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An underrated way to help the world
Everywhere I turn on the Internet, there are floods of messages about all the challenges the world faces today (clearly the algorithm tracks my online behaviors and sends signals my way). It’s dispiriting to experience the bombardment of news about climate change, poverty, inequality, wars and conflicts, and other atrocities that seem to only multiply…
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What’s smart about smartphones?
The past fifteen years or so have been marked by the rapid growth of two things: smartphones and social media. While the social media industry now seems to struggle at times to not fall from grace, the toppling of smartphones is nowhere in sight. The presence of smartphones is projected to only rise especially when…
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Advice for reading more
I have been asked by a few friends about how I read so much and I never really managed to give a good response. Typically it would be a shrug, or some (genuinely ashamed) comments about how reading too much in fact negates my ability to do anything else. More than as an encouragement to…
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Social media, OUT
For the past couple of weeks I have been venturing back into a few social media platforms (just because!) and to my surprise I didn’t find the experience all that bad. As per usual, however, I grew tired of it quite quickly and now I’m left with this urge to remove myself from social media…
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How climate solutions are anthropocentric, and why that is okay
I recently read the book Under A White Sky (2021) by the science journalist Elizabeth Kolbert. Through snippets of her trips to various locations around the world to report on strategies of combating environmental destruction, Kolbert introduces in this book a whole new dimension to what we typically refer to as the Anthropocene. Her previous Pulitzer-winning volume The Sixth…
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Climate “inactivism” and the risks of inflicting guilt in environmental politics
Earlier this year, Michael E. Mann, who is widely recognized as one of the creators of the famous “hockey stick” graph depicting historical increase in global temperature, published a book titled “The New Climate War”. Despite being written by a renowned climate scientist, the book is fully politicized in its argument against climate “inactivism”, broadly defined as…
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Are we Disobedient?
At first glance, a climate change documentary titled Disobedience already seems to promise tenacity of a message. Created by a company that goes by the name Disobedient Productions, the relatively short documentary fulfills my initial expectation of its being a stronghold of creative space. What is even more remarkable about this film, however, is its…
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Haircuts and makeovers
Transformations. Makeovers. Glow ups. Instant, yet radical appearance revamps at the flick of a magic wand. Hollywood and the likes brought me up in this world of delusions filled with magical, effortless character transformations that would only take seconds of footages, a lot of momentum buildup, and occasionally some pixie dust. In kids’ movies and…
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Searching for a middle point
How can I find the balance between this calling for some save-the-world vigor and grandeur, and the yearning for a more muted, subdued life filled with peace and contentment? In these past few years, I have been harboring no shortage of idealistic visions for a world where all the current ugliness of reality ceases to…
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To my love, from a long distance
I miss that day when I wanted to go to the old quarter in town, and you purposefully waited to catch me at the door, pretending that you were going there too. That trip ended up being our first date ever. On the same day we visited a clock tower and I only let you…