Weekly Reading List: 22/11/2025
Things I Read This Week That Made Me Think
This week’s reading list kept circling three very specific questions:
Who gets to tinker with bodies, with knowledge, with the sky?
Whose futures get written as serious history, and whose get dismissed as trivia, gossip, or girliness?
And what happens when people who were meant to stay in the margins quietly start leading the charge?
There’s the anti–cosmetic surgery essay that refuses to let “I’m just doing this for me” sit comfortably when “me” has been trained, since childhood, to treat her face as a job. There’s a history of leeches that starts out as “lol bloodsucking medieval nonsense” and ends in operating theatres and FDA approvals, tracing how folk cures become respectable the moment institutions decide to launder them. Alongside that is a midlife-neuroscience piece on why your brain genuinely runs out of fucks to give in your 40s, and a very practical explainer on how to trick that same brain into doing hard things without turning your entire life into a productivity spreadsheet.
Bodies here aren’t self-care Pinterest boards; they’re sites of negotiation. Between patriarchy and survival. Between village knowledge and clinical trials. Between a nervous system that wants safety and a culture that keeps demanding performance.
Zoom out one ring and the question becomes: who gets to build the future, and where?
Tigerfeathers’ aviation essay is a great example of this: a nerdy, grounded walk through why Brazil got Embraer, Europe built Airbus, China has COMAC and India, with all its aviation demand, still imports almost every serious aircraft it flies. It takes on a whole new colour because one of the authors, Khushi, isn’t just theorising about it, she’s literally trying to build planes out of India with Aspera, an autonomous cargo aircraft company. She’s not tweeting “India should build hard things”; she’s in the hangar at 2 a.m. arguing with CAD files and certification pathways.
Pair that with India Dispatch tearing apart the fiction of “$2,400 per capita income” and Scroll’s reporting on why Indian researchers end up publishing in predatory journals, and you start to see a pattern. Our big national numbers and shiny slogans are often propped up on institutions that are collapsing in the background. The people inside them are improvising, hustling, gaming metrics, and trying to stay afloat while policymakes pretend everything is fine.
Then there’s the piece that feels like the hinge of the week: My friend Gautam Bhatia’s “Secret History of Indian Science Fiction,” which basically says, “Before Asimov, there was Rokeya.”
He uses Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s Sultana’s Dream, a 1905 feminist technoutopia set in “Ladyland,” where men are shut away in the mardana and women run a crime-free, machine-assisted society, as the starting point for a whole genealogy of Indian SF. From kalpavigyan in Bengali, to Rahul Sankrityayan’s far-future utopias, to anti-caste futures and city-focused dystopias, he makes it very hard to keep pretending that serious SF started in America and we just joined later in English.
Rokeya, lounging in an easy chair thinking about the condition of Indian womanhood, literally dreams her way into a world where patriarchy is reversed and technology has been put to work for women’s freedom. It’s proto-feminism, proto–climate tech, proto–urban planning, proto–“what if we designed infrastructure for care instead of control.” And we’ve treated it, for decades, like a quirky aside in women’s studies.
At the farthest zoom level, you get to the planetary stuff and it’s… a lot.
There’s the Aeon essay on phosphorus, which informs you that this one element is the skeleton key for all life, agriculture, and long-term habitability, and that we’re currently mining it, wasting it, and flushing it into rivers with the same carelessness we bring to everything else. There’s the history of Indian doctors who left home to operate in wartime China, stitching bodies back together in trenches because anti-imperial solidarity, for them, wasn’t a panel discussion; it was a one-way ticket.
And then there’s Stardust Solutions: a private, U.S.-Israeli climate tech startup that wants to dim the sun. They’re raising tens of millions in VC, hiring lobbyists, and building proprietary reflective particles to inject into the stratosphere so governments can, one day, buy an off-the-shelf solar geoengineering system. It’s framed as “responsible optionality for a hotter world,” but you can feel, under every sentence, the unease of turning the sky into a product.
