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At 30 years old, Michelle Kunimoto already has more than 3,000 planet candidates under her belt.Inspired by science fiction and curiosity, the University of British Columbia astronomy graduate is passionate about searching for exoplanets — bodies orbiting stars outside our own solar system.She's currently leading a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) hunting for them. In 2024, Kunimoto will return to her alma mater as an assistant professor in UBC's department of physics and astronomy."She is an…

A thrilling group that I thought had gone for ever – so it was amazing to hear this, how fresh it is and yet so recognisable. My partner of 20 years died very suddenly of a brain aneurysm in October 2022 and I so wish he could have heard Caution to the Wind. It moves me immensely. Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt have always been so eloquent about love and loss, and about the joy of music and partying. Heartfelt ballads, pounding drum’n’bass, songs that play with the form of music itself – there’s a lot to love. In my own loss…

When Pakistani economist Mahub-ul Haq unveiled the first-ever UN Human Development Report before journalists, he did a little thought experiment to ask them a simple question. If an alien were to decide on settling down on Earth, which country would it would choose: Costa Rica, a poorer country with a better quality of life where people lived longer, or one of the oil-rich Middle-eastern nations, where people died younger? The answer was obvious: nobody wants to die prematurely. Putting growth in its place…

We miss the old Twitter. Even the name’s gone now. The credit for that goes to one of tech’s most polarising figures, Elon Musk. For long, I’d suspected the disintegration wasn’t one-sided. Ben Mezrich, no stranger to big tech’s eccentricities, puts it in plain words – “Twitter broke Elon Musk”. His 2023 book, Breaking Twitter, follows a rapid (and unexpected) personality transformation marked by the troll persona taking over even as undeniable brilliance often bubbled to the surface. “If things are not failing, you’re…

Most of us love a good juicy mystery book. The twists, the turns, the suspense and then finally the reveal – we love it, enjoy it, and indulge in it ever so often. The book that I enjoyed the most this year was not really a mystery book but, for me, it was also nothing less than one. It held a surprise on every spread, at every page turn. THIS IS NOT AN ART BOOK by Ra jKamal Aich is a collection of amazing visuals by an extraordinarily talented creative individual, with whom I’ve had the pleasure of working.…

The Future of Geography — How Power And Politics in Space Will Change Our World by Tim Marshall is beautifully descriptive: “The flickering lights of the stars tell many stories. Long before we even dreamed of venturing into space… Much of human endeavour has been driven by our desire to reach for the stars… ” Marshall’s research too is thorough as he brings in the earliest evidence of people attempting to understand the skies: “The earliest potential evidence of people trying to analyse and understand the skies dates…

The last book I read in 2022 was Chris Miller’s excellent Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology. It was thanks to this book, that I realized that Miller has also written an excellent account of why the Soviet Union collapsed suddenly in the 1980s in his 2020 book, The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy: Mikhail Gorbachev and the Collapse of the USSR. While there exists a lot of dense literature in economics on problems with socialist economic models, Miller’s work is perhaps the simplest account…

A recent visit to the Prado, Reina Sofia and the Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid became a handy excuse to read two books on seemingly disparate artists separated by over a century. Desmond Morris, more famous for The Naked Ape, casts his beady, zoologist’s eye on the lives of the surrealists in the book of the same name. Of old masters and modern greats (Thames and Hudson) More a philosophical concept than an art movement, surrealism was a response to the horrors of World War I and waned by the time the second…

This year, as usual, except for a Yiyun Li and a Patchett here and an RF Kuang there, I read mostly non fiction – memoirs, political biographies, studies of a filmmaker’s oeuvre, books on women in science, even a passionate treatise on an alternative food source that has led me to include crackling seaweed on my snack menu. Among the memoirs, I particularly enjoyed Sara Rai’s Raw Umber, which touches on growing up in Allahabad, her grandfather Premchand, the ordinariness of death, drawing from a pool of languages in her…

I don’t need Spotify’s year-end list. I already know that I’ve played Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours all through 2023. Blame Taylor Jenkins Reid. Her 2019 novel, Daisy Jones & the Six, follows a fictitious 1970s band – their music, the drama, the epic final show and subsequent breakup – and is loosely inspired by Rumours. It’s a tale told through interviews; events seen from the points of view of various members of the band. There’s sex, drugs, rock and roll. But there’s also the magic of hitting on a great tune, spinning…