Whose values get embedded into the algorithms that increasingly govern our lives? How are these data infrastructures complicating what it means to be human?
Tag: India
Hope and Capital: Talking India with Ravinder Kaur
“Anyone who comes in the way of the ‘good times’ becomes a threat to capital, and to the nation-state itself.”
Ethnographic Fictions: Talking with Megha Majumdar
Anthropology’s attention to the granular texture of someone’s life is a beautiful training for being a fiction writer.
Global Inequality and the Corona Shock
COVID-19 is the first truly comprehensive crisis of the Anthropocene era, affecting virtually everyone on the planet.
The Vulnerable Foundations of India’s Urbanism
In Delhi—a city of 17 million people—7.2 million residents already qualified for food aid before the pandemic. After, the numbers skyrocketed.
Merit Must Fall
What does “merit” mean in a context—like India—where caste pervades public life?
India in COVID-19: A Tragedy Foretold
The lockdown had terrible consequences on India’s informal economy, and will deepen the socioeconomic inequalities that divide the country.
Silicon Valley Is Not a Place
Silicon Valley has no mystical powers. It gets away with being thought of as apolitical simply because few have called its bluff.
India’s Fans and India’s Future
Obsession is one of the hallmarks of love in Indian cinema: specifically, a love that breaks down borders.
The Ruse of Fiction: An Interview with Amitava Kumar
Amitava Kumar’s recent novel, Immigrant, Montana, tells the story of Kailash, an Indian graduate student who ...
Fill the Halls: Space and Possibility in Lahore, Pakistan
Lahore today can feel like a city of security checks and gated passages, tall walls and ...
Risky Choices: Women and Cabs in Hyderabad, India
The arrival of app-based ride-hailing in Indian cities has made a significant difference in the way the middle class, especially young men and women ...
India’s Youth: Small Chances, Big Dreams
The first time someone recommended Snigdha Poonam’s Dreamers: How Young Indians Are Changing the World to me, I rolled my eyes at the title. I wondered ...
The Banality of Empire
One of the basic paradoxes of British imperialism is that even as it relied so fundamentally on violence, it insisted on presenting itself as opposed to violence, indeed as dedicated to stamping it ...
We Are All King Lear’s Children
Which is Shakespeare’s timeliest play—the one that best mirrors our present moment? This is a perennial question, and perhaps a silly one, but we might begin an answer ...
Virtual Roundtable on “The Mana of Mass Society”
Many of anthropology’s terms of art are taken from afar. Especially in the half century after 1870 ...
India’s Garbage Politics
Writing in 1993, after decades spent documenting America’s shifting landscapes, poet A. R. Ammons suggested that “garbage [ought] to be the poem of our time.” Inspired by “mounds of disposal” along a ...
Virtual Roundtable on Presidential First Use of Nuclear Weapons
Is it legal? Is it constitutional? Is it just?
Global Water Wars and the Public Good
Future global water wars are now widely predicted. In 1995, Ismail Seragaldin, vice president of the World Bank (1993–2000), first raised the specter of crisis with the ...
Indian Queer Futures
The landmark Delhi High Court verdict in 2009 striking down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code—the section criminalizing homosexual sex—heralded a significant shift in queer activism and queer ...