It’s hard not to reflect sometimes and realize that the topics that I write about are so often sad or serious or socratic in nature, and rarely dive into the realm of the happy or joyous. Some of this bleeds into my personal life too — many of my conversations…

And someone else too if you can — A few months ago I was chatting with a friend about a curious phenomenon that we had both began to notice. She and I both grew up in immigrant households — the kind of immigrant household that placed enormous weight on education, elevating it to the level of status. We…

Math, Money, Medicine — In 2000 — when I was in the fourth grade — I read an article about how to land a dream job at Microsoft. The article followed a candidate through the travails of interviewing for Microsoft’s consulting team from the application to the phone screen to the multiple in-person interviews…

An Ode to Anders Ericsson and Learning — In the Spring of 2016, Stephen Dubner released a series of podcasts in the Freakonomics Radio feed under the theme of self-improvement. He featured prominent personalities like Malcolm Gladwell and Tim Ferris during the series, but the series kicked off with an interview with Anders Ericsson, a Swedish research psychologist…

Inuit / n. / kartz-sih-loo-nih / ᖄ ᕐ ᑦ ᓯ ᓗ ᓂ — Today is the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of what’s felt like the longest year. …

aka Postcards to Strangers — The Postcard Game was thunk up in the common room of Len Hostel Kyoto Kawaramachi late in the evening of March 26th, 2019. Borne out of a conversation between fellow postcard writers Barry Leybovich and Terri-Louise Doyle over whiskey and matcha-flavored KitKats, it is exceedingly simple. Exceedingly Simple Rules Each person buys a…

Jamie clicked her heels a few times absentmindedly, faintly wishing doing so would return her home. Whatever home would even be, having spent the past six years since graduating college jumping from apartment to apartment across cities and oceans. Now she stood at the front of the line outside of…

On Sam Harris, free speech, and the scientific method — Sometimes, Sam Harris’s Making Sense podcast really bugs me. Truly, I think Harris is a smart guy — I appreciate his podcast and in particular I applaud his focus on important but underrepresented content such as effective altruism, existential risk, privacy, child sexual abuse, and more. …

Frames of reference, and dating in America — Content warning: This piece briefly mentions death by suicide. This should be fairly obvious. I can practically hear you thinking that only a nerd like me could ever think otherwise. We’ll ignore for now the behavioral psychologists whose lives’ work is literally to quantify relationships as math, but I agree…