Articles
![Life near elephants](https://samanth.in/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/elephant.jpg)
Life near elephants
Elephants have their own, ancient geographies. “They walk 20 or 25 kilometres a day — their bodies need it.” Increasingly, in southern India, that brings them into contact, and conflict, with human beings.
![The weight of a story](https://samanth.in/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/yemen.png)
The weight of a story
The words “she cries” show up sixty times in total in Bushra al-Maqtari’s What Have You Left Behind? The men in the book seem to weep less: “He cries” appears twenty times.
![Ukraine’s personal shopper](https://samanth.in/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/andrey.png)
Ukraine’s personal shopper
In the war against Russia, some Ukrainians carry AK-47s. Andrey Liscovich carries a shopping list. He’s giving a demo of the future of war: the military-retail complex.
![The insider](https://samanth.in/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/michael-lewis.png)
The insider
As author of The Big Short and Moneyball, Michael Lewis is perhaps the most celebrated journalist of his generation. Now he delivers an astonishing portrait of Sam Bankman-Fried, the fallen crypto billionaire. But did he get too close?
![The nursing brokers](https://samanth.in/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/nurses.png)
The nursing brokers
In India, brokers lure nurses into private care jobs in the UK, with tall promises that seem worth paying a lot for — until they fail to deliver.
![The war on Japanese knotweed](https://samanth.in/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/knotweed.png)
The war on Japanese knotweed
“I caught the odd feeling that I had come to the future world from which human beings had departed. Vegetation would be renewed year after year. Hybridised itadori would be the main creature in this area.”
![Hiking the Trans-Bhutan Trail](https://samanth.in/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/bhutan.png)
Hiking the Trans-Bhutan Trail
When I visited, the king had thrown open a restored version of an ancient route: once populated only by farmers ambling to their fields, royal messengers hurrying from court to court, and divine madmen scattering grain.
![Dismantling Sellafield](https://samanth.in/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/sellafield.png)
Dismantling Sellafield
At Sellafield, a nuclear power plant, nothing is produced anymore. But making safe what is left behind is an almost unimaginably complex task that requires us to think not on a human timescale, but a planetary one.
![Bollywood under Modi](https://samanth.in/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/bollywood.png)
Bollywood under Modi
Mumbai’s film industry was a much-vaunted bastion of India’s secular ideals. Since the rise of the BJP, it’s been flooded with stock Hindu heroes and Muslim villains, and shows and movies are being killed off.