Sadly, as the story goes, economic headwinds and Gulf War-related uncertainty spooked decision-makers at BMW enough to scale back plans and ultimately scrap the company’s masterpiece in progress. The M8 never saw a showroom, leaving the imperfect 850CSi and its lot to bear the burden of the automotive world’s disappointment. The 850i was impressive on paper and stunning at a distance, but unexpectedly aloof in the driver’s seat. The 850Ci supposedly had an intoxicating engine note and was easier to maintain, but the power was still insufficient for its weight, which exceeded 4,000 pounds. The 850CSi, with a 375-horsepower engine tuned by BMW’s M division itself, offered enough to ask for $70,000 (close to $160,000 when adjusted for inflation in 2025), but it never wore the M badge. After all, the reasoning went, it wasn’t quite performant enough—such as the leaner, more track-focused M3—to be honored as a true M car.

Three decades later, that vaunted notion of a “true M car” lends itself to profound irony. The latest M3 has crept up to a curb weight of 3,840 pounds—and it gets worse. At 5,390 pounds, today’s M5 has been analogized to a black hole more than once and directly compared to several heavy-duty trucks. The 850CSi, meanwhile, doesn’t look out of place in comparison to newer performance cars, including newer M cars, which frequently tip the scales at well over what was acceptable in the 1990s. (Some of the increased weight is bloat, but some of it results from the addition of well-justified safety features.) Now, the 850CSi is remembered fondly, even hagiographically, for its balanced mix of performance and grand-touring luxury.

So what went wrong? Did the standards of performance change, or did we?

When I think of automotive performance, I first think of the Bugatti variety: top speed, horsepower, 0-60 time, and other numbers that make the headlines. These headlines, I suspect, influence the way that enthusiasts and the broader population perceive performance, particularly when it comes to cars that are financially out of reach for the vast majority. Top-line numbers can come as part of an intermediary package, like the work of automotive journalists, breathtaking announcement videos, or other forms of media. For example, the R34 Nissan Skyline GT-R might not have gained such a cult following in the United States without the Fast and Furious movies. If you loved racing games in the early 2000s, it was practically an inevitability that you would encounter the cover art of Need for Speed: Most Wanted and the finesse of the iconic blue-and-silver BMW M3 GTR in motion.

But words on a page, to say nothing of numbers in a spreadsheet or pixels on a screen, are a lossy translation. Sure, secondhand accounts can spread and influence public understanding of what makes a car perform well. And yet, even the strongest messaging does not preclude altogether the potential for disconnects from the actual driving experience. Consider a more recent grand tourer, such as the Lexus LC500 convertible, whose interior and suspension are essential to the value proposition. It weighs about 4,500 pounds, so you end up paying six figures for a car with almost the same power-to-weight ratio that you could’ve gotten had you opted for a Honda Civic Type-R instead. But as the venerable Jason Fenske once alluded to, if you are running those numbers at the expense of taking the time to drop the top of the LC500 and listen to how it sounds in second gear, you’re likely robbing yourself of joy.

What counts as automotive performance has a shifting definition, with parameters that so often come down to sensation and purpose. And both run deep. Put another way, the cars that go down in history are not only the fast ones, but they are the ones with a story. And a great story of a car is often a great story about people. They become characters in their own right or the sites of interpersonal conflict and resolution. Some of them even get names of endearment—like Dougie the Subaru Outback, a 2003 model that Wall Street Journal writer A.J. Baime and his family drove for more than two decades, witnessing milestones like bringing newborns home from the hospital, teaching the kids to drive, and many road trips. Despite its age and lack of air conditioning, the Baimes can’t let go of the car because it’s a cherished member of the household, holding between its Cheerio- and Lego-strewn seats and battle-scarred bumpers a treasure trove of memories and shared experiences:

At some point, the car took on a name: Dougie. And at another, it shifted from the place where we taught our kids about the facts of life to where we became their students. Michelle and I saw our classic rock CDs gather dust as we learned to love SZA and Jay-Z through this new thing called Pandora that blasted from a smartphone. We learned the identities of all the Thomas the Tank Engine trains and the nuances of every generation of iPhone.

Automotive performance, ultimately, is defined through a winding process of complex, often highly subjective value judgments. It is worth revisiting the mistimed prototypes and the Dougies of the world every so often, if only to be reminded of the plot.

Now, after college, my peers and I branch off and pursue paths more bespoke to our interests, passions, and what we find meaningful in life. Some may choose careers in media, others may enter the startup scene, and some may travel for a bit before deciding on their next move. It is fascinating to see the diverse paths people take. There is an open canvas, so to speak, but with that comes the responsibility of knowing oneself better and being more deliberate in one’s choices. Without the strict guidance and guardrails of the past, there is a risk of swerving into oblivion. The current moment reminded me of this strip I came across a few years back on Existential Comics:

As time moves forward, I feel like I am implicitly siphoning off potential futures that I once had a shot at. In my mind, that’s fine if I am sure that the path I’m on is a favorable one, or something to which I am well suited.

When I first knew I would be going to Stanford, there was a tremendous thrill of the many branching-off points that I could see in the near future. Even if I wasn’t seriously considering many of those paths, it was almost intoxicating to see so many possibilities open up before my eyes. It might have been the closest I came to actually believing the idea that “you can be anything you want.” Of course, I didn’t entirely believe that then or now. I already knew I was going to study computer science back then, and I had experienced various degrees of pigeonholing already. Additionally, I think that circumstances can heavily influence the likelihood of where a person ends up or where they feel pressured to devote their time and energy.

At the moment, my heuristic is to eyeball my life and work in the space of an ikigai Venn diagram. If I am at the intersection of those circles, it is okay because I am doing the best with what I have got. But who knows if that’s true? There are so many unanswered questions about what those alternate timelines could have been, and it keeps me up at night sometimes. On the whole, however, I’m excited to embrace this newfound freedom and make the most of the opportunities that lie ahead. Plus, having some space to catch my breath and gather my thoughts has been a significant relief during this transition.

Next month, I will be starting my full-time position as a SwiftData Frameworks Engineer at Apple. It’s a daunting yet liberating feeling as I set up my apartment and endeavor to make acquaintance with Cupertino.

Given the entrenched position of JavaScript and the complexity of introducing alternative language support in browsers, it is likely that JavaScript will remain the dominant language for client-side web development for many years to come. A possible scenario that I foresee is a gradual shift toward a more heterogeneous web development landscape, where JavaScript interoperates with other languages through technologies like WebAssembly, rather than a complete displacement of JavaScript.

