, 8.20 pm, June 23, 2024: Here’s a good primer of what these patterns will actually look like, courtesy Nirmal Raj.)

However, the COMPACT team adds, our universe could still be shaped like one of the other two types of 3-tori even if their respective cubes are smaller than the max. distance. This is because these two shapes include twists that will produce two subtly different images of the universe once the light has completed one loop. And according to the COMPACT folks, they can’t yet eliminate the presence of these images in the astrophysics data. The collaboration’s members have written in the April 2024 paper that they intend to find new/better ways to ascertain their hypotheses with CMB data.

Until then, look out for… déjà vu?

Marginalia: On NewsClick, NYT, toolkits, etc.

The Bharatiya Janata Party in power in India knows that the process is the punishment, that the amount of punishment imposed depends on the law invoked in the chargesheet, and that no law is as ripe for misuse in this regard as the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) 1967. In fact, simply invoking the law and using the police to intimidate, arrest, and harass may be the state’s goal, rather than the eventual verdict itself, which is also unlikely to be in the state’s favour.

The latest recipients of this form of the state’s justice have been the news organisation NewsClick and its employees, including editor-in-chief Prabir Purkayastha. Even getting bail under (UAPA) is difficult because the Act locks away the conditions that need to be met to secure bail in a cage of vague statements, all of which a committed state can interpret to suit its agenda.

NewsClick has been accused of funding terror and its editor of conspiring to redraw India’s sovereign borders. During the police raids of NewsClick‘s employees and office that preceded the arrests, journalists also said that they were asked if they had covered and/or commented on social media platforms on the Citizenship (Amendment) Act 2019 and the three farm laws in 2020-2021.

So using the excuse of the The New York Times article, whose careless journalism opened a big hole for the Indian government to crawl through, the state initiated the raids; using the UAPA’s repurposable provisions, the state arrested NewsClick‘s journalists, seized their phones, laptops, and whatever other records were kept at its office, and kept them in the dark; and using the opportunity to deploy the police as an excuse, the state intimidated the journalists into sharing something – anything – that would allow the police to build even a minimally legitimate case.

This is the same template the police followed after BJP IT cell chief Amit Malviya filed cheating and defamation cases against The Wire for its Meta reports, based on which the police raided the houses of people not even named on the FIR and seized The Wire‘s human-resources and financial records and its employees’ personal information.

This is the toolkit: Find a hole, crawl in, seize everything, try to build a case, and extend police custody.

Kavita Krishnan had an insightful article in Scroll yesterday about how the The New York Times wished to quote her on its original story – casting suspicion on the business and political ties of Neville Roy Singham, whose company is NewsClick‘s chief investor – and why she declined, followed by the newspaper quoting her in a story about the raids without sufficient context.

Importantly, Krishnan wrote that The New York Times construed her having written for NewsClick as her having “links to NewsClick” (the sort of clandestine leap we’ve been accustomed to hearing only from establishment devotees in India so far); that it chose to name only NewsClick among all the news organisations it claimed could have been compromised by Singham’s investment; and the fact that it implied that NewsClick could be kowtowing to Chinese interests because it published a video about how China’s working class continues to be inspired by the country’s history.

The frailty of the threads holding together the NewsClick parts of the The New York Times report became more apparent when Neville’s investing company’s lawyer told The Hindu the following: “The New York Times failed to include PSF’s categorical denial of foreign funding, and instead left readers to believe that the source of PSF’s funding (or Mr. Singham’s for that matter) might have come from China, rather than from the sale of ThoughtWorks.”

Whatever the merits of the rest of the article, the parts that affected NewsClick show parachute journalism at its worst. That the BJP weaponised the article is not the The New York Times‘s fault; it was that the report was weaponisable at all. And it’s the latest in a line of objectionable work by the newspaper, including during the pandemic and vis-à-vis ISRO: see here, here, here, here, here, and here, among others.

NYT’s ISRO coverage continues assault on sense

The New York Times refuses to learn, perpetuating views of ISRO that are equal parts blurry and illiterate, and often missing points that become clearer with just a little bit of closer reading. The launch and subsequent success of Chandrayaan 3 brought its annoying gaze the way of India and its space programme, about which it published at least one article whose interpretation was at odds with reality. But for the newspaper’s stubbornness, and unmindful of the impact it has on the minds of its large audience in India, pushback is important, even just a little, when and where possible. This is another such attempt. On August 24, the day after the Chandrayaan 3 lander module descended on the moon’s surface in the south polar region, The New York Times published an article trying to tie the mission’s success with India’s ascendancy aspirations. Annotated excerpts follow:

Meet frugality porn – when this style of administration and work is exalted without acknowledging the restrictions it imposes. We see more of it in the coming paragraphs.

