Essays

What would have happened if, when Rosa Parks made her protest and sat at the front of the bus, no one tried to stop her? No police. No outrage. Just silence. Would we still remember her name? More importantly, would the decades-long civil rights battle that her quiet act helped ignite have ever begun?
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Whatever reigns where Seraphim flame and soar,
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Over the past few weeks, I’ve been laser-focused on getting my finances in order. Like many Americans over eighteen, I’ve accumulated more than my fair share of debt—along with the bad spending habits that come with it. Credit cards, a car loan that’s longer than it should be—everything short of payday loans and collections—I’ve got it.
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Above is, without question, my favorite painting of all time. Barge Haulers on the Volga is a nineteenth-century work by Russian painter Ilya Repin. It comes as no surprise to me that I was immediately drawn to it, as, like so many others, I’ve long been captivated by the cultural output of the Russian Empire and its many political incarnations: the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation, the RSFSR. Whether it’s Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Rachmaninoff, or even Solzhenitsyn’s bleak documentation of the soviet-era prison system in The Gulag Archipelago, Russian art has been some of the most intellectually and emotionally formative material I’ve encountered in recent years. Repin’s painting more than earns it's spot in that canon: deeply human, brutally honest, and impossible to forget.
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Without a doubt, the best book I’ve read this year is The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. I only opened it because it leads off The Harvard Classics—a 51‑volume anthology I describe in a separate essay—but I was pleasantly surprised by how readable, engaging, and practical it is.
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Having just finished reading The Journal of John Woolman, I was struck by a few different things, the foremost: just how early of an anti-slavery campaigner Woolman was. I knew that they guy wrote about the evils of slavery around the time of the American revolution. What I did not realize is that Woolman actually died in 1774, 2 years before The Declaration of Independence was even signed. To say that the guy was "ahead of his time" is one of the most egregious understatements in history. At a time when virtually everyone owned slaves, including virtually all of our first presidents - this guy was actually running around successfully convincing people, on an individual level, to just straight up grant freedom to slaves they had already paid for.
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The first exposure I had to this line of thinking, at least as far as I can remember, would be from Nikos Kazantzakis' novel: Zorba the Greek (which interestingly enough might have since become my favorite book). The original quote is said by Zorba to the protagonist: "How do you expect to get the better of a devil ... if you don't turn into a devil and a half yourself?"
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I can't remember exactly when or how I first came across The Harvard Classics, but ever since that day I have been on a mission to get a copy of the collection for myself. The Classics, originally published as: Dr. Elliot's Five Foot Shelf of Books are an absolutely massive, fifty-one volume collection of novels, poetry, history, philosophy, scientific writing, historical documents, and anything else that Dr. Elliot deemed necessary reading to establish a well-rounded liberal education. But the size of the collection isn't what's really special about it. Any fool could copy and paste 200 books into a Word Document, hit print, and self-publish in an effort to profit off of someone else's contributions to the world.
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Before I start writing any opinions here, I’d like to take a second to talk about why I think I’m qualified to say what the best markdown editor is; and what my criteria in choosing a markdown editor looks like. There is no shortage of blogs and articles out there that seek to answer this very question, so I wouldn’t expect anyone to just be taking my word for it, without knowing if my word has any value to you, or the way that you want to work.
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I couldn’t exactly tell you why, but I care a great deal about the progress of dark modes on modern software platforms. But I kind of always have hated the way that this feature is baked into software and websites. Almost always, you open a new app, or website; and at some point you realize you’d like to go into dark mode; so you fish around in the settings and menus looking for a button to do just that for you; or maybe you even get desperate and just Google the answer — the point is it’s a frustrating process. Every app, every web site, ever OS has a manual button that you, the user, have to go and track down. Of course that’s just the process for enabling the dark mode, turning it back off it equally annoying.
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I just got back from Avengers: Endgame, and it was pretty incredible. It took advantage of its three hour run time in a way I never expected, and formed itself into a quiet contemplation of the MCU’s past events. But, what surprised me about the film more than anything else, was the way that no single character felt short shrifted in the film. Of course the biggest complaint that I heard about the penultimate film, “Avengers: Infinity War”, was how the film moved quickly and glossed over important character moments. But somehow, in a film with perhaps more characters in the script than any other film in history, this was not the case with “Avengers: Endgame”.
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If you have read any reviews for the Harry Potter films online, you probably know that Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, is widely considered to be the best of the films. The praise for this movie off the charts. It has 91% on Rotten Tomatoes (a score beaten only by The Deathly Hallows Pt.2, at 94%), Roger Ebert gave it 3.5/4 starts, the film has high reviews on basically every movie rating platform out there, MetaCritic, IMDb, ext. If you google the movie, the top voted tags, are “magical”, “must watch”, “clever”, and “intense”; one of my favorite YouTuber’s, the Nerd Writer even made a video about why he believes The Prisoner of Azkaban to be the best movie.
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