This post contains fabulous longform articles categorised under Fiction and Others. These are handpicked articles over the course of years for CAT Aspirants. This post contains articles I had shared in 2018 and 2019.
Every Article will have blurb, either written by me or an extract from the original post (mostly the latter) followed by the link to reach the article.
2IIM’s CAT 2024 Percentile booster – Register Now!
Article 35
What’s the point of Reading Writing by Humans?
Article 34
I remember getting the letter from Real Madrid and tearing it up before I even opened it.
Article 33
Focusing too much on personal behaviour or consumption choices is a strategic blunder for those who want to make the world better.
Article 32
As a manager, a central part of your job is to develop people. But when you delegate a task to someone — with no prior training — simply because you are unavailable to do it, their chances of succeeding are slim
Article 31
“Imprisoned for the publication of his third book, a young Cairene novelist found himself wondering: Was any of it worth it?”
https://bit.ly/3CQyLim
Article 30
“RUBIK’S CUBE, DYSON’S SPHERE, MASLOW’S PYRAMID, etc.—the list goes on: standard shapes imbued with meaning or purpose and named after their creators. It’s one of the surest, easiest ways to attain immortality; you’re not inventing something new, just taking an existing shape and slapping your name on it. I’m determined to join the ranks of Rubik, Dyson, Maslow, et al by getting a shape to bear my name. But what shape?”
https://bit.ly/3nsgJ1n
Article 29
“The Eruption Of Instagram Island
New Zealand’s White Island is otherworldly, an 800-acre fantasyland that has beckoned Hollywood filmmakers and everyday selfie-seekers alike. It is also an active volcano, a roiling catastrophe waiting to happen. This is the story of the day when the worst-case scenario became real—and of the race to save those who faced the blast.”
http://bit.ly/3hO6zDL
Article 28
“Nothing Breaks Like A.I. Heart
An essay about artificial intelligence, emotional intelligence, and finding an ending”
https://bit.ly/3vwGpKo
Article 27
“Contact
An alien-made artefact or just interstellar debris? What ʻOumuamua says about how science works when data is scarce”
https://bit.ly/3cL9dbD
Article 26
“The John Wick Universe is Cancel Culture
“Si vis pacem para bellum”
translated
“If you want peace, prepare for war””
https://bit.ly/3xqtE6w
Article 25
“a tale of two pandemics
AIDS and COVID-19″
http://bit.ly/3lsT6CQ
Article 24
“Poor Little Rich Girls: The Ballad of Sara and Clare Bronfman
The heiress wanted to meet the Dalai Lama. She wanted the Dalai Lama to be her friend. She had been obsessed with him for two-and-a-half years.”
http://bit.ly/3p8rHHs
Article 23
“The Cheating Scandal That Ripped the Poker World Apart
Mike Postle was on an epic winning streak at a California casino. Veronica Brill thought he had to be playing dirty. Let the chips fall where they may.”
https://bit.ly/3oICSFX
Article 22
Brilliant, super long read.
“CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-SEEKER
Driven by romantic, spiritual, and medicinal imperatives, the author goes in search of something everyone tells him no longer exists: an opium den. From Hong Kong to Bangkok to the Golden Triangle, he is offered every decadence known to the East—and learns the truth about a legendarily perfect drug.”
https://bit.ly/2It08Zh
Article 21
“How to Pick a Career (That Actually Fits You)”
https://bit.ly/3qqGJcj
Article 20
“Dudes Without Heirs
Maria Headley translates ‘Beowulf,’ a story in which women make the world, and men make their legends by destroying it.”
https://bit.ly/2IPSMyH
Article 19
“From Journalist to Dealer in Two Years
A local coke dealer weighs in on the drug’s popularity.”
https://bit.ly/354kXCU
Article 18
“Ejji K. Umamahesh is 20 years “young” with an added 45 years of experience. He is proud to have lived every minute of his life on his own terms.”
https://bit.ly/3e2QFTC
Article 17
“The Incredible Buddha Boy
A legend is growing in Nepal, where people say a meditating boy hasn’t eaten or drunk in seven months. He barely moves, just sits under a tree, still as a stone. It’s impossible, some say. Is it a miracle? A hoax? George Saunders went to find out.”
https://bit.ly/34fxNxF
Article 16
“The year we were thirteen years old, I got pertussis and my best friend Dani became obsessed with cigarettes. She liked French New Wave movies and Audrey Hepburn and The Velvet Underground. She aspired to an aesthetic that valued thinness, pallor, dark clothes, dramatic eyeliner, smoking. What life handed her was poverty and an early puberty of pimples and suddenly enormous breasts. She worked with what she had.”
https://bit.ly/2T5Alb1
Article 15
“Post-Race Analysis: Germany 2020 — A Podium for Ricciardo and a Tattoo for Abiteboul”
https://bit.ly/31h0wjM
Article 14
“Wayne and Nancy exchanged a glance. They’d heard of the Hobson case, of course, had seen the sensational reports in the local news: Mr. Hobson, the former owner, had held his wife captive, tied to a chair in the basement, where, after several days, he shot her, then turned the rifle on himself.”
https://bit.ly/31E87rS
Article 13
“Sunken treasure, death-defying adventure, sibling rivalry: How Charles and John Deane invented modern deep-sea diving and saved the British Empire.”
https://bit.ly/3hDAYUp
Article 12
“The following is a story from Alexander Weinstein’s short story collection Universal love set in a near-future world where technology has altered the way people love.”
https://bit.ly/2Uqa48D
Article 11
“When NGS introduced NAD 83, replacing an older datum that dated to 1927, it was the geographic version of the shift from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar. If you’d been paying attention, you would have woken up on Dec. 6, 1988, to find that your house wasn’t at the same latitude and longitude anymore. “
https://bit.ly/2xUZTkf
2IIM’s CAT 2024 Percentile booster – Register Now!