It’s amusing how this question – once rightly derided as superficial – has of late come to be legitimised in articles by the BBC and now The New York Times.

Just one ISRO success and this is the crap we need to deal with. What “deeply rooted tradition”? What “pillar” of India’s rise? Name one field of research and I will point you to articles discussing deep-seated problems in it, ranging from paucity of funds for research to academic freedom, from shortcomings in research infrastructure and environments that are overcome almost entirely by enterprising researchers going out of their way to help others to bureaucratic and government interference that vitiates the uptake of research findings in the public sphere. If anything, the article suggests that the blueprint India is offering other nations is: “Get one pretty important moon mission right and the world’s most read newspaper will pretend that you have arisen, to the ignorance of very real, very bad problems.”

a) The governments of India and the US have allocated to ISRO and NASA similar fractions of their national budgets. b) Scientists are paid much better in the US than in India, at all levels, after adjusting for differences in purchasing power. c) NASA operates one of the world’s best public outreach efforts for a state-run entity while ISRO has no such department. The “potent message” that The New York Times is tooting is, in sum, hard to understand and potentially dangerous.

This is the same Modi who thought it best to plaster his portrait on all vaccination certificates (instead of photos of the respective vaccinees) but refused to investigate the Adani Group after Hindenburg’s allegations, who didn’t utter a peep about the incidents of brutal violence in Delhi, Hathras, Manipur or Nuh but whose giant face appeared on the screen about to show the last few – and most important – seconds of the Chandrayaan 3 lander’s descent on the moon’s surface, sending almost every viewer nationwide into paroxysms of rage. I’m not sure of the purpose of describing him in such positive terms vis-à-vis his communication.

The outcome of the Chandrayaan 3 mission created something that has become extremely rare in India since 2014: a success that could be celebrated sans any reservations. But it didn’t prove a way to overcome the “fiercely fractious politics”; in fact, it became yet another point – among the extant thousands – over which to deepen divisions and render impotent the effects of public debate on governance. In fact, absolutely every major national success since 2014 has been used to fuel the fire that is the “fiercely fractious politics”. And again, I fail to see these resources that India “is finally getting”.

Get a historian of science and technology in India since independence – i.e. someone who studies these things closely, going beyond appearances to examine the effects of scientific and/or technological development and practices on all classes of society – to say the same thing, and then we’ll talk. Until then, spare me the superficial and status-quoist reading of the place of science in India. Some suggested reading here, here, and here.

Finally, an acknowledgment of the problem with “frugality” and “shoestring” budgets, yet not nearly in the same context. And the second highlighted line is either a bald-faced fabrication or a reluctance to acknowledge reality: that scientists have been discouraged, silenced and/or harassed when their work is something a) that the state doesn’t know how to integrate into its nationalist narratives, b) that disputes, negates or complicates something whose public understanding the state would like to control but isn’t able to, or c) that the state simply cares little for.

The highlighted portion? True everywhere, all the time. Commendable, but not special.

You’ve got to be kidding me. Here we have The New York Times reviving the desiccated corpse of the beast that so many laboured to kill and bury: the comparison of ISRO’s Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) with the 2013 film Gravity and, by implication, NASA’s MAVEN mission. MOM was a technology demonstrator that cost Rs 454 crore (around $57 million), and whose scientific results did little to advance humankind’s understanding of Mars. Its principal accomplishment is that it got into orbit around Mars. MAVEN cost $582.5 million, or Rs 3,410.53 crore (assuming a conversion rate of Rs 58.55 to a dollar in 2013). For that its scientific output was orders of magnitude more notable than that from MOM.

As for Gravity: I’ve never understood this comparison. The film cost $80-130 million to make, according to Wikipedia; that’s 468.40-761.15 crore rupees. So what? Gattaca cost $36 million and Interstellar cost $165 million. Moon cost $5 million and Into Darkness cost $185 million. Can someone explain the comparison to me and actually have it make sense?

This is the note on which the article ends, which matters because what goes here has the privilege of delivering a psychologically impactful blow, and the writer (and/or editor) has to be careful to choose something for this portion whose blow will line up with the whole article’s overarching message. I’m disappointed that The New York Times picked this because it’s of a piece with the same casteist and classist politics and policies that, for India’s non-elite hundreds-of-millions, have disconnected “working hard” from financial, educational, biomedical, and social success even while keeping up the myth of the wholesomely gainful productivity.

Is Dias bringing the bus back?

