august 2025 updates

Summer is on the way out, and it’s been a strange few months. The world feels like a weird place to be in right now, and I’m not sure if that’s because of the political events going on, or I’m just getting older, or specific personal events, or we are in some sort of uniquely awful cataclysm humanity has never seen before, or some secret other thing.

The other day, my friend E joked over dinner that maybe we’ve reached the end of the history; we should just have Noah’s flood and start all over again. I don’t believe in anything so extreme, but as someone who frequently reacts to problems with “hm, let’s go read a book about this,” there really doesn’t feel like a book (or even a vague wishy-washy pamphlet) for everything that is happening.

Of course, this does not stop me from reading books to try to bring myself some mental structure to everything that is going on. I recently started reading Maggie Nelson’s The Art of Cruelty, a work of criticism which talks about various artists’ representations of cruelty and violence, how spectators interact with and respond to these, and the pressure to go viral and feed the attention economy. An early passage particularly stuck out to me:

For the mainstream thrust of anti-intellectualism, as it stands today, characterizes thinking itself as an elitist activity. … [Today’s anti-intellectualism] promotes something more like an idiocracy, in which low-grade pleasures (such as the capacity to buy cheap goods, pay low or no taxes, carry guns into Starbucks, and maintain the right not to help one another) displace all other forms of freedom, even those of the most transformative and profound variety.

Yes, I thought to myself, what an astute and articulate observation of our current times. Our capacity to think is being killed by ChatGPT and TikTok and an AI-slop-propagating SEO-optimized Internet where nothing is real and it’s all just getting so much worse and we are doing this to ourselves. To paraphrase Ilya Kaminsky: “At the trial of whatever Skynet monstrosity we’re cooking up for ourselves¹, we will ask: why did you allow all this? / And the answer will be an echo: why did you allow all this?²”

Later that night, I checked the publication year for The Art of Cruelty. It came out in 2011.

Oh, Maggie, we’re really in it now.

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Some personal updates

• I got a new job a few months ago doing product design for an AI medical scribe company. I really enjoy it so far. I won’t go into too much detail about it here, but I’m learning a lot and the work is interesting and meaningful to me. (Despite my criticisms of AI above, I remain optimistic about its potential and I believe there’s a lot of good use cases for it. If I keep talking about this it will take up a lot more words and do we really need more AI thinkpieces, but TL:DR; it’s nuanced.)
• sin0 issue 35 is launching soon. As usual, I am excited about this issue and the design team did a great job. I am a naturally reserved person and I have a very “If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more” attitude about pretty much everything and everyone I love, which includes sin0, so I feel like I could not say anything eloquent about it here. But I’m glad to have Sine Theta and I’d be a really different person if I hadn’t joined.
• I finished editing Chicago Open, which (after a year!! of work) was played earlier this month. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to take on this editorship, to be honest. I’d been a bit tired of quizbowl editing for a couple years now, and I felt irritated with myself for having plateaued as an editor, and I felt irritated with myself for expecting myself to continuously improve indefinitely when that’s just really not a good outlook on life to have. Infinite growth is not sustainable. Also…it’s just a hobby and you don’t have to excel at all, or any, of your hobbies.

To talk some more about the last bullet point, I am glad I did CO and while I didn’t do a perfect job (who ever does?), I did a pretty good job. It was eye-opening for me in ways I did not expect, and it made me question a lot of the baseline assumptions I’d felt so confident in.

It’s the hardest, highest-difficulty tournament quizbowl has. I’d edited at every previous collegiate-level difficulty, and I’d developed a fairly defined sense of the canon’s foundations that had served me well in every previous editorship. Editing 2023 ACF Nationals, in a way, felt like taking an exam at the end of a semester—I was proving I really understood the material. CO, with its absurdly high difficulty, reminded me the foundations I’d boxed myself into were not a real box. To borrow from one of my favorite poems, Lisel Mueller’s “Monet Refuses the Operation”:

I tell you it has taken me all my life [...]

to soften and blur and finally banish

the edges you regret I don’t see,

to learn that the line I called the horizon

does not exist and sky and water,

so long apart, are the same state of being.

