A scratchpad for exploring favorite themes: Borges, time, consciousness, computer science, etc.
There’s something exciting about the way that, as you visit a new place, the abstract incrementally gives way to the specific. Paris goes…
I missed the first part of eighth grade. When I came back, all my friends told me excitedly about the new kid Namara—someone whom I would…
The lambda calculus (or λ-calculus) is a formal system with fascinating ties to modern computation, particularly functional programming...
In chapter two of Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, an extended set of exercises deals with Huffman encoding. It's fascinating...
I’d always heard about the power of Lisp macros, which let you extend the language by rewriting code on the fly. You call macros just like…
In Horizon, Barry Lopez writes, “A species is not so much a permanent thing as a point on the developmental line of that thing through time.” People, too, are fundamentally four-dimensional...
Ideas are abstract, immaterial, in principle immortal. Objects are mutable; objects degrade and scatter; they crumble at our touch. Not one…
I just finished Mary Ruefle’s Madness, Rack, and Honey, a collection of lectures about poetry and art in general. It’s an amazing book...
After years of hearing Barry Lopez mentioned alongside some of my favorite writers—Edward Abbey, Aldo Leopold—I finally began to read him…
The strange thing about dreams isn’t that they’re strange. It’s that, as we experience them, they don’t feel strange. There’s something of…