May we ever see a day when web browsers or their engines can run code in other languages straight out of the box? Again, I wouldn’t hold my breath on it, but one can dream.

Meanwhile, the world has seen the likes of TypeScript, CoffeeScript, and Elm integrated into repositories, all of which can be transpiled into JavaScript. Even so, introducing a transpiler into the proverbial pipeline comes with its costs, such as excessive build-time woes. With TypeScript, in particular, may come a certain degree of navel-gazing, uninhibited complexity, and verbosity, or what David Heinemeier Hansson referred to as “type gymnastics” in a blog post last year, where he announced that TypeScript would be removed from an upcoming release of Turbo 8. On the topic of TypeScript, he went on to say: “Things that should be easy become hard, and things that are hard become any.” Yikes!

Notably, ECMAScript, the standard upon which JavaScript is based, continues to evolve. Many features that developers previously sought in other languages are being incorporated into JavaScript, making it more powerful and versatile. Just in recent years, a handful of people have been formulating a case to add static type syntax, which would be treated as comments in JavaScript engines.

“With Types as Comments, developers can remove a build step from their apps, keeping TypeScript and Flow codebases aligned with JavaScript,” the proposal reads.

I’m skeptical that the inclusion of these static types would result in many downstream optimizations on the side of the JavaScript interpreter. After all, these static types in the linked proposal are erased. If I had to guess, they’re more like type hints in Python—very helpful for communicating intent among programmers when followed, but, in contrast to a language like Rust or Swift, utterly toothless when the rubber hits the road. (I haven’t read the entire proposal, nor have I extensively tested a local clone of it, so take my remarks with a grain of salt.)

While JavaScript is likely to remain a cornerstone of web development for the foreseeable future, the increasing adoption of the aforementioned WebAssembly and the development of new tools and standards point towards a more polyglottal future for web development. Not to mention, despite WebAssembly’s expanding set of features, I currently only see its use cases to be most meaningful for performance-critical sections of websites rather than most aspects of interactivity. (Keep in mind that this is only one person’s perspective on the constantly shifting, ever-idiosyncratic landscape of web development.)

Achieving a world where browsers can natively execute a wide range of programming languages out of the box will require significant changes to web standards and browser implementations. For now, the combination of JavaScript, WebAssembly, and advanced build tools seems to be the practical compromise that may allow the web to chug along without unforced catastrophe.

• Google Docs
• Apple Notes
• Notion
• Scrivener
• Gmail
• Outlook
• Apple Mail
• Otter
• Slack
• iMessage
• Ulysses
• Day One
• ChatGPT
• Claude

Surely, this list is not comprehensive—it doesn’t even include physical notes, and it doesn’t include partial scripts. But it is arresting, and I wonder whether I’ll be able to keep pace relying on such a distribution of records. Not willing to wait and find out the answer to that question, I started to consolidate relevant or related documents in a handful of Scrivener projects, hoping that this exercise would lift some cognitive strain from my mind moving forward.

One of the best ways to sabotage your own productivity is by seeking to optimize your productivity. For example, when drafting this blog post, I cycled through eight fonts until I was moderately satisfied with how my words appeared onscreen. I call this formatting procrastination. It can worsen as the medium becomes more abstract and free-flowing, I’ve observed, as in the context of writing software. There are light mode editors, dark mode editors, .vimrc repositories, linters, integrated development environments, and the list goes on. Did you know that there’s such a thing as Visual Studio Magazine? An entire April update was dedicated to the fallout from Microsoft’s history of “courting developer outrage with its temerity to change the color of VS Code icons.” Frankly, just take a five-minute stroll through Stack Overflow, and you’ll see that the pedantic slam dunks only intensify from there. (A personal favorite of mine, which manages to remain civil, goes into breathtaking detail on the yield from syntax introduced in Python 3.3.) And if you want a central authority or style guide on writing JavaScript, you can forget about it.

Now, the second method of self-sabotage that I find in the personal productivity sphere is switching. As the name implies, this destructive behavior entails hopping from one trendy productivity tool to the next, sinking countless hours into transferring documents and settings across the Rubicon, all the while getting scarcely any meaningful work done. Even with Scrivener, I didn’t come close to going all in with all of my records, as I acknowledge that different tools have different strengths and use cases, and ultimately it is one’s creativity that enables the results; the technology plays a supporting role. Besides, that old adage about not putting all your eggs in one basket has served me before, and I have no reason to believe it won’t continue to do so.

If switching tools comes at a cost, then the act of context switching skips naming a price and gets straight to mugging you. If you’ve ever tried to focus on outlining a slideshow presentation, only to be pulled into an urgent email thread, only to Google something you don’t know, only to search Amazon for mouthwash, and only then to circle back to the original slideshow, you’re familiar with context switching. It plagues modern life. To get a sense of the severity of our mutually fractured attention, I recommend listening to “How the Digital Workspace Broke Our Brains” on Derek Thompson’s podcast Plain English. In it, he reveals that, for the average white-collar employee in marketing, advertising, finance, or media, up to 60% of the workweek is taken up by electronic communication. “That’s great,” you say. “Communication is vital to thriving human relationships, and a corporation is nothing more than a body of people.” Not so fast. Yes, over-communication is probably better than the opposite, but are we designed to interact with this many people so frequently? And how productive can you really be if you spend more time talking than doing? The podcast episode’s guest, Georgetown computer science professor Cal Newport, offers some sobering insights into the limits of the human mind.

Newport: And my argument is that this implicit decision we made to switch to the hyperactive hive mind is at the core of many woes in modern knowledge work. Having to maintain all of these ongoing back-and-forth conversations requires that we have to keep monitoring these communication channels. I do not have the ability to say, “Let me wait until 3 o’clock to check my inbox for the first time” if there are 12 conversations going on. And some of these conversations might have to have four or five back-and-forths to reach a decision, and that decision has to be reached today. And so I have to keep monitoring my inbox to see when your next message comes in. Because I’ve got to volley that back over the proverbial net pretty quickly because we have to get this back-and-forth four or five times to reach a decision by close of business.

