Cupertino, the year 2040. Sunrise. Elana raises herself up with wipers and spray bottles in a crane boom on the east side of the Spaceship, just as she has done every day for the last twenty years, and squints into the red sunlight towards downtown San Jose. Or at least, towards what remains of it. Towards whatever can be seen through the smog. Twelve years ago it had started as just an anti-gentrification riot in downtown with a public stake to burn settlement money collected from years of lawsuits against the tech giants. Then suddenly there were tens of thousands...
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The first time I saw Ron English’s art was in the documentary “Super Size Me” in my 12th grade Health class. (A long time ago, admittedly, but what better occasion than the turn of the decade to finally convert those drafts into actual posts?) He was introduced on screen much the same way as any documentary guest might be announced, with a banner reading something like “Dr. Dieto, nutrition expert”, except in this case it was “Ron English, artistic genius”. Me and my friend Eric from math club thought this was absolutely hilarious. Nobody else in the class laughed. This...
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This semester, I was lucky to get into MIT’s beginner glassblowing class, described as “the single most over-subscribed activity at MIT” because there are over 300 students vying for 20 randomly-selected spots. Their lottery system makes you n times more likely to get in if this is your nth attempt (compared to a first-time entrant), so I was surprised to be picked the second term I tried, to the despair of some of my older friends who’d watched many excited faces get in for seven semesters, but never their own… (On the other hand, a friend told me that her name...
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The concept of a raag in Hindustani classical music seems a lot like a language to me. I’m going to try to explain what a raag is from this perspective and see how much sense the analogy makes. (Fun fact: this idea was first mentioned to me by my dad, a few years ago, when I was first reading Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach and excitedly explaining to him the mathematical patterns in a Bach piece. He said, “Can’t you describe similar rules and patterns in the notes of a raag?”, of which I was instantly skeptical because what else...
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At the beginning of each new academic year any typical college expects new incoming first-year students. The college goes to some lengths to customize the students’ experience, to look out for them, and to make them feel like they are at the right place, like they belong. A small but potentially important part of this is to create door decorations, or simply, nametags to put on students’ names to mark their living spaces—spaces that are their very own (in addition to their roommates, of course). Additionally, ‘door decs’ are made uniform across a community, such as a small pod within...
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