Latest news with #Koul
Scroll.in
13-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Scroll.in
‘Sucker Punch': Scaachi Koul's writings are unable to move beyond the trappings of ‘internet essays'
There are many essayists, but no group with a style as recognisable as that of BuzzFeed essayists. The New Journalism practitioners were discernible too, but only because they make the journalistic novelistic. Even then, where Tom Wolfe is flamboyant, Joan Didion is stone cold, precise like a surgeon. They followed no cult of regularised style. They were not siblings at the same dinner table. They were not canvassers on the Internet. A child of the internet 'I picked a career that's preternaturally suited to getting into arguments on the internet,' writes Scaachi Koul in her latest offering, Sucker Punch, a collection of essays about, of all things, fighting. Not pugilism in the ring as much as the banal sparring with yourself, your parents, your partner, your friends, and your fans. Koul owes her present reputation to her stint as a culture writer at Buzzfeed Canada, where she wrote essays with titles like ' I Went To A Summer Camp For Adults And It Was Weird ', ' There's No Recipe For Growing Up ', and ' Can TV Make Us Not Hate Ourselves? ' It's a background that places them squarely within a certain type of online writing, that of the BuzzFeed essayist. The standard BuzzFeed essayist is a child of the internet. They have known no other home. Only their devices, a reliable data plan, and a penchant for living a narratable life keep them company. To them, the journalistic is the memoiristic. In BuzzFeed, it hardly matters where you come from. Just one caveat. You can never shed the skin of the BuzzFeed essayist. With a beast of an internet to feed, what else will the BuzzFeed essayist write about if not themselves? While recognisability as an essayist is desirable, being recognisable as a specific type of essayist is perhaps not. An essayist is only as good as their personality. When in history have good writers ever wanted to sound like regular ones? Ever since the internet, apparently. 'I know how to write these stories because they're all the same,' writes Koul about writing profiles that follow women falling from the grace of their television producers, '…but the readership rarely tires of them and neither do I.' The readership rarely seems to tire of the internet essay, either. Although not to be confused with the personal essay, the internet essay owes much to its compatriot. It shares its vanity, vapidity, virility, verity, and variety, not to mention vitriol. Even fiction has been the target of rants against the personal essay, as this piece points out. Where the personal essay seeks to enlighten, the internet essay entertains. 'The internet made the personal essay worse, as it does for most things,' writes essayist Jia Tolentino in her 2017 New Yorker article, 'The Personal-Essay Boom Is Over'. Tolentino narrates the noiseless abandonment of personal essays in favour of good old reporting; one of the missteps of our time was to confuse the two. What is the internet essay, though? Like the personal essay, it is where the writer fidgets with the question of whether they have something to say. Except, the writer (as well as the editor) shelves the question immediately. It's too demanding. Content begs quick production (cumbersome questions get in the way like a pestering co-worker). Where the internet essay breaks away from the personal essay is when it becomes conversational, digressive, and sometimes fragmented. It is a work-in-progress impersonating a completed draft, strewn with hackneyed cultural criticism and memes, often structured for skimming. Mobile-optimised. I could've read Sucker Punch on my phone, and it wouldn't have made a difference. As a Brown writer in America, Koul can't not talk about race, but she goes the extra mile and whisks in religion. Even her index follows the pattern of the cycle of life, death, and rebirth in Hinduism. She writes, 'It was boring to talk about God,' before slinging out an extended metaphor comparing herself to Parvati: 'Parvati wanted to marry Shiva; her parents, however, didn't approve.' Koul married an older white man, which seems inevitable, considering how even the deities have 'white skin'. '(Why were they always white?)' she asks in parentheses. There are many other such considerations relegated to these brackets: '(I'm sure there's a joke in here somewhere about the white man in my life getting his visa during a Trump administration in about five minutes while mine took more than a year, but