Recent content in Home on Gautam Narula
I set up this site in 2012 as a Wordpress site. I did so because I was familiar with Wordpress, and teenage me was not familiar enough with web development to try homerolling it. Wordpress was easy enough to setup and had many themes and plugins to choose from, but it also came with many downsides: 
 
 slow and bloated, even when I installed caching plugins since this site is mostly static…
Disclosure: this post contains affiliate links, meaning if you click the links and end up buying anything from Amazon, Jeff Bezos chuckles and diverts a small percentage of your purchase from his “Jeff Cowboy Outfit“ fund and sends it my way, at no additional cost to you. Thanks for supporting the site! 
 
 
 
 
 
 I recently read 
 The Expectation Effect: How Your…
A few months ago I got to play a blitz game against Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, the reigning World Blitz Chess Champion, as a prize for being the last one standing in a 35 board simultaneous exhibition (where I missed a forced draw, agh!). I never thought I’d get to play a world champion, and am grateful to MVL and the Marshall Chess Club for making this possible. 
 Below is the video of…
Disclosure: this post contains affiliate links, meaning if you click the links and end up buying anything from Amazon, Jeff Bezos diverts a small percentage of your purchase from his “Jeff Goes Back To Space 🤠" Fund and sends it my way, at no additional cost to you. Thanks for supporting the site! 
 
 
 
 

 
 Lore
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 As I have studied the art and craft…
When I was a teenager, I was notorious at the Atlanta Chess Club for getting into time trouble. I’d play a game with 30 minutes per side and struggle to not lose on time, eventually forced to blitz out a flurry of moves without thinking as the final minutes and seconds slipped away on my clock. This same problem persisted at longer time controls too: 45 minutes per side, 60 minutes per side, 90…
I waited until today to post this because I believe democracy was on the ballot in the Georgia Senate runoff races. I wanted Senator-elect Warnock (and Jon Ossoff) to win. Now that he has, I want to share my experience with Senator-elect Warnock from nearly a decade ago. 
 In 2015, I wrote 
 Remain Free
 
 about my friendship with death row inmate Troy Davis . The book covers the…
Last updated: August 30, 2021 
 The Queen’s Gambit has given rise to a new generation of chess enthusiasts. How to Get Good at Chess, Fast ’s traffic quadrupled between October and November 2020, and Lichess traffic jumped 10% in that same span. To all the new and reengaged chess players, welcome! 
 As part of this surge of interest, many new players have sent me questions and comments on…

 
 
 

 My grandfather passed away last night, at the age of 86. I only met him three times — the summer of 1998, when I spent my fifth birthday at his house in Jammu; a week or two in 2006, when I was 13; and last in 2018, when his illness had progressed to the point where we could no longer have conversations.

 It’s not just the police. The entire justice system is broken.
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 I was 15 years old when I met Troy Davis, a Black death row inmate, in 2008. Troy was convicted of the 1989 killing of Mark MacPhail, a white off-duty police officer, in Savannah, Georgia. In the decades after his conviction, seven of the nine trial eyewitnesses—all of them Black— recanted their testimony.…
NYC in the Time of Coronavirus 
 Both the city and the state of New York had their first confirmed case of coronavirus on March 1 . In the following weeks, NYC rapidly transformed into the epicenter of the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States 1 . 
 I thought I’d share a few photos of what it’s been like. 
 It started with (literal) half-measures, like restaurants being…
Eight years ago today, Troy Davis was executed. And four years ago today, Remain Free was published. 
 I still remember the night of the execution: Wednesday, September 21, 2011. I was a freshman. I had just finished my very first college exam and left Myers Hall to hop in my little red Chevy, which sputtered and struggled to get me down to Death Row in Jackson, Georgia. I remember the…
I’ve started writing book reviews to force myself to interact more critically with books I read, as well as more easily recommend books to my friends and readers. Rather than writing negative reviews of bad books, I only write reviews of the good ones. 
 Fiction 
 Nonfiction 
 The Expectation Effect: How Your Mindset Can Transform Your Life — An investigation into the scientific use of…
I was a judge for the 2018 Georgia Author of the Year Awards (GAYA). For Best Memoir, I selected This Gladdening Light: An Ecology of Fatherhood and Faith by Christopher Martin. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Below is my submission statement: 
 
