About Kakrat
Kakrat is an old word for the cawing of crows. Not one crow. Several, all at once, each one convinced it is making the most important point in the history of birds. Some elders say kaklat instead.
The word left the birds a long time ago. It now covers any room where everyone is talking and nobody is listening. The family dinner table. The wedding mandap. A video call with more than four people on it. There’s a whole essay about it, which is the closest thing this site has to a mission statement.
What this is
One person writing. No staff, no newsroom, no editorial board. Pieces go up when they’re finished, which is sometimes twice in a month and sometimes not for a season. I’d rather say that than claim a schedule I don’t keep.
The writing falls into three areas. Science and technology, mostly biology, because that’s what I trained in. Business and innovation, mostly what happens when research tries to become a company. Culture and ideas, which covers language, memory, family, and the occasional short story.
What I’m trying to do
Most science writing arrives in one of two registers. Either every result is a revolution, or the hedging is thick enough that you finish a piece unsure whether anything happened. Business writing has the same problem. I’m after the register in between, where you can say that something is genuinely remarkable and that most of the coverage of it is nonsense, in the same paragraph.
I also think being funny about a serious subject is a way of taking it seriously rather than a way of dodging it.
How sourcing works
Anything that makes factual claims ends with a Sources & notes block. It lists what the piece leans on and, where it matters, marks which parts are checked fact and which are my own commentary. Essays and stories don’t carry one. A meditation on crows doesn’t need a bibliography.
If a piece invents a statistic for comic effect, it says so in the same sentence. That rule has no exceptions.
Reading along
The archive has everything by date. The three topic pages sort it by subject. Search covers the full text of every piece. There’s no newsletter and no tracking of any kind. If you want to know when something new goes up, use the RSS feed.
Getting in touch
mail@kakrat.com. Corrections, arguments, and tips are all welcome. Corrections especially. If something here is wrong, I’d rather hear it from you than leave it standing.