A life in words

  • 2016 Ballot Preview!

    This venerable blog has gone many places. We’ve dealt with many and diverse issues, from psychiatry to terrorism, grad school to dating, government surveillance, wild west storytelling, bailouts, fake relationships, a profile picture contest, Spain travelogues, trivialities about long-defunct software packages, and many other topics of intense importance and relevance to our very day and age.…

  • Dark Vader

    Note: I originally wrote this post in November but for some reason never published it. (Unpublished posts probably outnumber published ones on this blog!) I just read through it again and decided it needs to see the light of day. Enjoy! Darth Vader. What a villain. At least that’s how we usually see him. After…

  • The Middle

    Yesterday I voted for John Kasich and Bernie Sanders. In a way it felt like heresy to participate in both the Republican and Democratic caucuses on the same day, in spite of there being no rule against it. And it felt crazy because the two candidates are so insanely different. But I felt it was…

The common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it. It serves… to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection [and] opens the door to foreign influence and corruption….George Washington, Farewell Address