So Physical Review Letters formally retracted that paper about manganese sulphide, in the limelight for having been coauthored by Ranga P. Dias, yesterday. The retraction notice states: “Of the authors on the original paper, R. Dias stands by the data in Fig. 1(b) and does not agree to retract the Letter.” Figure 1(b) is reproduced below.

The problem with the second plot is that its curves reportedly resemble some in Dias’s doctoral thesis from 2013, in which he had examined the same properties of germanium tetraselenide, a different kind of material. Curves can look the same to the extent that they can have the same overall shape; it’s a problem when they also reproduce the little variations that are a result of the specific material synthesised for a particular experiment and the measurements made on that day.

That Dias is the only person objecting to the retraction is interesting because it means one of his coaouthors, Ashkan Salamat, agreed to it. Salamat heads a lab in the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, that’s been implicated in the present controversy. Earlier this year, well after Physical Review Letters said it was looking into the allegations against the manganese sulphide paper, Scientific American reported:

Salamat has since responded, suggesting that even though the two data sets may appear similar, the resemblance is not indicative of copied data. “We’ve shown that if you just overlay other people’s data qualitatively, a lot of things look the same,” he says. “This is a very unfair approach.”

Physical Review Letters also accused Salamat of attempting to obstruct its investigation after it found that the raw data he claimed to have submitted of the group’s experiments wasn’t in fact the raw data. Since then, Salamat may well have changed his mind to avoid more hassle or in deference to the majority opinion, but I’m still curious if he could have changed his mind because he no longer thought the criticisms to be unfair.

Anyway, Dias is in the news because he’s made some claims in the past about having found room-temperature superconductors. A previous paper was retracted in September 2022, two years after it was published and independent researchers found some problems in the data. He had another paper published in March this year, reporting room-temperature but high-pressure superconductivity in nitrogen-doped lutetium hydride. This paper courted controversy because Dias et al. refused to share samples of the material so independent scientists could double-check the team’s claim.

Following the retraction, The New York Times asked Dias what he had to say, and his reply seems to bring back the bus under which principal investigators (PIs) have liked to throw their junior colleagues at signs of trouble in the past:

[He] has maintained that the paper accurately portrays the research findings. However, he said on Tuesday that his collaborators, working in the laboratory of Ashkan Salamat, a professor of physics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, introduced errors when producing charts of the data using Adobe Illustrator, software not typically used to make scientific charts.

“Any differences in the figure resulting from the use of Adobe Illustrator software were unintentional and not part of any effort to mislead or obstruct the peer review process,” Dr. Dias said in response to questions about the retraction. He acknowledged that the resistance measurements in question were performed at his laboratory in Rochester.

He’s saying that his lab made the measurements at the University of Rochester and sent the data to Salamat’s lab at the University of Nevada, where someone else (or elses) introduced errors using Adobe Illustrator – presumably while visualising the data, but even then Illustrator is a peculiar choice – and these errors caused the resulting plot to resemble one in Dias’s doctoral thesis. Hmm.

The New York Times also reported that after refusing in the past to investigate Dias’s work following allegations of misconduct, the University of Rochester has now launched an investigation “by outside experts”. The university doesn’t plan to release their report of the findings, however.

But even if the “outside experts” conclude that Dias didn’t really err and that, honestly, Salamat’s lab in Las Vegas was able to introduce very specific kinds of errors in what became figure 1(b), Dias must be held accountable for being one of the PIs of the study – a role whose responsibilities arguably include not letting tough situations devolve into finger-pointing.

NYT’s profile of India’s space startup scene

The New York Times published a ‘profile’ of the Indian spaceflight startup scene on July 4. The article is typical in that: a) by virtue of being published by one of the world’s most-read news outlets, it can only be a big boost to the actors in its narrative, in this case a few Indian startups; and b) it takes a superficial outside-in view that flattens complex issues and misses finer points that, to local observers, would change the meanings of some sentences in important ways.

By and large, the article seems like a swing in the opposite direction from that distasteful cartoon in 2014 – even if there is still that note of surprise, and that fixation on ISRO doing things at a lower cost, overlooking that it has not infrequently come at the expense of lower efficiency on many fronts. Then again, the article’s protagonists are the space startups, and I’m sincerely excited about their work.

In this post, I want to point out one issue that I think The New York Times could have fixed before publishing: the word “heavy” has been used in a confusing way in the article even if it’s been used only twice. First (emphasis added):

As ISRO … makes room for new private players, it shares with them a profitable legacy. Its spaceport, on the coastal island of Sriharikota, is near the Equator and suitable for launches into different orbital levels. The government agency’s “workhorse” rocket is one of the world’s most reliable for heavy loads. With a success rate of almost 95 percent, it has halved the cost of insurance for a satellite — making India one of the most competitive launch sites in the world.

