Can we have one account like this for South Asian music history pls

"Food spoils because of a lack of refrigeration, and people can’t use air conditioning or fans as temperatures rise to the high 80s. Basic goods are hard to find because fuel shortages affect production and distribution." Gift link.

Went outside, looked at a fat bumblebee in a weigela bush and forgot about fretting for a few seconds.

Writing has been independently invented maybe four times in human history. Radiocarbon dating has found evidence that the original inhabitants of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) invented writing independently. buff.ly/PS5nm5j #ShareGoodNewsToo

If you're hype about Artemis, there's a new, annotated version of Jules Verne's truly batshit speculation about what would get humans to the moon, edited by @anaklimchy.bsky.social with essays and annotation by me, @samitbasu.bsky.social, and more!

This is a brilliant book, expertly interlacing a bittersweet character arc with a gorgeously sensory evocation of another world that erupts into this one. One of my all time fave depictions of Calcutta too, especially its Chinese community. Read Indra!

My debut novel is also partly set in contemporary Kolkata, where a college professor meets a stranger at a folk music festival, and learns a secret history of immortal, shapeshifting predators of humans migrating from Europe to the Mughal Empire. A story of love, sex, violence, and transformation.

Meanwhile Britain... 😐

May as well preach about the humanities to the choir: one useful aspect of training as a historian is that it teaches you to be wrong a lot. Happens all the time. Often with embarrassingly obvious stuff. If you don’t quickly learn to withdraw mistakes, absorb new info & recalibrate, you’re toast

The PhD chapter I'm currently working on is about the complex interplay of religion, narratives and music in the subcontinent - not 'syncretism' but what Aditya Behl called a hall of mirrors.

Illustration: William Harvey, 1838–40, woodcut I finished final edits for A DARK AND NARROW HOUSE -- and with that a six year journey comes to an end. The book, started mid-pandemic in April 2020, has achieved its final strange shape at around 105,000 words.

The nagatitan! 🐍 www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

still not quite over the fact that i watched 15 year olds get sued for millions of dollars for downloading twelve songs and now we all have to accept AI slop because every tech company in the known universe decided that IP laws don't exist now that they're inconvenient for them

She sounded so extraordinary. Atmospheric sciences major with minors in music and philosophy. Gifted singer. Kind. It wouldn’t have been any less tragic had she been utterly ordinary but my god, what a light that man took from the world. I’m so sorry, Juniper.

finally some good fuckin news

"After a month of illegal incarceration without a shred of evidence and custodial torture, the UP Police has now slapped the NSA (National Security Act) on two of the illegally aarrestd..." maktoobmedia.com/post?id=1154...

I had a friend in Delhi who got kicked by one of these guys

Reminds me of the golden langur cutouts in Delhi – to scare the rhesus macaques

Love the sound of Meena Kandasamy's new book, and also instantly recall the Rekha-holding-a-dagger image the cover is inspired from: www.pagesofhackney.co.uk/webshop/prod...

'...the cattle egrets(...) observing their stalking dance and realising how prehistoric that movement is, which then escalates into all kinds of ideas about evolution and sediments, what’s buried under the earth, the fragments of bone and fossil.' Tishani Doshi poetrylondon.co.uk/birdsong-in-...

BBC News is honestly diabolical these days. Shallow and trite analysis, and acting as an insidious cover for racism and transphobia under the veil of ‘neutrality. Their coverage of the locals and Reform was completely nauseating also

I know there’s a lot going on in the world, and we don’t have enough attention to pay to any of it. But the throttling of Cuba by the US should be a bigger story than it is. There are about 10 million people in Cuba, subjected to horrendous collective punishment. www.theguardian.com/world/2026/m...

Let me out of this timeline

India has the largest Muslim population living as a minority in the world, an estimated 200 million, more than Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Syria combined. Over the 12 years, under Modi's BJP, the principal politics in India has been attacking Muslim dignity, lives and livelihoods.

So this made my day!

BBC are also framing this as ‘rival’ demonstrations. This is a conscious state broadcaster strategy to manufacture consent for imposing restriction on Palestine solidarity.