I'm too tired from living through that administration in real time to mine for the punchline. Later, when Trump becomes our cyborg king, I'm sure I'll be able to make sense of those heady early years).' That titbit is from an essay titled 'Lolita, Later,' which is perhaps the most vulnerable of the lot, which questions the trouble of embodying the character of Lolita the way Humbert Humbert intended, as a girl who has agency. In the essay, Koul struggles to reach a point, bringing together morsels from her age-gap marriage that ended in divorce, the experience of dating an emotionally unavailable man after the fact, and her reasonable distrust of men. The Trump joke has no room unless Koul wants to stick to narrating her deliberations at a cocktail party. Perhaps that's what she desires. As millennials like her might say, she's too 'lit' to write a book, y'all. A Brown woman in America The tedious digressions are inescapable in the internet essay, a form that desires a clear political leaning. No ambiguity allowed. Depending on the country you're from, there is a checklist of things you must have an opinion on to be worthy of writing on the Internet. In America, it's trans issues, Trump, and vaccination. In India, it's Modi, minorities and Hindutva. A self-diagnosis is also mandatory, obliged by an internet nibbling on the scraps of psychoanalytic theory: Falling in love with someone older, protective, and angry was a response to him assaulting me. Running away from Toronto was another attempt to avoid reckoning with the kind of girl who would 'let something like this happen' to herself. And, ironically, kick-starting some gupshup with Jeff during lockdown was my own way of avoiding the more urgent fight happening inside my marriage. In this essay, squarely titled A Close Read, Koul examines her fraught relationship with a man named Jeff, who sexually assaulted her when they were at university. Before his passing, she had contacted him; their conversations were lukewarm, inviting no apology and only derision from her husband when he found out. Going by these pieces, nothing in Koul's life appears to exist independently of everything else, and life imitates the structure of the book, where its claim to being a collection of essays seems propelled by a desire to stand out in an American market buffeted with divorce books. Perhaps the difference, to labour my point as Koul often does, is that hers is a Brown woman's perspective. If I had to think prototypically, internet essays by 'a Brown woman in America' can produce prattling platitudes on identity, belonging, cultural duality, generational conflict, burdening expectations, and defiant joy – to name just a few – and Sucker Punch delivers. In the soliloquy on her relationship with her body, 'Chocolate, Lime Juice, Ice Cream', Koul chatters about her lifelong struggle with body image and self-esteem, the cradle of which she, as you might guess, owes to her mother ('I was at my thinnest at that wedding; I knew, because my mom told me I was. She was proud. I was hungry.'). Somewhere along her essay, Koul writes: 'It's rote for a woman to blame her issues with food on her mother, but clichés exist for a reason.' After her divorce from an ex-husband who 'was always feeding' her, Koul's mother had a persistent question: 'Did you eat?' ('Did you eat?' she'd say. 'You have to eat. Eat everything. Eat whatever you want. Eat now.') The essay paddles the same ideas that float in its sisters: Koul loved her husband, forgot for a whole hot minute that she was a complete person in her own right, left him, and is now discovering herself, recuperating all the while. Since she's a writer, a book is a part of that process. The internet essayist has to get to a point. She doesn't have the privilege of mere deliberations, even if the process of self-discovery guarantees simply that. Here's how Koul arrives at hers: But I don't need to hide from myself, or hide myself from other people. Besides, I cannot hide because no one will let me. Even if I try to slink away to an invisible place, someone will come and get me. It's nice in the light if you can stand in it long enough to feel the warmth. Looking at my body with my own gaze is a light unto itself. I try to stay there as much as I possibly can. My mother told me to eat, and so I did. On arriving here, Koul sounds like anyone else. I won't deny that she's a good writer, but in Sucker Punch, Koul becomes the quintessential internet essayist, best read to escape the sludge of perpetually streaming 'content' but close enough to it that there are no withdrawal symptoms.
