The Science of Ghazals, and Reasons for the War
"Very often when somebody will come and give me a dump of a presentation or something like that, I say, "samjha de mujhe, whiteboard mein samjha" (explain it to me on a whiteboard)... because only a person who knows it can do it. A person who got the presentation made by somebody else cannot do it. That's point number one. Point number two for me, learning is easier if somebody just explains it on a whiteboard by drawing up the map rather than showing a map to me and then explaining the features. I'm not able to take that data in one go. I'd rather that it's constructed in front of me." - Capt. Raghu Raman
Different Kinds of Smart: “The smartest investors of all time went bankrupt 20 years ago this week. They did it during the greatest bull market of all time... The story of Long-Term Capital Management is more fascinating than sad. That investors with more academic smarts than perhaps any group before or since managed to lose everything says a lot about the limits of intelligence. It also highlights Bezos’s point: There are many kinds of smarts. We know – in hindsight – the LTCM team had epic amounts of one kind of smarts, but lacked some of the nuanced types that aren’t easily measured. Humility. Imagination. Accepting that the collective motivations of 7 billion people can’t be summarized in Excel.
https://collabfund.com/blog/different-kinds-of-smart/
What Goes Wrong When We Write Ghazals in English: It took forever for modern English-language poets to pick up on the existence of the ghazal, but once the word got out, plenty of smart people started trying to write original ghazals in English, with differing commitments to the formal rules. I’m one of these poets... This piece is about translation, but it’s also about writing original poetry in one’s own language while following the rules developed for a different language. I want to talk about English ghazals, but (for lots of good reasons) I’m going to start in left field … with haiku.
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2025/06/24/what-goes-wrong-when-we-write-ghazals-in-english
Where Will the Israel Iran War Go: Iran’s power is plummeting. Its defense capabilities are seriously damaged. Its leaders are being decimated. Its nuclear facilities have just been bombed to ashes. If it can save face, it would probably sign a ceasefire. If this is true, maybe Iran has a joker up its sleeve, but it had ample reasons to deploy it by now. The fact that it hasn’t suggests the biggest factor in deciding how the war will end between Israel and Iran is: When will Israel stop bombing Iran?
