3. Asiago

Peter Thiel responded "I don't know" to the question: "You would prefer the human race to endure, right?" On November 24, 1859, Charles Darwin published a book that would forever change biology on a fundamental level: On the Origin of Species posited the idea that the diversity of life was due to a series of minute changes to an organism across generations, eventually resulting in a new organism. Did the chicken come before the egg? It was actually more of a process; the organism-closest-to-a-chicken laid the first chicken egg. “Survival of the fittest,” philosopher Herbert Spencer called it. The strongest, most fit species would naturally rise above all.  Today, we’ve redefined the animal kingdom’s definition of power : rather than being the strongest or the most intelligent or being the best at something, fitness is often defined by those flimsy little green bills that have come to dictate most every aspect of our lives. Funnily enough, monetary might often t...

  “Minnesota ICE Live Updates: Omar Attack, Alex Pretti Shooting and Noem Impeachment Calls” “ Two agents who shot Alex Pretti put on leave as Trump tries to quell backlash” “‘ICE conveyor belt’ illegally detaining, moving Minnesota children to Texas faster then courts can respond” “Minnesota Proved MAGA Wrong” These are just a few of the thousands of news articles swarming the media currently due to what has been going on in Minnesota. Many people don’t realize that this isn’t just in Minneapolis, its everywhere.  ICE isn’t focusing on detaining illegal immigrants any more, they take US citizens, lawful residents, or even Native Americans. Minors, children who even had to show up to court not even knowing what a lawyer is. Documented people who haven’t broken any laws. Their only crime? Being black, hispanic, or asian.  Multiple times a day, this is occurring. Streets are empty, car doors are open and left abandoned–engines running, seatbelts cut, house doors are wide op...

  “With great power comes great responsibility.”  I can’t remember where I first heard that statement, but I do know that it is one of the truest and most profound things I have ever heard. While I have primarily considered this statement as a guiding moral principle to remember that my actions have consequences, I can’t help but notice that it has far wider implications.  Ever since the United States fought and won its independence from Great Britain, it has been more than wary of overly powerful leaders. The founders had experienced what it was like to have one individual’s voice dictate their rights, and as a result, they believed that power should be evenly distributed. They believed that no one person can or should be trusted to act with “great responsibility,” especially in the context of leading a country so powerful.  Consequently, checks and and balances were implemented into the federal government to prevent the unequal concentration of power in one branch....

Over the last couple of weeks, a penguin has taken its place at the pinnacle of my TikTok algorithm. A video captured by Werner Herzog shows a lone “deranged” penguin defying the monotonous path of its waddle to venture into the unknown mountains, heading towards certain death. One question lingers in the mind of Herzog: “But why.”  This unnamed penguin is the purest representation of Nietzsche ’s philosophy of “ Will to Power ,” which describes the urge to grow and overcome rather than simply survive. It is the desire to manifest one's will upon the world, even at the cost of itself. The penguin’s decision to forsake its waddle and millions of years of evolutionary instinct embodies this idea. Nietzsche’s most famous concept, the Übermensch (Overman), is also embodied by this penguin. The Übermensch is an idealized human who overcomes nihilism and traditional morality originally seen in Christianity around the 1800s. Nietzsche's concept of “ Transvaluation of Values ” can al...

  Juice spills over my fingernails, coating my palm, as I dig my fingers beneath the rubbery skin of a tangerine I snagged from the shining fruit bowl in the center of the prayer room. I’ve become so familiar with its nooks and crannies that I could navigate the entire room blindfolded. If we’re getting technical, it's not my prayer room. Still, I’ve been taught what goes unclaimed goes uncared for, so by that logic, everything in my local Gurudwara is technically mine, which may explain why I care for it the way a possessive and angsty teenage girl from a 2000s show might.  As I walk past the portraits lining the main hall, I stop at my grandfather’s, the fourteenth painting on the right-hand side, to be exact. My toes sink into the plush crimson carpet as I stare into his hazel eyes through the laminated glass. I remember gazing at them as a child; never before had I seen eyes so bright that they made me hate my dark brown ones.   My grandfather traveled from Lahore, P...

Since I was a kid, I have always been very close with my sister. She is caring and kind but she also has some slightly questionable ambitions. She wants to learn how to manipulate people. Now, that sounds like she’s a bad person but she really isn't. She has just learned that being successful requires a little manipulation.  I came across a Forbes article titled “ Understanding How Good Leadership Requires Great Manipulation ” that discusses how manipulation, at its core, is “the use of emotions to get another person or group to act as desired by the manipulator.” Manipulation has been given a bad rep. In reality, it is simply convincing others to assist you in achieving your goal. Forbes talks about how teams are more successful if they share a vision that both leaders and team members feel passionate about; leaders must communicate the vision in a way that will “make clear how their team will be more emotionally successful when the vision has been reached.”  Manipulation doe...

Fog.  It creeps slowly, like the ghost of a wildcat treading softly through the tall grass, illuminated by moonlight. Its tendrils tempt, beckoning you towards a stagnant sanctuary among old rock and young grass. Don’t you want peace?  Yes, you do, but not like this. If you choose to step through the rusted gate anyway, you will hear it creak shut behind you. Its groaning screech gets swallowed by the emptiness and after that, the air is still. Nothing quivers. Now you are keenly aware of the crawling things squirming below the wet dirt, twisting and squelching, digesting the dead in the dark.  On the surface where you stand (for now) it is green and grey and brown, splotches of moss lay scattered on stone pillars rising out of the ground. The words on some of them have been obscured by mold and mildew for years now though others are freshly carved; some names remembered but most forgotten, not out of malice but simply due to the apathetic erosion of time.  Will you ...