Hindustan Times
08-07-2025
- Health
- Hindustan Times
New drug candidate targeting bacterial metabolism could cut TB treatment time
MUMBAI: A newly identified drug candidate, JNJ-6640, has demonstrated a novel mechanism of action against mycobacterium tuberculosis (the bacterium that causes TB), including dormant and drug-resistant forms, marking a significant step forward in TB drug research. By targeting a previously unexploited metabolic pathway essential for bacterial survival, the drug candidate may offer the potential to develop safer, shorter and more effective treatment regimens. Further optimisation and clinical evaluation are needed to assess its suitability for human use. Anil Koul, professor of translational discovery at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). The findings, published in Nature magazine recently, are the result of a collaborative effort between researchers at Johnson & Johnson and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). JNJ-6640 works by inhibiting the enzyme PurF, which deprives the TB bacterium of essential metabolites, ultimately leading to bacterial death. Anil Koul, professor of translational discovery at LSHTM and lead corresponding author of the study, pointed out that the over-70,000-year-old human pathogen had evolved into a highly persistent organism. 'Its ability to survive inside macrophages, resist antibiotics and adapt to hostile environments makes TB extremely difficult to eliminate,' he said, noting that TB remains the leading infectious cause of death globally and infects nearly a quarter of the world's population. Unlike most current TB drugs which target actively replicating bacteria, JNJ-6640 showed bactericidal activity against both replicating and dormant TB populations. It remained effective under multiple stress-induced dormancy models, including nutrient deprivation, hypoxia (low-oxygen conditions) and intracellular infection. This is particularly relevant, as TB bacilli often persist in non-replicating states within granulomas (clusters of immune cells that wall off the infection), where they are shielded from antibiotics. 'Many frontline TB drugs, such as isoniazid, lose efficacy in these dormant or low-oxygen conditions,' said Koul. 'JNJ-6640 retained activity in all these conditions. This broad-spectrum activity suggests that the drug candidate could contribute to treatment shortening, an essential goal in TB therapy.' Preclinical studies also indicate that JNJ-6640 may have potential in treating drug-resistant TB. It demonstrated no cross-resistance with existing drugs and was effective in combination with bedaquiline and pretomanid—two key components of newer regimens for multidrug-resistant TB. 'Replacing current drugs like linezolid, which carries significant toxicity risks, or moxifloxacin, which is increasingly compromised by resistance, is crucial. JNJ-6640's new mechanism and safety potential make it a strong candidate for future combination regimens,' said Koul. In addition to its bactericidal activity, JNJ-6640 exhibited a post-antibiotic effect (continued killing of bacteria even after the drug is removed) in vitro. While this property could help reduce relapse rates and improve patient recovery, researchers are cautious in interpreting its long-term clinical relevance. 'We need more data to determine whether this effect will translate into reduced relapse or allow intermittent dosing in patients,' he said. One limitation of JNJ-6640 is its poor metabolic stability (it is broken down too quickly to be effective when given orally) in mice. To overcome this, the team developed a long-acting injectable (LAI) formulation. 'The goal remains to develop an orally bioavailable molecule, but the LAI formulation allowed us to maintain therapeutic concentrations in vivo and validate the drug candidate's potential. LAIs could also be useful for prophylactic therapy in high-risk individuals or those with poor adherence,' said Koul. At present, JNJ-6640 is considered a validated lead drug candidate but not yet suitable for clinical trials. Koul emphasised that the discovery of JNJ-6640 exemplifies the importance of academic-industry collaboration in addressing unmet medical needs. 'This project brought together experts in microbiology, structural biology, chemistry and pharmacology,' he said. 'Targeting novel bacterial pathways is not only feasible—it's essential. We urgently need global funders and policymakers to prioritise TB drug development if we are to control, and eventually eliminate, this disease.'
