I encountered a radical idea in Robert Wrights’s Why Buddhism is True. Our last big phase of evolution happened during the hunter-gatherer phase and we haven’t yet evolved to adapt to the modern world (this is not the radical idea). I encountered this fact for the first time in Yuval Har . . . Read more

This is one of those rare sci-fi books that managed to bore me. So much so that I left the last short story halfway through, out of exasperation. I was really looking forward to the book because of Arrival. The story that inspired Arrival, Story of Your Life, is indeed quite good but the rest of the . . . Read more

I’m an avid reader and there are quite a few books that have made me completely restructure my life and thinking. This is a relatively new phenomenon. It is only when I started facing a lot of uncertainty and conflict that I started to read and think more seriously and let what I read change m . . . Read more

Whenever I become aware of some chaos in my mind, I try to follow my chain of thoughts to the source. This makes “me” just how tenuous and ridiculous most connections from one thought to the next are. The fickle mind crosses the flimsiest of bridges simply to fulfill its own need of cons . . . Read more

Memories of Murder, which is a Korean movie, is one of my favorite detective movies. I like Korean movies a lot, so I decided to try out some Korean TV. And now Season 1 of Stranger, a Korean series, is one of my favorite detective series! The series is not innovative or unique in any way. But it is . . . Read more

I had been thinking on and off about free will for some time now. To anyone who has some time to think, the pandemic is bound to raise some serious questions about control and free will. The following marathon conversation between Lex Fridman and Sam Harris rekindled my interest in the subject. Do h . . . Read more

Of late, I’ve lost the patience to watch long TV shows. Surprisingly, the pandemic made me want to watch series even less and instead I wasted a lot of time on YouTube watching short British comedy clips. I was then pleasantly surprised when I got hooked on to watching Peaky Blinders on Netfli . . . Read more

“If you can’t understand it without an explanation, you can’t understand it with an explanation." - 1Q84 What most surprised me about 1Q84 is that I actually liked reading it! I have read enough Murakami that as I was reading the book I knew that he was not going to explain an . . . Read more

I often take long walks and think about things while walking. Being a mathematician, I have a tendency to figure things out in my head. While this works great most of the time, there are occasions when this causes me a great deal of anxiety and frustration. As life becomes more complex, the latter s . . . Read more

"The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't." Rereading the five books in The Hitchhiker’s Guide trilogy is the best self-care I’ve done throughout the pandemic. I would have loved to meet Douglas Adams, what a great guy he must have been to be friends with! It’s ha . . . Read more

With every Camus book there are two major problems: The writing is purposefully contrived, possibly lost in translation from French. The meaning is purposefully contrived, possibly lost in translation from French. In spite of this, I just cannot get enough of his books. He is the most enlightened pe . . . Read more

I love the adaptations of graphic novels. I love contrasting and comparing the two art forms and seeing how they bring out completely different aspects of the same story. The comics are a collection of short stories whereas the series is closer to a novel. In the comics, the characters have very sin . . . Read more

For the lack of better things to do, I have been visiting my dentist lately. The x-ray machine they had looked like it came straight out of the Starship Enterprise. While I was getting my teeth drilled, even though I was sweating profusely and barely managed to not shit in my pants, I could not but . . . Read more

I have heard Matthew Walker talk about sleep, a lot. But I never really took him seriously. I find him preachy and his talks are always exaggerated. The first time I got really curious about sleep is when I heard this talk: One of the silver linings of this depressing lockdown is that this has given . . . Read more

“What do you think, would not one tiny crime be wiped out by thousands of good deeds?” Crime and Punishment is Dostoevsky’s criticism of naive rationalism, utilitarianism, and armchair philosophizing. For such a boring topic, this is a surprisingly fun read. Adhering to his own cri . . . Read more