• Bridging Global Divides

    We live in an era characterized by unprecedented connectivity and yet, paradoxically, also burgeoning divisiveness. This is why, for me, E.B. White’s call in his essay ‘Intimations’ to find individuals “big enough to love the whole planet” reverberates with a profound urgency. White’s words from December 1941 beckon us to envision a society nurtured by…

  • Setting Down to Type a Masterpiece – Photophile Musings

    When I was younger, I had a vintage typewriter that formerly belonged to a family member. It was painted pale green. I can’t recall the brand, but it still worked. In the late 90’s, though, it was impossible to acquire a new ribbon for it. Nowadays, they do produce universal typewriter ribbons for vintage manual…

  • The Trouble with Grand Plans

    Self-motivation is a strange creature. People love to preach about building good habits, as if stacking enough of them together will build you a better life. Sure, routines have their place. But no habit will save you if you don’t know why you’re doing the thing in the first place. More than anything, I’ve always…

  • What is Truth in the Age of Misinformation?

    Once Upon a Truth… In the beginning, there was Truth. No questions asked, carved into stone tablets and shouted from mountaintops by bearded men with suspiciously confident eyebrows. You knew where you stood. Reality was what the guy with the staff and the fire-belching bush said it was. These were the good old days, back…

  • The Charlatans’ Paradise

    Let’s not pretend we live in a rational world. We reside, often too comfortably I might add, in a full-throttle, glitter-drenched Charlatans’ Paradise. Our modern world has become a kingdom ruled by confidence artists in limited-edition sneakers and bespoke suits, armed with buzzwords, ring lights, and disturbingly bright teeth. Our national pastime isn’t baseball anymore;…

  • From Boss B*tch to Burnout: When Empowerment Becomes Performative

    You and I probably each know someone in our lives that embodies the Boss Bitch. We all know one of those, a shimmering capitalist chimera who allegedly “has it all” and reminds the rest of us plebs that we, too, could rise and grind our way into the annals of hashtag empowerment. But that dream…

  • The Bridges and Barriers of Common Language

    “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world” – Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations For years, I’ve felt that nearly every single word I utter is but a shadow of the thought I wish to convey. Indeed, human expression is often forcibly funneled into the narrow alleyways of symbols and allegory, what we colloquially…

  • Masters of Minutiae

    It was another day at the office, in the Year of Our Lord 2012, yet another one of those days where the universe seemed to conspire against me. My inbox overflowed with social media updates and inconsequential emails. The news app on my smartphone blared an endless stream of doom and gloom. As I rocked…

  • Today’s Society VS World State Society in Brave New World

    The World State society presented in Brave New World might appear radically different from our own. However, there are some striking similarities, yet simultaneously it’s fascinating to see how certain things in our present culture have been totally done away with in the World State. Art, as we know it, no longer exists. However, the…

  • Could AI Writers Become Better Than Human Writers?

    Let’s put our futurist caps on for a moment. It’s 2035, and the New York Times Bestseller list is dominated by AI-generated novels.*War and Peace 2.0* by GPT-10 is the most talked-about book of the year, lauded for its “emotional depth” and “stunning insight into the human condition.” Meanwhile, human writers everywhere drown their sorrows…