Arts, Books & Writing
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Writing Beyond the Noise
When Stanley Kubrick released 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968, audiences entered theaters expecting a science fiction adventure. They saw spacecraft moving with balletic grace, a red-eyed computer that seemed almost human, and a journey into cosmic mystery. Yet what lingers decades later is not the spectacle of rockets or the year printed in the…
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The Freedom of Plain Text and AI
There is no shortage of apps that promise to organize the human mind. Obsidian with its glowing graph view, Notion with its customizable dashboards, Roam with its block-level linking. Each has created communities of enthusiasts who spend hours tweaking their systems, sharing screenshots, and hunting for the perfect plugin. The rise of artificial intelligence has…
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Ghosts and Roots of Language
Languages are not simply tools of communication. They are also archives, keeping within their structures the echoes of past centuries. Every time we write or speak, we are inheriting choices made long before us, by scribes, poets, reformers, and governments. A word on the page may look ordinary, but its spelling, shape, and sound are…
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Revisiting A Thousand Plateaus
When A Thousand Plateaus appeared in 1980, the internet was not yet part of daily life. Computers existed but were mostly confined to research centers, military projects, and specialized offices. The idea of a vast, global network of minds and machines was still science fiction. Yet the book seemed to sense that something was shifting.…
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Markdown vs Plain Text
The relationship between plain text and markdown is often taken for granted. Many assume they belong to the same family, that a preference for one naturally includes the other. But is that really true? When I move between a pure plain text editor like Notepad or TextEdit and a markdown editor like Typora or Obsidian,…
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The Open Door of Plain Prose
Open a book of mathematics and the page looks like a map to another planet. Strange letters and symbols occupy the space where you expect sentences. For those who speak its language, the page may hold elegance and order. For everyone else, it is a wall. The same thing happens with music. To a musician,…
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When Knowledge Performs
A library at rest is almost a contradiction. The shelves are filled with books, each holding the trace of someone’s thought, yet in the stillness there is no thinking taking place. The pages wait. The words rest in lines, perfectly preserved, but silent. We often imagine that a library is full of knowledge. In truth,…
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The Writer I Return To
There is a unique kind of joy that comes not from reading the works of great authors, but from reading what we ourselves have written. We often speak of favorite writers and beloved books, but when a person has written enough across the years, when journals pile up, essays stretch back into the past, and…
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The Myth of the Perfect Language
For centuries, human beings have longed for a language that could say everything, perfectly and clearly. From the myths of Adamic speech to the philosophical dreams of Leibniz and the practical constructions of Esperanto and Ido, we have repeatedly returned to the hope that a language might exist that is free from contradiction, immune to…
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Writing as a Way of Being
Most people see a social media post as something small, something momentary. It’s just an update, a joke, a meal photo, a line of thought thrown into the feed. But for me, each post carries a kind of weight. Even when I share something casual, a part of me is writing as if it might…
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Tracing the World by Hand
As everything becomes digitized, so much of life now unfolds behind a screen. We read on screens, write on screens, even gather memories in pixels. And from time to time, we miss the feel of paper, not just as a medium, but as a companion in how we used to think, move, and relate to…
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The End of the Slide Show
In modern work culture, certain formats dominate how knowledge is shared: the live presentation, often delivered in person or on video calls, and the webinar, typically conducted online for larger audiences. They follow a similar formula. A speaker guides the audience through a series of slides, elaborating on bullet points while trying to keep things…