Give the techie in your life access to the inner workings of the companies and characters shaping Big Tech.

Hunger, caste, and colonial power intersect with devastating consequences in Jeyamohan’s powerful novel centred on a colonial building in Chennai.

Raghavan Srinivasan posits the Bhakti movement in Tamilakam as an early instance of resistance to power structures, yet his study leaves several important issues untouched or only briefly mentioned.

Irwin Allan Sealy travels in the US in search of a cluster of ancient Tamil yoginis, carved in stone and now scattered across museums, only to find them in unexpected people and places. 

Deep, comprehensive, and demanding, Mammals of India by A.J.T. Johnsingh and P.O. Nameer is a natural cousin of S.H. Prater’s The Book of Indian Animals.

How to sleep like Jesus is not a prescription for how many hours you need to sleep each night. It is about progressively transforming into someone who can entrust both their sleeping and their waking to God. If sleep doesn’t come, this perspective of trust allows you to pray openly and honestly to the Lord.... Continue Reading

A lot of the practices that go under the heading of meditation are things that essentially try to manipulate physiology, like postures and breathing techniques, to try to push away all the distractions, clear the mind, and get to a quiet headspace. Whereas the meditation commended in Scripture—in Psalm 1 and picked up by the... Continue Reading

Elon Musk has donated more than $365 million to support Republicans in the midterm elections. Musk's influence on the federal government is the focus of "Blockers," a new book by Michael Lewis. Lisa Desjardins sat down with Lewis to discuss Musk's time leading DOGE and the federal workers who found themselves in its crosshairs.

An invaluable selection of poet Adil Jussawalla’s private collection is live on the website of The Bombay Poetry Crawl.

Tourism may give one the impression of seeing an unexplored world, but novels help one imagine it. As such, reading novels is a good way of discovering another country.

If you are looking for a language that probes the meaning of love and grief and all that makes us human, Carson’s books are for you.

Czech literature, artificial intelligence, audiobooks, long standing participation and freedom of expression shaped five days of international publishing business and public debate The Frankfurt Book Fair welcomed 236,000 visitors from 137 countries in 2026, sustaining its position as the international publishing industry’s principal meeting place. Across five days, the fair combined rights negotiations and professional […]

The ornithologist on a life spent studying birds, his association with Dr Sálim Ali, and the urgent need to protect India’s grasslands and wetlands.

Tahmima Anam’s new novel is a short and succinct cautionary tale about the wages of exploitation, whether of women or of the environment.

The 2026 International Booker shortlisted novel is a restrained saga that approaches complex questions with remarkable subtlety.

Stories on the color orange, the data center rush, a local hero, the AI labor takeover, and a boy dinner subreddit.

For a novel centred on the Great Irish Famine of Ireland, Maggie O’Farrell’s Land is surprisingly insulated from pain.  

Veteran diplomat Rajiv Dogra’s new book argues that the well-being of a nation depends on the quality of its leadership, and that expansion carries within itself the seeds of exhaustion that eventually bring empires down.

Using the 20th century as a case in point, the book shows how authoritarianism can take hold of a society, grow, and sustain itself. 

For Oakland Review of Books, Stephanie Uchino-Beach writes about getting laid off at an education tech company that transformed into an “AI-first outfit.” As as customer success manager, she acted as a liaison to district administrators, school principals, and teachers. While AI could automate some of her tasks, what about the core responsibilities of her CSM role: building real relationships and understanding an educator’s needs? An AI sees data points, not people. This is a sobering read from a former tech worker living in the Bay Area, and an edtech company that has gone all in on AI and forgotten about its mission.

Before I went to work for Silicon Valley, I was a lot of things. A few jobs before this last one, I was an elementary school teacher in Chicago, helping kids learn to read, creating units, planning lessons, and buying supplies with my own money on the weekends, like countless other teachers around the country. I grew up on the Peninsula, and I made the move into Customer Success to get a job that would let me move home. Tech was never my dream; it was a means to an end. My dad studied computer science and still works in tech to this day and enjoys it, so it seemed like a satisfying and fruitful career was plausible. I figured that once I broke in, all my problems would be solved: I could get a house, have a kid, and fulfill every middle-class dream that had always felt slightly out of reach for a millennial like myself. 

And yet, job after job, I consistently left feeling unsatisfied. Unsatisfied by how I wasn’t growing and wasn’t developing my skills. Unsatisfied with poor managers who were just in the right place at the right time to be promoted but so often lacked the skills to provide the same success for their employees. Unsatisfied with how the products I worked on could do wrong by the communities we sold them to, even though every company said they were “mission-driven” and “put our customers first.”