We all know the difficulties that Harvard has been going through, and I thought that it would be fun to showcase an actual Harvard perspective, so I’m sharing this free article from the New York Times to all of you written by Steven Pinker, from my own subscription.  It is well worth reading, and I hope you will enjoy it if you choose to read it!  Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/23/opinion/harvard-university-trump-administration.html?rsrc=ss&unlocked_article_code=1.KE8.FQW2.LxEovGin6Ef6&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare Pinker is a disarming man. If you read his articles, they are quirky yet intellectually engaging. The man stuffs so many different facts into a single paragraph that it often makes me wonder how or whether he just has access to all of the ideas he does, articulating within a single hand wave expressions and fires of the most deeply interconnected set of neurons I may have ever witnessed on the planet.  Well, at least that’s what I feel having read Pinker for quite a number of years now – And not knowing that he was the Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard University Well, that’s just a lack of attention to detail on my part, but it’s an interesting reality Sometimes people may have done or know far more than you might even think, perceive, or understand And sometimes these surprises can be rather fascinating.  Read the essay and it will give you a picture of what I understand about elite universities in the US at this point – Not exactly woke madrasas or the very headquarters of the CCP as President Trump seems to suggest, but instead as something rather different, definitely vibrant albeit with its flaws, where strident opinions are often shared, becoming the very voice of a generation through nothing more than the saliency bias and social media even amid an admitted climate where certain ideas are put to rest not because they are bad ones, but instead because […]

Some of you who follow me on YouTube know that I’ve been conducting some coverage of the PKR Deputy President elections featuring former deputy President Rafizi Ramli, and incoming deputy President Nurul Izzah. Sometimes it’s good to take a moment to think about the events that have happened over the course of the past, to understand things a little deeper, so I decided to do an analysis of the election results, which I’m sure many Malaysians were following. It is my first time doing this, and I will share my thought process along the way. When I look at the vote totals and also who got how many votes, I realize that we have been told earlier that there were about 32,030 people who were eligible to vote. Yet, at the same time, when we added together the votes cast for Rafizi and also Nurul Izzah, the total was only 13,669. This was a 42.7% turnout. Now, this was significantly better compared to previous PKR elections during which the turnouts ranged from about 10–15%. But thinking about that made me realize something important: Firstly, Nurul Izzah only has about 30% of the vote and she does not have a strong mandate. Second of all, this system made it so that what we see seems to be a highly improbable result. Now, some of you may know that PKR recently moved over to a delegate system. The way that it works is that there are 220 divisions of PKR and they all select a certain number of delegates to end up making up the total pool of people who are eligible to vote. In other words, this is not a random sample – This is not the general population. Indeed, if it were, and we were dealing with just your average everyday social media poll, it is almost a foregone conclusion that […]

Sepupus, it’s not every day that I am genuinely shocked by a piece of news.  It’s also not every day that I feel compelled to use an O.O react on Instagram.  Today’s news gave me both opportunities in a double-whammy perfect storm.  The Trump administration will be revoking Harvard’s ability to enroll international students.  You might think that this is a simple matter that affects just one generation of students, as Singapore’s Calvin Cheng hinted, but no, that’s not the case. It affects multiple generations of students, and not just the ones who are going over to Harvard, but also the ones who are currently there. Well, I know you all better than you think.  Most of you would probably immediately declare that this is unconscionable, an attack against freedom, a fight against the good of the world and the darkest evil – unstoppable sword, immovable shield, justice and destruction – the very recounting of the Bhagavad Gita itself by Robert J Oppenheimer (Harvard University 4.0 Summa Cum Laude I believe) himself when he said: At the time that Oppenheimer had recounted these ominous words, nobody had died and it all seemed like a test that would merely remain a test. Nothing really would happen, would it? The United States wouldn’t dare use the atom bomb, would it? Yet, on August 6, Little Boy dropped on Hiroshima, 80,000 people died. On August 9, Fat Man dropped on Nagasaki, 40,000 people died. Including long-term effects from radiation and injuries, the total death toll was estimated to be over 200,000. What happened with Harvard may very well be one of those proclamations, except in slightly less poetic language, but with no less damage, including to many personal friends and acquaintances from Malaysia and beyond.  Now, I know what some of you might say: FAFO.  F*** Around and Find Out. But I think it […]

In the journey of life, change is inevitable and I say that unironically. Why “unironically”? Because people have repeated “change is inevitable” to high heaven and it often comes off like a word hash brown, fresh off the shelf of a cooling rack; toasty, delicious, yet ultimately unhealthy, factually fast food language. Yet so as the hash brown is delicious, so is the language of ‘change is inevitable’, only to be appreciated if it is savored properly. If it seems a little strange to you that I’m writing about hash browns and change, know that it is for me too, but it is one of those changes I see from 2025 – the sort that involves taking on random streams of thought and fashioning them into the rivulets that add into a current that move forward, summing into a flow. I do wonder a little bit about whether there’s a consistent pattern though. I find that I’ve become a bit more thoughtful about things like these – that I have a higher discernment for what constitutes quality thoughts, while at the same time holding the small blessing of being able to evaluate things in light of a larger goal of social change and transformation through the development of content, ideas, and otherwise. It sometimes feels like I am in the middle of a grand dialectic with the world, one where I stand in the marginal territories of an evanescent frontier, fighting against a world that I do not want to come to pass, aiming to reshape it to my will. I think about so many things. Biology, willpower, society. Mind, hand, money. Power, politics, philosophy. Birth, life, age, death; competition, progress, history; nation, spirituality, world; destiny, history, legacy. It seems to me that these words now come out easily from me, not from the outer rim of the deeper examined mind, […]