 Disillusioned by the “artificial light spread by industrial Christianity,” Christopher Martin is in search of a new…
I’ll be speaking at two upcoming events: 
 The Moth Mainstage in Brooklyn on June 21, 2018 at 8 PM. 
 “Between Life and Execution: The Troy Davis Story and its Impact on Capital Punishment” at The Boston Public Library, Rabb Hall, 700 Boylston Street, Boston, MA 01226, July 7, 2018 at 2 PM. 
 Hope to see you there!
Today is the one year anniversary of my father’s sudden and unexpected death. It’s also the birthday of Troy Davis, my friend who was executed on death row in 2011 and whom I wrote Remain Free about. These were the two most influential men in my life, so I thought I’d share a few words on their relationship. 
 Both my father and I were moderate supporters of the death penalty in 2008, before…
I enjoyed speaking at the Moth in Boston so much that I’m doing it again! This time, I’ll be at The Moth Main Stage in Salt Lake City on May 30. Tickets are available for purchase at https://themoth.org/events/the-moth-mainstage-in-salt-lake-city
I’ll be speaking at The Moth Main Stage in Boston on April 27! Tickets are available for purchase at https://themoth.org/events/the-moth-mainstage-in-boston-3 .
Whenever I think of something to write about, I note it down and sketch a brief outline. It’s a pretty long list, because I’ve written very little since I completed Remain Free in 2015. In early 2021 I began writing regularly again. Here are the next few pieces I’ll be posting: 
 
 Various articles on rapid chess improvement 
 
 I’ve written three posts on chess improvement, all…
I noticed this when I voted for the first time in 2012: Georgia’s ballot initiatives, which are typically amendments to the state constitution, are frighteningly biased in their wording to push voters into voting yes. 
 Here are the ballot initiatives, verbatim 1 , for 2016, which Georgians are voting on as I type these words: 
 
 **Amendment 1: ** 
 Provides greater flexibility…
Five years ago today, my friend Troy Davis was wrongfully executed. One year ago today, I published Remain Free to share his story. 
 In that one year: 
 
 Remain Free beat out a New York Times bestseller written by a US president for the Georgia Author of the Year Award 
 Remain Free has been featured in NRI Pulse, India New England News, Khabar Magazine, and the Sunday edition of…
CreativeMornings Boston has posted my talk from May 2016, titled “Coming of Age on Death Row”. The teaser: 
 
 ** I fight to live so you can remain free ** 
 What happens when the realities of a suburban teenager and the world’s most well-known death row inmate collide? The answer involves secret phone recordings, a maximum-security prison, bizarre interpretations of the Eighth…
I primarily speak about the Troy Davis case, the death penalty, issues in the American criminal justice system, my personal experiences befriending a death row inmate during my teenage years, and the process of funding/writing/publishing Remain Free , etc. 
 Upcoming Events 
 There are no upcoming events at this time. 
 Past Events 
 “Between Life and Execution: The Troy Davis…
Inspired by Derek Siver’s Now Project , this page describes what I’m working on now: 
 
 Working at Stitch Fix as a data scientist 
 Migrating this site from WordPress to a statically generated site 
 Hosting regular Nick Cage movie nights, where the movie is typically chosen by RNG 
 Hosting pizza beta test nights, where I share my experiments with different pizza styles and…
I’ll be hosting a Remain Free book discussion and signing at Trident Booksellers (338 Newbury St, Boston, MA 02115) on Monday, May 16, at 7:00 PM! I’ll be reading several excerpts from the book and discussing the events within those excerpts in more detail, as well as the process of writing the book. Trident is Boston’s largest independent bookstore and they’ve got great food as well, so I hope to…

 
 
 

 Good evening. Before I begin, I’d like to thank the Cornell International Affairs Society for giving the opportunity to speak to you all tonight, and for organizing this wonderful conference. 
 Tonight, I want to tell you a story. It begins when I was 15 years old, on September 3, 2008, in a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia. I received a phone call from a friend. He was…

 
 
 

 On this day, four years ago, Georgia executed my friend, my mentor, my uncle, Troy Davis. I believe he was innocent. Today I’m officially releasing Remain Free , so the world doesn’t forget who he was or the truth of what really happened. 
 I wish you all could’ve met him. My greatest hope with Remain Free is that, through the hundreds of recorded…

 Death Row 
 
 This is a preview from Remain Free , which will be released on September 21, 2015.

 Phone Call 
 
 This is a preview from Remain Free , which will be released on September 21, 2015. 
 September 3, 2008. 
 I was watching TV when the phone call came. 
 “Hey, it’s Sahil. Do you have a second to talk?” Sahil was a childhood friend a few years older than me. While his parents and my mother had been friends for decades, he’d never called before. Why now? He…

 
 
 

 I’m thrilled to officially announce the publication of Remain Free , a book I’ve spent three years working on. It will be released on September 21, 2015. I’ll answer a few commonly asked questions here. I answered other questions in a Reddit AMA I did when I first announced the book back in 2012. 
 What is Remain Free ? 
 Remain Free is a…
Lists predicting future innovations are pretty common these days. There are usually a few recurring themes, like artificial intelligence, personalized medicine, and the “Internet of Things.” This list is five ideas that could make a big change in the future but haven’t really been explored yet. 
 
