Bhargav Varshney

We thought we were just having fun times with devices; it turns out we were spreading nuclear waste over the entire surface of the earth. Piling up heaps of radioactive slag inside our homes. Smearing it over our faces at night. And then a generation was born into that poisoned world; we got to watch them take shape, and it became obvious how broke... See more

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.

My definition of good transfiguration is allowing people I trust to show me what they see in me clearly. We see ourselves with a great deal of blurriness, often with a negative tilt. Other people can see the line of continuity threaded through every seemingly disjointed experience, or the richness in your raw material. Other people can very much he... See more

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 pers... See more

The seeking was passive, the reward pale, the sense of agency bled dry. I checked reflexively, without intention.

Too many people think freedom is the ability to do anything you want, instead of the discipline to not be a slave to your compulsions.