I don’t mind my data being used my for research to help the NHS etc, however, because the government have now allowed Palantir access, I have withdrawn my consent using this link: your-data-matters.service.nhs.uk

This Islamophobic attack happened on Monday night & today is the first I'm coming across it. Correct me if I've missed something, but I can't find any coverage in the national media

'My child is fading before my eyes while the world stays silent. For days I’ve begged for a piece of bread to stop his hunger and a blanket to shield him from the beach cold,but no one answers. Is my son’s life worth nothing? Please, help us survive this nightmare. Donate now!🙏💔😭'

And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.

I feel like "adapt or die" is what was yelled at me to try and force me into heterosexuality & cisnormativity, white supremacy & ableism. "Everyone is doing it, it's the norm, you'll be left behind." A stark sign that techbros know & intend LLMs as a social technology for reinforcing oppression.

“A citation is a formal assertion of a relationship between works, and when that relationship is fabricated, the integrity of the entire document and the scholarly record is compromised.”

Hollow Tongue my Southern Gothic novella from @rdspress.bsky.social, is part of a choose-your-price-point StoryBundle of Shirley Jackson Award @sjacksonawards.bsky.social winning and nominated novellas! Get 3 ePUB books for $5 minimum or for $30 get all 17! storybundle.com/award?utm_so...

No donations for 4 days. Jamal needs donations to stay alive. His parents are exhausted, desperate, and deleted repeatedly by Bluesky. Share & donate to help them.

Very excited to be presenting at 'Fantasy's Present Pasts', hosted by the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic at the University of Glasgow this summer. Talking about historical fantasy and writing THE POISON PALACE, my upcoming novel that mixes both: www.gla.ac.uk/schools/crit...

Anthologists, writers you could consider inviting to your next antho: Indrapramit Das, Vajra Chandrasekera, Zin E. Rocklyn, Donyae Coles, Samir Sirk Morató, Russell Nichols, Dominique Dickey, Eliza Chan, Jorja Osha, Nadia Bulkin, Ian Muneshwar, Tobi Ogundiran, Zig Zag Claybourne, Uchechukwu Nwaka.

At some point there needs to be a *proper* conversation about how cruelty has become a new normal for so many people. And we can't just keep putting it down to structures. Too many people with plenty of agency are actively choosing this.

Baraa was unable to secure the rent for the land on which she & her surviving son Ibrahim were living in a tent. They're displaced & without shelter in the midst of Israel's genocidal siege again. She's lost 2 daughters to the genocide. You can help her secure shelter by sharing & donating:

(May I just say that the ignorance about India in particular, and post-colonial countries generally, by ostensibly well-meaning informed people in rich countries is enough to drive me around the fucking bend?)

Can I just ask, #r4today, as you seem to be very keen to talk about and investigate Polanski’s council tax issue, why not the same feverish scrutiny over the far more troubling and glaringly corrupt £5M bribe Farage took from that crypto billionaire, Harborne? We can hear your strings being pulled.

More of Bengal's 'new dawn' under the BJP. Modi youth saffron brownshirts storm a university Vice Chancellor's office and threaten him until he chants 'Long live Mother India'.

Just sliding in here to say, I (a human) designed these stickers to express this sentiment, wherever you like 😌

Israel is still bombing babies. You can help little Ghazal survive a shrapnel injury from an airstrike that fractured her tiny foot. Her family desperately needs help getting her the surgery & care she needs under siege. She also has a respiratory infection. Share and donate, please:

An endorsement from a friend I hugely admire. Thank you Indra! ❤️

Read Shreya's work! She's a fabulous writer.

Stage of PhD writing: feeling sorry for my supervisor.

No donations for 2 d. You can help little Jamal survive Israel's genocide right now by sharing & donating for his insulin & asthma meds. He needs donations to live, to no fault of his own or his family, but because he was born in Gaza & abandoned by the world to extermination sponsored by our taxes:

Had convos w/ multiple people in the past 4 days who DID NOT KNOW that 1. AI doesn't "think" or know anything; it's a probability machine 2. It was created using massive amounts of work stolen from actual people including me 3. The environmental costs are astronomical Spread the word, every time!

"Your history gets in the way of my memory. I am everything you lost. You can't forgive me. I am everything you lost. Your perfect Enemy. Your memory gets in the way of my memory:" Agha Shahid Ali

This one's called 'Playing Macbeth at the Electra Theatre on Beadon Street':