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Robert Downey Jr. left the spectators in splits of laughter as he lifted his award for Best Supporting Actor at the Critics Choice Awards 2024. The actor won for his commendable performance in Christopher Nolan's 2023 directorial - Oppenheimer. Robert Downey Jr. at the Critics Choice Awards 2024 where he won the Best Supporting Actor Award for Oppenheimer.(Getty Images via AFP) What stood out in the Iron Man actor's speech was the bits he'd picked up from all the savage comments he'd received from the Critics…

The year 2023 proved a big one for lunar science. India’s Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft landed near the south pole of the Moon, a huge accomplishment for a country relatively new to the space scene, especially after its Chandrayaan-2 craft crashed in 2019. At the same time, NASA’s been gearing up for a host of Moon-related missions, including its Artemis program. In 2023, the agency gained nine signatories to the Artemis Accords, an international agreement for peaceful space exploration, for a total of 32 countries that…

Within four months of ChatGPT’s launch on Nov. 30, 2022, most Americans had heard of the AI chatbot. Hype about – and fear of – the technology was at a fever pitch for much of 2023. OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, Anthropic’s Claude and Microsoft’s Copilot are among the chatbots powered by large language models to provide uncannily humanlike conversations. The experience of interacting with one of these chatbots, combined with Silicon Valley spin, can leave the impression that these technical marvels are conscious…

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…

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…

Where are you really from? It’s a question that is impossible to answer. Go back just a few generations, and the mist begins to form. Lines, and oceans, are invariably crossed. Go back even further, and the story becomes a bit clearer – because it is shared. The Stone Age; the Iron Age; the trek out of Africa. A sweeping look at a species that has always been on the move (Hachette) Rewind again, and there are simply no clear answers. “A small part of the DNA of most modern humans – between 1 and 4 per cent –…

The question of Palestine is likely to be on the minds of many readers as the year draws to a close and I am sure many would have read the seminal work on this by the incomparable academic/activist Edward Said. But to understand the current conflict, it is necessary to look back at the many works on the subject of this seemingly intractable conflict. The first you should go back to is the magnificent Failing Peace: Gaza and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict by Sara Roy. Though written over 16 years ago, this…