Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

Electric vehicle purchases, solar panel installations, windmills going up...as the Third Persian Gulf War degenerates into a tit-for-tat blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, increased use of renewable energy seems to be a panacea. That is, until you dig a little deeper and realize that the oil and natural gas stuck behind the Strait are not just for energy use. Petroleum is the raw material for everything from the fertilizers to feed our crops to the helium that is indispensable to manufacturing semiconductors. Electricity can transport us, but cannot put food and information technology on our tables.

Western liberals rejoiced when Victor Orban, the prime minister of Hungary for the last decade and a half, was finally thrown out of office recently, despite persistently tilting the field to his favor through monopolizing mainstream media and gerrymandering electoral districts to dilute opposition votes. Peter Magyar, the incoming prime minister, immediately called for a complete overhaul of the state broadcaster and rescinding Hungary's opposition to the EU's further funding of Ukrainian war efforts. Brussels seemed to have lost an enemy and gained an ally.

For the frequent traveler, it is a once-per-decade ritual. Visit the nearest embassy or consulate in whatever country he happens to reside in at the time, and come out with a brand-new booklet ready for entry and exit stamps. It is almost a temporary reminder of patriotism: someone who intentionally left the homeland to roam the world, only to pledge allegiance in the form of a bureaucratic procedure indispensable for a nomadic lifestyle in the modern world, where every country seems more sensitive to national security risks. 

There is something deeply satisfying about finding typos and grammatical errors in articles from reputable newspapers like the New York Times or the Economist . The reader knows that these organizations employ dozens of dedicated editors to review, restructure, and polish pieces written by veteran journalists who themselves have years of experience checking on other people's work, not to mention degrees from prestigious academic programs specializing in exactly the types of writing they are paid to do. When readers can pick up what slips through these eyes and minds, they feel just a little bit like the pros' equals.

In another war, by the third week, people will accept the routine of a new reality and will have moved on to something newer and more exciting. We cannot say the same about the so-called Third Persian Gulf War that is unfolding across a swath of the Middle East. The photos of residential compounds and civil infrastructure pummeled by bombs and missiles are getting as numbing to see as the growing statistics of casualties. But this war refuses to simply exist out of our minds: its consequences are too real and too close to be summarized as "someone else's problem."

After Chinese-American figure skater Alysa Liu scored a memorable gold medal in the Milano Winter Olympics, more details are emerging in her underdog-to-winner life story. The world is slowly putting together the reasons behind the sudden retirement at age 16, after failing to medal in multiple world championships that she competed in, and her insistence that her return to the skating world would be entirely done in her own terms, skating when and how she feels, eating what she wants, and looking how she desires. 

I'm in the midst of a lull in my main job of supporting high school students with college admissions, with last year's bunch nervously awaiting their results, while this year's haven't started brainstorming the essay topics. During the downtime, I had been partially consumed by a mobile game, in which the player is an independent trader in a galaxy in which the central authority collapsed, and a cult-like rebellion seeks to assert control. The player navigates the many lawless frontiers, visiting planets that are home to civilizations menaced by economic difficulties, civil conflict, or simply isolation from trading partners.

"Napoli is a bit rough around the edges, but beneath the hassle and bustle is a vibrant city of good food and good people," so the many travel vloggers say about southern Italy's largest city. The disclaimer is highly warranted. After all, the city is known for having produced several well-known mafia groups that, in the decades past, managed to turn the city into a den of street crime. While northern Italy turned its historical and cultural sights into a tourist boom and endearing image of fashionability, Napoli was largely avoided despite its equally illustrious offerings.

The government signaled displeasure with the reporting by revoking the journalistic privilege of several correspondents ...goes the typical back-and-forth between authoritarian regimes and critical (often Western ) media outlets. Those revocations are based on a perhaps deliberately bureaucratic method in controlling access: the existence of the journalism visa in most jurisdictions. Foreigners working for major news brands are expected to self-identify as seeking to publish information. This is so that they do not bring their employers problems, while enabling local authorities to better track their whereabouts.

Outside the imposing, vertical stone walls that enclose the hilltop fortress jutting into the sea is another Valletta. There, the few tourists battle crumbling passageways hugging the rugged coastline, cold sweat breaking out as they come face to face with narrow paths where their feet are inches away from a steep drop into the raging ocean below. But they also come out into a small seaside community, where small fishing boats lie next to wooden houses and storage units, unchanged in decades. Families gather, surely away from their main inland houses, to barbecue, feed stray cats, and greet intrepid travelers passing by.

