Sumit Paul-Choudhury
The Island
As seen in:
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writer, thinker, dreamer.
former editor-in-chief @newscientist and co-creator, @newscilive and @arcfinity.
now contemplating endless possibilities @alternity
Articles by Sumit Paul-Choudhury
Hoe optimisme je gezondheid een oppepper kan geven
Optimisme is geen wondermiddel – er zijn zat situaties te bedenken waarin het zelfs averechts werkt. Maar onderzoek lijkt erop te wijzen dat je van een positieve instelling in zijn algemeenheid wel degelijk vruchten kunt plukken. En er zijn technieken die je hierbij kunnen helpen. Is een kip optimistisch? Probeer daar maar eens achter te komen. Je kunt zo’n dier immers niet vragen of een glas water halfvol of halfleeg is.
New library books
These works of psychology are newly available through the Allen County Public Library. “The Age of Diagnosis: How Our Obsession with Medical Labels Is Making Us Sicker” by Suzanne O’Sullivan From a neurologist and award-winning author comes a meticulous and compassionate exploration of how our culture of medical diagnosis can harm, rather than help, patients.
Spring Cleaning for the Soul: 10 Books to Start the Season Strong
Something magical happens in the spring. After a winter of stillness and reflection, every bit of new movement and color begins to spark anticipation. Any day now, that tiny green bud poking through the mud will burst open into a beautiful crocus. Soon, others will follow and one morning you’ll wake up to a palette of petals adorning the earth. Or as the creeks and rivers melt, a nightly chorus of frog-tune hums will gradually crescendo till summertime.
Irrational, maybe, but optimism works
The Bright Side: Why Optimists Have the Power to Change the World By Sumit Paul-Choudhury Canongate (distributed in India by PenguinRandomHouse), 288 pages, Rs 699 Optimism, irrational though it might be, is central to the human psyche: it seems to give us an advantage both in everyday life and in the evolutionary race. Sumit Paul-Choudhury’s ‘The Bright Side’ makes a vital and transformative new argument: that optimism is not only the natural state of humanity, but an essential one.
The Bright Side | E-book | 9789021342818 | Sumit Paul-Choudhury
In The Bright Side presenteert journalist Sumit Paul-Choudhury een revolutionaire zienswijze: optimisme is niet alleen aangeboren, het is ook van levensbelang. Zonder optimisme hadden we het niet gered in de onvoorspelbare en vaak vijandige wereld waarin we zijn geëvolueerd. Maar optimisme is niet uitsluitend voor extreme tijden. Het werkt ook door in het leven van alledag: in onze relaties, onze carrière, ons fysieke en mentale reilen en zeilen.
Why it’s possible to be optimistic in a world of bad news
The original optimist, Leibniz, was mocked and misunderstood. Centuries later, his worldview can help us navigate modern life What does it mean to be optimistic? We usually think of optimism as an expectation that things will work out for the best.
38 New Books to Start Your New Year
I’m pleased to share what I consider the most promising, must-read nonfiction titles scheduled for release in January 2025. These titles make up our second group of nominees for Season 26 of the Next Big Idea Club. Our Next Big Idea Club curators—Susan, Malcolm Gladwell, Adam Grant, and Daniel Pink—will narrow the list down to a handful of finalists and, ultimately, two official season selections.
Why the “optimism bias” rules our hopes for the future
A weekly newsletter featuring the biggest ideas from the smartest people Excerpted from The Bright Side: How Optimists Change the World, and How You Can Be One by Sumit Paul-Choudhury. Published by Scribner. Copyright 2025. All rights reserved. What actually is optimism? One approach is to consider it as a psychological trait — an individual personality characteristic that affects an individual’s behaviour, doesn’t change much over time, and is fairly consistent in most situations.
The Bright Side
About The Book In the thought-provoking tradition of Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now and Yuval Noah Harari’s Homo Deus, a fascinating and reassuring look at the philosophy, psychology, and practice of optimism, and why being optimistic is a moral obligation—even in the face of seemingly insurmountable challenges.
The Next Big Idea Club’s January 2025 Must-Read Books
I’m pleased to share what I consider the most promising, must-read nonfiction titles scheduled for release in January 2025. These titles make up our second group of nominees for Season 26 of the Next Big Idea Club. Our Next Big Idea Club curators—Susan Cain, Malcolm Gladwell, Adam Grant, and Daniel Pink—will narrow the list down to a handful of finalists and, ultimately, two official season selections.
