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. ...
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? ...
Badass women are running the political stage in a pre-colonial-Filipino-inspired universe. Let me tell you about Black Salt Queen, my summer read that got me back into reading contemporary fantasy. ⚠️ Contains spoilers! Let me first start off by saying that I am no fantasy genre expert. When I read for pleasure I tend to gravitate more towards family sagas, coming-of-age novels and classics. Yet, of course, my taste in books is an ever-changing mish-mash of genres, rivaled in its inconsistency only by my 2025 Spotify Wrapped. From John Steinbeck to Miranda July, and from books on eels to landscape architecture academia, the most important and unifying feature of my preferences as a reader is simple: I take recommendations seriously. IRL. From friends and foe, but not from Goodreads algorithms! ...
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. ...
I vividly remember how, during my second year of Bachelor’s in Zoom class, one of my favorite professors mentioned Elena Ferrante as one of the most important contemporary authors to follow in our lifetime. Since a friend and I always took this class together seated on my old uncomfortable couch in front of one laptop, I lurked and saw in his notes he put something along the lines of “read ferate??” ...