For many people, a squat toilet represents backwardness. In the olden days, a hole in the floor opened up to a smelly cesspit, from which farmers shoveled excrement into their fields for free manure. Grimy public bathrooms in third-world countries are almost always portrayed by broken, dark squatters with flies buzzing above. In contrast, Japan, commonly portrayed as the pinnacle  of advanced toilet culture, is represented by heated seats and remote-controlled bidets on sitters, with squating toilets ( washiki or "Japanese-style" in the local parlance) relegated increasingly to the oldest houses and schools.

The 30-year-old man in the black-and-white photo smiled at me, his happiness at perhaps his first time in Beijing for work still visible more than 60 years after the fact. Yet, moments later, I found myself ripping the beautifully preserved photo in half; the arbitrary split in the brittle paper ran through that very smile, a stark reminder of a sudden but entirely unceremonious goodbye. By the hundredth rip, I had become mechanical, pieces of old photos, alongside scraps of diary entries with neat handwriting and certifications of all kinds, so unemotionally falling into the black garbage bag below. 

The Western world has a paradoxical relationship with authoritarianism. Non-democracies the world over are roundly criticized for their inability to uphold human rights, protect minorities, and ignore citizens' desires for more freedoms and better livelihoods. Yet, in the corporate world, too many fawn over titans who run their corporations as personal fiefdoms, managing through a combination of a cult of personality and one-man decision-making. How come Elon Musk and Steve Jobs are almost glorified for having dictatorial powers when actual dictators are simply bad people?

Early December 2025, Malta rescued 61 illegal immigrants from a capsized boat in the Mediterranean, providing them with emergency medical support after taking them ashore. With the majority of the rescued coming from Bangladesh and various African countries, the visuals of their being treated (for free) by Maltese medics and ambulances only give local netizens, already angry about rampant foreign arrivals in the country, additional ammunition to call for a more stringent anti-immigrant stance by the government. 

"You shouldn't see parenting as self-sacrifice so that your kids don't see love as depletion." That line from The Fax Club hits a little too close to home. The book, which documents a year-long experiment in which 100 anonymous participants answered a weekly question that arrived at them by fax, showed just how deliberate contemplation, uninterrupted by the quick dopamine hits of social media, can create real philosophical gems through the most ordinary people. The best, like this one, came out of everyday observations about human relationships.

I still remember all the praises that veteran development professionals showered on Paul Kagame. It was 2015, and I was landing in Tanzania for my work at the One Acre Fund, an American microfinance NGO. The Rwandan president was the darling of Western donors, creating a country of political stability, clean streets, and a transparent welcome for foreign investors in a neighborhood often characterized by opaque shakedown, hidden costs of doing business, and unpredictable, sudden changes in policymaking that risk leaving people, assets, and money stranded.

AI has arrived at the audio age. Only years after robotic voices dominated the test-to-voice space, AI producers are investing substantial resources in humans willing to contribute their voice recordings to equip the latest generation of chatbot conversation partners. The result is an ever more natural set of sample voices that can recite textual responses, to the point that a blind listener would not be able to distinguish the machine-generated from the human original. Days are not far away when voice transcription, as a human job, becomes entirely obsolete.

"Could I...ask a completely unrelated question?" One of the attendees hesitantly spoke up in our online discussion session. As I saw him lower his head in the grainy video thumbnail, he quietly muttered, "How...does your life end up like that?" And before I could inquire what he exactly meant, he intoned, his voice a bit louder and even angrier, "I'm interested in living in different countries too....but it just doesn't seem like it plays out that way." I opened my mouth and closed it again before I could say a word. I had to think for a moment after realizing it was a much more sensitive question than I had expected.

When people envision a "revolution," they often conjure images of sudden bouts of violence and radical change. People coordinate large-scale gatherings where they clash with the police and military to voice their suffering and demand change. From the protests emerge charismatic leaders whose speeches move crowds and whose ideologies are projected into the public consciousness. When the authorities refuse to budge in the face of popular discontent, protests turn into mob violence, then organized armed opposition that overcomes the defenders of the regime. 

The Japanese often attribute the country's high-quality manufactured products to  Shokunin Damashii (職人魂) in action. A historical culture of craftsmen focusing on doing one thing and just one thing well in his or her life has led to a slew of artisanal success stories, from fabled swords from centuries ago to the aged sake rice wine taking over the world's palate. Despite modern manufacturing's reliance on automation and assembly lines, the country's electronics giants and carmakers continue to suggest that this culture of perfectionism over individual lifetimes is the secret ingredient to made in Japan's fine reputation.