Friendship is one of the most beautiful forms of love a person can give and receive, and one of the most unique experiences a person can admire. I don't think I realized this till a few months ago, when I truly looked at the people I surround myself with, and genuinely questioning who I would be without them. Of course everybody values friendship, but I wonder how many people truly understand the power it can have.  They get you in ways no one else can, and can be some of the only people a person can truly connect with. It's people who you make countless memories with, who you spend your 4 (or however many) years of highschool with before everybody goes their own way, a person you once had a class with, the person you meet at a random place at a random time yet has become so deeply engraved in your life. That’s the beauty of it, there are no guidelines or regulations to it. Its just the matter of a simple “click.” The thought of having a relationship, sure, has its ups and down...

  During winter break, I completed my annual reread of Alice's Adventure in Wonderland . I started this “tradition” in fourth grade and have been using the same copy since fifth grade (I borrowed the first one from the library). The text offers surprising insights on the power of language, primarily through the book’s antagonist, the Queen of Hearts. One of the most iconic lines of Alice in Wonderland is “Off with their heads,” spoken profusely by the Queen of Hearts. What’s truly jarring about her obsession with these phrases is that she says them for the smallest things. It sets a dark and terrifying tone, no matter the instance, for it. For example, as the guards were painting roses red, the queen was infuriated (in her arbitrary anger) and called for their beheading. Imagine your mom saying that I am going to behead you for not cleaning up your room; it evokes undeserved dread and fear. There is a concept of this called the “ Performative Speech Acts ,” which according to Wikip...

  Wanderer above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich, 1818, symbolizing the great unknown (among other things). It's a real place, in fact—the Elbe Sandstone Mountains between Germany and the Czech Republic. Does free will exist? There’s no way to know empirically—not yet, at least, according to quantum mechanics. The only thing left to do, then, is speculate. Numerous philosophers have tried to answer this question: Schopenhauer, Hume, Kant, Sartre… Religion has its own unique answer. According to Christianity, for example, the omniscient God, from the beginning of the universe (and possibly earlier), knew everything that would occur. Every possible permutation of every possible action and reaction, down to the behavior of the tiniest atom. In other words, Christianity asserts the existence of fate —a predetermined path—rather than destiny —a life that could be independently chosen. Hinduism claims that free will does exist, but in order to achieve nirvana and escape the ne...

For the longest time, I had genuinely no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I knew very early on that I wanted absolutely nothing to do with the field of computer science, technology, or anything along those lines. But for the life of me, I simply could not figure out what it was that I did want to do, and it definitely didn’t help that I was surrounded by friends who had known since they were six years old that they were destined to be doctors or mechanical engineers. So whenever anyone would pose the terrifying question of what I wanted to pursue in the future, I would laugh it off and tell them I was still “figuring it out.”   But the truth was, the uncertain state of my future frightened me. What if I never found something that genuinely excited me? And more, what if my indecisiveness and inability to form a concrete plan was an indication of the fact that I was going to spend the rest of my life wandering aimlessly day after day without a real purpose? Fast forward a...

“Don’t give them the power to affect you.” This sentence has been ingrained in my brain ever since I was kid. Every time I came home complaining about a random interaction I had that day, instead of agreeing with me or telling me to stop complaining, my dad would tell me to stop giving other people power over me. I did not truly understand what this meant when I was a kid but it really is one of the best pieces of advice I have been given. In essence, words alone have no power. Words themselves cannot cause any true damage. As soon as we start paying attention to words—allowing them to eat up our time and infest our headspace—that is when they start having the ability to make an impact on our lives. It’s almost as if words are simply oxygen, constantly floating around, always present. Our reaction to those words is the spark. Our reaction is what starts the fire. But lucky for us, that is something we can control. As soon as we start letting what people say affect us, that is when we s...

As you read this, a little flat void brick is likely somewhere in your sight.  Sitting on your desk, maybe, or in your pocket, within reach. Or better yet, it’s what you are using to read this blog post.  We are tethered to these bricks now, whether we like them or not; having one is a ticket of entry into a society where Google must be at our fingertips and we have to have access to all of our friends and our schoolwork and the entire world. We offload so much onto our bricks people have begun arguing that they’ve become an “extended mind” of sorts, extensions of our hands that store knowledge and memories. Moreover, everything has an app now, gluing the bricks more securely to our palms. Restaurants, washing machines, speakers, lights. Bathroom passes. Grades. We’ve gained power over our surroundings in the form of insight, but this information breathes down our necks in return. I see this echoed again and again in online circles: that algorithmic social media feeds and apps...

  Red drips off the drywall, coating the cement below in crimson.  “It looked like blood,” a student said.  Many thought it was; it wouldn’t be beyond the realm of possibility.   At Grenada High School , only twenty-five minutes away from Fremont, racist and hateful rhetoric plagued the lives of high school students.  “I heard the F slur so many times you’d think it was my name,” said a junior at Grenada High School.  “As someone who has experienced online threats of [death], I cannot regard such symbols [like a swastika] as a joke,” another student states.  It took the LPD (Livermore Police Department) a few hours to determine that it was spray paint, not blood. But the reported incident of a crimson swastika drawn on the walls of a high school was the first of many, with another instance being students audaciously designating colored and white bathrooms, only permitting select students to use each one.  Sadly, as the years pass, racist and ...