Author: Neelabh

I am always back to where I begin.

How Silicon Valley Made Work More Stressful


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Lyons: This is a very cynical take, but all of that superficial stuff was really this bright, shiny object that they dangled in front of employees, while on the side they were sweeping away a lot of the more fundamental stuff like job security, the chance to get promotions, the chance to develop your career inside an organization at the very lowest level, to have health benefits. It’s amazing how many people in their 20s I talked to who said the one thing they really want and they’ve never had is a job with health insurance.

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Knowledge@Wharton

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How the tobacco industry targets young people with social media influencers


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The tobacco industry never backs down.

Social media detective work started to reveal a few consistent themes. Whenever Marlboro branding appeared in the frames of otherwise innocuous pictures, the hashtag #IDecideTo would too, slotted in at the bottom of the post. Similarly, any picture prominently featuring Lucky Strike would be equipped with #LikeUs_Party. They also appeared to be region-specific, with the most common hashtags in, for example, Brazil –  #AheadBR, #Quemtepira, #TasteTheCity and #Readytoroll – used by British American Tobacco to advertise Kent, Dunhill, and Lucky Strike.

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Francisco Garcia — Dazed

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The new potato


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Diversity holds the key.

Many countries continue to plant popular potato varieties that have remained essentially unchanged for decades. But new approaches, including genetic engineering, promise to add more options. Potato breeders are particularly excited about a radical new way of creating better varieties. This system, called hybrid diploid breeding, could cut the time required by more than half, make it easier to combine traits in one variety, and allow farmers to plant seeds instead of bulky chunks of tuber. “It will change the world tremendously,” says Paul Struik, an agronomist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands.

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Erik Stokstad — Science

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Miss Bala


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In the earlier, more authentic film, Naranjo generally employs an austere style: his languorous pans and tracking shots suggest the weight and force of the world beyond his heroine’s comprehension. Naranjo knows when to take a straightforward, analytical look at a decisive act. He depicts the drug lord’s meticulous taping of cash to the heroine’s naked waist as a devastating montage of defilement. An image of Sigman facing forward, hands behind her head, in a black bra and a money belt made of packing tape, provided the original film with its searing poster art.

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Michael Sragow — Film Comment

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India’s Big Naval Nightmare: Aircraft Carriers as Floating Paper Tigers?


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Most likely, India would attempt to enforce a blockade of Pakistan and use its carriers to strike land-based targets. But Pakistan has several means to attack Indian carriers — with near-undetectable submarines and anti-ship missiles — which must also operate relatively far from India itself in the western and northern Arabian Sea. China does not have a similar disadvantage, as the PLAN would likely keep its carriers close and within the “first island chain” including Taiwan, closer to shore where supporting aircraft and ground-based missile launchers can help out.

Thus, Indian carriers would be relatively vulnerable and only one of them will have aircraft capable of launching with standard ordnance and fuel. And that is after Vishal sets sail in the next decade.

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Robert Beckhusen — The National Interest

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44 AFRICAN AMERICANS WHO SHOOK UP THE WORLD


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This is a great list.

This is not a list of The Greatest African-Americans of All Time or The Most Influential Blacks in History. Or even The Dopest Brothers and Sisters Who Matter Most This Week. It is a list — fervently debated among our staff, chiseled and refined — of 44 blacks who shook up the world or at least their corner of it. We recognize that this is not a complete list of jaw-dropping black achievers; we know that such a list would never run out of names. Why limit ours to 44? It’s an homage to the first African-American president, whose own stunning accomplishment was something our mothers and grandfathers and great-grandmothers never thought they’d see in their lifetimes.

The complete listThe complete list

Intro by Kevin Merida / Portraits by Robert Ball — The Undefeated

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Woke


The original meaning of the word woke deserves a resurrection. The seeds for it are in our activism, our art, and ourselves: in Colin Kaepernick’s public protest, in the work of Black Lives Matter and other black- and person-of-color-led organizations, in the art and music of Kara Walker, Kehinde Wiley, Kendrick Lamar, and Solange. But wokeness has always begun with the self. I had lunch with a friend last week, and after we traded stories about jobs and marriages and the news, we switched, as is our custom, to the topic of police brutality. “Stay woke,” he told me at the end of our conversation. It was the first time in a while that I’d heard those words, but they still held their old power. An electric hit went up my spine.

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Kashana Cauley — Believer