Chhota Pegs

Your author on the crossroads: Someone has started fiddling with the lighting. This last spring, Claude and I wrote A User’s Guide to the Last Good Moment . The idea of the LGM was simple enough. A scientist is five things—Scholar, Calculator, Referee, Logician, Architect—and AI had already mastered the first two, was well on its way to the third, and was starting to make unsettling noises about the fourth. The fifth, the Architect who decides what is worth wondering about, was still in the Human domain. We were living, we said, in the photograph we only recognize afterward: the one where everything is still fine. Six months later, I am reporting back from inside the photograph. The kids are still young (at least in my heart) and the house is occasionally full. But we have come to a crossroads, and someone has started fiddling with the lighting. Into the Arms of the LGM The newest models from Anthropic and OpenAI have not so much nudged us toward the LGM as pushed us firmly...

by Debraj Ray and Claude Sonnet 4.6 Building a city; New Jersey from Manhattan There is a photograph you never think to take until it’s too late. The one where everything is still fine. The kids are young, the house is full. You only recognize it afterward, squinting at the image, thinking: that was the moment . This photograph of such a moment was taken in the early spring of 2026. The Scientist, in Five Movements A scientist, reduced to essentials, is five things. She is: Scholar . She reads the literature, organizes available findings, understands new results as they appear, and maps the terrain of what is known. Calculator . She does arithmetic and everyday algebra, runs regressions and numerical simulations, and writes code that transform data into inference. Referee . She reads and evaluates the argument of another and sometimes asks (with barely concealed glee):  but does this really follow? Logici...

From L to R: Dipak Banerjee, Mihir Rakshit and Nabendu Sen. These are notes written for a panel talk I gave on my undergraduate education at Presidency College in Calcutta, 1974-1977.  I joined Presidency College in 1974 to pursue a BA in Economics after finishing school from St. Xavier's in Calcutta. I had taken the IIT entrance exam but my heart wasn't in it. Besides, I didn't want to go to Madras, Delhi or even Kharagpur. Then I read Samuelson's Economics text and I was hooked. Here was a language in which social concerns could perhaps be adequately expressed, and which aspired to some degree of precision. I took the economics entrance exam at Presidency and to my great joy I was accepted. It was a small class and obviously I remember every one of my classmates with not a small amount of affection and pride. The best three students -- perhaps the best four -- were all women. (I don't believe any of them went on to do a Ph.D. in economics: read into that what you ...

On Bordeaux: Tales of the Unexpected from the World’s Greatest Wine Region , edited by SUSAN KEEVIL, with an Introduction by JANE ANSON, Académie du Vin Library (Simon McMurtrie), 2020, 287 pp. ISBN 978-1-913141-05-09 (hardcover). To be published in the Journal of Wine Economics. On Bordeaux is a rambling collection of extracts and articles on “the world’s greatest wine region,” that poetic patch of southwestern France that straddles the Gironde as it nears journey’s end. We are reminded of the special, distinct nature of this terroir from the get-go: the book begins with four testaments to Bordeaux’s delicate yet proud dependence on the “power of the vintage.” The compendium then winds through a litany of interlaced themes: topography, individual châteaux , the aristocracy, Bordeaux personalities, the ravages wrought by Phylloxera , the serendipitous benedictions of Botrytis cinerea , and the uncertainties of global warming. There are the inevitable comparisons: across vintages and a...

Fuji-san on the approach to Narita airport; Debraj Ray (2017) On June 25, 2021, the Sreenidhi Institute of Science and Technology , located in Hyderabad, released the Report of an "Expert Committee," entitled " Open Reviews of the Proof of the Riemann Hypothesis ." The “proof" referred to an unpublished paper by Professor Kumar Eswaran, which claimed to have settled one of the most distinguished open questions in Mathematics, a conjecture stated by Bernhard Riemann in a classic paper written in 1859. As the Preface to the Report states, Eswaran’s contribution “was lying extant on the Internet for nearly four years and had received thousands of reads and downloads but had not received the assent of a mathematical journal to subject it to a detailed peer review." The Committee sought an open review of Eswaran’s paper from 1,200 “eminent mathematicians and scientists." Based on the reports received by the Committee, and its own deliberations, the Commit...