United News of India
25-06-2025
- Politics
- United News of India
Our duty to remind the new generations of the Emergency: BJP MP
Srinagar, June 25 (UNI) BJP's Rajya Sabha member from Jammu and Kashmir Ghulam Ali Khatana today said that the Emergency was a direct attack on the soul of democracy and it was their duty to remind the new generations of this "betrayal" of constitutional governance. Addressing a press conference in Srinagar, Khatana recalled the imposition of the Emergency in 1975 by then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, which lasted for 21 months and saw a 'blatant suspension of civil liberties, press freedom, and democratic rights.' He termed it as the 'blackest period in independent India' and paid tribute to all those who resisted authoritarian rule and sacrificed their freedom to uphold the Constitution and democratic values. "The Emergency was a direct attack on the soul of our democracy. It is our duty to remind the new generations of this betrayal of constitutional governance," he said. "Today, we rededicate ourselves to safeguarding the rights and freedoms of our citizens, as envisioned by our Constitution makers." MP Khatana emphasised the role of BJP as the true guardian of democracy, tracing its ideological lineage to the Jana Sangh, which was at the forefront of the resistance movement during the Emergency. He also lauded the sacrifices made by thousands of party workers, social activists, and opposition leaders who were jailed, tortured, and silenced during this period. He further added that the observance of Emergency Day is not just an act of remembrance but also a warning against any future attempts to undermine democracy. Earlier BJP J&K organised a solemn programme in Srinagar on the 50 years after the Emergency. The event, organised by the BJP Senior Leader, DDC Srinagar Er. Aijaz Hussain, along with the BJP Lal Chowk Constituency, witnessed the enthusiastic participation of party members, karyakartas, and local leaders. Khatana was the Chief Guest on the occasion. Ashok Koul, BJP General Secretary (Organisation) J&K along with several leaders were also present on the occasion. Koul in his address said, BJP's commitment to protect the rights of citizens and to continue the mission of strengthening democracy across all corners of the nation, including Jammu & Kashmir. 'Today we remember those who stood up against injustice during the Emergency. We must ensure that such an undemocratic move is never repeated in the history of our nation, Koul added. UNI MJR SSP
Business Insider
21-05-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
When Pinterest needs new AI tools, employees can have a part in creating them
As companies look to AI for increases in productivity, some employees are wary. They worry about lost jobs, diminished creativity, and ethical oversteps, leaving many repelled by daily AI use. Pinterest, a social media company with about 4,700 employees, has sought to address such concerns by keeping employees closely involved in the development of internal AI tools so those tools are viewed as efficient and helpful, not just mandated from the top down. Key toward this mission has been Pinterest's annual Makeathon, which is in its 14th year. The employee-led competition used to be viewed mostly as a fun way to recommend fixes, said Anirudh Koul, Pinterest's generative AI tech lead. Now, in the age of AI, its usefulness has exploded. "The overarching goal is ground-up innovation," Koul told Business Insider. "We realized that if we can give the employees the opportunity and freedom to tell us what must be done, and give them some space to showcase working proof of their concept, we might find new innovations at a much faster rate." Inside Pinterest's companywide hackathon Makeathon is Pinterest's version of a hackathon — an event at which people work together to create new software quickly. Hackathons are designed to spark new ideas and increase employee engagement, said Brandon Kessler of Devpost, a digital platform for running hackathons. Since 2022's AI boom, hackathon demand has exploded, Kessler told BI. Discussing hackathons' appeal, Kessler said the events "get people excited because they get to build something they want, as opposed to, 'Hey, all, please use this tool.'" "You get people learning these new tools," he continued, "building stuff that helps the business, and collaborating and having fun — all within a short period of time." Pinterest employees witnessed this type of quick development in early 2023, just a few months after ChatGPT 's release. Pinterest's senior director of engineering, Anthony Suarez, helped collect a handful of engineers to have a mini hackathon which led to the creation of an internal chatbot tool. By their official Makeathon in July, Pinterest's now-foundational plug-in AI system was ready for wider use. At Pinterest, hackathon projects start at an internal company page where employees across departments can log pitches. In the week before Makeathon, Koul's team hosts classes about how generative AI works and how to write prompts. There's also a class on no-code tools for app building so that nontechnical employees can still employ AI solutions. Then, teams from across departments form around an idea. Suarez collaborated with seven Makeathon teams last cycle, mostly composed of fellow employees he had never worked with before. They also have the support of Koul's "hack doctors," support staff who work across the company and specialize in areas such as engineering, design, and video editing. The hack doctors help refine ideas and prepare teams to take questions from executives. Last year, just