Linking Park

Never Before in Its History Has India Been So Adrift in the World

We had hugs and words, many words, in our post-2014 period of self-inflation, but do not even have these now, it seems. There has never been a moment in India’s history when it has been so adrift in the world, so confused about what it stands for and against and so humiliated.

The Booker Prize Foundation has shared pictures of some of the longlisted writers' writing spots.

Tighter US visa rules reshape Indian marriages: NRIs lose their shine

Stricter U.S. immigration policies are now affecting more than just careers as they are now influencing family decisions in India. Growing visa uncertainties are making many parents hesitant to marry their children to Indian nationals working in the United States, worried that immigration hurdles could threaten jobs and long-term residency.

I don’t see a problem here if “working in the U.S.” was such an important criterion.

This Dallas School Proves Diversity Works. Why Aren’t Others Copying Its Success?

“I do feel sad about it not being a neighborhood school for her,” she said. “But at the same time, the trade-off is so much better. Every parent I’ve talked to at Solar agrees that they love the diversity. They love that their child is exposed to all these different cultures. Most people are not going to live in a bubble their entire life. That’s just not how the world is.”

I hate to answer the question in the headline, but isn’t the answer obvious?

A Rebel Writer’s First Revolt: A memoir by Arundhati Roy chronicles her tumultuous relationship with her mother

At report-card time, Mary broke a wooden ruler while beating her son for his “average” results. The next morning, she showered her daughter, whose report card was better, with praise and a rare embrace. Roy is haunted by the shame of this. “Since then, for me, all personal achievement comes with a sense of foreboding,” she writes. “On the occasions when I am toasted or applauded, I always feel that someone else, someone quiet, is being beaten in the other room.”

There Are No Weird Blogs Anymore Cause It’s More Fruitful to Drive Them Out of Business

The point is to make the private equity firm more profitable. The Denver Post and Deadspin, and Vice News are just widgets, endlessly interchangeable in the service of maximizing shareholder value. Only chumps make money by selling goods or services these days; the real geniuses rely on management fees, deal fees, dividend recapitalizations, real estate deals, and the like.

There will be eventually one winner, but now’s the best time to check out the 2025 National Book Award Finalists. Quick questions for the year’s best writers, poets, and translators.

Discuss...

Having a sense of purpose linked to lower dementia risk

Researchers found that people who reported a higher sense of purpose in life were about 28% less likely to develop cognitive impairment – including mild cognitive impairment and dementia.

The growing and persistent success of LoFi Girl

Williams, the music researcher, told 404 Media that Lofi Girl's aesthetic taps into “the psychology of productivity mirroring,” which is a technique in which people motivate themselves to do a task by having another person around.

Williams says the music itself can often become secondary to the familiar, comforting vibe for Lofi Girl listeners. “Lofi Girl appeals most to young music fans who love and consume lots of different kinds of music, but appreciate the Lofi Girl specifically because it gives them something predictable in an evermore chaotic world,” she said.

I created my own AI medical team. It changed the way doctors treat my cancer.

AI doesn’t replace anyone; it augments everyone. It can give patients the ability to understand more, doctors the ability to synthesize more, and the system the ability to respond faster, earlier, and more intelligently than ever before.

This approach doesn’t hand the keys to machines. Instead, it builds a partnership between human judgment and machine intelligence — a partnership that sees us as individuals. When I wanted to know what else was being tried around the world, AI helped me to learn the paths others had gone down. AI can keep up with the incredible pace of medical discovery much more efficiently than humans. It can find the signal in the noise, even across disciplines.

Charlie Kirk’s Legacy Deserves No Mourning

But Kirk’s actions undercut that notion every day. His entire business was saying the other side was evil and dehumanizing them. The debates were simply performances, and he could not have an entertaining public fight without opposition. Turning Point did not work to bring people together; it worked to bring about a country where anyone who wasn’t a white Christian nationalist wasn’t welcome. I won’t celebrate his death, but I’m not obligated to celebrate his life, either.

Disconnecting from Discord

Unfortunately, it’s become clear that Discord is not a safe option for chat, and this is deeply concerning at a time when members of marginalized groups are especially vulnerable. Between user data being hosted in the United States and Discord’s apparent willingness to promptly hand over your communication to any agency that requests it, I can’t in good conscience continue to offer it as an option for omg.lol members.