In the launch-vehicle sector, the word ‘heavy’ has a specific meaning and can’t be used directly in its colloquial sense. The “workhorse” referred to here is obviously the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV), which, like the Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV), is classified as a medium-lift launch vehicle. ‘Medium-lift’ means being able to lift 2-20 tonnes to the low-earth orbit (LEO). This in turn implies that the article’s (first) use of “heavy” means just colloquially heavy. The second use creates the confusion (emphasis added):

It was Elon Musk who stole India’s — and the world’s — thunder on the space business. His company, SpaceX, and its relaunchable rockets brought down the cost of sending heavy objects into orbit so much that India could not compete. Even today, from American spaceports at $6,500 per kilogram, SpaceX’s launches are the cheapest anywhere.

One could think that since both the PSLV and SpaceX’s reusable launch vehicle, Falcon 9, lift “heavy” payloads, they have the same capacity, affirmed by the line that SpaceX stole India’s thunder. This is not true: Falcon 9 (in the Block 5 configuration currently in use) can lift 22.8 tonnes to the LEO and 8.3 tonnes to the higher geostationary transfer orbit; the PSLV can manage only 1.4 tonnes to the latter.

A clarifying quote follows:

“We are more like a cab,” Mr. Chandana [of Skyroot] said. His company charges higher rates for smaller-payload launches, whereas SpaceX “is more like a bus or a train, where they take all their passengers and put them in one destination,” he said.

Given the masses involved, the PSLV was always a “cab” compared to the Falcon 9. In fact, ISRO is currently working on its own reusable launch vehicle with a payload capacity of around 20 tonnes to the LEO and an expected mass-to-orbit cost of $4,000/kg, down from around $20,000 today. This thing, whenever it is ready, will create an actual opportunity for thunder-stealing on either side (it has already been considerably delayed).

There are many other niggles that, as I said, I won’t get into, but I must say that I’m very curious why “pharmaceuticals” has been singled out here, together with “information technology”:

An image of India’s first satellite graced the two-rupee note until 1995. Then for a while India paid less attention to its space ambitions, with young researchers focused on more tangible developments in information technology and pharmaceuticals. Now India is not only the world’s most populous country but also its fastest-growing large economy and a thriving center of innovation.

What is this secret revolution that I’ve missed, a revolution that, by implication, contributed to the country’s economic position today? Perhaps it’s generic drugs – but it pales in comparison to the growth of the IT sector and there has been no indication that it was led by “young researchers”. So, curious…

The strange NYT article on taming minks

I’m probably waking up late to this but the New York Times has published yet another article in which it creates a false balance by first focusing on the problematic side of a story for an inordinately long time, without any of the requisite qualifications and arguments, before jumping, in the last few paragraphs to one or two rebuttals that reveal, for the first time, that there could in fact be serious problems with all that came before.

The first instance was about a study on the links between one’s genes and facial features. The second is a profile of a man named Joseph Carter who tames minks. The article is headlined ‘How ‘the Most Vicious, Horrible Animal Alive’ Became a YouTube Star’. You’d think minks are “vicious” and “horrible” because they’re aggressive or something like that, but no – you discover the real reason all the way down in paragraph #12:

“Pretty much everyone I asked, they told me the same thing — ‘They’re the most vicious, horrible animal alive,’” Mr. Carter said. “‘They’re completely untamable, untrainable, and it doesn’t really matter what you do.’”

So, in 2003, he decided that he would start taming mink. He quickly succeeded.

Putting such descriptors as “vicious” and “horrible” in single-quotes in the headline doesn’t help if those terms are being used – by unnamed persons, to boot – to mean minks are hard to tame. That just makes them normal. But the headline’s choice of words (and subsequently the refusal by the first 82% (by number of paragraphs) of the piece to engage with the issue) gives the impression that the newspaper is going to ignore that. A similar kind of dangerous ridiculousness emerges further down the piece, with no sense of irony:

“You can’t control, you can’t change the genetics of an individual,” he said. “But you can, with the environment, slightly change their view of life.”

Why do we need to change minks’ view of anything? Right after, the article segues to a group of researchers at a veterinary college in London, whose story appears to supply the only redeeming feature of Carter’s games with minks: the idea that in order to conduct their experiments with minks, the team would have to design more challenging tasks with higher rewards than they were handing out. Other than this, there’s very little to explain why Carter does what he does.