Somewhere in the middle of all this are the more intimate but no-less-political stories:
– bacteria “remembering” antibiotic stress and changing how they survive later;
– my own essay on why women making money becomes everyone’s favourite moral problem;
– a long, REALLY messy Telos piece about infidelity, power, and who gets to weaponise media narratives when journalists are both players and storytellers in the same game.
We live in a world where experimentation has gone private on faces, on academic careers, on aircraft, on the climate, on our own attention spans. The state withdraws, or fumbles; capital steps in; individuals get told to fix it at the level of their jawline, their CV, their time-blocked calendar, their personal “brand.” Meanwhile, people like Rokeya, Khushi, underpaid PhD students in tier-2 universities, frontline surgeons in someone else’s war, and even a bacteria colony in a petri dish are all saying, in their own ways: we remember what you did to us, and we’re adapting.
So if last week’s theme was “management,” this week’s might be “memory”:
Bodies and cells remembering harm.
Genres remembering their foremothers.
Countries remembering the solidarity projects history textbooks forgot.
The atmosphere itself starting to “remember” our emissions in the form of increasingly weird weather.
It all comes back to one question:
Who are we letting rewrite the rules? And who are we still treating as a footnote, even when they were there first?
Let’s go.
1. The Anti-Cosmetic Surgery Essay Every Woman Needs
The Anti-Cosmetic Surgery Essay Every Woman Needs – fatherkarine
This is a polemic against the soft-focus, “I’m doing this for me” cosmetic surgery narrative. It’s arguing that you can’t separate “choice” from the aesthetic regime that trained you to hate your face in the first place. The essay goes after the idea that surgically conforming to a patriarchal, whitewashed standard is neutral self-love, and treats fillers, lifts, snatches and snips as what they often are: survival strategies in a rigged game, sold back to us as empowerment.
What I got out of it:
This crystallised a discomfort I’ve had with “nuanced” surgery discourse for a while. It doesn’t dunk on individual women, but it DOES question the conditions that make these choices feel inevitable. The thing I’m taking away: any conversation about aesthetic “choice” that doesn’t name patriarchy, race, fatphobia, and class is lying by omission. You don’t have to be anti-every-procedure, but you do have to be honest about what you’re buying into.
2. Leeches and the Legitimizing of Folk Medicine
Leeches and the Legitimizing of Folk Medicine – Asimov Press
This starts as a story about leeches (actual leeches) and turns into a story about who gets to be called “scientific.” It tracks how leech therapy went from village hack / joke / “backward” medicine to an approved tool in reconstructive surgery and microsurgery. Along the way, it shows how folk practices get laundered: standardised, sterilised, trialled, written up in the right journals, and finally handed back to the world with a different price tag and a different accent.
What I got out of it:
The big unlock:
Expertise oftenis just a function of a time lag. What’s “superstitious” in one decade becomes “cutting-edge” in another.
The path from ridicule to respect always runs through institutions that care as much about aesthetics (how knowledge looks) as about outcomes.
It made me think about how much Indian “home science” we’ve internalised as cringe, only to watch it come back as $60 wellness products in glass bottles.
3. Wings Over India: Manufacturing Our Aviation Future
Wings Over India: Manufacturing Our Aviation Future – Tigerfeathers
This is my favourite genre of writing: nerdery with a political agenda. It walks through how Brazil built Embraer, how Europe built Airbus, how China is pushing COMAC, then turns to India and asks the obvious question: with all this air traffic, why don’t we build planes?
It digs into half-hearted programmes, the NAL Hansa story, procurement that never scaled, and the absence of a real “national mission” around civil aviation. What makes it land (lol) is that one of the authors, Khushi, is not just an observer; she’s the founder of Aspera, which is trying to build autonomous amphibious aircraft out of India. She is, literally, leading the charge she’s describing: fundraising, prototyping, dreaming in stress tests and safety cases.
What I got out of it:
The aviation “boom” is, currently, a subsidy to foreign OEMs. Our demand pays for their factories.