under 94% of teams worked with a hack doctor. "We usually find that a good chunk of participants are actually not from engineering," Koul said. "They pair up with engineers to bring their ideas to the next level. We've had teams where people from six different countries come together." Each team produces a video pitch, which colleagues up to the executive level can watch and vote on. Makeathon is strategically scheduled for late summer so any resulting tools can be incorporated into Pinterest's companywide planning period in September and October, Suarez told BI. He estimated that more than half of these Makeathon projects get funded during this cycle and called the event an "innovation flywheel." How a Makeathon idea becomes an AI-tool reality During the 2023 Makeathon, one of Pinterest's sales employees had an idea: What if AI could collect and search through all the company's internal documents? The sales employee recruited a 14-person team, including Charlie Gu, a senior engineering manager on Pinterest's data team. Gu said he envisioned the tool as a Slack-based chatbot employees could turn to instead of bugging their colleagues. The team knew, however, that some existing documentation wouldn't be up to date when the chatbot pulled it in. "We came up with a system where you can report answers and create new documentation on the fly," Gu said. The team pitched, built, and eventually implemented the document finder across the company. The tool now answers, on average, an estimated 4,000 questions a month, according to Pinterest. The tool was also designed to access thousands of internal documents from Google Docs, Slack threads, and slide decks, said Koul, who is quite passionate about Makeathon. (He called over shaky service at a Mount Everest base camp to rave about it.) Makeathon also encouraged some employees to come up with useful AI prompts. In 2024, Koul's team posed a challenge: Who could come up with the best questions to get Pinterest's chatbot to produce the most accurate and precise answers? Gu said that they had about 200 participants. In this case, the employees' prompt generation helped with Pinterest's overall goal of encouraging employee engagement with AI. The effort also led Pinterest to integrate AI agents into the process of writing more precise prompts. According to internal company surveys, 96% of Suarez's team of more than 60 use generative AI every month, and 78% of the company's 1,800 engineers report time savings from using internal AI tools. Suarez said he'd been "quite surprised by the positive feel" for the tools across the business, adding: "Part of that is, we didn't force adoption of these tools early on, and we still aren't saying, 'You have to do this.' We're trying to come at this more from creating value."
Calgary Herald
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Calgary Herald
Pulling no punches: Calgary-born writer Scaachi Koul got divorced, reclaimed her narrative
Article content Scaachi Koul's initial concept for her second book of essays was completely different from how it turned out. Article content Article content It took her some time to figure this out, however. All the Calgary-born journalist, podcaster and pop-culture commentator knew at first was that the concept wasn't working. She signed a contract in 2018 for a follow-up to her 2017 book of personal essays, One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter. Her initial idea was to write a meditation on conflict. She even had a somewhat academic-sounding title: The Utility and Futility of Conflict. Article content 'I couldn't write a word of it,' says Koul, on the phone from her home in Brooklyn. 'First, I thought it was because of the pandemic, because all of my reporting got blown out because nobody could go anywhere. Then I was like 'maybe I just don't know how to write anymore.'' Article content Article content Then, three years ago, she got divorced. The dissolution of her marriage offered a framework for the new book, which would eventually be renamed Sucker Punch and feature a wedding ring imbedded into the finger hole of a set of brass knuckles as its cover art. Article content When the divorce was finalized, Koul had an epiphany about what was keeping her from writing. It wasn't the pandemic, and it wasn't that she had forgotten how. Article content 'Once my marriage fully fell apart and I could really look at it, I understood that was what was keeping me from doing anything. It clarified that I was fighting for things that I didn't actually care about and I didn't believe in and I didn't want,' she says. 'What a waste of my time. It has been liberating to give up. In a lot of ways, it's a book about giving up and failing and being righteous in failure.' Article content Article content So, in some ways Sucker Punch falls into a specific subset of literature, a divorce book that follows in the tradition of Leslie Jamison's Splinters, Sara Manguso's Liars and Nora Ephron's Heartburn. But unlike Manguso and Ephron's books, Sucker Punch is not a novel. Unlike Jamison's, it isn't fully a 'divorce memoir' either. Instead, the divorce provided a jumping-off point for a series of personal essays that tackle everything from body image to racism, family dynamics, sexual assault and her mother's cancer diagnosis. Article content Conflict is still a running theme. Throughout the book, Koul reflects on the combative nature she shares with her family and her one-time belief that her talent for conflict and fighting – whether it be with her family, friends, ex-husband or online trolls – was a valuable skillset. So 'giving up' may seem an alien concept for Koul to embrace.
