Maya Angelou’s seminal autobiography I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings was a reading that a freshman in Oakland’s public school could not appreciate whole-heartedly, especially if a graded essay followed. “Other things were more important”, she wrote in 1969 in the second sentence of one of the most essential books of culture and history. I remember I got such terrible marks on English papers, too often I would overwhelm my paper with...

I don’t care what ChatGPT told you, think for yourself. And with the likes of Gemini, Claude, and Copilot furtively elbowing their way into conquering the industry, it won’t be long before the syndicates conquer every aspect of our lives. Since 2021 when the technology became widely available to anyone with internet, an alarming number of people rely on artificial intelligence (AI) to make grocery lists, plagiarize, plan vacations, dictate their love life, curb loneliness,...

(in experimentation: majority is written in blank verse)

At the end of this month Solaria Chip is heading to the dance floor at Tacoma Dome to watch REZZ make history as its first female electronic DJ to headline at this major venue. The Ukranian-Canadian DJ and producer, née Isabelle Rezazadeh, is one of our all-time favorite artists known for her midtempo bass-driven tracks that reverberate throughout your bones. From intro to finish, her songs demonstrate precision, prowess, and prolific originality. Dark...

Americans witnessed the metamorphosis of mountains, crossed verdant meadows and constellations of ancient trees, reveled in nature’s mathematically tantalizing fractals, only to culminate in confining themselves to the recesses of capitalism and since last year, the intimations of oligarchy. The very roots of politics synthesized to discern freedom from tyrannies, yet contemporary America traverses backwards and into the disenfranchisement and deconstruction of individual liberties. Since this seize, the Trump administration quickly targeted public welfare...

Nearly a century and a decade ago on March 8, women suffragists in Russia began a strike for “Peace and Bread”. I’m writing this while sitting with a cup of coffee and butter slathered on two thick slices of sourdough—a privilege I get to enjoy every day. But sometimes I don’t know peace as a contemporary woman. Despite the massive progress we have seen towards gender equality, frequent setbacks from the reigning administration...

With 2025 now in full swing, it has so far been a time of forward-thinking and goal-setting. The end of a year, however, is usually the opposite. It is a time of introspection, reflection, and most importantly, celebration. As I reflected, I marveled at how so much has changed. Not much remains constant, but one of the few things that does, at least in my life, is music. I am of the impression that music...

Aristotle argued that oligarchies and democracies become the prevailing forms of government over 2 millennium ago. Today, the so-called American democracy, if it may soon still be called that, is at its tipping point under the contemporaneous political climate. Since the threat of government shutdown this month, billionaire Elon Musk openly derailed a critical government spending measure, primarily on healthcare relief and assistance. Musk, who recently funded Trump’s campaign for $277 million dollars,...

2024 made a lot of waves in science. AI explosive’s impact on our lives continues to yield improvements on logical performance, such as Google’s quantum error corrections, and AlphaProof which trains the ability of AI systems to do mathematical computations. The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics went to its pioneers of artificial neural networks, which isn’t a surprise considering AI’s overwhelming success. I’m not an expert on AI, and my opinion piece...

Every day we are faced with a seemingly endless amount of responsibilities that demand attention — from taking care of household chores, to walking the dog, to responding to work emails. In our modern-day society, there never seems to be enough time in the day to simply exist. For someone with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), it only makes it that much harder to keep up with the many demands of life. Mundane, everyday tasks...

Incidentally, I wept during one of my shifts at the observatory upon reaching the epilogue of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Insulted and Humiliated. The roman-feuilleton, published in 1861 after his Siberian exile, marked the beginning of Dostoevsky’s trove of powerful literature among the likes of The House of the Dead, Notes from the Underground, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Possessed/The Devils, and my favorite: The Brothers Karamazov. Albeit...

”All I do is keep running in my own cozy, homemade void, my own nostalgic silence.” -Haruki Murakami