65daysofstatic's 'Wreckage Systems' Pushes Algorithmic Music
"We will not retreat. This band is unstoppable!" These sampled words, which come at the peak of "Retreat! Retreat!," an anthemic song by the instrumental post-rock band 65daysofstatic, have long been taken as a rallying cry by fans during their propulsive live gigs. The Sheffield-based quartet's latest project takes that statement of intent to heart: it is literally unstoppable. Well, almost.
arebyte Gallery - Science Fiction Squared
arebyte presents Science Fiction Squared, a one-day convention exploring the future of science fiction, as part of arebyte's 2022/23 programme Sci-Fi which looks at fictioning and alternative futures through a series of exhibitions, live performances, online experiences and educational activities.
William Gibson on writing sci-fi as the world takes a dystopian dive
Getty Images / WIRED Is ours the darkest timeline? William Gibson thinks it might be. Gibson’s last book, The Peripheral, introduced the “Jackpot”, a cascade of global catastrophes that wipes out much of the human race, along with an ingenious take on time travel that allows digital communication – including telepresence – across alternate timelines.
Tomorrow’s Gods: What is the future of religion?
Tomorrow’s Gods: What is the future of religion? Throughout history, people’s faith and their attachments to religious institutions have transformed, argues Sumit Paul-Choudhury. So what’s next? * This story is featured in BBC Future’s “Best of 2019” collection. Discover more of our picks. Before Mohammed, before Jesus, before Buddha, there was Zoroaster. Some 3,500 years ago, in Bronze Age Iran, he had a vision of the one supreme God.
Tomorrow’s Gods: What is the future of religion?
Before Mohammed, before Jesus, before Buddha, there was Zoroaster. Some 3,500 years ago, in Bronze Age Iran, he had a vision of the one supreme God. A thousand years later, Zoroastrianism, the world’s first great monotheistic religion, was the official faith of the mighty Persian Empire, its fire temples attended by millions of adherents. A thousand years after that, the empire collapsed, and the followers of Zoroaster were persecuted and converted to the new faith of their conquerors, Islam.
What will music be like in 20 years?
Sumit Paul-Choudhury picks out trends that could shape music over the coming decades, including algoraves, Fortnite concerts and songs catered to smart speakers. Dadabots have been playing technical death metal on YouTube constantly since March – a feat impossible for real bands like Abiotic, pictured (Credit: Alamy) The Dadabots project is on the fringes both musically and technologically, but it highlights a trend that’s likely to dominate the next 20 years in popular music.
How the apocalypse could be a good thing
Refugees from some apocalyptic threat – a natural disaster, say, or a killer plague or even zombies or aliens – secure themselves in some bolt-hole. There, they try desperately to call for help from the outside world. But the phone lines are down, the airwaves full of static. So it is that the survivors realise their fate is in their hands alone.
The Sun review - a shiny blockbuster for London's Science Museum
Mesmerising footage from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory and an exquisite Bronze Age golden disc help a new show capture our complex relationship with the sun The Sun: Living With Our Star, Science Museum, London, to 6 May 2019 THE sun is a star, and not a particularly remarkable one. This commonplace hides a powerful contradiction. For Earth-dwellers, it is not just any old star, it is our star, the star that utterly dominates existence on our planet.
The Sun review-a shiny blockbuster for London’s Science Museum
Mesmerising footage from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory and an exquisite Bronze Age golden disc help a new show capture our complex relationship with the sun The sun is a star, and not a particularly remarkable one. This everyday observation conceals a powerful contradiction in our daily experience. For us Earth-dwellers, it is not just any old star, it is our star, the star which utterly dominates existence on our planet.
Preserved ocean creatures make landfall in London
The afterlife of Hai Hai the baby minke whale (pictured above) started inauspiciously. His three-tonne corpse, beached on a Chinese island in 2009, was already rotting by the time scientists reached it. Undeterred, a team of almost three dozen anatomists swung into action, labouring for nearly two years to preserve, dehydrate and plastinate it, before reassembling it to reveal musculature on one side, and bones, nerves and organs on the other.
AI, reality and wildlife crime: All you need for a good read
Enjoy a bravura investigation of our troubled times, discover why aliens exist, and marvel at the bioheist of the century – all the best in holiday reading BUZZ ALDRIN takes a robust approach to those who deny that he visited the moon. On Twitter, he is merely blunt; in person, they might get a punch in the face. All the hard facts, and the weight of opinion, are on Aldrin’s side, but still his challengers come at him. What makes them so committed to their own, non-consensus reality?