Maybe it’s time to concede that the mental apparatuses of Homo sapiens cannot do everything that one would prefer. Honestly, I’m starting to be convinced that this concession might be many years overdue. Toward the end of the 20th century, British anthropologist Robin Dunbar started to notice a connection between non-human primates’ brain sizes and the sizes of the social groups to which they belong. Ultimately, in 1992 he published a research paper on the matter in the Journal of Human Evolution, proposing upfront that “the number of neocortical neurons limits the organism’s information-processing capacity and that this then limits the number of relationships that an individual can monitor simultaneously.” Furthermore, he wrote, that the group size ought to be either a linear or a power function of brain size, and no matter which function it truly is, “the size of interacting cliques will be a logarithmic function of brain size.”

The implication for us humans turned out to be that our ability to maintain a stable network of personal connections peters out toward 150 relationships. It’s one of those delightful studies that goes to great lengths to state something that falls within common sense or happens to have already been intuited by most people as a consequence of existing. But let us not lose sight of the profundity of Dunbar’s number. Three decades later, his theory continues to stand tall.

Digital communication is one of many modern luxuries of the First World. Simultaneously, it makes it possible to scale interpersonal human interaction beyond its natural limit. A caveman’s brain—that is to say, the brain of all humans in this century—is no match. Heck, even the CEO of Slack thinks you should spend less time in your channels and DMs.

It’s pretty unoriginal of me to point out that technology is often not the solution or that it has downsides, including the capacity to make one’s life worse than it otherwise would be. From Pandora and Prometheus to gunpowder and the Haber process, human culture and tradition are rife with cautionary tales about the disaster that can ensue when awe-inspiring technology goes awry. But remember handwriting? It didn’t even require a keyboard. Maybe you remember writing letters? I don’t. No, I do. I remember regularly sending handwritten thank you notes to many adults in my life growing up, at the orders of my parents. They’d start with something along the lines of “Dear Auntie” or “Dear Mr. Smith” and had to include details of appreciation related to whatever they in particular had done or given—no generic messages. The stationery was typically embossed with subtle floral patterns and other adornments, much to the contrast of my questionable penmanship, and the corresponding envelopes to this stationery had a distinct whiff that was neither pleasant nor unpleasant. It was different, as if the paper itself had been fermented somehow, perhaps for the sake of craft.

Those letters were annoying in the moment, but they allude to something worth noting. Once upon a time, letters were about as convenient as long-distance communication got. Often when I read regular correspondence between people from the past, I’m taken aback by how tender they can be and how meticulously each thought is conveyed.

To better understand what I mean, I find the correspondence below to be effective. There are two letters, one from Albert Camus shortly after he had won the 1957 Nobel Prize in Literature, and then a reply from his schoolteacher Louis Germain.

Dear Monsieur Germain,

I let the commotion around me these days subside a bit before speaking to you from the bottom of my heart. I have just been given far too great an honour, one I neither sought nor solicited.

But when I heard the news, my first thought, after my mother, was of you. Without you, without the affectionate hand you extended to the small poor child that I was, without your teaching and example, none of all this would have happened.

I don’t make too much of this sort of honour. But at least it gives me the opportunity to tell you what you have been and still are for me, and to assure you that your efforts, your work, and the generous heart you put into it still live in one of your little schoolboys who, despite the years, has never stopped being your grateful pupil. I embrace you with all my heart.

Albert Camus

My dear child,

I do not know how to express the delight you gave me with your gracious act nor how to thank you for it. If it were possible, I would give a great hug to the big boy you have become who for me will always be “my little Camus.”

Who is Camus? I have the impression that those who try to penetrate your nature do not quite succeed. You have always shown an instinctive reticence about revealing your nature, your feelings. You succeed all the more for being unaffected, direct. And good on top of that! I got these impressions of you in class. The pedagogue who does his job conscientiously overlooks no opportunity to know his pupils, his children, and these occur all the time. An answer, a gesture, a stance are amply revealing. So I think I well know the nice little fellow you were, and very often the child contains the seed of the man he will become. Your pleasure at being in school burst out all over. Your face showed optimism. And I never suspected the actual situation of your family from studying you. I only had a glimpse when your mother came to see me about your being listed among the candidates for the scholarship. Anyway, that happened when you were about to leave me. But until then you seemed to me to be in the same position as your classmates. You always had what you needed. Like your brother, you were nicely dressed. I don’t think I can find a greater compliment to your mother.

It gives me very great satisfaction to see that your fame has not gone to your head. You have remained Camus: bravo. I have followed with interest the many vicissitudes of the play you adapted and also staged: The Possessed. I love you too much not to wish you the greatest success: it is what you deserve.

Know that, even when I do not write, I often think of all of you.

Madame Germain and I warmly embrace all four of you.

Affectionately yours.
Louis Germain

Source: Letters of Note

Part of me wishes that the world moved a little bit slower so that sending and receiving letters like this seemed like a reasonable practice, rather than a misguided if slightly charming attempt to conjure some relic of days past.

Oh, I’m doing it again—the third method of self-sabotage that I intended to mention earlier. You may have once heard someone say, “Once I’ve settled into a cabin in the woods, I’ll be able to work on this,” or something to the effect of it. I’ve probably said that before. I know that I’ve at least had the thought several times, and I’m effectively saying it right now by imagining some ideal world in which I’ve been socially permitted to write a letter to someone by hand. Though I am not in a cabin, maybe what I imagine is not so intricate. Maybe I can just pick up a pen and paper and give the letter a try.

When I stop and think about it, the pervasiveness of these negative experiences of youth seems almost obvious, dare I say. Perhaps my line of reasoning is misguided, but when I try to imagine my life in the absence of school—an institution that has been some significant part of my life for as long as I can remember—it seems like it would be a profound weight off my shoulders. That said, it’s uncontroversial, at least in my neck of the woods, to say that pursuing a degree in higher education is an essential undertaking that cannot be omitted. It’s a time-tested source of stability and social mobility.

But if there is an equivalent in a university to working in a cubicle, that’s probably the state of mind in which I’ve spent the past few months—years, even. I do feel quite often that I’ve already crossed the point of diminishing returns, and pushing through this last part of undergraduate study is more performative than it is substantive. I hope that I am wrong about that.

