link to full post: the Doppler effect
[this piece also appears in the Spring ’21 issue of Literary Interpretations, through SF State University]

“As I’m walking back home, I look up at the sky and my mouth pops open underneath the mask I inconsistently remember to take off when no one is near me: I see this amazing, eagle-shaped cloud—so distinctly formed with a hooked beak, huge sweeping wings, even a little blue space for the eye—it looks just like the eagle in the post office logo. Priority mail! Clutched in its beak is the whispy cloud shape of some much smaller spread-winged bird. Dinner. karma?

Welcome to America! Where if we all just follow the rules, no one will get hurt.”

Sparked by musings on Science Fiction and interstellar space travel:
“The greatest technology humans will ever know is that of their own bodies, their own spirit, their own essential being. I do believe that the next, greatest, breathtaking technological discovery, the next “iPod,” if you will, will be exactly that: the discovery of human, being.”

Link to post: Ground Zero

Earlier today I described my brain to a friend as a slowly dripping soggy cheeseburger flung on a window. Then I went for a run and sat down to tackle this book review assignment that I’d been resisting for weeks. I’ve never written nor read a critical book review and d.i.d.n.’t w.a.n.t t.o d.o i.t, because it was described to us as essentially an exercise in bull-shittery.

Here’s the result. So glad I just went ahead and dove in because good god did I ever have so much fun: Review of Ellen Peel’s Politics, Persuasion, and Pragmatism

Here is a brief 1-page response paper to a few short selections from Kant’s Critique of Judgement composed hurriedly for a graduate seminar (one assigns short selections and one-page responses in a graduate seminar?!?!). But it was one of the first times I’ve ever engaged analytically with a philosophical text:  Short response