Surprise meEntangled Vale
Babies, Teenagers, and Cultural Difference
Cultural difference reveals our blind spots — and loosening our grip on what we think we know is part of the learning.
Surprise meEntangled Vale
Re-Risking Society
The most unforgettable lessons are often the ones that would never survive a curriculum review.
Surprise meEntangled Vale
Objects of Worship
Even ordinary habits can become objects of worship — and battlegrounds for meaning.
Surprise meEntangled Vale
The Self-Made Myth Is Holding Us Back
We’ve been told we can become anyone if we just try hard enough. But what if becoming is always a shared act?
Surprise meEntangled Vale
The Algebra of Context
You can teach the same formula a hundred times — but it only arrives when the context is right.
Surprise meEntangled Vale
The Philosophy You Think You Have, and the One That Has You
Your unexamined philosophy may be quietly shrinking your world. Here’s how to begin tending it as a living, breathing worldview instead.
Surprise meEntangled Vale
Falling in Trust
We talk about falling in love, but rarely about falling in trust — even though trust shapes the texture of every relationship that thrives or falters.
Surprise meEntangled Vale
Warp and Weft
A university should be a place where knowledge is woven together, not just pulled apart into individual threads. But what happens when the weft starts to fray?
Surprise meEntangled ValeMaker's Forge
Viral or Vital? A Lyrical Exegesis of a Digital Ethics Anthem
An exploration of virality, vitality, and the metaphysics of digital identity—why our pursuit of being seen may be at odds with truly being.
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Teaching, Mozart and Salieri
Teaching is its own kind of artistry—less about brilliance and more about guiding others toward their own voice.
Surprise meEntangled Vale
Hard Work or Good Luck
The Edwardian postcard craze was the social media of its time, revealing a divide between those who believed in luck and those who saw success as a moral reward. A century later, are we any closer to reconciling hard work with fortune?
Surprise meHearthlandsEntangled Vale
Hippies, Hackers, Hipsters: Are We Changing the World or Just Talking About It?
What if the real gap isn’t between knowledge and action, but between concern and care? Our entanglement with systems makes meaningful change difficult—but does it absolve us of responsibility?
🗞️ The Myth of the Informed Citizen
Nicholas Carr traces a recurring fantasy of modern life: that each new communication technology, from the telegraph to the internet, would produce wiser citizens and healthier democracies — and how each expansion of information instead bred new forms of confusion and overload. At its centr
Read the note ↗🎥 Who Is the Worst Person Louis Theroux Has Met?
Louis Theroux has spent decades sitting with people most of us would keep at a distance and gently asking them to explain themselves. What he keeps finding isn't unbridgeable otherness but something more unsettling: familiar motives, loosely held, rarely examined. Echoing Arendt's 'banalit
Read the note ↗👁️ To Be There but Not to Be Seen
A former New York City pickpocket, Wilfred Rose, returns to the subway where he worked, narrating how he did it and what it cost him — how to read a crowd, choreograph attention, pass without notice. Alongside the craft is the other side: arrests, family, loss, and a habit he describes as
Read the note ↗📖 Iran's Ultimate Banned Book
'Iran has been trapped in a cycle of self-love and self-hate for centuries, and nothing captures that contradiction like The Blind Owl.' Banned both before and after 1979, the novel follows a troubled painter through a surreal, fragmented narrative. Amir Ahmadi Arian traces its strange aft
Read the note ↗🗿 When a Culture No Longer Wants to Live
Paleoanthropologist Ludovic Slimak pushes past the 'Neanderthals were basically us' rehabilitation to something more unsettling: what if they were genuinely different — different minds, different relationships to territory and meaning? He suggests their disappearance followed a collapse of
Read the note ↗🎙️ A Real Company Staffed by Fake People
A podcast in which a journalist investigates entrepreneurship in the AI age by trying to run a real company staffed by fake (AI) people. Somewhere between investigative journalism and deadpan performance art — no breathless futurism, no moral panic. It quietly shows how much of 'running a
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