More generally, Thompson’s thesis is so simple and glaring—and maybe that’s why it stunned me. As he’s also suggested, many of us in the ivory tower are rewarded for writing dense prose that wraps ideas in ever-inaccessible layers of abstraction. I appreciate that he can bypass the fluff, cut to the heart of the matter, and manage to throw some humor in there as well. I think that to surrender to the educational system as it is structured currently almost normalizes the misery of school while ignoring the ephemeral joys that can be found in daily life as a student. Think about how many times you’ve heard someone decry the mentality of “well, when I do or get x, then I’ll be happy.” Yet that’s tacitly the mentality anyone embodies if the necessity of unpleasant aspects of their daily life is based on some distant promise—such as the next revered academic appointment or an impressive job title at an influential company. All the while, expectations of qualifications in the hiring world seem only to go up in scope and complexity, so much so that I think people forget that they’re not meant to be in school forever. I hope that as I grow and gain new experiences I’ll get a clearer idea of how to address or attenuate this confound.

Gripes notwithstanding, it would be misleading not to mention the many academic experiences from this past quarter that have harbored some faith. For example, MATH 159: Discrete Probabilistic Methods was one of those gems where you can explore something deeply fascinating and nuanced with unbounded curiosity, while succeeding academically as well. On the first day, while Borga was reviewing bipartite graphs, he mentioned in passing that there are some proofs related to what he’d written on the board that were open questions for decades before people fully figured it out. “So lots of the homework questions are going to be like this,” he said. “They will either be labeled ‘hard’ or ‘very hard.’” As you can imagine, this remark sent a chill down my spine, but after a few days I came to love the class. Professor Borga’s lectures reminded me of Professor Piech from a previous class I took, in subtle ways. There was never a dry moment during lectures. Borga’s wit and compassion were always there, and I enjoyed talking to him during office hours about partial differential equations and his favorite math YouTube channels, Numberphile and 3Blue1Brown.

CS 224N: Natural Language Processing with Deep Learning is another course I took this quarter that holds a special place in my heart. Indeed, I had wanted to take it since I came across a YouTube video in high school that exposed me to recurrent neural networks in TensorFlow. Well, actually the interest had been developing before then, for ultimately, I am someone who loves stories. I love to read stories, tell stories, and learn about how the methods of storytelling have evolved alongside humankind, including with the relatively recent innovation of writing. There are a ton of languages spoken and written around the world, even though I just speak one of them natively. That said, by dipping my toes in various other languages over the years, I actually got a better, more traditional understanding of how the English language is grammatically structured. Analyzing language through NLP methods presents yet another perspective into these fascinating systems we’ve developed over time to transmit our thoughts and feelings from one place to the next. And of course, with ChatGPT, we’re getting a sense of how powerful (and fallible, alas) large language models can be in a range of applications. Incidentally, it’s also given me all sorts of ideas for how the technology can be applied to the journalism space. Not to mention, essentially every lecture of CS 224N brought something new to mind that I had not considered before, and many of the topics seemed to keep pace with current events and the latest developments at the frontier of the NLP field, both academically and industrially. To be part of that movement, discovering the limits of what humankind knows to be possible, is an exhilarating feeling.

The “minBERT” final project was stressful at times, but overall I think I managed the workload relatively well. One aspect of the class I did not anticipate was that hundreds of people take this class every year, and this year CS 224N was actually the most popular class out of all being taught in winter quarter. So often I had trouble accessing a member of the teaching team when I was stuck. At the end of the day, though, it never ended up hurting to spend more time refining my PyTorch skill set, as well as my familiarity with setting up virtual environments for deep learning, reading NLP papers, and using matrix calculus to represent statistical relationships between words, phrases, and linguistic constructs.

That brings me to CS 206: Exploring Computational Journalism. It was a phenomenal way to bring people together from across disciplines to ask fascinating questions, tinker with technology, and consider the rapidly shifting journalistic landscape. Throughout the quarter, students are put into groups and work together on software that addresses a specific problem space in journalism. My group was focused on simplifying and informing editorial decisions on what to cover, when to cover it, and what stories to prioritize. I wore several hats in this project-based course, but I think my contributions were strongest when I could act as an intermediary. A lot of this class is about bridging gaps between people from different backgrounds to enhance how journalism is practiced and how readers can best be served, and emphasizing robust software without getting bogged down in the weeds for too long. Drawing on my intersection of technical and journalistic experiences, I defined high-level goals and identified several familiar APIs and React libraries that enabled us to come running out the gates. We never looked back.

The end result was Storytracker, a web app that aims to assist users discover real-time differences in the subject matter, emphasis, and timeliness of various publications. We had imagined it being used to evaluate how coverage of a story has evolved over time, comparing how different newsrooms cover the same story, and comparing the density across topics for each newsroom. Source code is on GitHub.

The objective with UI design was to embody the look and feel of a newspaper, with minimal color, touches of serif typography, and a generally clean aesthetic. For convenience’s sake, we chose three high-volume publications to showcase in our software: The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and Fox News. Given how many stories they publish every day, we had tons of data points for web scraping and analyzing features of their newsworthiness decision-making process. That way, we figured, there might be more ways for us to discover and deliver insight into what kinds of decisions newsrooms are making and possibly why, given the emphasis, context invoked, related concepts or sources interviewed by one publication and how those may differ from another publication, even when covering fundamentally the same story as it develops.

Of course, if we could just define, in English, what we mean when we say newsworthy and then have a computer magically attend to that definition we provide in real-time, it would be pretty nice. One step at a time. Besides, newsworthiness can mean something slightly different for every reader, reporter, and editor, but for reference, this how my group defined it, in four segments:

• Impact. The gravity of implications for an audience or distinct group of people.
• Timeliness. How long ago an event occurred; dynamically changing circumstances.
• Incongruity. Something that disrupts the status quo or preconceived notions; conflict, weirdness.
• Prominence. The “why” of a story; physical or social proximity, human interest.

If we had more time, I think that we could have made something even more refined, but with the quarter system, we had 10 weeks, which really was more like eight since we spent the first two weeks just trying to get organized into groups. In any case, it was a lot of fun, and I’m proud of what we did. Not to mention, the teaching team was phenomenal, and I’m just so grateful to have had the opportunity to be in that class.

By the way, speaking of moments of joy as a student, I haven’t yet mentioned PSYC 215B: Introduction to Psychedelic Medicine. Prior to January, I had not, in earnest, taken a look around the School of Medicine before. Despite the distance I had to cover every time I went to PSYC 215B lecture, I’m better for the walk. Otherwise, I might have never discovered this space so serene.

Charming, isn’t it? Oh, and there’s the class itself as well. PSYC 215 was a fascinating, continually evolving class that could use a blog post of its own. We learned about the frontiers of psychedelic medicine and the related science, culture, and phenomenology. My final presentation, if you’re interested, was about the parallels between the effects of N,N-Dimethyltryptamine and near-death experiences, and heavily referenced this 2018 study on the topic. That area of research and treatment appears to be quite nascent, but I’ll be following it closely. The class also acts as a great branching-off point for members of any discipline. Shoutout to the teaching team for putting together this remarkable intellectual and spiritual expedition.

