The Village Republic and the Sink of Localism
Gandhi saw the village as a republic and Ambedkar saw it as a trap, and India's long experiment with panchayats has still not decided between them.
GRADFLIX Editors · Hard
All essays
PhilosophyPsychologyArts & LiteratureCulture & SocietyHistory & CivilizationPolitics & GovernanceEconomics & BusinessScienceTechnology & FutureNature & EnvironmentEducation & Knowledge
The Psychologist Who Asked What Mystics Were For
William James judged mystical states by what they did for a life and not by where they came from. The method is generous, and it leaves the oldest question unanswered.
GRADFLIX Editors3 Qs · Hard
The Twins Announced After the Edit and Before the Rules
Two girls were born in 2018 after a scientist edited their embryos, and the world learned of it afterwards. Courts and regulators have been catching up ever since.
GRADFLIX Editors5 Qs · Medium
The Dinosaur That Was Struck Off and Brought Back
A famous dinosaur lost its name in 1903 and regained it in 2015. Whether it deserved to depends less on bones than on where scientists draw lines.
GRADFLIX Editors2 Qs · Medium
The Memoir That Was Sold as Truth and Refunded as Fiction
A bestselling memoir of addiction turned out to contain invented episodes, and its publisher offered refunds with conditions. The case raises a plain question about who guarantees a product's label.
Abhishek Leela Pandey4 Qs · Medium
Sexiness Is Not a Property of the Body
Beauty can be catalogued but desire keeps slipping out of the list, which suggests that attraction lives in a relationship and not in a body.
GRADFLIX Editors4 Qs · Hard
The Runner Disqualified for a Car Ride and the Winner Fed Strychnine
At the St. Louis Olympics of 1904 one marathoner was thrown out for riding in a car and another was crowned after being given strychnine. The difference had less to do with fairness than with what the rule book happened to say.
GRADFLIX Editors6 Qs · Medium
The Cells That Outlived Their Donor and the Rights That Did Not
Cells taken without consent in 1951 still divide in laboratories around the world. The law has been slower than the cells to say what their source is owed.
Abhishek Leela Pandey5 Qs · Medium
The Optimist in Hiding and the Century That Answered Him
A hunted man wrote the most confident book about human improvement in March 1794. Malthus, two world wars and the Indian Constitution have each answered it since, and none has closed the argument.
GRADFLIX Editors · Hard
The Outing That Became a Business Model
A shilling train ride to a temperance meeting in 1841 turned into the template for the package holiday. The business idea inside it was older than the holiday.
GRADFLIX Editors4 Qs · Medium
The Man in the Jar Who Claimed the World as His City
A philosopher said to have lived in a jar once called himself a citizen of the world. More than twenty three centuries later the phrase still cannot be pinned to a single meaning.
GRADFLIX Editors3 Qs · Hard
The Game With No Players
Four short rules and a grid of cells produced patterns that move, multiply and compute. Whether that is order or only the appearance of it is harder to say.
GRADFLIX Editors2 Qs · Medium
The Paradox of the Richer Who Were Not Happier - An RC Inspired by IIM Indore
In 1974 an economist reported that nations grew richer without growing happier. Fifty years of argument have shown that the answer depends less on the money than on the question asked of the people who have it.
GRADFLIX Editors4 Qs · Hard
The Baby Who Was Born in a Dish and the Experts Who Objected
The first baby conceived outside a human body arrived in 1978 to eminent warnings of harm. Fifty years on, the objections look less like caution than like a prediction that failed.
GRADFLIX Editors6 Qs · Medium
The Identity Card That Turned a Label into a Line
A colonial census in the 1930s took labels that had once been flexible and wrote them onto a card that outlived the empire that issued it.
GRADFLIX Editors5 Qs · Medium
The Bomb That Did Not Explode and the Policy That Did
A famous prediction of mass famine failed, yet the fear behind it shaped policy in India and still shapes arguments about numbers, fairness and the future.
GRADFLIX Editors · Hard
The Violins That Lost the Blind Test
A century of reverence for the Cremonese master met a trial in which the players could not see which violin they held.
GRADFLIX Editors1 Qs · Medium
The Money That Never Had to Move
On a Pacific island, stones too heavy to carry changed owners without moving, and the habit has become a favourite parable about what money really is.
GRADFLIX Editors4 Qs · Medium
The Traveller Who Never Carried the Noodle to Italy
The story that Marco Polo brought pasta home from China is told in kitchens everywhere, yet a notary in Genoa wrote down a basket of macaroni before he returned.
GRADFLIX Editors6 Qs · Medium
The Madman Who Spoke to the Wrong Audience
The most famous sentence in modern philosophy is usually heard as a victory cry, yet the parable that contains it is addressed to people who were not grieving at all.
GRADFLIX Editors3 Qs · Hard
The Decision That Seemed to Come Before the Decider - An RC Inspired by IIM Indore
A famous experiment appeared to show that the brain commits to an action before a person knows they have chosen it, but a later reading suggests the evidence may be an artefact of how it was averaged.
GRADFLIX Editors4 Qs · Hard
The Judgment That Freed One Man and Left Slavery Standing
Lord Mansfield's famous ruling of 1772 is remembered as the end of slavery in England. The real holding was far smaller, and its reach far greater.
GRADFLIX Editors5 Qs · Medium
The Temples of Modern India and the Villages Beneath Them
India built its great dams in the name of the many, and the reservoirs rose over the homes of a few. The question of who may be asked to pay for a public good has never been fully settled.
GRADFLIX Editors · Hard
The Signal That Wrote Its Own Exclamation
For seventy two seconds in 1977 a telescope heard something that has never come back. An astronomer's one word reaction gave it a name.
