I have finally started what I had been thinking of doing for at least two years now: relearning statistics. I am a freelance journalist/programmer, and I control the volume of work I want to hold at any point. …

Today, I have hit a personal milestone: cult.fit app informs me I have been regular with my workouts for 52 weeks in a row — meaning, over the last year, I exercised every single week without exception. …

Originally posted on my personal blog on January 1, 2021 Today, I complete five years in journalism: one year at The Hindu (my first job, straight out of university), two years at the Hindustan Times — which overlapped with a five-month fellowship at the Wall Street Journal — and two…

Originally posted on my personal blog “There is a lot of uncertainty in figuring out how this will work out,” reads the seventh point in my journal entry titled “On Quitting”, dated 13th January 2019 — the day I resigned from my full-time job at the Hindustan Times. After two…

Samarth Bansal (Y11) and Ashutosh Ranka (Y13) On November 2, IIT Kanpur turned 60. The Institute was celebrating its foundation day, and one of us was at the campus during the festivities. In his speech, Abhay Karandikar, the director of IIT Kanpur, recounted the glorious history of the institute and…

NaMo app, the personal mobile application of the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, is as vulnerable to communal propaganda and fake news as Facebook, WhatsApp and Twitter. Originally posted on DisFact, my weekly newsletter about Indian politics, policy and the economy. Subscribe here. “Of the total 40,000 rape cases in…

Welcome to DisFact, a weekly India newsletter. I am Samarth Bansal. If you like this post, sign up for weekly updates. Here is a list of all previous issues. Today: Climate change. Are countries meeting the targets set in the 2015 Paris climate agreement? What about India? Climate finance: The…

On 9th August, around noon, my friend from IIT Kanpur sent me a text message: “You have to see the IITK Alumni Association group on Facebook.” I already had. No one who is a part of the group could have possibly ignored it — unless Facebook’s algorithm thought otherwise. It…

Chris Spatola (@Chris_Spatola), an analyst at ESPN, is the closest to what the median verified Twitter user looks like. Here is why: Chris the second most common first name among verified users. 1,520 users share that name. He has around 10,800 followers. The median for verified users is 10,521. He…