This is not a talent problem. It’s a state-capacity and ambition problem. We’re perfectly capable of designing aircraft; we’ve just refused to design the institutions and policies around them.
The fact that Khushi is both writing and building makes the “India should build hard things” line feel earned.
It slotted neatly into my Indian Dynamism brain: a reminder that “deep tech” needs tooling, certification, liability, and someone willing to spend 15 years in an unsexy fight with reality.
4. India’s $2,400 Per Capita Income Is Statistical Fiction
India’s $2,400 Per Capita Income Is Statistical Fiction – India Dispatch
This essay takes the beloved “India has crossed $2,400 per capita income” stat and basically says: sure, but for whom? It walks through how averages work, what gets hidden in them, and how a thin sliver of affluent India pulls the number up while the majority is living much closer to a four-digit annual income.
What I got out of it:
It’s a good antidote to LinkedIn “new India” charts. The key shift for me was treating per capita metrics as a storytelling tool for elites, not a real description of most people’s lives. It nudged me to be much more explicit in my own writing about which India I’m talking about when I say “we.”
5. The Secret History of Indian Science Fiction
The Secret History of Indian Science Fiction – AlterMag
Gautam Bhatia does a genealogy of Indian SF and opens with a line that frames the whole thing: “Before Asimov, there was Rokeya.” He starts with Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s 1905 story Sultana’s Dream, first published in the Indian Ladies’ Magazine, where a woman falls asleep and wakes up in “Ladyland”, a feminist technoutopia where men are shut away in the mardana, women run public life, war and crime are gone, and advanced technology has taken over most labour.
From there, he:
Talks about defamiliarisation / cognitive estrangement: Rokeya takes something foundational (patriarchy), flips it, and uses that to make the familiar world strange.
Traces kalpavigyan in Bengali and Urdu (J.C. Bose’s cyclones, Rahul Sankrityayan’s Baeesveen Sadi) as part of an early subcontinental SF tradition.
Moves into feminist utopias, socialist experiments, anti-caste futures, and city-focused dystopias, and how Indian SF has always been suspicious of neat “national future” narratives.
He spends real time on Rokeya Begum as a foremother, not a footnote: Sultana’s Dream sits at the head of a line that runs through Gilman, Le Guin, Russ, Butler, and beyond.
What I got out of it:
It upgraded Rokeya from “fun fact” to “pillar.” She’s a brown Muslim woman in purdah who imagined solar power, weather control, and gender-flipped governance before half the Western canon.
It killed, for me, the idea that Indian SF is a recent, English-only thing. The roots are older, multilingual, explicitly political.
It sharpened the tension between “national futures” (India as GDP chart) and plural, resistant futures that don’t want to be co-opted into nation-branding.
It also made me want to treat Indian SFF as serious input for anyone thinking about policy, tech, or capital here. These are the futures people have been workshopping for over a century.
6. Why Do Women Making Money Piss Us Off?
Why Do Women Making Money Piss Us Off? – hk’s newsletter
My own piece, so I’ll just sketch the spine. It starts from the observation that visible women making serious money (founders, influencers, creators, executives) seem to trigger a very specific kind of rage. The essay tries to disentangle justified anger at capitalism and inequality from the lazy habit of punching women in the face for playing the only game available.
I dig into:
How women are asked to hold everyone’s guilt about capitalism: be aspirational but not greedy, ambitious but not calculating, generous but not “selling out.”
Why it feels easier to hate the girl with a brand deal than the fund that backed the company that underpays you.
The double standard around “display” when it’s a woman buying nice things with her own money vs a man doing the same.
What I got out of it:
Writing it made me see how often our “take-downs” of women are misdirected class anger, because they’re the only visible, low-risk targets in a chain of power. It also clarified what kind of feminism I’m interested in: one that can be frank about money without making women feel like they have to apologise for wanting it.