I also took CS 161: Design and Analysis of Algorithms this quarter but am struggling at the moment to think of something inspiring to say about that course. Whoops. Well, I do remember after CS 161 lecture one day, exiting the Huang Engineering Center, I was a two-minute walk from the Physics and Astrophysics Building. It just so happened that on the balcony of that building an event was about to be held by the Stanford Quantum Computing Association (SQCA). Professor Stephen Shenker of the Department of Physics was slated to speak. Typically, for whatever reason, I receive email announcements from the SQCA leadership about events on the day they take place without any prior notification. This time was no exception; the only reason I knew the event was happening was because I happened to notice when it dropped into my inbox at 8:48 that morning.

It was a wonderfully relaxed event. Only a handful of people were there, maybe 12 altogether, so we sat at a table and talked over pizza. I got to ask him questions, and he asked us questions about our lives and interests. His down-to-earth nature, humor, and infectious curiosity brought a smile to my face as I listened to him describe the story of his life, the daily schedule of a physicist, and his breakthrough discoveries in string theory. My one regret is that I didn’t manage to ask him about his research collaborations with Professor Leonard Susskind. Moreover, there’s this beautiful, awe-inspiring video on Quanta Magazine’s YouTube channel that recently came out, and I would’ve loved to hear his thoughts on how some of the ways that quantum gravity and quantum information are far more connected than one might initially suspect—or his thoughts on how the holographic wormhole experiment holds up and whether it can be reproduced.

Next time. That was probably Week 5 when SQCA put on that event, and midterm mania was reaching a fever pitch. As the story goes, one’s mind can start to feel like a slush of random words and numbers when the proverbial foot refuses to let up on the gas. So thankfully I had that time to speak with Professor Shenker, as his inspiration provided great solace and continues to do so.

Coursework kept me busy, and more than 300 people applied to The Stanford Daily this year, so it was a big effort getting people assigned to the right teams and up to speed but well worth it. Overall, I think the school year is going well. The zeitgeist is definitely better than it was a year prior. Just by the arrow of time alone, we’ve all been able to get some distance from the darkest days of Zoom University, although in many subtle ways, I think for certain demographics especially, we are only beginning to see the ripple effects of the pandemic. Personally, there’s a lot that I’d love to put behind me, but I’m learning the hard way that not everything sheds so easily. The best I can do (well, maybe this isn’t a healthy strategy, actually) is to give off the impression I’m unscathed. How I desperately wish.

During fall quarter, I took three classes: CS 109: Introduction to Probability for Computer Scientists, CS 111: Operating Systems Principles, and CS 279: Molecular Biology: Structure and Organization of Biomolecules and Cells. I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of instruction, as well as my level of engagement with the material. In Molecular Biology, I found the kind of boundless, interdisciplinary adventure that colleges advertise. It seems I found a class that lives up to that pitch. Each lecture featured some new idea that I had never thought about, which was thoroughly exciting, and I got the impression that I was diving into a topic to learn much more than I was taking the class to check off another box on a list of academic obstacles to graduation that have become so dominant over aspects of my psyche. Finally. The pace and assignments were fair, and as long as you’re learning about what fascinates you, you’re doing alright. I smiled a lot in that class. At the same time, my professor encouraged us not to oversaturate our schedules with technical coursework and instead seek a more complete education and personal development by exploring the humanities as well. It’s hard to understate how refreshing that was to hear. Ultimately, my schedule is starting to constrain me to mostly technical coursework, and I’ve resisted less and less as time goes on. Every now and then, I try to meet up with a friend or two for coffee or a walk, and one week I saw the Stanford Chamber Chorale perform. But the general trend that I notice is that students are intensely preoccupied with their own day-to-day obligations and optimizing them, and there’s not much of an incentive to go out of one’s way to help a fellow student or meet new people. As a result, the community turns ever-atomized and risk-averse.

In any case, CS 111 has its charms, too. While I likely would not have taken it had it not been a requirement for my major, I enjoyed my professor’s lectures and learned about a lot of fascinating material, like filesystems, memory management, and synchronization. That was not meant to be sarcastic—it sounds mundane at first, but when you’re staring at a computer for so much of the day and then get to pull back the curtains just a little bit and ask about how things work under the hood, it really leaves you wanting to know more.

As for CS 109, well, the professor I had is a gift to humankind. He took us on a journey, starting from the mere act of counting on the first day, to random variables, to the forefront of what we as a species currently know about artificial intelligence and the approximation of nonlinear functions. Each lecture was creative, compassionate, and funny, leaving a smile on my face. Problem sets were put together with care and had many of the types of questions that would make you itch to answer. Again, going into the quarter, I had pretty moderate expectations, but my expectations were surpassed time and time again. It baffles me. Somehow, this course was different, and it gives me hope. Perhaps it will give you hope, too.

And don’t forget the obscenely wide crosswalks, which add quite a lot of personality, and the stoplights that last more than 70 seconds.

Unfortunately, my capacity to truly enjoy what the city has to offer felt severely limited, as I never managed to find an adequate period to recharge and felt a vague undercurrent of unease every day. I did make it to Georgetown, though, and tried to enjoy the moment. Then it started raining buckets, to continue with the theme of inconvenience, and between the stupendously elaborate street layout and my waterlogged eyes, I got lost trying to find my way to the nearest train station.

When the first day of my internship came around on June 13, I learned the hard way that Uber is not the way to go. I thought it was better to Uber on the first day so I would not have to deal with the possibility of struggling to get a Metro card and finding the correct train. Turns out I was wrong. Anyway, the Uber took 18 minutes to arrive, and long story short, I arrived at the building and saw a door with the logo of The Washington Post, ventured a guess that this was the correct lobby of the office building.

At 8:44 a.m., I bolted in with about 15 seconds to spare. I had to be there by 8:45 and had been instructed to wait there for a woman from Human Resources who was going to introduce herself, take the interns on a tour of the building, and get us acquainted with our respected teams and roles. Tour we did. It was a nice place, I must admit, with state-of-the-art Keurig machines and all those marble walls and a terrace from which the Washington Monument was visible. Then there was a penthouse on the top floor, which for some reason feels like a detail I’d be remiss not to include.

