Deepak 

Team NL, 

I just wanted to thank you for the incredible work you are doing. Your recent investigations, especially on Yogi's ad campaign and the stone-laden truck at Jantar Mantar, are gaining a lot of attention. I am even seeing them being shared as cartoons referencing NL’s findings, even in the local language, Kannada. Whenever my friends forward them to me, I just smile and say I already knew about it because I subscribe to Newslaundry. Keep up the excellent work!

Adil

Adil here, environmental and safety engineer, raised near the Jhelum in Srinagar, living in Germany since 2016 and now working for Autobahn GmbH near Krefeld/Düsseldorf. Hence JhelumToRhine. Recent Haftas, from Khalra and state power to Meta, food taboos and religious processions, leave me with one question: would we defend the same principle if it protected someone we disagreed with?

Governments seek votes; corporations seek profit. Neither is automatically our saviour. Culture deserves respect, but reverence alone shouldn’t restrict another person’s choices. Whether Carnival, Kanwar or Muharram fills our streets, rules should apply consistently. Lovely hearing Jayashree again; Mehraj brings a biased Kashmiri smile, and Rinchen is a refreshing addition. Perhaps democracy needs science’s finest habit: question even your own hypothesis, and change your mind when better evidence arrives.

Adil | JhelumToRhine

Shoor Veer 

In the last Hafta, a subscriber asked about resources for building an intellectual foundation to assess news and form opinions. For me, learning about cognitive biases has been enormously helpful in forming opinions rooted in evidence and detecting algorithmic manipulation. It's the single most important tool to have and to use against the tsunami of information we all deal with. In another discussion, Mehraj blamed liberalism for wokism. I find that argument completely bonkers. Woke culture is a direct result of social media, not any ideology. Liberalism puts the individual first, and wokism is all about collective guilt. Liberalism has stood against the witch hunts and mob justice that both right and left authoritarians have wrought. There are valid critiques of liberalism in how it has shaped society, but it's just lazy to scapegoat it for all social maladies. 

PAWO

Just want to say that I am so proud of Newslaundry and The News Minute team. It takes moving mountains to make this independent media successful despite the abuses you get from the right wing and the left wing. 

Small teams can do great things. All it takes is a subscription. Subscribe now and power Newslaundry’s work.