Short Sharp Science: Second explosion at Fukushima nuclear plant
Update 0815 GMT 14 March 2011: An explosion has destroyed the building housing reactor No. 3 at the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear plant, injuring eleven people. However, Japanese authorities say the reactor containment vessel has remained intact, as it did at reactor no. 1, which suffered a similar explosion on Saturday. Radiation levels in the area remain low.
Snap decisions: Thomas Ruff's show is, literally, off colour | New Scientist
“Photography is a kind of prosthesis for humans,” says Thomas Ruff. A craft that began with nothing more than a lens and a photosensitive plate has turned into an art that involves a vast array of image-capturing devices that allow us to see far beyond the limitations of our own eyes.
The slime mould instruments that make sweet music | New Scientist
It is probably safe to assume the slime mould Physarum polycephalum doesn’t long for the limelight. It normally spends its life quietly eating microbes surrounded by decaying wood and leaf litter. But this humble single-celled organism has nonetheless found itself centre stage in an unusual musical movement. Eduardo Miranda thinks we’ve spent too much time building wacky instruments and touchscreen controllers for making music, and not enough thinking about new ways to generate musical ideas.
How to think about 2076 | New Scientist
JOURNALISM has famously been described as “the first rough draft of history.” New Scientist‘s own brand of journalism – which is 60 years old this week – is a bit different. We aim to provide a first rough draft of the future. Over the past 60 years we have not just reported new discoveries and inventions in science and technology. We have also tried to explain why they matter and where they’re likely to lead. That’s not easy.
Quantum superheroes: The science of Watchmen | New Scientist
It’s 1985. Nixon’s still in the White House and Zeppelins fill the sky. And a motley crew of costumed heroes have come out of retirement to unravel a mystery that starts with the brutal slaying of a former colleague and ends with… well, that’d be telling. This is the alternate world of the new movie Watchmen – a world populated by ordinary people who do extraordinary things, and one extraordinary person who has forgotten what it’s like to be ordinary.
Face to face in the Arctic with a terrifying new sublime | New Scientist
IT IS forbidden by law to die of natural causes in Longyearbyen, the world’s northernmost town – because the rock-hard permafrost makes it impossible to bury you. Nor can you be born here, due to the peculiar legal status of the Svalbard archipelago, a thousand kilometres north of Norway. Forty-two nations, including the unlikely Arctic powers of Afghanistan and Venezuela, have the right to settle and exploit its resources: from whales in the 18th century, to furs in the 19th and coal in the 20th.
Forget killer robots: This is the future of supersmart machines
Insight and Technology Scare stories about artificial intelligence are missing the point: a world with superintelligent machines in it will be far stranger than that RELAX: the AI apocalypse has been cancelled. A rash of recent headlines blared that Google was developing a “kill switch to stop a robot uprising against humans“, as put it, with a picture of a menacing metal army.
Our audience with the Pope revealed how glitz funds medicine
IT WAS one hell of a double act, if you’ll pardon the phrase: a keynote address given by the vice president of the United States â followed by a speech from Pope Francis. Their remarks were addressed to a small crowd, by the standards of the Vatican’s audience chamber, but a distinguished one: pioneering researchers, visionary technologists, dignified patients â and deep-pocketed philanthropists.
Inside the Samuel Johnson book prize: The science problem
Why are there so few science and technology books on the shortlists – or even longlists – of mainstream book prizes, asks one of the judges By Sumit Paul-Choudhury WHY doesn’t science win mainstream book prizes? No straight science book has won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction, often called the UK’s most prestigious non-fiction award, in its 17-year history. Why? Is it because writing original, clear and readable science books is hard?
Heaven on earth: The multiverse made of rock and grass
A former coal mine in Scotland has been transformed into a vast cosmic homage, complete with galactic hills and megalithic universes IN A disused open-cast coal mine deep within Scotland's Lowther Hills, an architect and a duke have built a whole new universe. In fact, it's even bigger than that: they've constructed a multiverse – out of grass, water and rock. The 22-hectare site at Crawick, a few miles north of Dumfries, has been transformed from an eyesore into a vast work of land art.
Soon They’ll Be Driving It, Too
Should you be worried by the emergence of intelligent machines? To some the answer is clear. “Full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race,” Stephen Hawking warned recently. Martin Ford’s “Rise of the Robots” offers a more prosaic reason for concern: Partially intelligent machines might render humans not so much extinct as redundant.
