The Country Between Us
Notes on Carolyn Forche’s poems in the midst of our nation’s struggle to contain the pandemic.
Category Life
Hello Again, to The Far Side
Our scientific and technological experiments often began as what can be ex post as seen as bumbling comical attempts to understand things. The Far Side often poked fun at the brightest among us. Welcome Back, to The Far Side.
Assorted: Ladakh, O’Connor and Thiel
In light of the ongoing skirmishes in Ladakh region the Indian subcontinent, I came across an interesting essay by Peter Worthington, who co-founded Toronto Sun (and who was its editor-in-chief for 12 years), on his first-hand observations in India-China conflict…
Walled Gardens and Finite Games
There are two ways to live our life: as a series of finite games, valuing achievements, or a long infinite game, valuing morals. This is our time to listen and rise to the challenge we face to create a better world.
Four Stages and A Funeral
A famous meme due to Senator Ted Stevens analogizes internet as “a series of tubes”. Like bustling cities, it is a fuel that converts the potential energy constrained in orderliness, to a kinetic energy of human endeavor. Internet releases the atoms of our thoughts to escape parochialism. Internet is messy, disorderly and increasingly ruled by social media monopolies, but it can be where “the mind is free”. [...]
Pandemic Reading Recommendations
It has been a tough April, and I am among the fortunate ones. I know from the extraordinary people around me, how difficult and dire the conditions have been for many people.
Here are my pandemic recommendations. Some light, some heavy. Some funny, some serious. Instead of reviewing them fully, I recall the associative memories from reading experience that came back to me, as I thumbed through these copies.
Catch and Kill: Review
Ronan Farrow, along with journalists like Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, deserve our deepest gratitude. While they make it clear that they are not the story, it requires a certain guileless audacity to jump into unknown dangers where “angels fear to tread”. Much like Bad Blood by John Carreyrou, Catch and Kill is a peerless example of investigative journalism into strange realities that we believe exist only in fiction.