There’s a flicker of an insight when a canal operator says Carter helps them trap the “muskrats, rats, raccoons and beavers” that erode the canal’s banks. There’s another flicker when the article says Carter buys “many of his animals” from fur farms, where the animals are killed before they’re a year old when in fact they could live to three, as they do with Carter. Towards the very end, we learn, Carter also prays for his minks every night.

So he’s saving them in the sort of way the US saves other countries?

It’s hard to say when he’s also setting out to tame these animals to – as the article seems to suggest – see if he can succeed. In fact, the article is so poorly composed and structured that it’s hard to say if the story it narrates is a faithful reflection of Carter’s sensibilities or if it’s just lazy writing. We never find out if Carter has ever considered ‘rescuing’ these animals and releasing them into the wild or if he has considered joining experts and activists fighting to have the animal farms shut. We only have the vacuous claim that is Carter’s belief that he’s giving them a “new life”.

The last 18% of the article also contains a few quotes that I’d call weak for not being sharp enough to poke more holes in Carter’s views, at least as the New York Times seems to relay them. There is one paragraph citing a 2001 study about what makes mink stressed and another about the welfare of Carter’s minks being better than those that are caged in the farms. But the authors appear to have expended no sincere effort to link them together vis-à-vis Carter’s activities.

In fact, there is a quote by a scientist introduced to rationalise Carter’s views: “It’s like any thoroughbred horse, or performance animal — or birds of prey who go out hunting. If asked, they probably would prefer to hunt.” Wouldn’t you think that if they were asked, and if they could provide an answer that we could understand, they would much rather be free of all constraints rather than being part of Carter’s circus?

There is also a dubious presumption here that creates a false choice – between being caged in a farm and being tamed by a human: that the minks ought to be grateful because some humans are choosing to stress them less, instead of not stress them whatsoever. Whether a mink might be killed by predators or have a harder time finding food in the wild, if it is released, is completely irrelevant.

Then comes the most infuriating sentence of the lot, following the scientist’s quote: “Mr. Carter has his own theories.” Not ideas or beliefs but theories. Because scientists’ theories, tested as they need to be against our existing body of knowledge and with experiments designed to eliminate even inadvertent bias, are at least semantically equivalent to Carter’s “own theories”, founded on his individual need for self-justification and harmony with the saviour complex.

And then the last paragraph:

“Animals don’t have ethics,” he said. “They have sensation, they can feel pain, they have the ability to learn, but they don’t have ethics. That’s a human thing.”

I don’t know how to make sense of it, other than with the suspicion that the authors and/or editors grafted these lines to the bottom because they sounded profound.

What makes ‘good science journalism’?

From ‘Your Doppelgänger Is Out There and You Probably Share DNA With Them’, The New York Times, August 23, 2022:

Dr. Esteller also suggested that there could be links between facial features and behavioral patterns, and that the study’s findings might one day aid forensic science by providing a glimpse of the faces of criminal suspects known only from DNA samples. However, Daphne Martschenko, a postdoctoral researcher at the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics who was not involved with the study, urged caution in applying its findings to forensics.

There are two big problems here: 1) Esteller’s comment is at the doorstep of eugenics, and 2) the reporter creates a false balance by reporting both Esteller’s comment and Martschenko’s rebuttal to that comment, when in fact the right course of action would’ve been to drop this portion entirely, as well as take a closer look at why Esteller et al. conducted the study in the first place and whether the study paper and other work at the Esteller lab is suspect.

This said, it’s a bit gratifying (in a bad way) when a high-stature foreign news publication like The New York Times makes a dangerous mistake in a science-related story. Millions of people are misinformed, which sucks, but when independent scientists and other readers publicly address these mistakes, their call-outs create an opportunity for people (though not as many as are misinformed) to understand exactly what is wrong and, more importantly from the PoV of readers in India, that The New York Times also makes mistakes, that it isn’t a standard-bearer of good science journalism and that being good is a constant and diverse process.

1) “NYT also makes mistakes” is important to know if only to dispel the popular and frustrating perception that “all American news outlets are individually better than all Indian news outlets”. I had to wade through a considerable amount of this when I started at The Hindu a decade ago – at the hands of most readers as well as some colleagues. I still face this in a persistent way in the form of people who believe some article in The Atlantic is much better than an article on the same topic in, say, The Wire Science, for few, if any, reasons beyond the quality of the language. But of course this will always set The Atlantic and The Wire Science and its peers in India apart: English isn’t the first language for many of us – yet it seldom gets in the way of good storytelling. In fact, I’ve often noticed American publications in particular to be prone to oversimplification more often than their counterparts in Europe or, for that matter, in India. In my considered (but also limited) view, the appreciation of science stories is also a skill, and the population that aspires to harbour it in my country is often prone to the Dunning-Kruger effect.