 The Sharing Economy of Goods 
 
 The sharing economy is an economic system where an…
I college, I majored in Computer Science and Political Science. The poli sci kids could be divided into two camps—the people who wanted to go to law school (60 percent), and the people who wanted to get into politics (40 percent). Similarly, there was a divide in CS—the people who wanted to become software engineers (80 percent), and the people who wanted to become computer scientists in some form…
This post was originally published on September 21, 2013 at www.remainfree.com . 
 Troy Davis was executed two years ago today. 
 I woke up shortly after sunrise. Today was gameday in Athens, Georgia, and as I hustled out of my apartment I saw families sprawled among dozens of red UGA tents, chatting excitedly and huddling around the television in anticipation of the big game. A few…
Today is February 4, 2014, exactly one decade after a nineteen-year-old Mark Zuckerberg launched thefacebook from his dorm room. Today, the company is worth over $150 billion and has over 1.2 billion active users. I joined Facebook in late 2007. Back then, Facebook was fun. I’d waste hours on the site writing statuses, scrolling through my newsfeed, and messaging friends. But these days, I don’t…
I was rummaging through old files on my computer and came across my primary college application essay, “Play like Picasso.” I remember staying up late one night in what must have been November 2010 and writing it in about an hour. Surprisingly, almost nothing was changed in the editing process. The essays were to be roughly 500 words–this clocks in at 547. 
 Play like Picasso 
 I can’t…
Edit: This article on chess improvement was unexpectedly popular, reaching #2 on Hacker News and being linked to on LifeHacker . Thanks for your patience as I work through all the comments and emails I receive. 
 There are many misconceptions about rapid chess improvement. In this post I’m going to lay out a simple but effective way to get good at chess, fast. 
 This system is based on…
I get a lot of questions about my name. Here’s a handy list of answers to soothe your inquisitive mind so you can finally sleep at night. 
 How is your name pronounced? 
 “Gotham,” like Gotham City from Batman. 
 Wow, that’s really cool! 
 That isn’t a question. 
 Is it really pronounced like that? 
 I often hear this question. Indians or people of Indian descent assume I’m…
In March, I traveled to Costa Rica. The purpose of the trip was to gain a better understanding of how globalized surf culture and surf tourism impacted the country and its people. We spent a week speaking to locals and foreigners, exploring towns and villages along the Pacific coast, observing conservation efforts, meeting with community leaders, and discussing what we saw. I could write a lengthy…
When I was a kid, my favorite TV show was The Simpsons 1 . During the commercial breaks I often saw ads for contests associated with some product, i.e. “Mail in the box top from your bran flakes to be entered in our $10,000 sweepstakes!” While the ads avoided running afoul of any illegal lottery rules by including a “no purchase necessary” clause in the fine print at the end, the hope was that you…
Most games today, even well-funded and established games, have terrible ranking systems. For example, tennis’s ATP ranking system is based on “points”, which are awarded by participating in select tournaments in the previous 52 weeks. The system is needlessly complicated and somewhat arbitrary, and does not directly take strength of opposition into account. The upper echelons of Halo and Call of…
Through methodical, data-driven analysis of your tournament results, you can quickly break through chess plateaus 
 When I was 16, I went on a hiatus from competitive chess. Although I would occasionally play in tournaments for fun and out of habit, I stopped actively training and sure enough plunged in the rankings. But by early 2012, I had grown frustrated with losing and was ready to come…

 
 National Champion! K-6 unrated winner at the Supernationals III with a score of 7/7 (2005) 
 

 My dad taught me how to play chess when I was five years old. When I was seven, I joined my school’s chess club and found I had a knack for the game, and through playing I quickly rose towards the top of the rating ladder. The game stuck with me long after many of my chess club…
The earliest selection of my writing I have is a story I wrote in kindergarten about going to McDonald’s, illustrated with stick figures and a crayon-colored rendition of the iconic golden arches. I’ve written a bit since then, and on this page I’ve listed my more notable writing. 
 I still have many unfulfilled writing ambitions (a novel, a pizza-themed travelogue, a collection of essays, a…
I wrote my first program when I was nine years old. Using JavaScript and HTML, I built a simple browser calculator. I then began using my newfound skills for evil at school by creating prank JavaScript dialog boxes warning of an “impending virus” that required restarting the computer. My teachers were not amused, and almost banned me from using the computers. The next year I paid my debt to…

 
 
 

 Gautam ( pronounced Gotham” ) Narula is an author, machine learning engineer, and data scientist. He is the author of Remain Free , a memoir detailing his friendship with death row inmate Troy Davis and years working on the case while exploring the issues that plague the death penalty and our criminal justice system. Remain Free won the 2016 Georgia Author of the Year…