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Same old randomness can now be found at http://rishabhkaul.in/blog

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Peace.

Squirm

Obviously, its not a sports magazine.

My friend who studies at Vassar College always goes on about how its possibly the most liberal place on earth.

After flipping through the pages of their in-college sex magazine, I am convinced.

Squirm: The Art of Campus Sex acts as Vassar's mouthpiece on smut. With user generated prose, poetry, interviews and photography, the magazine says that it will arouse you. It says its a "literary and artistic forum for diverse perspectives on sex, daring to transcend numbing traditional discourses."

Whats amazing is that the magazine has been funding itself (you can find ads of local sex shops) for over a decade. I can imagine why something like this would be so very radical at Vassar, leave alone India, where its editors would be burnt alive with their houses reduced to rubble.

Inside, one can find views from people of all sexual orientations. Some classy, some intriguing and some just plain bizzare, but all, (in some cases, brutally) honest.

The magazine also contains a lot of resources in form of agencies, numbers you can call when you're in trouble and support groups.

And Squirm isn't a lone ranger. According to this article, Swarthmore College publishes its own erotic magazine called Untouchables.

What I have been reading lately...

These are pages I have been flipping recently...

Gang Leader for a Day

For those who have read Freakonomics will remember the chapter about the Indian guy who spent sometime with crackheads and helped come up with material that later became "Why drug dealers live with their moms: in the best seller.

The Indian kid happens to be one of the best social scientists in the world (or so I hear) today and has written a book about the same experience. This was written way back in 2008 but I got my hands on it only recently.

Sudhir Venkatesh describes his times with the drug lords of Chicago and to understand poverty and society better.

Fooled by Randomness

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is an arrogant man. He may also be one of the smartest. Fooled by randomness is an interesting take on probability and how its simple principles have been completely ignored by leading financial giants and how that has screwed them up.

If you have done a course in elementary probability, then you understand the book even better.

But beware, as my friend Nayak says, his arrogance might put
you off from appreciating the book.


Making Globalisation Work

Although I had bought this quite a while back, I stopped reading this in the middle so I could finish Jeffrey Sachs' Commonwealth. So now I am back to Making Globalisation Work.

The book is about how globalisation is inevitable and in order for it to be sustainable it should try to uplift the poor countries of the world. The world as it stands, is certainly anything but flat.

The book goes about cursing the IMF and other organizations who the author feels aren't doing much good. He talks at length about his vision for development and how its closely related to social justice (just how many times will I provide a link to Stan's article, I cant recount, so will not do it this time), other issues include the role of patents in developing countries, access to health care, debt relief, climate change etc etc.

re-use

I am currently on a 2 week tour of Italy and am in love with the place. One of the coolest stores that I noticed in Rome, nicely squeezed in between some of the biggest fashion labels in the world was this store called Re(f)use.

As is evident from the name, everything in the store was reused from something or the other and made into a novelty. In the picture below those bags are made from polythene if I am not wrong and the bags behind from some scrap cloth. Quite a simple idea!

I have seen a similar venture in India as well but somehow can't remember the name.