After the penthouse, I had the pleasure of meeting some of my iOS teammates. It took a moment to properly set up a development environment on my work computer, but I had it done by the end of the day. I could even run the code of The Post’s flagship mobile app pretty seamlessly in a simulator. Pretty mind-boggling at first. It was the same app on my iPhone that I already knew and loved! The real official deal. Pretty special to actually see this under the hood.

Then, eight days into my internship, my team handed me an Apple Watch Series 7 and assigned me to build an all-new watchOS app from the ground up that would exist as a companion to the flagship mobile app. One week and 2,317 lines of code later, I opened a single pull request with a working prototype. Over the next two months and through 18 (more digestible) pull requests, a fuller story played out.

Peeking into Slack channels on Roe v. Wade, poring over advertisement revenue analytics on the day of Cassidy Hutchinson’s committee hearing, and running into fellow Stanford Daily members in the office, I came to know a summer that’s left me many stories to tell in the years to come. Not to mention, I thoroughly enjoyed working with my team in particular. Historically, I’ve found iOS developers to be exceptionally kind and supportive people who are often Apple customers themselves and are passionate about improving the products and services they use every day. That authentic connection goes a long way.

Given the size of the iOS team and our location on the sixth floor, I did not interact with the other summer interns as much as I could have, but I did get to meet many of them through company-organized hackathons and other events, including a Nationals game in July and a picnic in August.

It was a great summer to meet people, and it was a great summer for building skills, learning, and training in frameworks, paradigms, and common technical problems. For example, I got to sit in on professional development events related to the BERT language model, automated content curation, election turnout forecasting, and subscriber propensity estimation. Previously, I had no idea that these kinds of innovations were going on at The Washington Post, no less that I’d be able to just walk into a meeting and listen.

The interns and I also got to see the printing press in August as well, a land of self-driving forklifts and humongous rolls of (what looked scandalously similar to) toilet paper. Conrad, who had been working there for more than 20 years and who showed us around, said each tower could churn out 65,000 96-page newspapers per hour. Ironically, the newspapers were not “hot off the press”—they were cold and wet. More ironically, they still have recycling bins in the offices. But they really seem ready for the apocalypse over there. I asked him about their backup power, and I think he said they have two or three generators and tons of redundancies built in so that there’s always an alternative if something breaks. This is the Murphy’s-law kind of approach I can get behind.

Likewise, it was fascinating to hear his thoughts on the evolution of the newspaper industry and how The Washington Post’s business model has adapted over the years.

Then I decided to ask him about their electronics—nothing is virtualized, and he creates custom operating systems for all the microprocessors so that about 98% of the core and memory for a device can be allocated to a single task without the possibility of any other process getting in the way. Each operating system made for a single process in the facility makes use of a kernel that’s already been created for the hardware. There’s an Ethernet connection to most of them and thus some interrupts, but it seems like a pretty rock-solid setup. (Yes, I really was that guy who asked him for these details.) Indeed, the level of consideration going into the newsroom and technology ceased not to impress me.

It has been a blessing to gain new insight into the future prospect of meaningful possibilities beyond campus. At times my college journey has felt like a mosaic of shapeless clay—mesmerizing and directionless—and at times it’s felt like a pristine ceramic vase—coherent but brittle. The years haven’t entirely unfolded the way I would have wanted, but I’ve tried to make the best of circumstance by being open to new experiences and making an effort to be kind to my peers and professors. I’d like to think that part of this mentality has gotten me where I am today, and my diversity of experiences in D.C. has encouraged me to keep putting one foot in front of the other, that I may arrive at the next opportunity to find a sense of responsibility, direction, and belonging.

“This pandemic is old,” he had said on the first day of class as his dog barked faintly in the background (which we jokingly referred to in the chat as a cocker spandrel). “It has been a disaster.”

When I watched a video of him in 2018, I was enraptured by his nimble wit, compassion, and fluent ability to teach for understanding and purpose. More than an hour elapsed and the first lecture in the YouTube series was over. For some reason I had the sensation that he had deeply tapped into preexisting curiosity that spoke to how listless I felt at that time in my life. It was a kind of educational experience that I had been lacking. Without sparing a moment, I purchased a copy of his book Behave, which contains lots of overlapping content with Human Behavioral Biology. I am glad I had the privilege to formally take the class this past spring.

The workload was more laid back than the rest of my spring coursework, but somehow I learned so much more than I did in nearly any other course I’ve taken in college. It almost sounds too good to be true, as if Sapolsky were concocting some kind of pedagogical sorcery, but I’m reminded that while intense suffering can be an element of growth, it isn’t always. Sometimes learning can be a joyous activity. Schools have a way of enforcing artificial pressures that take can away all the fun, in my opinion, chipping away day after day until all but drudgery remains. I don’t believe that any educator seeks to do this to their students, but it’s easy to fall prey to this pattern that is so antithetical to education and development. The artificial pressures never seem to remain at bay for long, and after so many years of enduring drudgery like this, it’s people like Professor Sapolsky who keep me going.

He knew that the webinar format was less than ideal, stating that the pandemic has been “a disaster for everyone and it has been a particular disaster for people in your age group, for all sorts of reasons, including screwing up all sorts of aspects of what is most important and best about college for you.” It’s true, yet he made the best of the situation, and for that I am grateful.

At times I fear that the ripple effects are as uncontrollable as they are longstanding, especially when my age group could use a morale boost, not more doom. For example, I heard a few times spring quarter being described as merely a “transient phase.” Students I saw on campus were washed up at the shore and stressed and hurting. When you’re in a state like that, the set of solutions to a differential equation suddenly isn’t that important anymore. Nervous laughter was common at breakfast in the dining halls, too, particularly during the first week of spring. I was no exception. Every time someone asked how it was going, I would giddily retort, “Nothing disastrous so far.”

Luckily, as the days went on, I continued to find community and purpose in various nooks and crannies of campus. For example, the Quantum Computing Career Panel in April surpassed my expectations and reminded me that differential equations do matter. Held at the William Gates Computer Science Building, droves of Mediterranean food were prepared for attendees, which was rather fortuitous given that I had not eaten anything that day until then. I thoroughly enjoyed listening to speakers Rodney Lessard, principal computational scientist at Schlumberger, and Ieva Liepuoniute, a chemist at IBM-Almaden Research Center. Lessard’s background in high-energy astrophysics resonated quite a lot, and Liepuoniute told us all about Qiskit and her daily routine at IBM in a very approachable, accessible, and interdisciplinary way that encouraged me to learn more or look for opportunities to get more experience in quantum science and engineering.

