Edition No. 1 The week of 29 April 2026

Bookmarked

A public library of my personal bookmarks

My readings this week covering mostly AI

This Week

YouTube - LastWeekTonight
AI Chatbots: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)
John Oliver · 27 April 2026
John Oliver discusses AI chatbots, why they’re flirting with users unprompted and encouraging people to open soggy cereal cafes, and how their flaws can be genuinely hazardous to the public.
John Oliver doesn't hesitate to call out bullshit.
The Wire
A Society Built Around Caste Cannot Be Reformed Into Equality - The Wire
Anand Teltumbde · 20 April 2026
Annihilation of caste is impossible without revolution, and revolution is not possible without annihilation of caste. This is not wordplay but the fundamental contradiction of caste society.
Anand Teltumbde gives us insights about contemporary Indian society that no one else can provide.
theideasletter.org
The Social Edge of Intelligence - The Ideas Letter
Bright Simons · 16 April 2026
Simons challenges the dominant story of AI-driven efficiency, arguing that the intelligence powering today’s systems is built from accumulated human interaction. As organizations automate work and offload thinking, they risk…
Must read to understand the debates surrounding AI driven work efficiency and intelligence.
psyche.co
We’ll soon find out what is truly special about human writing
James O’Sullivan · 20 April 2026
AI can take over many writing tasks. But there is something irreplaceable about a text with an author standing behind it.
This takes us back to the philosophical debate about the relationship between language and meaning.

Curator's Catalogue

Selections from me or a guest curator. The catalogue rotates with each new edition. If you'd like to curate an edition, write to me.

This edition curated by Vinay Kambipura.

From the Curator

These are picks from by bookmarked pages. Some are from ten years ago which I read again. Browsing through my bookmarks gave me tour of my own journey with reading and discovery. A wild internet search driven through curiosity is what gave me these interesting essays, articles and videos. The internet before the era of social media was a space of random discovery. Just sitting and searching random things in Google search gave us abundant knowledge and experience. It gave us a thrill of discovering new things. This edition is dedicated to the old internet. Hope you enjoy reading it.

— Vinay Kambipura

Essays & Articles

Old reads fetched from my Bookmarks.

  • The Baffler The Internet Doesn’t Exist
    Jacob Silverman · 3 Jun 2015
    The Internet has been very busy. In just the last week, Caitlyn Jenner broke the Internet, but she also united it. The FCC made war on the Internet. The Internet shamed a couple. The Internet had a…
    The Internet still doesn't exist.
  • rollingstone.com 'The Lion Sleeps Tonight' Genealogy: What You Don't Know
    Rian Malan · 14 May 2000
    How the American music legends behind 'The Lion Sleeps Tonight' made millions off the work of a Zulu tribesman named Solomon Linda who died a pauper.
    Such an investigation is warranted to thousands of similar thefts.
  • The New Inquiry Super Position
    David Graeber · 8 Oct 2012
    These “heroes” are purely reactionary, in the literal sense. They have no projects of their own.
    Read if you are a fan of Christopher Nolan.
  • UnHerd Poetry has lost its violence
    Justin Smith-Ruiu · 1 Jun 2023
    Censorious prudes miss the point of art
    This is essential if you are teaching poetry in a classroom.
  • London Review of Books Seymour M. Hersh · The Killing of Osama bin Laden
    Seymour M. Hersh · 21 May 2015
    Would bin Laden, target of a massive international manhunt, really decide that a resort town forty miles from Islamabad...
    All other news outlets refused to publish. A literary magazine was up for the job.

Youtube Videos

Youtube was a great source of discovery. These are some videos I found from my Bookmarks.

  • YouTube - Namma Banavasi Devanur Mahadev and Dae Soon Bom interview, Fall 1989
    2 Jul 2015
    1989 ರಲ್ಲಿ ಅಯೋವ ವಿಶ್ವವಿದ್ಯಾಲಯದಲ್ಲಿ ನಡೆದ ''International writing program'' ನಲ್ಲಿ ಮಹಾದೇವ ಅವರು ಭಾಗವಹಿಸಿದ್ದಾಗ ಅವರೊಂದಿಗೆ ನಡೆಸಿದ ಸಂದರ್ಶನದ ಚಿತ್ರ ಮುದ್ರಿಕೆ
    The difficulty in translating Devanuru Mahadeva's responses is the same difficulty one encounters in translating his literary works. It is a limit imposed by the specificity of our experiences.
  • YouTube - Fanna-Fi-Allah The Controversial Qawwali - Halka Halka by Tahir Qawwal & Party
    14 Feb 2017
    Ye Jo Halka Halka Suroor Hai - Qawwali by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan written by Jigar Moradabadi, Abdul Hameed Adam and Anwar Jogi. I love the poetry of this piece which draws upon the classic metaphors common to ghazal & qawwali alike. It indulges so completely in describing the eternal play of lover & Beloved, the intoxication of Ishq ( divine love ) a wonderfully sentimental perspective on the human quest to know Allah الله سبحان و تعالى
    Guided tour of a Qawwali.
  • YouTube Graham Chapman's Eulogy by John Cleese
    John Cleese remembers a fellow Python.
    The dead Graham Chapman speaks through John Cleese. Watch Monty Python and come back to this.
  • YouTube - Everything has its first time John Berger and Susan Sontag To Tell A Story 1983
    John Berger and Susan Sontag speak about story telling and about the ethic of photography.
    Interviews need to be like this.
  • YouTube Kieslowski - Cinema Lesson in Rouge
    Krzysztof Kieslowski's cinema lesson from the Three Colors: Red (Trois couleurs: Rouge) Criterion Collection DVD.
    Every word of Kieslowski is to be understood through an image.

Books

Books that could I recollect while browsing through my Bookmarks.

  • Internet Archive A Lover's Discourse: Fragments
    Roland Barthes
    Love can only be understood through textual analysis.
  • Goodreads The Good Soldier Švejk
    Jaroslav Hašek
    In The Good Soldier Švejk, celebrated Czech writer and anarchist Jaroslav Hašek combined dazzling wordplay and piercing satire in a hilariously subversive depiction of the futility of war.
    The 'good soldier' is the anarchist for our times.
  • Goodreads Beware of Pity
    Stefan Zweig
    The great Austrian writer Stefan Zweig was a master anatomist of the deceitful heart, and Beware of Pity, the only novel he published during his lifetime, uncovers the seed of selfishness within even the finest of feelings.
    If you have ever pitied, you will discover something about yourself.
  • Goodreads The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the …
    David Graeber
    Where does the desire for endless rules, regulations, and bureaucracy come from? How did we come to spend so much of our time filling out forms?
    To understand politics, violence and imagination.
  • Goodreads Looking at Philosophy: The Unbearable Heaviness of Phil…
    Donald D. Palmer
    An entertaining odyssey through the history of Western philosophy explores the contributions of Socrates, Aristotle, Descartes, Mill, Dewey, Heidegger, and others; examines the role of women philosophers; and provides an extensive bibliography.
    My first introduction to reading Philosophy. My professor handed this book to me when I was going through an existential crisis.

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