I finished reading Susan Orlean’s memoir Joyride this week. The book was a breeze to get through (evidently because of Orlean’s engrossing prose and stories), but I kept finding myself taking long pauses to soak in all the insights she dispensed through her stories, like freebies at an amusement park. I have a tendency to…
In 2025, as usual, I was reading rather indisciminately. At the start of the year, I’d set out to read with more intention, to not grab random books from the library catalogue purely based on their “vibes”, and to not give in to an irrational craving for consuming just about any readable material. Needless to…
I live in Canada. More specifically, I live in Quebec, which officially only recognizes French as their language, while the rest of the country counts both French and English as the official tongues. Quebec is perhaps the province that singlehandedly keeps French alive in the whole of Canada, and kudos to them for that. I…
One of my eternal ‘wants’ in life is to one day have my own library at home – wall-to-wall bookshelves filled with books, curated through a lifetime of reading. To me, “making it in life” comes partially in the form of having discretionary money to spend on one’s genuine hobbies, which in my case concern…
Not long ago I was wondering how much of the Internet is now taken over by AI. Apparently people now use LLM chat bots in place of search engines; we’ve come a long way from non-sensical word like “googling” entering the mainstream vocab to, oh I don’t know, having “gpt” as a verb soon, perhaps.…
Two questions for you: How close do you think we are to successfully managing the climate crisis? And how long do you estimate we still have to try to do so? I suspect there are no correct nor definitive answers to these, and whoever you ask will have a different perspective informing their answers (don’t…
In a recent New Yorker commentary titled “The Battle for the Bros”, the author breaks down how the Democrats (or “the left”) in the US lost a voter base among young men to the conservatives in recent years. In short, the leftist movement of “wokeness” apparently offended so many of them that it seemed altogether…
When reality feels like a flaming dumpster, some may see utopian thinking and daydreaming as just escapism at best, or maladaptation at worst. Well, I happen to think it’s pretty essential, not as a coping mechanism, but as a rope to get out of this quicksand. Burying our heads in the doom and gloom has…
If you know me in real life, you might know that I read a lot. At the same time, I don’t often make reading a social activity. I leave my book reviews and takeaways here and there on the Internet, but I rarely seek out a space to consistently read alongside others or nurture conversations…
Wouldn’t it be nice if there existed a tight-knit community of idealists, where idealism weren’t shut down immediately for a lack of pragmatism, and where people with a shared vision could actually pool their minds together to forge concrete paths towards it? Wouldn’t it be nice if these idealists, instead of being told their utopian…
During the month of December, I traveled around with just one small backpack and one handbag. This brush with minimalism left me with some thoughts and reflections. When I was an adolescent, I had a phase where I would idolize the minimalist lifestyle to the point of committing to a black-and-white “personal uniform” just to…
As the year closes and people are (once again) awaiting that blank slate to (re)start many of their personal aspirations, I just wanted to quickly share a tool I have been using for the past 2-3 years to track my own progress across various projects And despite the world moving through a myriad of new,…
I once read a piece of advice about writing the same way one talks. Essentially, the simplicity of spoken language not only feels more natural and genuine, but also appears to be more effective in reaching a broad audience. I understand the appeal of this advice, because I occasionally can only tolerate simple writing that…
I have taken some time off from being active online and engaging in digital correspondence with friends for a few weeks now. Somehow, it has felt both like a condensation and an expansion of time. During this period, I have stopped some activities I used to spend much more time doing (reading books, writing this…