I created this site a few years ago with the intent of starting a blog. Life got in the way (probably for the best, as the web is now spared the insufferable thoughts of me-as-an-undergrad), and three years later I’m going to try again.

I promise to start posting for real before the end of the month, lest I fall into the trap of only blogging about why I don’t blog more. But for this post, I’ll limit myself to an introduction.

Why am I doing this, anyway?

We are gathered here today because:

  • Men would rather start a blog than go to therapy.
  • I’m an insufferable hipster and blogging is finally retro.
  • My opinions are too “real” for the rest of the internet, and goddammit, people need to hear them!
  • …

Okay, maybe there isn’t a singular reason.

What am I going to write about?

Everything. That said, I expect most of my posts will be centered around:

Book reviews

A subset of books I’ve read in the past couple years, which I plan to review at some point:

  • Jane Jacobs – The Death and Life of Great American Cities
  • Thomas Kuhn – The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
  • Carmen Maria Machado – Her Body and Other Parties

Some books I’m currently reading, planning on reading, or planning on re-reading, and which I may or may not end up reviewing:

  • Susanna Clarke – Piranesi
  • Edward S. Herman & Noam Chomsky – Manufacturing Consent
  • Vladimir Nabokov – Pale Fire
  • Steven Weinberg – The Quantum Theory of Fields

Physics

My day job is as a physics PhD student, so naturally, I’ll spend some time writing about physics.

I wouldn’t call this a “science outreach” blog, in that I’m not interested in discussing physics non-mathematically. Science writing, when you can’t use terms like “orthogonal” or “isomorphic” or “to leading order”, is an entirely different skill that I’m not very good at (plenty of other people are very good at it; go read Quanta). But when possible, I’ll try to keep things accessible to undergrads, technically minded non-physicists, and precocious high schoolers.

If I had to point to a gold standard for the technical-but-still-conversational type of science writing I’d like to do, it would be these three posts by Scott Aaronson. When I write about science, it’ll be with the conscious goal of imitating his style.

Programming

I sometimes hack random projects together in my spare time. Several will be showcased here. Stay tuned.

Politics & Philosophy

I expect political posts will comprise a minority of my writing here, and rank punditry will comprise an even smaller minority of that.

This is not because my political views aren’t important, or because I believe in being “civil” or “apolitical”. It’s because I rarely feel like I have anything to add. Although all writing is to some extent political, most overtly political writing is bad, and the handful who can do it well are more talented than I am.

That said, if I think of a particularly sharp argument or a useful framing, I won’t hesitate to sound off.

What else?

Earlier, when I said there wasn’t a single reason for starting this blog, perhaps I was being more pithy than honest. If there is a reason, it’s the memory of a time before I used social media, before everything was about centralization and doomscrolling and reply guys, when the internet seemed to present boundless possibility, when it was a place that people could share things they loved…

…and the vain hope that maybe it could be that way again.

If you’ll permit me a further extension of this embarrassing measure of sincerity, then in the spirit of sharing things we love, I’d like to close with a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay:

Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare.
Let all who prate of Beauty hold their peace,
And lay them prone upon the earth and cease
To ponder on themselves, the while they stare
At nothing, intricately drawn nowhere
In shapes of shifting lineage; let geese
Gabble and hiss, but heroes seek release
From dusty bondage into luminous air.
O blinding hour, O holy, terrible day,
When first the shaft into his vision shone
Of light anatomized! Euclid alone
Has looked on Beauty bare. Fortunate they
Who, though once only and then but far away,
Have heard her massive sandal set on stone.