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(04/09/26 12:00am)
This past spring break, I was lucky enough to travel to Hawaii with my lovely roommates, two of my favorite people. At the bag check line on our way out of The Big Island, standing beneath massive wooden ceiling fans that did next to nothing against the humid evening, one of my friends said to me, “I get it. I get what you’ve been trying to get me to do this whole time.” She said she’d brought her laptop to try and squeeze some work in, and every time she asked me when I’d do the same, I’d said some variation of wanting to forget it all and stay in the moment. Allegedly, I’d been trying to get her to be present — truth be told, I’d been giving my honest answer.
(04/06/26 5:00am)
In Foundations of Brain, Behavior and Cognition (FBBC), I learned about the idea of a place cell. There is this group of neurons in the hippocampus that represent location in the mind: perhaps some may fire — and therefore represent — a specific study space, while another group might fire and help us recognize the corner of the cafeteria we're sitting in. As with the rest of the brain, these place cells are intricately connected with other neurons that compute other things, such as sensory processing or word recognition.
(04/01/26 6:00pm)
In early spring, advertisements for dating apps start appearing everywhere. They promise efficiency. Compatibility percentages. Personality models. They reassure you that somewhere inside a black-box algorithm, someone has already calculated who could love you best.
(03/30/26 7:00am)
While brainstorming for my first Voices article this semester, I found myself rereading the pieces I wrote when college was still new enough to feel like something from a movie. One line from the first article I ever wrote stopped me: “I entered college believing in my ability to create and reinvent myself.”
(04/05/26 11:00pm)
I’ve been wanting to write an article for my mom, but never know where to start. An anecdote would be reductionist. A compliment would feel flattening. Any rendering would be static — and maybe that’s at the heart of it, that writing commits something to paper and necessarily asks us to draw pieces together into a neat picture. But people are not neat pictures, least of all those we know well.
(04/06/26 3:50am)
19 is such a “middle child.” You’re past that initial excitement you had at 18 of technically being an adult, but you’re also still mentally a teen because your age doesn’t start with a 2. Yes, I’m turning 20 in about three months, and it feels very strange, but let this piece be something I can look back on years into the future.
(03/25/26 3:44am)
Let me take you back to November 28th, 2025. It is 23:15 and to a group of friends, I text:
(03/25/26 3:39am)
There’s a sort of ineffable magic in my hometown.
(03/26/26 1:00am)
A little over two months ago, I turned twenty. Candles with beaming numbers had flared at me as their glossy pools of wax spilled over from the seismic shake of cake-bearing arms. I watched my mother’s eyes flicker closed as her voice took on the familiar cadence of a birthday tune.
(03/13/26 1:00pm)
For the longest time, the snow wouldn't melt, and we were all slipping around on ice-encrusted mounds of it. Half the sidewalks remained unshoveled for weeks, and the other half were mosaics of different colors of ice melt. There wasn’t a whole lot to do since any amount of time spent outside felt treacherous and unpleasant, so I took to spending as much of my time as I could inside.
(03/12/26 12:00pm)
Last weekend, I was convinced (read: dragged) to go out by a high school friend who was in town. So I left the comfort of my stuffed-animal-filled bed and put aside my sacred 9 p.m. bedtime to go out on the town and relive my undergraduate days for one night only.
(04/08/26 8:33pm)
Preface
(03/11/26 8:00am)
In the midst of the crowded Rec Center, there is one place that contrasts the noise of running treadmills, shoes squeaking on the court and weights clanging together: the pool. To find it, you must head downstairs, past the weight rooms, where you will find a narrow hallway that will lead you to it. As you enter, the scent of chlorine will greet you instantly, as if you’ve walked through a portal to another world. You’ll hear the sound of water dancing, an ambience so different from the rest of the rec.
(03/09/26 4:26am)
Feb. 17, 2026, marks three years to the day that I got into Hopkins, and this anniversary has me thinking so much about the things that’ve stayed the same. In the process, I’ve discovered that I have trouble letting go.
(03/09/26 3:00am)
All of this has happened before. Right now, I am drinking a 16 oz. Watermelon Celsius because CharMar ran out of Blue Crush. I am writing another article about riding a train slightly less than a year after the first because my mind ran out of other ideas. This article will be less interesting because I did not venture outside Union Station this time in Chicago, and instead of reading books to spark cognitive shifts I watched Wicked. And Dear Evan Hansen. And Criminal Minds. Call this a sequel, the type that’s worse than the first. At least this time, no one called me Jack Harlow — only something worse. You be the judge.
(02/27/26 9:00am)
Chinese New Year is coming up, so I’ve been thinking a lot about my relationship with my culture. This will be the third year where I haven’t celebrated it because I won’t be home with my family to do so. It is especially frustrating when I think back to how I sat around at home on the 25th of December, spending the day doing my very best to become one with the couch because there wasn’t anything worth celebrating on that day for my family, and yet that is the day we all had off.
(02/23/26 8:00am)
When I was in my junior year of high school, my AP Calculus teacher played a video for us the day before winter break. It was a TED Talk by Tim Urban, the popular blogger behind “Wait But Why,” who delved into the mind of a procrastinator: featuring the Instant Gratification Monkey (the one who replaces the Rational Decision Maker in our mind and takes us on quests such as doomscrolling when there’s an impending deadline, eliciting a mix of anxiety and unearned gratification) and the Panic Monster (who eventually takes the wheel from the Instant Gratification Monkey when a deadline comes too close, leading us to pull all-nighters to save ourselves from the consequence of an unfinished task).
(02/25/26 11:00am)
The sound of a blender at seven in the morning is usually the herald of a New Year’s Resolution. It’s the sound of frozen blueberries, spinach, protein powder and milk being pulverized into some slush; the kind of health smoothie that promises a fresh start with a healthier body and mind.
(02/23/26 4:00am)
We were stranded in North Carolina after a delayed flight caused us to miss our layover. I was sitting on a metal chair stolen from a nearby Starbucks. There was a numbing pain in my arm, suggesting to me it had been a mistake to use it as a pillow. Drowsily, I attempted to focus on the fan of cards in my hand and the voice of a friend as he tried to explain the rules to a game we were too sleep deprived to understand properly. Nevertheless, we huddled around the deck of cards, shuffling and dealing until the rising sun signaled us to go catch the next flight. Somehow, the chaos of travel had shrunk into the small space between us, captured and organized by fifty two pieces of paper.
(03/11/26 4:34am)
When I was twelve, I wrote a children’s book called What’s In My Lunchbox? for my sixth-grade English class, which detailed the origins of a B.L.T. sandwich, an apple juice box and a bag of potato chips. As I put together drawings of a little ant crawling his way through the genesis of my lunch, I learned that Mott’s apple juice is bottled in my home state of New York, that the potato chip factories often throw away entire truckloads of potatoes if too many are found to be blemished and that the crispy bacon in my sandwich was produced in a massive industrialized farming facility run almost entirely by an underpaid migrant workforce. My book was celebrated with many prestigious literary awards (check pluses, gold stars...). I became a vegetarian shortly afterwards.
