Short things, kept in the open. A commonplace book, formerly rabbitholes.garden.

Henry David Thoreau’s essay Walking isn’t just about nature—it’s a diagnosis of modern life’s deepest tragedy: we’ve become estranged from our wild selves. In a world dominated by left-brain thinking that treats everything as a resource to exploit, we’ve lost our contemplative spaces and buried our primordial desire to wander. The irony is that we’re all walkers at heart—visit any beach or forest and feel that irresistible pull to just walk wherever the path leads. Thoreau’s essay penetrated the silt of modernity that has accumulated over our inner romantic spirit, revealing what we’ve sacrificed for progress. The question remains: what do we need to walk in peace again?

My reflections on reading the essay.

I’m a huge fan of Venkatesh Rao’s writing and I reread this essay on his experience with AI-assisted writing. Now that pretty much everybody has access some basic large language models (LLMs) through the free plans of ChatGPT or the better Chinese models like DeepSeek and Qwen, is there a need to go through the manual…

Making sense of reality as it unfolds is always hard because of the variance in outcomes. With Artificial Intelligence, that difficulty compounds massively. Both the narrative variance and the actual variance of potential AI outcomes are so vast that having strong opinions isn’t really a luxury one can afford. If one’s…

Lately, I’ve been reading a bit about the great Francis Bacon, and in parallel, I’ve been working on a site where I curate letters from the public domain. While googling for letters related to Bacon, I came across one he sent to his uncle—and the line in bold gave me goosebumps: Lastly, I confess that I have as vast…

Understanding the greatest anonymous poem.

Reflections on Harold Bloom’s interview with Charlie Rose on why should one read.

LLMs show promise but can’t yet build software. AI’s rise is slow, uneven, and energy-hungry—progress needs breakthroughs or massive infrastructure.

In 2019, two political scientists, Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, published one of the most well-timed papers in recent memory. Titled Weaponized Interdependence: How Global Economic Networks Shape State Coercion, it argued that globalization today runs on networks, both physical and digital, that underpin…

A few thoughts what AI might do the human ability to think critically.

The troubling decline in conscientiousness. A critical life skill is fading out — and especially fast among young adults

A morning coffee on the terrace becomes a meditation on what we’ve lost: the quiet spaces that allow us to think, dream, and become fully human. From Bangalore’s traffic-choked streets to LEGO-block cities that strip away wonder, this is a manifesto for defending the contemplative spaces essential to human flourishing. Why asking for silence has become a revolutionary act, and what it means for our children who may never know what it’s like to walk in peace.

I didn’t know that hybridization in plants and animals can lead to sterility in many cases. Well-known examples include the mule (a cross between a horse and a donkey) and ligers (a lion-tiger hybrid). But sometimes these chance encounters can lead to remarkable evolutionary innovations like potatoes. Apparently, on a…

Hollis Robbins is one of the most thoughtful commentators on how artificial intelligence is reshaping education. Her latest piece is, once again, bang on the money. She has consistently pointed out the futility or rather, the growing obsolescence of modern university education ie., That is the information delivery and…

Reflections from 500 Pages into War and Peace At the beginning of this year, I started reading War and Peace thanks to this post. This is my first proper literary classic, and I was intimidated—it’s a massive 1300-page novel. At that size, it’s more of a doorstopper, a blunt-force murder weapon, a budget-friendly…

I just finished watching The Theory of Everything, a biographical drama about the life of the famed theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking. It follows how Hawking finds love and battles adversity as he slowly becomes paralysed after being diagnosed with motor neurone disease. He was given two years to live after his…

Rudyard Kipling, Michael Caine, and the Testicle-Punching Self-Help Industrial Complex I woke up and, like any good, sane, and sensible human being, I picked up my phone, headed to the commode, sat on the toilet, and started my productivity ritual of doomscrolling. And in between my highly productive doomscrolling, I…

A few good links. ---------- Kevin Munger on Anti-Mimetics I always enjoy, although frustratingly so, reading Kevin Munger, who is probably one of the most interesting thinkers on all things media. I don’t always understand half of what he says because it’s often deeply technical, and I don’t come from a media studies…

An essay exploring the history, economics, and politics of tariffs, prompted by the re-imposition of sweeping new trade barriers. The request called for a detailed, nuanced, and fact-checked analysis covering the evolution of tariffs, their successes and failures, the spectrum of economic opinion, key research and…