Anyway, that’s one of several reasons I also don’t feel much impetus to actually get better at playing quizbowl. I consider quizbowl to be a useful gateway into my cultural interests, and I’ve read so many books I’ve loved because of quizbowl. But the quizbowl canon, like any canon, is just a construct quizbowlers, with their own human biases and opinions, have collectively built up together over time; there is no real reason to adhere to it. It’s also why I’ve never been interested in those “100 Books to Read Before You Die”-type lists.

I’m also glad to have the brainspace back. To refer back to Maggie Nelson, nowadays it feels like a luxury to even have the space, time, and energy to think. I don’t regret all the hours I spent mentally rearranging clues and brainstorming question ideas in my head when I could have done anything else (not that that’s an anti-intellectual or “low-grade pleasure” activity, in fact very far from it), but I am relieved and grateful I will have more capacity to think, read, write (my poor neglected novel…), draw, design, tinker with various side projects, Consume Media, and stare into space daydreaming about whatever.

This is a luxury I’ve been more aware of lately in part because my new job has far fewer meetings than my previous one, and it’s really sunk in for me how valuable it is to have deep focus time, to research and try different ideas and experiment. The tech company Linear did a post about their UI redesign, and this image of the CEO’s different design explorations in Figma lives in my head rent-free (product designers, if you know, you know—it's hard to get time to do stuff like this!):

I probably won’t edit any quizbowl sets for at least another few years, as I’d like to focus more on my design and my writing, and I generally want to have more space to think about other things. I’m still freelancing, though, and I still love working on quizbowl sets.

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A few things I read for CO (and liked):

“The Bloody Chamber” by Angela Carter (reread)

I love Carter’s prose so much. It is so vivid and rich and fully itself. It’s like caviar in text form. I am still not sure how I feel about her ideas. While it was probably very radical at the time and laid down some important foundational groundwork, some of it (particularly in The Bloody Chamber) has not aged into today’s feminism very well, although in some ways that’s moreso an indictment of contemporary mainstream feminism than of Carter. (I do still think Nights at the Circus is an excellent commentary on the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope.)

Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi

I’d read four Oyeyemi novels already and figured I should just read this one since it’s her most famous novel. It was excellent and most of it was a delight to read, except for the last 20ish pages, which was bizarrely transphobic and incredibly out of left field (her other books have perfectly fine queer representation). I really do not know why she wrote that ending. I love Oyeyemi’s writing, but every book by her is a solid 7-9/10 and I keep reading them hoping that the next one is going to be the 10/10 for me that absolutely hits it out of the park, and it still hasn’t happened yet.

Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The categorization of GGM as magical realism / historical fiction / Nobel Laureate Writes About How His Country Is Struggling makes it easy to think of his work as specific to his circumstances. But a novel about how an entire town knew one of their own was going to be murdered and then failed to warn or protect him feels, ah, quite relevant. It’s a story about collective complicity. Also, of course the prose is great.

The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington

This was great. Thoughtful, charmingly eccentric, funny, and smart. Deserves to be a far more famous classic than it is.

The Garden Against Time by Olivia Laing

I enjoy Laing’s writing a lot overall and this was a great book that examines the cultural history of gardens and the questions they surface with regard to inclusion/exclusion, utopias, community, privilege/luxury, land ownership, and environmentalism. I consider myself an environmentalist, but I’ve never related to “ohhh isn’t nature so beautiful and tranquil and lovely” sort of messaging and I like that while this book does also talk about how nature is beautiful and lovely, it’s a much more nuanced analysis than that.

“Civil Peace” by Chinua Achebe

While I respect Achebe’s impact on literature, I didn’t particularly enjoy reading Things Fall Apart. So I was surprised how moved I was by this simple 6-page story. Maybe it’s because it’s about an ordinary person trying to survive the fallout of a war with his family, and, well, speaking of…

Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative by Isabella Hammad

A really eloquent essay/lecture on the Palestinian struggle and the role of literature. I need to go back and reread this sometime to better absorb the details, but this was a thoughtful cultural analysis that I encourage people to read.

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