GRADFLIX Editors2 Qs · Medium
The Flaw Intel Called Rare
A professor found a division error in a Pentium chip in 1994, and a company answered with probabilities. The bill that followed was measured in hundreds of millions of dollars.
GRADFLIX Editors4 Qs · Medium
The Marshmallow That Was Never Only About Willpower
A treat on a plate became the most famous test of character in modern psychology. A larger study and a cleverer experiment suggest that the children may have been answering a different question.
GRADFLIX Editors6 Qs · Medium
The Hoax That Proved Whatever Its Readers Already Believed
A physicist submitted a deliberate nonsense article to a journal in 1996, and it was published. Thirty years on, both sides of the quarrel still claim the episode as their evidence.
GRADFLIX Editors3 Qs · Hard
Can the Ramayana Survive Its Own Spectacle? - An RC Inspired by IIM Indore
A film reportedly costing Rs 4,000 crore is about to retell the Ramayana, while a modest 1987 serial once emptied India's streets. The question is whether a story can grow larger on screen while its meaning grows smaller.
GRADFLIX Editors4 Qs · Hard
The Psychology of Being Confidently Wrong
The Psychology of Being Confidently Wrong
GRADFLIX Editors4 Qs · Hard
The Reservoir That Burst and the Rule India Chose to Outgrow
An English reservoir gave the common law a rule about dangerous things. A gas leak in Delhi showed why India needed a stricter one.
GRADFLIX Editors5 Qs · Medium
The Tongue the Nation Could Not Choose
India's Constitution names an official language, a list of scheduled languages and a promise to review. Seven decades later the review has still not ended the argument.
GRADFLIX Editors · Hard
The Test Scores That Kept Rising and Then Stopped
Intelligence test scores climbed for most of a century. Then, in at least one country, they began to fall within the same families.
GRADFLIX Editors2 Qs · Medium
The Machine IBM Built and the Standard It Could Not Keep
IBM created the personal computer industry in a year. A decision made to save time left the profits of that industry with two of its suppliers.
GRADFLIX Editors4 Qs · Medium
The Wall That Astronauts Could Not Find
For generations schoolchildren learned that the Great Wall of China can be seen from space. The first Chinese astronaut returned with a different report.
GRADFLIX Editors6 Qs · Medium
The Runaway Tram That Was Never Meant to Be Polled
The trolley problem began as a footnote in an argument about abortion. Its journey into the engineering of driverless cars may have changed what it was built to ask.
GRADFLIX Editors3 Qs · Hard
The Streak That Statisticians Said Never Existed - An RC Inspired by IIM Indore
A famous paper told basketball fans that streaks were an illusion. A later paper found a flaw in the arithmetic that produced the verdict.
GRADFLIX Editors4 Qs · Hard
The Conviction That Fell on a Technicality and the Law That Stayed
A Tennessee teacher was convicted in 1925 for teaching evolution, and the conviction was undone two years later for a reason that had nothing to do with science. The law that put him in court lived on.
GRADFLIX Editors5 Qs · Medium
The Census That Counted Caste and the Category It May Have Made
India stopped counting caste in 1951 and is preparing to count it again. Whether a census describes a society or helps to build it is a question older than the Republic.
GRADFLIX Editors · Hard
The Sugar Dose That Was Never Given
Parents who thought their sons had eaten sugar saw wilder behaviour, though no sugar was served. The finding raises a question about how much of what adults observe is brought in from their own expectations.
GRADFLIX Editors1 Qs · Medium
The Watchmakers Who Invented Quartz and Still Lost the Market
Switzerland built the first quartz watch prototypes and then watched Japan sell them. The standard story blames pride, but the real cause may lie in how the industry was organised.
GRADFLIX Editors4 Qs · Medium
The Horned Helmet That No Viking Ever Wore
The most famous piece of Viking costume has never turned up in a Viking grave. Its real home is the nineteenth century stage, and its survival is stranger than its origin.
GRADFLIX Editors6 Qs · Medium
The Science of Lysenkoism
In 1948 a Soviet agronomist persuaded the state to outlaw an entire branch of biology. The reasons it worked, and the reasons it is hard to dismiss cleanly, say something uncomfortable about how belief survives.
GRADFLIX Editors3 Qs · Hard
The Wisdom of Crowds
A Victorian scientist set out to prove that ordinary people judge badly and found a crowd that was almost exactly right. The trouble is what happens once the crowd starts to talk.
GRADFLIX Editors4 Qs · Hard
The Horse That Could Count and the Face That Did Not Know
A horse in Berlin tapped out sums to the delight of the crowds, and a psychologist later showed that the arithmetic belonged to the audience.
GRADFLIX Editors3 Qs · Hard
The Word Meritocracy Began as a Warning
The man who made the word famous meant it as a satire. A look at his warning, at India's long argument over merit and reservation, and at what deserving can mean.
GRADFLIX Editors · Hard
The Emperor Who Was Not Short
For two centuries the autopsy figure has been cited as proof that Napoleon was small. A look at the units, the cartoons and the nicknames tells a different story.
GRADFLIX Editors6 Qs · Medium
The Dancers of Strasbourg and the Cure That Fed the Plague
In the summer of 1518 a street in Strasbourg filled with people who could not stop dancing, and the official remedy may have made things worse.
GRADFLIX Editors2 Qs · Medium
The Giant That Declined a Small Partner and Defended Its Late Fees
Blockbuster is said to have turned down a chance to run Netflix, and the reasons were less foolish than the legend suggests.
GRADFLIX Editors4 Qs · Medium