Article 10
“In Defoe’s first novel, considered by some to be literature’s first novel, Crusoe grows up in York wanting to see the world, believing fulfilment lies far from England. He gets enslaved by Barbary pirates; he grows tobacco in Brazil; at the end, he treks across the Pyrenees. But he always wants more, and an ill-fated voyage for slaves runs into a storm and strands him on his famous island. At first, Crusoe bewails his loneliness, but then he sets to work, retrieving supplies from the wreck, building a shelter and all manner of furniture, growing crops, drying grapes, penning goats, even trying to his hand at beer making.”
https://bit.ly/2zpH9tH
Article 9
“For most of time, Earth was a safe and stable home for our world. But over the last century, your world has been advancing exponentially in technology but remaining stagnant in wisdom. You’re rapidly gaining tremendous powers but still behaving like short-sighted primates. The voice of wisdom is there, but it’s being trampled over by political parties, religions, and nations too mired in blind conflict to lift their heads up and see the bigger picture.”
https://bit.ly/2UAGBIl
Article 8
“But Siberia is anything but ethereal. It is perhaps the dreariest, most nullifying place on earth. Stretching from the Ural Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, from China and the deserts of Central Asia almost to the top of the world, its expanses show little variation across their 4,000 miles east to west or nearly 2,000 miles north to south. Siberia is flat, flat, flat — with the exception of low hills, called sopki, in its eastern regions, and remote mountains, such as the Suntar Khayata, so far north that few Siberians have ever seen them.”
http://bit.ly/32IYyX5
Article 7
“This reluctance stems from the belief that in rape cases, the biggest problem is not false reporting, but no reporting. Only about one-fifth to one-third of rapes get reported to police, national surveys show. One reason is that women fear police won’t believe them.”
http://bit.ly/2oYW0pF
Article 6
“I take turns sleeping and panicking, sleeping and panicking. We get some warmish soda (they’ve run out of ice, they tell us) and a baguette with ham (no cheese, but no indication whether they’ve run out of it or never intended to place it there in the first place). Twelve hours in, we’re over Turkmenistan. Sixteen hours in, we can see the desert. The Badain Jaran. Thirty minutes later we land directly onto the A-SIG airstrip. The pilot says, “Welcome to sunny Alpha Signatooooory!””
http://bit.ly/2OosMLC
Article 5
“As the Marvel Cinematic Universe approaches its 10-year mark with the apocalyptic Avengers: Infinity War, its films have begun to move in a similarly dark direction. After kicking things off with stirring origin movies like Iron Man, Thor, and Captain America: The First Avenger, the series has gradually started to examine the shaky underpinnings of its heroic Avengers, and is now laying the groundwork for their calamitous upending.”
http://bit.ly/2vbic2U
Article 4
Article that squeezes data, statistics, and football into one. Unlke usual clickbaity articles, this neither promises to predict this world cup results nor actually does it.
“Mr Wilson. For spectators, however, this randomness offers a glimmer of hope. Teams from Asia, Africa and North America remain the underdogs, but ought to have had more fairytale runs like South Korea’s in 2002. The 21st Club reckons there is a one-in-four chance a first-time champion will emerge this year. For one intoxicating month, fans around the world will forget the years of hurt and believe that their history books, like those in Montevideo’s museum, could be about to add a glorious new chapter.”
https://econ.st/3auDJno
Article 3
Brilliant piece of fiction that is set on a dystopian future where corporations take over everything, including law and order. Seems like, not too far from reality in a way though! :p
“When it became legally compulsory to carry ID, £300 for the certified ID card, £500 fine if caught without it, he knew he was observing an injustice that sent thousands of innocent people to the patty line, too skint to buy, too skint to pay for being too skint to buy. When it became impossible to vote without the ID, he knew he lived in a tyranny, but by then he wasn’t sure what there was left to do in protest. He’d be okay. If he kept his head down. He’d be fine.”
http://bit.ly/30MetEI
Article 2
Excerpt from a sci-fi novel. Curious and curiouser. Very interesting piece to read.
“That other anonymous party could not see Ingray where she sat—saw her as the same sort of dark gray blur she herself faced. Sat in an identical small room, somewhere else on this station. Could not see Ingray’s expression, if she let her dismay and despair show itself on her face. But the Facilitator could see them both. E wouldn’t betray having seen even Ingray’s smallest reaction, she was sure. Still. “Unexpected difficulties are not my concern,” she said, calmly and smoothly as she could manage. “The price was agreed beforehand.” The price was everything she owned, not counting the clothes she wore, or passage home—already paid.”
http://bit.ly/2RH9MIm
Article 1
Brilliant piece of fiction that is set in the future, perhaps not so far from now. Talks about Reviving those you have lost. Great Read.
http://bit.ly/37jOc2Z
Amazing collection of articles, thank you!