Phew. Anyhow, here we are in June. After a panicked Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday this week, I barely managed to pack my belongings randomly into several cardboard boxes. Before I could fully appreciate the observation that my room now looked the same as it did when I arrived in September, it was time to leave for San Francisco International Airport if I wanted to board my flight to Washington, D.C., where my summer internship would begin in just a few days.

Thankfully I made it to the gate that night with time to spare.

The red-eye flight from the West Coast to the East Coast is some kind of out-of-body experience. I was maddeningly fatigued but couldn’t quite get my mind to turn off for a few hours of shuteye once situated in the airplane. Then again, I wasn’t entirely awake either. I was in a haze. My most persistent memory from that night was of the looping clips from Dog (2022) on the display mounted to the seat in front of me. I must have watched Channing Tatum chase down that hound hundreds of times.

An upside to a flight like this, however, is that it has a way of snapping you onto Eastern Time the instant you see the sun rising out the window. As such, a second wind hit me, enough to get to the baggage claim upon landing and call another Uber. As the driver—Ronald was his name—helped me heave my luggage into the trunk of his Chevrolet Traverse, he said, “Yep, we’re definitely transporting dead bodies!” So at least I wasn’t the only one who thought the weight of my duffel bags seemed surprising for the volume.

Not a moment too soon, I arrived at my hotel, checked in, and collapsed into the bed. Phew. But not so fast. It can’t be that easy. Only a few hours of sleep were possible, for I had an appointment in the evening to receive the key to my apartment. Long story short, I figured out these details and have since checked out of the hotel and moved into the apartment with my sketchy duffel bags. A few other packages from California are expected to arrive in the coming days with my clothes, bedding, and daily essentials. For now, I have a few hours to get through some chores and hit the sack early so that tomorrow morning I’ll have a better chance of being sufficiently caught up on rest. It’s probably best not to show up to the first day of a job with bags under one’s eyes.

This has not been the most fun week I’ve lived, but through my inner dialogue and interpersonal interactions from one day to another, I’ve managed to preserve a degree of faith that I’m doing something right amid the chaos, not only for myself but for the people around me. Let the next day begin, come what may.

It didn’t take long for the writer Maggie Mertens to deem 2022 the “Year of Practical Thinking” in an Atlantic article. Indeed, at this moment, I see many people putting forth a genuine effort to stay afloat, but one disruption after another can be so demoralizing, even to the point of erratic behavior. It’s hard to keep track of it all. This has been a trying quarter on campus, and now that final exams are over, I feel only faint catharsis. Sobriety and exhaustion seem to dominate. People seem pretty wiped out for many, many valid reasons, but I know I’ve been trying to stay positive. Easier said than done.

A lot of the weeks were such a slog, but it’s far from being all bad. I’m especially thankful for my French literature class, which might have been one of the best academic experiences I’ve had in college so far. Formally, the title of the course is French Kiss: The History of Love and the French Novel. Books we read included The Princess of Cleves, Manon Lescaut, Dangerous Liaisons, The Lady of the Camellias, Madame Bovary, and The Lover. The other courses I took were Computer Organization and Systems, Principles of Economics, and Introduction to the Foundations of Contemporary Geophysics.

So, what about the coming spring quarter? “Sun’s out, guns out,” they say. But more seriously, I also seek to better utilize the resources around me. That way, I believe, I can develop new study habits, knock the rust off ones that may have diminished during remote instruction last school year, and build a schedule that allows me to maximize my experiences in and out of the classroom. Of course, no one other than the seniors knows what spring on campus is like (current juniors were freshmen when the pandemic started and got sent home right as winter quarter was concluding), but they keep hyping it up. Better not turn out to be a disappointment!

The class that I’m most excited for is Human Behavioral Biology. It’s one of the most sought-after here, as it’s taught once every two years by an immensely accomplished and hilarious neuroendocrinologist named Robert Sapolsky. The only reason I got a seat in it was because I clicked the “Enroll” button as soon as it opened at midnight and luckily had a decent Internet connection. If you go to the official Stanford YouTube channel, you’ll see that the most viewed video is Steve Jobs’ commencement address in 2005, and essentially the remaining top nine are Sapolsky and Leonard Susskind, the latter of whom teaches a course called Cosmology and Extragalactic Astrophysics that I’d like to take. Susskind is 80 years old and played an instrumental role in the initial development of string theory, which blows my mind. Really hoping I’ll get to meet him in my time here.

By finding a better balance in my college experience, I think that I’ll start to enjoy my activities and engagements more. After all, these are fascinating opportunities with fascinating people, I must remind myself, not chores. For example, I am currently co-leading a rocketry project at the Student Space Initiative, and our tests launches and upcoming competitions are adding extra pressure to what we do. One night,I started wiring a little flight computer to be attached to a laser-cut avionics bay and shoved into the phenolic tubing of the body of the rocket. Why? That’s what I ask myself as well. Why? Why? Why? There must be a way to determine when to release the first stage separates. Searching for a spare accelerometer, I was stung by the absurdity of being incessantly stressed and frustrated by something that I’m supposed to love. In reality, I think that there’s a lot of anger in my life and in the world generally that can sometimes end up misdirected.

As you can see, we have a huge bunker on campus in the Hansen Experimental Physics Lab, in which GPS was developed, apparently. It is tough act to follow up, but I do my best.

Meanwhile, it’s been more than a year since I interviewed one of the leaders of the Stanford Quantum Computing Association (SQCA) for an article I was working on at the time. As I have gained more clarity, I have reached out to this organization again this past quarter to learn more about the opportunities available to me. In the fall, I had already endeavored to further immerse myself in the field of quantum science and engineering, attending a startup founders roundtable hosted by SQCA, but this past February, I attended a course pathways event related to hardware, algorithms, and theory that have been recently updated on the group’s website. A lot to take in, sure, but hopefully it will be a helpful resource for future decisions I’ll make about my studies. Then, I had the privilege of speaking with the president of the group. It was a happy coincidence that I eat breakfast in the same dining hall as a friend of hers. The ball keeps rolling, and I’m so glad that I’ve been immersing myself in this niche. The Quantum Coalition is putting on QC Hack 2022 in April, and I shall follow it closely.