The Nether: Real morality for a virtual world
At loggerheads: is a virtual simulation of a crime still a crime? (Image: Johan Persson) Read more: Click here to read the original, longer version of this story The Nether by Jennifer Haley, Duke of York's Theatre, London, until 25 April "WHO are we when we live without consequences?" That's the question a detective poses angrily to the owner of the Hideaway, a virtual clubhouse catering to paedophiles, in Jennifer Haley's charged, compact play about online morality.
The Nether: Real morality for a virtual world
A new play uses the idea of paedophilia in a simulated reality to raise tough questions about how we should behave in virtual spaces The play relies on suggestion, not shock (Image: Johan Persson) "Who are we when we live without consequences?" That's the question a detective poses angrily to the owner of the Hideaway, a virtual clubhouse catering to paedophiles in The Nether, Jennifer Haley's charged, compact play about online morality.
Back to black: The enduring quest to portray nothing
NanoBlck-Sqr #1Carroll/Fletcher Gallery, London, until 21 February 2015Adventures of the Black Square: Abstract Art and Society 1915-2015Whitechapel Gallery, London, until 6 April 2015 It doesn't look like much. But then, that's rather the point. The work Belgian artist Frederik De Wilde is showing, in a dimly lit basement just off London's Oxford Street, is a black square (see pic, above). Not just any black, either.
Stonehenge surrounded by mysterious buried monuments
The landscape around Stonehenge has yielded hidden treasure: 17 previously unknown ritual monuments, a "house of the dead" predating the stone circle, and what appears to be a ceremonial route around Stonehenge itself. Instead of today's solitary monument, Stonehenge was the focus of "a completely theatrical arrangement," says archaeologist Vincent Gaffney of the University of Birmingham in the UK.
Chronicling a revolution in digital art
Assemblance delights the hand as well as the eye and ear (Image: Assemblance, 2014/courtesy of Umbrellium) Retro arcade games, cutting-edge special effects and interactive birdmen are all on show at a major retrospective of digital art at London's Barbican Centre Tiny pixelated organisms live, move, multiply and die in cold little ponds of light on the floor.
Sumit Paul-Choudhury
BEFORE I could give my change to the homeless man sitting by the wall of the Waterloo underpass, I noticed another passer-by approaching. As I watched, astounded, he backed up, then ran full tilt at the sitting man, before leaping over him. "Tramp-jumping," he called out to his braying idiot friends, and they went on their way. I was furious. As such incidents go, it was minor: homeless people are incessantly harrassed, and frequently beaten up – or worse.
Complex fusion reactor takes shape as start date slips
Nobody said it was going to be easy. After years of delays, work has finally begun on key components of ITER, the ambitious international project to build a revolutionary nuclear fusion reactor. ITER remains dogged by its own complexity, however, and its director-general says that it may not now fire up until 2023 – three years later than the most recent official deadline. ITER's ultimate aim is to generate energy in the same way that the sun does, by fusing hydrogen nuclei to form helium.
Hawking: all we need to know
Hawking, directed by Stephen Finnigan, premiered last night at the Cambridge Film Festival. There are very few biopics of scientists, and fewer still that can rely on their subject's name alone, but Stephen Finnigan clearly felt no need for elaboration with his film about Stephen Hawking. The film coincides with the physicist's autobiography, more modestly entitled My Brief History – but again, it's his name that dominates the book cover.
Murmuration - Forever Alone Drone
Forever Alone Drone by Sumit Paul-Choudhury When Voyager 2 blasted off on 20 August 1977, I was just about old enough to grasp what it was, and where it was going. I could read and recite the names of the nine planets; imperious Jupiter, Voyager 2’s first port of call, was my favourite.
image uploaded by @sumit (sumit paul-choudhury)
Taken on:February 25, 2013 5:03pm UTC Camera:iPhone 5 (Apple)
Ice-age art hints at birth of modern mind
The world’s oldest portrait, the world’s first fully carved sculpture, the world's oldest ceramic figure, the world’s earliest puppet - there’s no shortage of superlatives in the new exhibition of art from the ice age at the British Museum in London But focus too closely on the exhibits’ record-breaking ages alone, and you might miss the broader point: these beautiful objects are the earliest evidence we have of humans who seem to have had minds like ours.
Very Large Array, Maharaja-of-J...
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India has no shortage of fantas...
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I endorse this message > http:/...
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Coruscant has flies >
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Inside of a Gormley it's too da...
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When did @Number10gov relocate ...
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That's not even on the map. But...
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