2) “NYT isn’t a standard-bearer of good science journalism” is useful to know because of the less-than-straightforward manner in which publications acquire a reputation for “good science journalism”. Specifically, publications aren’t equally good at covering all branches of scientific study; some are better in some fields and others are at some others. Getting your facts right, speaking to all the relevant stakeholders and using sensitive language will get you 90% of the way, but you can tell the differences between publications by how well they cover the remaining 10%, which comes from beat knowledge, expertise and having the right editors.

3) “Being good is a constant and diverse process” – ‘diverse’ because of the previous point and ‘constant’ because, well, that’s how it is. It’s not that our previous work doesn’t keep us in good standing but that we shouldn’t overestimate how much that standing counts for. This is especially so in this age of short attention spans, short-lived memories and the subtle but pervasive encouragement to be hurtful towards others on the internet. “Good science journalism” is a tag we need to get by getting every single story right – and in this sense, you, the reader, are better off not doling out lifetime awards to outlets. Instead, understand that no outlet is going to be uniformly excellent at all times and evaluate each story on its own merits. This way, you’ll also create an opportunity for Indian news outlets to be free of the tyranny of unrealistic expectations and even surprise you now and then with excellence of our own.

Finally, none of this is to say that these mistakes happen. They shouldn’t and they’re entirely preventable. Instead, it’s a reminder to keep your eyes peeled at all times and not just when you’re reading an article produced by an Indian outlet.

The climate change of bad news

This post flows a bit like the 1987 film Full Metal Jacket. As one friend put it, “It starts somewhere and then goes in a different direction.”

This year hasn’t been beset by the same old steady drizzle of bad news we have every year – but has borne the brunt of cyclonic storms, each one distinctively episodic and devastating. The latest of these storms is l’affair Rukmini Callimachi. To the uninitiated: Callimachi is a reporter with the NYT who shot to fame from 2015 or so onwards for her inside reports of the Islamic Caliphate; she later dramatised her efforts to produce these stories in a podcast called Caliphate. And in this time, she raked up four Pulitzer Prize nominations (although I don’t set much store by prizes in general).

I haven’t read or listened to her work, so when a friend shared a link to the NYT’s own report, by its media columnist Ben Smith, discussing the charges against Callimachi and their newfound, but evidently delayed, efforts to reevaluate her work, I wasn’t guilty of not having criticised her myself. (If you think this is a tall order: the headline of Jacob Silverman’s review of this storm for The New Republic describes, in a few words, how quickly her house of cards seems to fall down.)

However, these days, a successful journalist is two things: she is the producer of stories that have changed the world, and which continue to live lives of their own, and she is a role-model of sorts. Her output and her resolve represent what is possible if only one tried. An even greater example of such work is that of the journalists at the Miami Herald – especially Julie Brown – who exposed Jeffrey Epstein and brought on, among other changes, a reckoning at various universities around the US that had knowingly accepted his money and overtures.

But now, with Callimachi’s articles seemingly teetering on the brink of legitimacy, both the things she stood for are on the edge as well. First, the good thing: her stories, which – if Smith’s account is to be believed – Callimachi seems to have composed in her head before moving in to report them, often, if not always, with the spiritual and material support of many of NYT’s senior editors. Second, the bad: her legacy, such as it is – erected as a façade at which we could all marvel, at least those of us who unquestioningly placed our faith and hope in the greatness of another. This is the guilt I feel, a fractured reflection of what Callimachi’s coverage of the Islamic Caliphate at the NYT is itself going through right now.

However, I will also be quick to shed this guilt because I insist that as much as I’m tasked – by my employer, but the zeitgeist, so to speak – to be wary, cautious, skeptical, to fact-check, fact-check, fact-check, to maintain cupfuls of salt at hand so I’m never taken for a ride, just as much as I’m behooved to stand on guard, I’m also fortifying an increasingly small, and increasingly precious, garden in a corner of my mind, a place away from the bad news that I can visit in my daydreams, where I can recoup some hope and optimism. Today, the winds of l’affair Callimachi blew away her articles and podcasts from this place.

Make no mistake, I will still call out everything that deserves to be called out: from the multiple red-flags Silverman spotlighted to the anti-oriental undertones of Callimachi’s methods, of her claims and even of the self-recrimination bubbling up around her, to a lot of which Rafia Zakaria has (repeatedly) called attention. I’m only saddened, for now, by the unstoppable eradication of all that is good, such as it is, and by the guilt for my part in it. As a political being, in this moment I deem this march upon ignorance to be necessary, but as a human one, it is deeply, and to my mind unforeseeably, exacting. A cognitive dissonance for the times, I suppose, although I’m sure I will cope soon enough.

