Or, misusing the term “Hegelian dialectic” With at least one semester to go (senior spring and a possible MEng), it’s premature to use this title, but I’ll use it anyway — it’s pithy and not false, though also not comprehensive. I’ve heard “the Hegelian dialectic” defined approximately once in my...

While reading the MDN page for @keyframes, which are used to make CSS animations, I saw the sentence: Declarations in a keyframe qualified with !important are ignored. This seemed surprising. I generally have the sense that adding !important to a declaration makes that declaration “win out”, i.e. over ones that...

There are many reasons why a person might choose to write and share things. I recently realized that although my reasons all boil down to “I write for myself”, I often hold myself back with self-criticisms that are only relevant if my goal is to write for others. For example,...

Society often tells us that fitness is one-size-fits-all, that it’s about tedious, grueling workouts in the name of looking a certain way… I have fun experimenting… flowing through poses like water and wind. I feel… awe at what our bodies can do when we talk to them.

My parents go grocery shopping way more than they need to. It’s their hobby. I know others who, by necessity or by personality, treat grocery shopping as a chore to optimize. Solve the traveling salesman problem on the store layout given your desired items. Compute a monthly budget for your...

In my third year of high school, I decided to organize an event called Science and Us. The idea was to introduce fellow high schoolers to people in science communication and give them an opportunity to make projects explaining complex topics to the public. I did this because I realized...

Each screenshot asks us how we wish to embed a “subject” in context. In an age where our devices are our most personal objects, screenshots speak volumes about what matters to us. When platforms measure and nudge our every move, screenshots can make the private public, the temporary permanent.

The US’s pandemic response leaves a gaping hole that private entities, including technology companies, have scrambled to fill. The tech industry, software in particular, has the power to influence the priorities on society’s agenda — what problems are worthy of tackling, what the criteria are for potential solutions — and...

I hear it all the time. “Once you get into the real world…” “This is intended to prepare you for the real world…” Other common phrases like “What do you want to be when you grow up?” hint at it too — the idea that as youth, we’re in something...

Discord isn’t just for gamers. Teens are creating personal Discord servers for chatting with their friends, fulfilling pandemic-induced desires for social interaction and creating dynamic communities.

Hello friends, it’s that time of the year again! Obviously, COVID-19 has impacted everything. I’m grateful to be interning at Gatsby, which was remote and distributed to begin with. My original plan was to travel across the country while working, living in various cities in ~the American heartland~ for 2-3...

The problem Now that I’m home due to the pandemic, I’ve been trying to make sense of my first year of college and why it felt so unsatisfactory. Though I’m still in the process of figuring that out, I know that part of my discontent manifests itself as loneliness or...

At the end of 2018, I told some friends, “This is the first year that wasn’t the best year of my life.” Fortunately, 2019 went better—it was full of big changes, rare opportunities, and emotional growth. In 2020, I’ll focus on being intentional about what I do so I can...

In 1633, Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei stood on trial, facing threats of torture from the Roman Catholic Church. The Inquisition forced him to recant his theory that the Earth revolves around the Sun—a compelling explanation of his observations of Jupiter’s moons and Venus’s phases—and sentenced him to a lifetime of...

This post is nearly two months late (so late that some of the points no longer apply to my life), but here’s my review of the third quarter of 2019! (See quarter 1 and quarter 2.) This time, I’m splitting the review up into two posts. The first part is...

Hi and welcome to the second edition of Figurative Coffee! Today, I’m sharing a conversation I had last summer with Karen Zusi (@kzoosi), Media Relations Manager at the Broad Institute, a genomics research center at Harvard and MIT. I originally conducted this interview for Science and Us to help student...

Hi and welcome to the first edition of Figurative Coffee! I launched this newsletter last week and I’m excited and grateful that 160+ people have signed up. This week, I’m sharing an interview with Chris Walker (@EnDimensions), a 2013 Thiel Fellow and staff member at Hack Club, a worldwide community...

I really enjoyed publishing a quarterly review of milestones at the beginning of April and plan on writing another one for July 1, but in the middle of 2019’s second quarter is a major change in my life: graduating high school and living on my own for the first time!...

2018 has been a year of challenges and growth, and I’m excited for 2019. Here’s a recap of the past year, as best as I can remember. Winter In January, I participated in SheHacks, my first 36-hour hackathon! My team, composed of high school and college students from MA, NY,...