7. Aging Out of Fucks: The Neuroscience of Caring Less
Aging Out of Fucks: The Neuroscience of Caring Less – Midlife Shift
Oh my god THIS WAS SO GOOD. It walks through how our salience and threat-detection systems shift as we age, why certain social anxieties burn out, and how the brain starts to budget its attention more ruthlessly. Basically: there are physiological reasons you stop having the capacity to care about every perceived slight or imagined audience.
What I got out of it:
It gave me language for something I’d been watching in older women I admire: it’s not that they don’t care; it’s that they’ve started spending their care differently. It also softened my own self-judgment around “I just don’t have the energy to play some games anymore.” Sometimes that’s growth, not laziness.
8. A Startup’s Bid to Dim the Sun
A Startup’s Bid to Dim the Sun – The New Yorker
This is about Stardust Solutions, a private U.S.-Israeli climate tech startup building a system for solar geoengineering: reflecting a small fraction of sunlight back into space to cool the planet. They’re developing proprietary reflective particles, a way to disperse them into the stratosphere, and a monitoring stack so governments can, in theory, treat “turning the dial on sunlight” as a policy tool.
Some details that matter:
They’re a venture-backed company with tens of millions in funding.
They’re planning careful, limited stratospheric tests before any actual deployment.
They say they won’t move without government authorisation and that their goal is to enable informed decision-making, not to go rogue.
Critics (reasonably) worry about weather disruption, geopolitical fallout, moral hazard on emissions reduction, and the ethics of building private IP around the sky.
What I got out of it:
This is the exact kind of thing that feels like sci-fi until you remember it’s someone’s actual OKR.
Three feelings:
It’s a case study in tech outpacing governance. Our capacity to mess with planetary systems is outstripping our capacity to agree on whether we should.
It reframed geoengineering in my head as infrastructure + business model, not just “science”: particles, aircraft, data systems, lobbying, long-term service contracts.
It made the boring stuff (grid upgrades, emissions cuts, adaptation) look incredibly normal and realistic compared to gambling on the reflectivity of the stratosphere.
It’s both completely understandable (we are running out of time) and deeply unsettling.
9. The Cycling of Phosphorus Is the Basis for All Life on Earth
The Cycling of Phosphorus Is the Basis for All Life on Earth – Aeon
This is a pondering, luminous (gettit? GETTIT?) essay on phosphorus: how it moves through rocks, oceans, soil, plants, animals, and back; how agriculture hacked that cycle with mined fertiliser; and how we’re now facing both depletion (of high-quality phosphate rock) and oversaturation (runoff, algal blooms, dead zones).
It treats phosphorus as a kind of narrative thread you can use to stitch together geology, biology, farming, sewage treatment, and global inequality.
What I got out of it:
It’s one of those pieces that alters the way you look at very mundane things: fertiliser subsidies, river foam, food prices. Phosphorus has now gone from “chemistry chapter I once crammed” to “bottleneck for civilisation.” Also, a solid reminder that if you don’t understand the material flows under your economy, your policy/VC hot takes are mostly fanfiction.
10. The Indian Doctors Who Risked Their Lives to Support China in Its War with Japan
The Indian Doctors Who Risked Their Lives to Support China in Its War with Japan – Scroll
This is narrative history about the Indian Medical Mission to China in the late 1930s. A group of Indian doctors, including Dr Dwarkanath Kotnis, go to support Chinese forces during the Second Sino-Japanese War. They operate in horrific frontline conditions, treat thousands of wounded soldiers and civilians, and many never come back.
It’s a story of anti-imperial solidarity that doesn’t fit into current nationalism on either side.
What I got out of it:
I liked how unromantic it was. There are no Marvel-movie heroics, just exhaustion, infection, and relentless work. It expanded my sense of what “internationalism” has looked like in our history: not just conferences and slogans, but scalpels in field hospitals, undertaken with very little guarantee of recognition or safety.