In parallel to these events in February, I also remember listening to an episode of The Daily that featured Peter Mcindoe, the founder of the Birds Aren’t Real moment. (I promise this tangent will make sense soon.) It’s a riveting story of what he called “ideological loneliness” that led him to a dark place in life, and one day he came up with a conspiracy theory on the spot. Suddenly, his message began to spread far and wide, even though it was originally a joke, one could say, or a mockery of the world he saw. During the interview, he described the movement’s growth, and how a “cacophony of comedy and absurdism” had the effect of diffusing evil.

Birds Aren’t Real is almost like an igloo in a snowstorm, if that makes sense. It’s kind of like a place where people can kind of make shelter out of the same type of material that’s causing the chaos, given that people can take misinformation and use it as a place to safely process misinformation. I think comedy is a very disarming form of communication. And it allows people to come together and laugh at these things that in everyday life, are terrifying. And there’s something about laughing at these things that kind of breaks the illusion of the monster.

Those words have followed me since. What a fascinating notion it is to fashion a shield from a storm by building a shelter with the very material that afflicts you. It’s a way to cope, as if holding up a mirror and laughing. It’s a way to be heard. It’s a way to be less lonely, less hurt.

People will come to these rallies in the hundreds. And I think that in some ways, it almost operates as a safe space for people. I don’t know. I feel like every day, I wake up and open my phone, I’m just seeing chaos. I think just kind of growing up alongside the Internet, just like Gen Z or anyone my age has just kind of grown up alongside it the whole time. And with that, there’s no real rules as a society of how to deal with something like the Internet. So I think with that just comes all the madness in our face at once. And I think a lot of people feel the madness and don’t really have a way to express it.

That might be one of the most important uses of a story: it gives us a common vernacular of emotions. Stories give us a way to see one another as complete individuals, with quirks, features, insecurities, hopes, dreams, the whole nine yards. These days, I’ve had more appreciation not only for institutions in the edifice of knowledge, but also the humans behind that knowledge. So many people contribute to the devices that I use, textbooks that I read, and food I eat on a daily basis, for example. When you acknowledge the humanity of someone or in something, it’s a powerful thing. You might not always agree or understand, but you can at least know for sure that they are also a son or a daughter or a mother or an uncle or an aunt and they have seen sunsets and they enjoy the scent of freshly trimmed grass and they have feelings and needs that are as real as yours.

So if there’s something that I’ve taken away from recent months in particular, it is to be kind. Give someone a call. Listen. Give someone a hug. They are more than their work. They are more than an image. Seek to understand where others are coming from. Text a friend. Remind them that you care and that they matter. Not everything is what it seems. You might not truly know what could be going on for them.

Compassion will not always be returned—or at least that’s what I’ve gathered from experience—but perhaps in the end it’s still a better policy to make an effort to listen and understand. The past couple of years alone are enough to see that society has become further atomized, in turn upending the idea for many Americans of “rugged individualism.” I almost desperately want to believe that more people will come to value human connection and interdependence. Do not lie to yourself. We need one another.

Going into this school year, there were a couple of events to finally welcome the Class of 2024, but I don’t think it matched what my experience would have been in 2020 had the world not been in such a precarious state. I was not up to maxing out my schedule and thus took three courses: Creative Nonfiction, Programming Abstractions, and Race and Gender in Silicon Valley. I’ve been trying to pick up new hobbies at least (music production) and improve existing ones (electric violin and photography).

The last time I was a “new kid” at school, I had just turned five, so being new here (by in-person standards) elicits many mixed feelings. Thankfully, I think that my roommate and I are a great match. We had lunch together during the first week and began to learn about each other. I was glad to be connecting with people already.

“Transitioning to the college experience” is an aggravating refrain to hear, and I do not think of this story that way, because I think we’ve all been ready and can carry out basic independent tasks and study. Of course, there’s a lot to navigate socially and elsewhere, but I think most of what’s difficult about that has nothing to do with what’s here on campus. The chaos and disruption of this day and age do not immediately vanish, unfortunately. As I alluded to in a September article in The Stanford Daily, confidence, patience—virtues like these aren’t as easy to come by or to embody. One of the most significant selective advantages that Homo sapiens has achieved through our evolution is the ability to recognize patterns. Last year, I read Growing Up by Russell Baker and he spoke to this idea of being trapped in a mode of disappointment. (For context, he grew up during the Great Depression.) With things now going normally more or less (what does that even mean anymore?), I must work against seeing it as merely an anomalous intermission between two catastrophes. A vaccine does not unlearn such behaviors; that’s something we’re left to figure out on our own, and as America starts to let out a collective sigh, whenever that may be, we’re going to have more lucidity with which to realize how disrupted the world truly is.

“Don’t you ever feel like a time traveler?” I sometimes say to classmates. “That you ended up in the wrong timeline thanks to 2020, and now can’t find a way back to the reality you had once known?” Typically, I get something along the lines of this: “That’s some philosophical nonsense that I’m not ready to deal with at 9:30 in the morning.” Okay, they have a point, but I can already see social dysfunction resulting from the pandemic and much languishing at first chance. Something feels eerie and unnatural, as if we’re not suddenly supposed to be here. Reminds me of the Divine Comedy, which I read in the summer. This part of the translation I know by heart:

In the middle of our lives, / I found myself in a dark wood, / for the right path had been lost.

Well, enough of that. I think I’m trying to count the positives and be as hospitable to people as I can (potentially easier said than done) while we all try to make sense of the devastation and reverberations that continue to pervade our everyday lives. For instance, live performances on campus are enthralling and healing to me. Not to mention, I get to see how talented my peers truly are, and it’s baffling sometimes. A former co-writer of mine and I crossed paths by chance a couple of months ago, and when I came to see her perform in the Chamber Chorale, I was inclined to learn more about her artistic endeavors.

It just so happened that she would play a lead role in an upcoming annual student-run musical within the following week as well. If you ask me, she outshone everyone by a mile, despite the excellent quality of the other performers and production overall. Technically speaking, her dramatic and vocal skills are off the charts. I was mesmerized.

In addition to her, I have met several new people, familiar faces, siblings of familiar faces, and colleagues from Zoom University. I’ve visited the Cantor Arts Center and the House (building on campus where we hang out and produce the print edition of The Daily). Attending the football games can be great fun, too. Perhaps college is a big all-you-can-eat buffet, with analogous agony and ecstasy. But for now, I’ll be home for the holidays, and therein I will do my best to enjoy the company of those special people who may anticipate my arrival.