And it wasn’t. Arlen, boasting about 5000 residents, was certainly no Morgan, which had fewer than 500, and could probably comfortably sustain either Ray’s Convenience or Pete’s Corner Mart; but it was clear to both that it would not sustain two grocery stores. Arlen had been shrinking for years, slowly at first, but every year brought about more departures than arrivals as jobs increasingly urbanized and the ever dreaded rural brain drain pulled college graduates away from their hometown. The residents that remained were buying fewer goods as well, choosing instead to make the bulk of their purchases at the new corporate chain grocery store in Corpus Christi.
I wanted to write something Kafkaesque, inspired by the flash fiction in Kafkaesque: Fourteen Stories. I would call it a rough draft though I may never come back to it. It is incredible that Kafka could do so much more in so few words.
The Hack team receives frequent feature requests. Many features do not make their way into the language for many reasons. Perhaps the utility of the feature is too niche or perhaps the feature cannot be implemented without drastic architecture changes. The bar any new language feature must pass is not low. One of the forces that keeps the bar high is language complexity. There are many desirable reasons to keep the complexity of a language low, and each new feature of a programming language can pose the risk of adding significant language complexity.
I recently read C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters on the recommendation of many friends from different periods of my life. Amazingly, it genuinely changed my perspective on religion. Whether this effect was a unique consequence of the book itself or whether any book about religion would have done it is a more difficult question to answer. But in thinking about the book, I was struck by a couple of various elements of the book that make it stand out in my mind. In particular, the epistolary nature of the book and the “flipped” perspective (of the demons’ point of view) strike me as particularly unique. The more I thought about it, the more I think that these choices, whether they were made deliberately or whimsically, contribute in a meaningful way to the book and the author’s purpose.
An essay (my last college essay) written for Shakespeare, The Later Plays about the role of disguises in The Winter’s Tale.
A short essay written for Saints, Heretics, and Atheists: An Historical Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion. The essay discusses the age old problem of evil and examines one response to it.
A short essay written for Saints, Heretics, and Atheists: An Historical Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion. The essay discusses the age old question of whether the existence of objective morality is dependent on the existance of God (in a classical sense).
A short essay written for Saints, Heretics, and Atheists: An Historical Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion. The essay summarizes the first of three points made by Spinoza in the appendix to Chapter 1 of the Ethics.
An essay written for Shakespeare, The Later Plays about the structure of Iago’s lies and fictions in Othello. I compare the structure of Iago’s fictions to proofs by contradiction, and muse about possible takeaways that would apply to fiction more broadly.
A short essay written for Saints, Heretics, and Atheists: An Historical Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion. The essay that attempts to explain Augustine’s reconciliation of God’s Divine Foreknowledge and Human Free Will.
The final essay for Dilemmas of Equity and Excellence in American K-12 Education. At the end of 2016, the federal government changed its data collection policy on teacher preparation programs. The essay concerns the best practices states should use to ensure the success of the program.
One of three essays written for the final for Asian American Literature where I compare Hagedorn’s Dogeaters and Phan’s We Should Never Meet.
One of three essays written for the final for Asian American Literature where I draw some connection between poems in Ali’s collection, A Nostalgia’s Map of America.
One of three essays written for the final for Asian American Literature where I write about how the editor’s of Aiiieeeee might view the comments a characters makes in Le’s short story Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice.
A fictitious memo written for The Road to the White House, a class about the 2016 election and the general American presidential elections. I wrote the memo to John Kasich on methods to encourage Asian American youth to turn out.
An essay I wrote for Asian American Literature where I compare Bulosan’s short story How My Stories Were Written and Phan’s Emancipation. Both short stories discuss storytelling and stories. I examine the idea of story ownership with Bulosan’s ideas about story ownership in mind.
An close reading essay I wrote for Asian American Literature on Kingston’s No Name Woman.
One of the final exam essays I wrote for Money, Markets, and Morals on Kant, Aristotle, and Bentham. The essay concerns the differences between utilitarianism and Kantianism, which are irreconcilable due to a fundamental difference in approaching morality.
One of the final exam essays I wrote for Money, Markets, and Morals on the morality of carbon offsets. Professor Sandel is unlikely to believe that carbon offsets are a morally appropriate mechanism whereas utilitarians might see it as an efficient and effective solution to address global warming.
For our “For Performance, Tradition & Cultural Studies: An Introduction to Folklore and Mythology” class, we participated in the practice of collecting folklore. For this particular exercise, I wrote about Adam’s House Drag Night. While I did not make this particular class a priority this semester, going to watch the performance was a very cool experience for me.
One of four essays written for Money, Markets, and Morals where I argue that, by combining the writings of Aristotle and Downs, one can make an argument for demoncracy being the best or least bad form of government.
One of four essays written for Money, Markets, and Morals where I argue that sellling votes may actually be argued against on utilitarian grounds, despite economic arguments in favor of the practice.
One of four essays written for Money, Markets, and Morals where I argue that Mill’s version of utilitarianism strays too far from the roots of utilitarianism and relies on some hierarchy of good that utilitarianism cannot defend from its first principles.
The first of four essays written for Money, Markets, and Morals where I argue that arguments in favor of price gouging rely on some assumptions about market forces that may not be valid during times of crisis.
An essay written for Epic: From Homer to Star Wars on Milton’s Paradise Lost where I examine the character of Satan and his portrayal as an antihero. As part of the epic tradition, Paradise Lost draws from and acknowledges its relationship to the Aeneid and previous works and those relationships are examined in the essay.
The first essay for Epic: From Homer to Star Wars where I compare the Iliad and the Odyssey’s treatment of heroism in the characters of Achilles and Odysseus.
In this essay for On Risk and Reason, I write about playgrounds and their role in adolescent development.
An essay I wrote for On Risk and Reason about prior belief and the difficulty of changing prior belief.
The first essay I wrote for On Risk and Reason.
The final essay for Building Just Institutions.
The second essay I wrote for Building Just Institutions.
The first essay I wrote for Building Just Institutions.