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- Arvind's Newsletter
Historian and writer Ramachandra Guha opines that the collapse of the party system reflects the decline of Indian democracy.
"Scholars both Indian and foreign have argued that the health of our democracy has deteriorated in recent years. However, one aspect of India’s democratic decline has perhaps not got the attention it deserves. This is the collapse of the party system. Indeed, in some ways, this is a more telling sign of how far Indian democracy has fallen than the attacks on press freedom, the suborning of independent institutions, the opacity of electoral funding and so on. " Read on
2. Less than two weeks into its tenure, the new government in Israel has moved quickly on a wave of far-right agenda items that would weaken the judiciary, entrench Israeli control of the West Bank and bifurcate the military chain of command to give some far-right ministers greater control of matters related to the occupation, opines this article in the New York Times.The government, last week, moved forward with the centrepiece of its program — releasing for the first time a detailed plan for a sweeping judicial overhaul that includes reducing the Supreme Court’s influence over Parliament and strengthening the government’s role in the appointment of judges. Critics say the coalition’s proposed changes would completely change the nature of Israel’s liberal democracy, which is dynamic but also fragile. Israel doesn’t have a formal constitution; it has basic laws that can be changed with 61 out of 120 votes in the parliament. Netanyahu’s coalition has 64.
3.To reduce the harmful health effects of sitting, take a five-minute light walk every half-hour. That’s the key finding of a new study that my colleagues and I published in the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise.
4. If you’ve ever emerged from the shower or returned from walking your dog with a clever idea or a solution to a problem you’d been struggling with, it may not be a fluke.
Rather than constantly grinding away at a problem or desperately seeking a flash of inspiration, research from the last 15 years suggests that people may be more likely to have creative breakthroughs or epiphanies when they’re doing a habitual task that doesn’t require much thought—an activity in which you’re basically on autopilot. This lets your mind wander or engage in spontaneous cognition or “stream of consciousness” thinking, which experts believe helps retrieve unusual memories and generate new ideas.
5. Artificial intelligence in general and ChatGPT of OpenAI in particular is likely to go down as one of the big technological breakthroughs of 2022. Ben Thompson of the highly regarded technology blogsite – Stratechery, analyses what this breakthrough means for the world’s biggest tech companies – Amazon, Apple, Meta, Google and Microsoft - who wins and who doesn’t based on their business models and their current capabilities in AI.
