‘Put the camera down’

Covering protests has become the riskiest job for journalists in the United States. Donald Trump’s constant tirade against the press has normalised abuse against the press by ordinary people. CJR captures this in a gripping report

Cat Person

A short story in The New Yorker that’s about a 20-year-old girl’s short relationship with a 34-year-old man. Cat Person has sparked a thousand theories. Read the story and the response to it.

These are recommendations by Manisha Pande @MnshaP

What on earth?

The Discovery Communications-produced show quotes American archaeologists who say a 30-mile-line between India and Sri Lanka is made up of rocks that are 7,000 years old, older than the sandbar supporting them, which is 4,000 years old.

This is a recommendation by Atul Chaurasia @beechbazar

Cahier Africain: Documenting War Crimes in CAR

A two-part documentary on war crimes in the Central African Republic. I recommend this because I was touched by how the victims/survivors, who refused to remain silent, turned to each other and put together the evidence of all the brutalities they suffered in a tattered notebook. The notebook was found by the documentary maker in a dusty backyard of the country.

This is a recommendation by Sahla Nechiyil @sahlanechiyil

From North Korea with dread

A documentation of North Korea, which is threatening the world with nuclear war. Two New York Times journalists enter a hostile country, where they are constantly under surveillance, accompanied by government officials, restricted from travelling outside the capital and told who to talk to – in short, every journalist’s worst nightmare. Despite this, the two journalists do a fantastic job of recording their days. By acknowledging what their being American is doing to the process of filming and they don’t merely record the aggression as bystanders, but also note the fact that it is being directed towards them in some way. By doing all of this, they immediately become immune to the idea of journalists dispassionately assessing a situation to tell some all prevailing truth. Instead, they humanise not just the subjects in the film but also the entire process in which the film was made. To me, this is the most credible way of accounting any situation, especially a conflict.

This is a recommendation by Nidhi Suresh @NidhiSuresh02

The case against reading everything

The sage advice from a writer to everyone who picks up a pen is ‘read widely, read wisely and read everything’ type sap. Here’s an honest and humble takedown.

The forgotten man

This is a Baffler piece on Murray N. Rothbard, the harbinger of Trump and the alt-right, who advocated getting over media elites to reach the masses. Sad, the American media didn’t see this coming much as we lament the Indian media’s blindness to Modi until the 2014 “wave”.

These are recommendations by Vikram Kilpady @kilpady