11. Bacterial Persistence and “Memory” of Antibiotic Exposure
Medical theories on the cause of death in crucifixion is what I read last week; this week’s rabbit hole was a different paper: PubMed 29997606
This is a technical article on bacterial persister cells: tiny subpopulations that survive antibiotic treatment not by being genetically resistant, but by basically going to sleep. The paper explores how exposure to antibiotics can induce a kind of “memory” in these cells, changing how they respond to future stress.
What I got out of it:
I mostly read it because the idea of bacteria “remembering” stress is inherently cool/creepy. It left me with:
A renewed respect for how quickly life finds ways around our neat solutions.
A line I can’t stop using: systems remember pain. Once they’ve adapted to survive a certain kind of harm, they rarely go back to baseline.
It’s also a reminder that our whole “just develop new antibiotics” story sits on top of arms races like this, playing out invisibly in hospitals and guts.
12. How to Trick Your Brain into Doing Hard Things
How to Trick Your Brain into Doing Hard Things – Brain Health Decoded
This is a practical, de-jargoned guide to why your brain resists effort and how to design around that. It talks about:
Why big, vague tasks feel threatening.
How to shrink the “activation cost” of starting.
How to use rewards, environment design, and timeboxing so that willpower is the last resort, not the first tool.
Nothing wildly new, but unusually clear and honest about the limits of grit.
What I got out of it:
It gave me a more compassionate view for my own avoidance. Instead of “I’m lazy,” it’s “I’ve made the first step too cognitively expensive.” When I apply the very boring advice (open the doc the night before, lay out gym clothes, define “done” clearly) the resistance drops.
13. Class, Caste, Collapsing Public Universities: Why Indian Researchers Publish in Predatory Journals
Class, caste, collapsing public universities: Why Indian researchers publish in predatory journals – Scroll
This is a deeply unflattering x-ray of Indian academia. It lays out how India became a world leader in predatory-journal publications, then zooms into the why: absurd promotion norms that count quantity over quality, gutted state universities, pay and mentorship gaps that fall brutally along caste and class lines, and the lack of access to “legitimate” journals for scholars outside elite institutions.
What I got out of it:
It reframes predatory publishing as a structural outcome, not primarily a story of individual bad actors.
It makes visible how caste organises who gets to be seen as a “real” knowledge producer.
It slots into a broader pattern: metrics-driven systems with no support almost inevitably create grey markets and workarounds.
It made me angrier at the people designing the rules than at the desperate PhD trying to keep their job.
14. Part 1: How I Found Out
Part 1: How I Found Out – Telos News
Ryan Lizza writes about discovering that his partner, journalist Olivia Nuzzi, was having an affair with a presidential candidate she was covering, and about what happened next when the story, and their breakup, became media fodder.
What I got out of it:
Beyond the gossip, it’s a case study in who gets to control the story when journalists themselves are the protagonists. It made me sit with:
How easily “accountability journalism” can shade into weaponised narrative when power and intimacy are tangled.
How vulnerable freelancers and independents are compared to people with institutions behind them.
How much of what we take as “the” story is just whoever got to the keyboard first in a moment of pain.
Memory isn’t just about looking back. It’s about who gets to decide what “counts” as science, as history, as progress, as failure. A leech in a village pond, a woman dreaming up Ladyland, a tired PhD in a collapsing state university, a small team trying to build planes in a country that would rather buy them in dollars: all of them are doing quiet archival work just by insisting on being real.
What spooked me a little this week is how often the experimentation has gone private while the consequences stay public. Faces, CVs, bacterial colonies, airplanes, the stratosphere. The state shrugs, capital optimises, and the individual is told to fix it at the level of their jawline, their productivity stack, their “brand”. Meanwhile, the systems we built to forget remember us just fine.
So maybe the real work, whether you’re writing policy or fanfic or grant applications, is to be very intentional about who you choose to remember and what you refuse to normalise.
Whose names do you say out loud? Whose shortcuts do you stop tolerating?
And when the next “inevitable” future is presented to you, do you recognise whose memory it’s built on?
Until next week.