Karan Mahajan

When more Chinese started coming after the Gold Rush, employed on large projects like the Pacific Railroad, anti-Chinese sentiment became shrill.

This Is Not That Dawn' is remarkable in part for its careful and sensitive attention to women's lives - and also for its harsh critique of men and their failure to stop violence.

Novelists get to say plenty in their massive tomes; rock singers only get four-minute songs with two verses and a chorus' worth of lyrics, and so there's a real pleasure in accessing the intelligence behind the music, even if it doesn't qualify as 'great literature.'

As a Punjabi, you only have to look at your own family's past to find horror stories about arranged marriages and brutality.

It's getting worse under Prime Minister Modi. The economic miracle has failed, to a degree, and people are reaching back to a kind of imagined Hindu past for a feeling of pride. And that feeling of pride necessarily comes from denying any kind of Muslim heritage. People my age seem to be becoming illiberal in a way that I'm surprised by.

When a certain swathe of India's population considers the country's ancient past, it doesn't see a country fragmented into kingdoms, savaged by caste divisions, and mired in poverty; rather, what's envisioned is a vast, unified Hindu empire stretching from Kashmir to the Indian tip at Kanyakumari.

I travelled around small-town India a lot for a job from 2010-2012, and I was impressed by the energy I encountered in these places.

Terrorists have goals beyond their supposed pacts with God. They are authors, too.

After a post-Bill Berry softening with albums like 'Up' and 'Reveal,' R.E.M. seems to be toughening up again; on the strength of the first single, 'Discoverer,' the band's new record looks to continue with the same muscular rock and roll that defined its last album, 'Accelerate.'

People love talking about the banality of evil and the fact that ordinary people do bad things. I actually want to stay away from that.

I remember returning to Bangalore after a few months of travel and seeing it as a first-world city, like New York or San Francisco. This may be obvious to some people, but I grew up in Delhi, and I had no experience of how someone from a 'Tier 2' city may view a 'Tier 1' city. You really do emigrate between worlds when you come from those towns.

American life is based on a reassurance that we like one another but won't violate one another's privacies. This makes it a land of small talk.