In 2003, a Swedish philosopher named Nick Bostrom published a paper that would quietly reshape how some of the world's brightest minds think about reality itself. The argument was elegant and unsettling: if a sufficientl...

Thirty years ago, two Game Boy cartridges — Pokémon Red and Green — launched in Japan with modest expectations. Today, Pokémon is the highest-grossing media franchise in history, worth an estimated $150 billion. The mile...

The most anticipated night in fashion has a theme — and it's one that leaves almost no creative limit. The 2026 Met Gala, set for May 4 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, will center on the exhibition Costume Art, with a...

A 1989 Japanese animated film about a teenage witch and her talking cat is selling out IMAX theaters across North America in 2026. That's not a quirk. That's Studio Ghibli. Kiki's Delivery Service hits IMAX screens on Ma...

The generation that grew up on smartphones is now making a point of putting them down. "Going analogue" has emerged as one of TikTok's most counterintuitive viral trends of 2026 — a movement spreading across the very pla...

It started innocuously enough. Someone posted a throwback photo. Then a celebrity did the same. Then 37 million Instagram posts followed. "2026 is the new 2016" has become the defining viral trend of early this year — a...

Yoga represents perhaps India's most successful cultural export to the West. From relative obscurity in the 1960s when a few countercultural Americans encountered yoga through spiritual teachers and Eastern philosophy, i...

In an office in Bangalore, a software engineer pauses during lunch to listen to a podcast about the Bhagavad Gita. In a college library in Delhi, a law student annotates a new English translation of the Upanishads. In a...

When India's Ram Mandir in Ayodhya opened in January 2024, over 2 million pilgrims visited within the first month. The infrastructure matured to handle this: newly constructed roads, hotels rising rapidly, security syste...

The moment is always the same. A debut trailer drops. The comments overflow: who is this actor's father, mother, or aunt? Within hours, databases of film family trees emerge. The suspicion precedes any assessment of tale...

In September 2018, the Supreme Court of India delivered a judgment that was celebrated as historic: it partially decriminalized homosexuality, striking down the relevant portions of Section 377 that had criminalized cons...

Streaming platforms have created an interesting and somewhat tragic paradox for Indian classical music: unprecedented accessibility coupled with systematic loss of context. A listener can now encounter Pandit Ravi Shanka...

Classical Indian music—Hindustani and Carnatic—occupies a peculiar place in contemporary India. It's revered as high art, taught in universities, performed at prestigious concerts. Yet it commands perhaps 0.1% of the lis...

Five years ago, the question was whether Netflix could compete with Bollywood. Today, the question is whether Bollywood can compete with Netflix—and the answer increasingly is no. The displacement is happening not throug...

In Dhaka, Colombo, Kathmandu, and Lahore, the cinema halls play the same films that dominate Indian screens. Bollywood dominates not through imperialism but through simple competitive advantage: Indian films have larger...

Walk into a Whole Foods in California and you'll find ashwagandha and turmeric supplements in multiple forms—powders, capsules, tinctures—displayed alongside ginseng and echinacea. Five years ago, this didn't exist. Toda...

Every April 14, India observes Ambedkar Jayanti with a curious and revealing split. In government buildings and corporate offices, portraits of B.R. Ambedkar are garlanded. Ministers give speeches. The Constitution he dr...

Nobody planned this. There was no government committee that sat down in 2015 and said: let's make the world practice yoga, start cooking with turmeric, watch Indian films, and download Ayurveda apps. There was no ministr...