Spinning and Other Existential Mistakes Last Friday night, a terrifying existential insight struck me – and it happened during an already terrifying activity: spinning class. Across from me, the fitness coach was cycling with a hypnotizingly equal cadence. All around, gym-goers were dripping sweat, electrolytes and dignity. And just when I thought the cardio was approaching its grand finale, my heart rate took an unauthorized swerve upwards. “There is only one really serious philosophical problem,” Albert Camus once thought – and that is the question of whether life is worth living. ...
In A Lover’s Discourse, my boy Roland Barthes describes the miserable trap of interpreting signs: But for me, an amorous subject, everything which is new, everything which disturbs, is received not as a fact but in the aspect of a sign which must be interpreted […] If the other has given me this new telephone number, what was that the sign of? Was it an invitation to telephone right away, for the pleasure of the call, or only should the occasion arise, out of necessity? ...
It’s December 23rd, I’m waiting for my plane to take off from the Paris CDG airport, lifting me towards my hometown for the Christmas holidays. “Girl you sweet like Fanta, Fanta” is banging in my AirPods for about 15 seconds before I anxiously switch to another short musical blurb, and then another. Whenever I find myself in a particular state of mind, when my thoughts are short, uneasy, frantically jumping from one to the other, inevitably, my Spotify playlist follows. ...
Sorry to trouble you was how the note began, which is such a great opener. Please, trouble me! Trouble me! I’ve been waiting my whole life to be troubled by a note like this! The very first lines of Miranda July’s second novel All Fours quickly got under my skin. It was early February of 2025 and while I was in a bookstore in Wellington, New Zealand, I was carefully reading the first pages all books that made the finals of my pre-selection process. All Fours’s beginning most intensely left me wanting more. ...
Would Kierkegaard say Roland Barthes Was Anxiously Attached? In reflecting on the Adorable, the unique quality that draws us to our objects of desire, 20th-century French theorist Roland Barthes writes in A Lover’s Discourse: Herein a great enigma, to which I shall never possess the key: Why is it that I desire So-and-so? Why is it that I desire So-and-so lastingly, longingly? Or to paraphrase it the way Sex and the City protagonist Carrie Bradshaw would have said it: I couldn’t help but wonder… Why am I utterly and ridiculously obsessed with Mr. Big? ...
“Welcome to Behind the Bastards, a podcast where every week I’m trying to make you feel worse about life, even though life makes you feel worse about life, every week.” It is on this optimistic, high-vibe note that my favorite host, Robert Evans, welcomes listeners. And don’t you dare expect things to be any less grim in this article! Produced by Cool Zone Media, Behind the Bastards delves into the lives of some of the worst people to have ever plagued humanity and marks more than a million downloads monthly. ...
You cannot overestimate the unimportance of practically everything writes Greg McKeown in Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less. Sure, practically everything is unimportant, yet virtually most things have a formidable way of overwhelming me and convincing me of their Targaryenesque birthright to be on top of my to-do list. Just a few days ago I was cooking at home and almost without noticing, I was mentally going through all of the projects I had to focus on in the coming months. My anxiety was growing as my thoughts were physically bouncing on and off emails I had to write, books I wanted to read, and even bigger musings such as who I wanted to become. Did I want to be a teacher, or work in tech, or organize kids summer camps in Bulgaria? Then, let’s throw in the mix the 23 podcast episodes I have saved to listen to, blog article ideas, wanting to adopt a dog, get into woodwork, move apartments, and let us not forget my addiction to mindlessly scrolling on dating apps or refreshing WhatsApp! ...
Have you ever asked yourself if 2008’s DreamWorks animation Kung Fu Panda could be read as “a somewhat naive, but nonetheless basically accurate illustration of an important aspect of Lacanian theory”? Well, if you are still reading Žižek with me, hello and welcome to page 69, section title Les non-dupes errent! Slowly making my way through Living in the End Times, I could not have been more excited to start reading a subpart where the author’s analytical might is focused on one of the funniest cartoon blockbusters from my childhood, namely Kung Fu Panda (2008, John Stevensoon and Mark Osborne). Žižek has once and for all put a fictional goose’s “special noodle soup” as a serious intellectual example in my head and there is no going back… ...
As I am writing this, it is the final week of the year, it is snowing outside and in an hour from now I will be having coffee with the biggest reader of my family - my great-aunt Nina. Even though in the past months, I have felt as if I am mainlystress-reading academic articles and juggling between different responsibilities, something about this beautiful snowy morning gave me the muse to remember and share some of the wonderful books I had the privilege and pleasure of reading this past year. ...
Isn’t it funny realizing the consequences of seemingly insignificant day to day choices? We often consume the narrative à la How I Met Your Mother where every tiny event, new encounter, romantic disappointment leads the protagonist Ted Mosby one step closer to the moment he meets the future mother of his children (which would be impossible without every random occurrence beforehand). Well, I feel that I had my own little HIMYM loop closed the other day when [drum rolls] I finally got on Reddit! And what was the tiny seemingly insignificant step leading to it? None other than me picking up Žižek’s Living in The End Times at a moment where I had all of my books packed in boxes. ...