Bhargav Varshney

write a memoir that was “defiantly self-incriminating”—and the result was a messy jumble of conflicting impulses, part provocation, part self-critique. Western readers rode roughshod over this paradox and made of Chua a kind of Asian minstrel figure. But more than anything else, Battle Hymn is a very American project—one no traditional Chinese... See more

9 Life Lessons by Tim Minchin

1. You don’t have to have a dream. Be micro-ambitious, work with pride on whatever is in front of you. Be careful on long term dreams, if you focus too far in front of you, you won’t see the shiny thing out the corner of your eye.

2. Don’t seek happiness. Keep busy and aim to make someone else happy and you might find you get

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Music has no purpose, it merely brings together people’s dreams, fragilities, licentiousness and weirdness. It can bring masses of people together through that. As much as those in the underground find each other, so do the Swifties and The ARMY. Scale, here, doesn’t stop the human capacity of bonding through music and the exchange of identity.

If we do not understand that most people had no choice but to devote their lives to growing and cooking food, we are incapable of comprehending that the foods of Culinary Modernism — egalitarian, available more or less equally to all, without demanding the disproportionate amount of the resources of time or money that traditional foodstuffs did —... See more

I care, in the end, about expressing my obdurate singularity at any cost.

attention as inner ecology—and then, I could see ways that a holistic system was imperiled. I could see an inner landscape as a patch of thriving rainforest, a complex, interdependent ecology slashed back and stripped bare to accommodate the incursions of an export crop (and as we know, export crops don’t feed the locals). The long-rooted,... See more