Kamila

Teenage Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva was banned from the sport for four years over a positive doping test taken just before the 2022 Winter Olympics, the Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled on Monday. The ban backdates to before the most recent Winter Games in Beijing, stripping Russia of its figure skating team gold and potentially paving the way for the U.S. team to finally be awarded first place two years after the controversy first surfaced. The suspension is dated from Dec. 25, 2021, meaning Valieva,…

There’s nothing I would like more than for Nothing’s Phone (2) to actually look like a major upgrade from the company’s first cellular device to hit the market. But instead, all the hints we now have about CEO Carl Pei’s jump into a more premium phone market seem to be a slight upgrade from the much-hyped, LED-backeddevice that came out a year ago.What Drew John Boyega Back Into Sci-Fi? | io9 InterviewNothing has said it’s gunning for a July 11 release date, but so far has released little to no specs to the public,…

Kamila Shamsie’s latest novel chronicles the friendship of two women from their early teens through to middle age. Zahra is the daughter of a sports journalist and Maryam is due to inherit her father’s luxury leather goods business. We first meet them when they are 14-year-olds in 1980s Karachi hanging out at each other’s houses and obsessing over school cliques, boys and their love of Jackie Collins novels and George Michael. Humming in the background is the new political dawn represented by Benazir Bhutto after the…

The Plague Jacqueline Rose Life, death and politics Sigmund Freud thought that an awareness of death gave life a special value. According to the renowned cultural critic Jacqueline Rose, the sudden death in 1920 of Freud’s favourite daughter Sophie Halberstadt-Freud resulted in his “philosophy of grief”, one that stems not just from his inner realm but also from the external political world. At the time,…

My earliest reading memoryAn illustrated version of Ian Fleming’s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. I was probably three or so, in Karachi, and according to my parents I couldn’t yet read but had learned the book by heart so knew when to tell them to turn the page. I have a clear memory of looking at words on the page beneath the illustration of a flying car.My favourite book growing upThe Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by CS Lewis. I was in a room full of adults, bored, when I first noticed this book with an appealing title on…

Is the IT industry still considered as men-dominated field, or are the times slowly changing? We asked female IT professionals from different countries in Europe about their experience in IT or data-related jobs.Photo by Mimi Thian on UnsplashWhy does it matter if the people working in the tech industry are more often women or men? Today tech recruiters are often trying to ensure diversity in IT and data teams to make sure that a team of 10 software engineers or data analysts won’t come up with the same 10 solutions to a…

Thinking about career change into data? Check common prejudices about getting job as a junior.One of my first data analysis project was fun. Photo: Czechitas (https://www.czechitas.cz/en), published with permission of Czechitas z.ú.Are you thinking about a new career in a promising data science field? If a former coal miner or opera singer can do it, you can probably do it too.I have been there, not in the mines though, nor torturing an audience with my high pitched voice. I jumped from writing articles about electric…

A lot of research went into your last few books. Was that the case for Best of Friends too?It had less research than the previous three novels. The section set in 1988 in Karachi was based on my experience, but there were gaps in my memory. So I would go on Twitter and ask, “Karachi people, give me the names of video shops in the 1980s.” While the first section required little research as I had lived through it and it was about two girls in school, for the latter, I had to figure out what venture capitalists do. I knew…

You don’t have to read past the opening pages of Kamila Shamsie’s new novel to figure out the theme. Zahra, the daughter of a popular cricket broadcaster in 1980s Karachi, thinks that American movies seldom focus on female friendships, that these relationships often unfold as “a subplot to romance, never the heart of the story”. Shamsie, by contrast, is preoccupied with the platonic bond between Zahra and her classmate Maryam, the scion of a post-partition business family. We see them first as uncertain teenagers in…

Literary genres age, much as people do. Postcolonial literature – PoCo to friends – was once an angry young outsider leading the charge against empire. Now, much older and having made some money, PoCo seems to have compromised with the world, depicting chic, transnational lives jetting between humid capital cities and the glamorous locales of New York and London. Invariably educated at Oxbridge and the Ivy League, the characters pursue comfortable careers in politics, the media and, almost always, high finance. After a…