The Austin Church Targeted by Ken Paxton for Helping the Homeless. Pastor Mark Hilbelink is the true Jesus.

There are roughly three thousand churches in the Austin area, and that “if every church in Austin served two homeless people, you wouldn’t need day centers. Unfortunately, Christianity has adopted a kind of exceptionalism, a club mentality,” he said, “and that’s really sad.”

Discuss...

Inside China’s stolen iPhone building:

But like many of the electronics markets in the labyrinthine malls of Huaqiangbei, the fourth floor of the building has its own specialism: selling second-hand iPhones from Europe and the US.

There is no freedom of speech in India even though it’s mentioned in its Constitution.

On May 18, the 42-year-old professor was arrested by the police and a district court mechanically remanded him to two days of police custody. When the Supreme Court finally heard the matter by on May 21, the bench, headed by Justice Surya Kant and consisting of Justice N. Kotiswar Singh, criticised Mahmudabad’s “choice of words”, labelling it as “dog whistling”, asking him why he sought “cheap publicity”, but ultimately decided to release him from custody on interim bail. However, it declined to suspend the ongoing investigation.

Blogrolls are not worth it

This person didn't owe me an explanation. Being included on a list of sites they enjoyed was flattering, but, again, not something I am entitled to. I get that. At the end of the day, I'm talking about a fucking blogroll here. Like, yeah, this is extremely low on the big list of potential grievances.

Nearly 1% of the population in the U.S. identifies as trans.

More than 2.8 million people now identify as transgender in the US, including an estimated 724,000 youth, according to a new data analysis that is the largest of its kind to date. Researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Williams Institute used federal surveys and data from state health agencies to identify the size and demographics of the trans population in each state.

Lovely chat with Gary He. Also, I found a new blog to follow.

Gary He wrote a wonderful book, McAtlas: A Global Guide to the Golden Arches, about McDonald’s all around the world, which I highly recommend. It’s a smart, beautiful book, that is also a lot of fun. Oh, and it has won two James Beard awards

I am not eligible for another 13 months, but it’s always a joy to read about someone’s willingness to call another country home, especially about the day of.

I am not writing this note because I want to take on these questions, even though I acknowledge them. I am writing this because I do not want to forget how I felt yesterday.

Discuss...

A new set of links for today:

“My new deadline: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth” – Bill Gates.

Every single reason you ban someone is to help the community. Sometimes you’re protecting the community from itself, sometimes you’re doing things because there’s a grumpy lawyer standing over your shoulder (metaphorically), but at the end of the day you ban people who are actively harmful to the community.

And why unbanning them is more harmful.

But as is the American (male) way, they believe that guns and money will protect them. And this is the truth that even the vampires tell the living: that in White America, Black people will never be safe, no matter how many guns or dollars they have.

‘Sinner’ is as good as it gets.

She doesn’t write poems.

She is one.

An open letter to RFK, Jr. who thinks my daughter is a burden. Beautiful.

The constant ebb and flow of hormones that guide the menstrual cycle don't just affect reproductive anatomy. They also reshape the brain, and research gives us insight into how this happens.

Perhaps that explains a lot so just be patient with them.

When I was a kid, I lived in a podunk, suburban town in the middle of nowhere. It wasn't a major city or even a major state, but I was able to quite easily stay on top of everything pop culture related, even things that weren't mainstream or even super popular in my country.

I didn’t even grow up in this country and yet I could keep updated on the pop culture and other things not even discussed in my country. Hard agree that we need a curated and trusted website for all niches. Heck, I ran one for the Indian blogging community for a minute.

Discuss...

Medium gets it. They are not even shy about using words that stand for DEI.

AP Calculus or AP Statistics? Which should you take in high school? One of my former colleagues takes a shot at answering.

How will the universe end? The question just got an unexpected twist. Don’t get your hopes up. It’s not anytime soon.

If you did 100 ChatGPT prompts in 1 day and feel bad about the increased energy, you could remove an equal amount of energy from your daily use by:

• Running a clothes drier for 6 fewer minutes.
• Running an air conditioner for 18 fewer minutes.

A cheat sheet for using ChatGPT.

But yeah, go ahead and compute your GPU's carbon emissions and include them in your published papers.

A great example of how community organizing, and not relying on another political party, can take on a fascist administration and win.

Discuss...

One more take on taking notes.