Fortunately, perhaps in a counterintuitive sense, the Callimachi episode is personally not very hard to recover from. While it is true that what Callimachi and her collaborators have (still largely allegedly) done is quite different from, say, what Jonah Lehrer did, they were both motivated by a common sin: to print what could be instead of what is (and even these words might be too strong). More specifically, reporting on war brings with it its own seductions, many of them quite powerful, to the extent that some – as Zakaria implied in her piece for The Baffler – may choose to believe Callimachi et al’s failings are still the failings of an institution vis-à-vis conflict journalism. But no, the problem is pervasive.

However, looking on this shitshow from not-so-distant India, two bells have been quick to go off. First, this is very old wine in a new bottle, in which, to borrow Zakaria’s words, “the greed for catching terrorists” is pressed into the service of making “white journalists’ careers”; you could replace ‘terrorists’ with anything else that has been touched, at any point in its history, by a colonist or invader. Also read Priyanka Borpujari’s 2019 essay in the Columbia Journalism Review, in which she writes:

The title ‘foreign correspondent’ has long been synonymous with whiteness, maleness, and imperialism—journalists fly in from North America, Europe, and Australia to cover the poverty and wars of the non-Western world. In recent years, a push for diversity has meant that more women are pursuing stories in what was once the domain of men—conflict zones and fractured democracies—or in traditionally private female spaces. But the opportunities for journalists in non-Western nations to tell their own stories in international outlets have not been as great. Overwhelmingly, foreign reportage still relies on a model of Western, and largely white, reporters hiring local journalists in subservient roles.”

And thanks to biases in the way technology is constructed, used as well as located around the world, the problem extends to the consumption of journalism as well. To quote from an older post:

Where an app [that amplifies content] was made matters because nobody is going to build an app in location A and hope that it becomes popular in faraway location B. Pocket itself is San Franciscan and the bias shows: most recommendations I’ve received, or even the non-personalised trending topics I’ve spotted, are American. In fact, among all the tools I use and curation services I follow, I’ve come across only two exceptions: the heartwarming human-curated 3QuarksDaily and Quora. I’m not familiar with Quora’s story but I’m sure it’s interesting – about how a Q&A platform out of Mountain View came to be dominated by Indian users.

I notice a not insignificant number of articles and essays, in English, to this day emerging from blogs and publications in Central, South and Southeast Asia, South America and of course Africa that will never go viral on Twitter, make it to the list of ‘most read’ articles on Pocket or be cited by even the most quirky columnist – even as the same ideas and arguments will virtually ‘break the internet’ the moment they emerge from The Atlantic or New Yorker a few months later.

None of the writers of The Atlantic or New Yorker can be blamed, at least not most of the time, for something quite hard to discover in the first place, but that doesn’t mean Big Tech isn’t distorting our view of who is doing good work and who isn’t. And many Indian journalists and writers are often at the wrong end of this discovery problem.

In this light, what Callimachi and the NYT did is not new at all but in fact further widens, or accentuates, the divide between being non-white, non-Western and being white and Western. This is a divide that I and many others, perhaps especially the others, have been habituated to ignore – especially when the crime at hand appears to be victimless but in fact quietly sidelines those who have already been historically, and today structurally, displaced from the ‘mainstream’.

On the other hand, what the NYT has perpetrated here is akin to what many in India (myself included) have done and, to different degrees, continue to have a part in. Specifically, the second bell that goes off has to do with my privileges, one product of which is that I will always be a parachute-journalist in my own country – a member of the top 1% who claims to understand the problems of the 99%.

Journalism professor Justin Martin gently defended parachute journalism in a 2011 essay, deeming fluency in “one of the main local languages” to be a prerequisite of parachuting well. I am not likely to speak any other languages than the four I already know, and less literally, I can never know, in any meaningful sense, what it means to be poor, transgender, tribal, of a lower caste; that lived experience will stay out of reach, and my assessment of what is right will always be inferior to those of, say, a desperate job-seeker, a transgender activist, a member of a tribe, a Dalit scholar when, for example, the topic at hand is poverty, gender, Indigenous people’s rights and caste.

