I have been exercising my cooking muscles this holiday season, with a plethora of delicious dishes for my family members. For Thanksgiving, I made delicata squash bisque and apple-cranberry salad with Impossible Pumpkin Pie for dessert, and the soup especially was such a hit that my Aunt wants it to be a new family tradition. [...]
It turns out that science isn’t the infallible, objective thing it’s made out to be. This does not always come as a surprise, but until recently I rarely realized how deep science’s subjectivity goes. After all, humans are the ones designing the experiments, and they are the ones interpreting the results. Scientists frame their empiricism [...]
Why is taste a legitimate defense for eating meat (and dairy and eggs)? Almost every conversation I have with people about veganism ends with a smile and “it just tastes so good!” Being friendly, I remain casual and let the subject drop — but inside, my mind’s eye is twitching because I find this ‘argument’ [...]
Heck yeah! Obama won!
I guess I can stay in the country after all!
My week in Hawaii was not a vacation, I can tell you that. I went to see if I might be an apprenticed to an inventor named Dean after graduation, but it turned out that he had an agenda for the week we (my dad and I) were there. I never quite figured out what [...]
Alan Watts is determined to be in my Thesis. I have the great fortune to live across the hall from a freshman named Taylor, who spends his time reading and listening to Nietzsche, Lovecraft, and Alan Watts (in addition to watercolor painting and drinking tea), and he introduced me to this counter-culture East-meets-West philosopher who [...]
If you give a mouse a cookie, it’s going to want a glass of milk. And if Sarah starts running, she’s going to want to run a race. Apparently. After seeing the Falmouth Road Race finish line, I knew that running with a bunch of other enthusiastic people would be more fun than looping around [...]
It was a most relaxing two weeks at Cape Cod, with intermittent thunderstorms, dancing, and poking at glowing moon jellies. I fell in love with Thomas’s family and friends, and I liked pretty much anyone who cared to stop by and stay a few days. True, it was a bit too crowded at times, but [...]
Noam Chomsky is dumb. He doesn’t think communication is language’s primary purpose, he thinks language is a perfect formal system disconnected from gesture, intonation, and context. It’s no wonder, then, that he is mystified by how a beautiful grammar could evolve from a messy primate brain, and how he could imagine that a computer would [...]
I should speak about Ireland now, with its green fields and its crumbling castles and its eternal rain. Mary had come to work at Tir na nOg, “Land of the Children,” our host’s indoor playground. Anne practically raised Mary and Thomas, and her son Kieran was almost a younger brother. (Now he is a surly [...]