Awww…are you suffering a sales (and stock price) slump? Well, that should teach you about going anti-DEI.

An excellent primer on understanding the bond market and how it shapes…well, everything.

If you must and are using Twitter for science, this is a great tip.

An alternative to AirTags, but one that works with the Apple and Google networks? Sign me up. But it costs the same.

Janelle James also commented on this exact reason for our collective misery – some people are too rich. As the kids say but maybe in a more sophisticated way with ten-dollar words – Devour the Affluenza-Afflicted.

This is happening because some people are too rich.

Discuss...

The Values of Work. Excellent talk by Jenny Zhang.

Talk about a nail-biting finish. What a shot in the last second! (Basketball)

The only good thing that has come out of the “Signal-gate” is the increased popularity of Signal.

Trumpism, too, has an aesthetic. Allow me to pretentiously, subjectively, declare it not beautiful. The aesthetic of Trumpism is sprawl – which had already infected the United States long before the Maga movement metastasised.

What does Maga-land look like?

Whatever you think of David Blaine, he does impressive shit. In a recent TV series for National Geographic, he takes us behind the scenes to see how he trains to take new risks. Watch the video at the end of him kissing the cobra (or does he?)

No wonder my attempts at irony or sarcasm fall short (mostly) with my American colleagues.

“You were victimizing yourself. Every act of kindness you’ve done, you’ve done to yourself. Every happy and sad moment ever experienced by any human was, or will be, experienced by you.”

A wonderful short story by Andy Weir.

Discuss...

Street protests today are far more numerous and frequent than skeptics might suggest.

“Where is the resistance?” is a common refrain. Our research affirms that resistance is alive and well.

But hey, if doomscrolling helps you sleep better, good luck.

After using the chatbot for four weeks, female study participants were slightly less likely to socialize with people than their male counterparts who did the same. Meanwhile, participants who interacted with ChatGPT’s voice mode in a gender that was not their own for their interactions reported significantly higher levels of loneliness and more emotional dependency on the chatbot at the end of the experiment. OpenAI plans to submit both studies to peer-reviewed journals.

Not many are using the chatbots as companion apps (think ‘Her’) just yet, so the results may not indicate more significant trends. However, I’m glad OpenAI plans to submit its studies to peer-reviewed journals.

New flash: Free speech still sucks in India. Typical reaction from new Shiv Sainiks who prove they’re just as bad as the ones from the 90s. Here is the standup video that caused the ruckus. It’s pretty incredible. As we would say, bande ke gaand mein dum hai. For a change, check out the comments; people are donating money in heaps.

Thanks to the new administration, people are unsurprisingly staying away from traveling to the U.S. The tourism industry is going to find out because the Trumpies fucked around.

The progressive Left’s favorite politician is happiest when he’s blaming the Democrats for Trump’s actions.

When medications you take to improve your health start killing you, always trace it back to the source making them.

Discuss...

Grammarly’s report on [The Productivity Shift: Higher Ed Insights](https://go.grammarly.com/l/894581/2025-03-11/5z1wg/894581/17417025804y6CHz51/EXTGrammarly173429SOBCG4ECutReportV1min.pdf), focusing on key trends to help educators guide future graduates through communication overload and responsible AI adoption. It’s by Grammarly and they’ve now adopted AI in a big way, so consider that as a caveat.

LASA offers four signature courses – that are mandatory for all freshmen [Science and Technology (SciTech) and Electronic Magazine (Ezine)] and sophomores [Great Ideas and Planet Earth (Plearth)]. There has been debate internally whether these should be mandatory since they take up two elective slots in those years. I loved reading this pros and cons debate in their student newspaper. After reading it, I’m on the Pro side.

Discuss...

The first word they chose to remove was Matter (🔗 direct link). Erasing identity. Literally.

MUNDUS SINE CAESARIBUS — A WORLD WITHOUT CAESARS. Unfortunately, ‘Sold Out.’

A bhakti boom is clearly being manufactured, like an extended trance party. The manufacturers and monetisers think they are as cunning as Chanakya of yore. They are reclaiming their civilization while filling their purses. This delusion of the deluder is what Adi Shankara referred to as ‘maya’ over 1,300 years ago.

India’s unfortunate manufactured religious devotion.

Liverpool’s famed “You Will Never Walk Alone” anthem and Jerzy Dudek’s role [podcast episode] in immortalizing the already famous song.

Discuss...