As Martin also admits, “Hiring correspondents who live in the countries and regions they cover … is ideal”, and my higher social status in India does place me in a country other than the one I’m writing about. Although I may not be guilty of allowing information sources I haven’t vetted enough to feed exaggerated stories that I can’t prove in any other way to be true – that is, although we may not all be Rukmini Callimachis ourselves – the composition of our newsrooms means we are only one illegitimate source away, only one moment of weakness for what could be in place of what is away, from creating the next storm.

Two sides of the road and the gutter next to it

I have a mid-October deadline for an essay so obviously when I started reading up on the topic this morning, I ended up on a different part of the web – where I found this: a piece by a journalist talking about the problems with displaying one’s biases. Its headline:

It’s a straightforward statement until you start thinking about what bias is, and according to whom. On 99% of occasions when a speaker uses the word, she means it as a deviation from the view from nowhere. But the view from nowhere seldom exists. It’s almost always a view from somewhere even if many of us don’t care to acknowledge that, especially in stories where people are involved.

It’s very easy to say Richard Feynman and Kary Mullis deserved to win their Nobel Prizes in 1965 and 1993, resp., and stake your claim to being objective, but the natural universe is little like the anthropological one. For example, it’s nearly impossible to separate your opinion of Feynman’s or Mullis’s greatness from your opinions about how they treated women, which leads to the question whether the prizes Feynman and Mullis won might have been awarded to others – perhaps to women who would’ve stayed in science if not for these men and made the discoveries they did.

One way or another, we are all biased. Those of us who are journalists writing articles involving people and their peopleness are required to be aware of these biases and eliminate them according to the requirements of each story. Only those of us who are monks are getting rid of biases entirely (if at all).

It’s important to note here that the Poynter article makes a simpler mistake. It narrates the story of two reporters: one, Omar Kelly, doubted an alleged rape victim’s story because the woman in question had reported the incident many months after it happened; the other, the author herself, didn’t express such biases publicly, allowing her to be approached by another victim (from a different incident) to have her allegations brought to a wider audience.

Do you see the problem here? Doubting the victim or blaming the victim for what happened to her in the event of a sexual crime is not bias. It’s stupid and insensitive. Poynter’s headline should’ve been “Reporters who are stupid and insensitive fail their sources – and their profession”. The author of the piece further writes about Kelly:

He took sides. He acted like a fan, not a journalist. He attacked the victim instead of seeking out the facts as a journalist should do.

Doubting the victim is not a side; if it is, then seeking the facts would be a form of bias. It’s like saying a road has two sides: the road itself and the gutter next to it. Elevating unreason and treating it at par with reasonable positions on a common issue is what has brought large chunks of our entire industry to its current moment – when, for example, the New York Times looks at Trump and sees just another American president or when Swarajya looks at Surjit Bhalla and sees just another economist.

Indeed, many people have demonised the idea of a bias by synonymising it with untenable positions better described (courteously) as ignorant. So when the moment comes for us to admit our biases, we become wary, maybe even feel ashamed, when in fact they are simply preferences that we engender as we go about our lives.

Ultimately, if the expectation is that bias – as in its opposition to objectivity, a.k.a. the view from nowhere – shouldn’t exist, then the optimal course of action is to eliminate our specious preference for objectivity (different from factuality) itself, and replace it with honesty and a commitment to reason. I, for example, don’t blame people for their victimisation; I also subject an article exhorting agricultural workers to switch to organic farming to more scrutiny than I would an article about programmes to sensitise farmers about issues with pesticide overuse.

To watch ‘The Post’

I read a few reviews of The Post. Based on what the critics are saying, it seems the film has at least the potential to raise the spirits of many journalists today who could use a leg up. That said, I do resent that some of my friends and peers think I should be more excited about the film. This is how my conversations with them have generally gone.

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Have you watched The Post?

No.

OMG, why not?!

You mean you’d like me to be excited about watching a film about a story based in the industry I work day in, day out but about which you don’t give a damn unless it’s brought to life by a pair of pompous (not to mention white) Hollywood actors while also blissfully ignorant of the fact that dangerous and consequential choices of the kind the journalists probably make in the film are made on a daily basis by journalists in many parts of the world?

… yeah.

Or do you mean have I watched the film about a story based in the industry I work day in, day out and I’m quite likely to know about but you wouldn’t acknowledge that until I joined the rest of you, went to the movies and finally walked away feeling its makers had mangled both the spirit of what had actually happened and reduced it down to the valour of a few people, when in fact a lot more hearts and minds went into achieving what they had, just so a small group of well-established actors could draw all the attention – while you walk away feeling the film was how things had actually happened and that I’m the cynic whose cynicism won’t switch off?

I’m going to walk away from you now.

Featured image credit: DieElchin/pixabay.