Metaphysical Musings

Severance reads as factory lines of sentences, queues of commas lined up with ideas leading to a fevered apocalypse. It is a text that fully inhabits its ideas, in plot and form. It is full of modern-day malaise, detailing the experience of living after capitalism has stopped progressing and is instead manifested through monotony, automation, and homogeneity. How capitalistic structures have reached a complacency of new corporate-slop-shop-restaurants and the poverty cycle.

Introduction: Doctor Faustus - first performed in either 1592 or 1593 and officially published posthumously in 1604 is an Elizabethan era tragedy. Summing it up in adjectives, it is a short, beautiful, and haunting text. In Doctor Faustus, a romantic quality is imputed to the epistemically dissatisfied Renaissance man and his quest for knowledge through the gothic imagery, fantastical adventures, and the intrigue of the occult between heaven and hell. However, by the end,  Do

To what extent was Deng Xiaoping successful in reconciling a communist political vision with capitalist economic practices? The two main sources used by this investigation are Immanuel Hsü’s ‘The Rise of Modern China’ (specifically Part 7: China after Mao) and Martin King Whyte’s essay ‘China’s Post-Socialist Inequality’. The sources are distinct in their outlook. In Part 7, Hsu provides a micro survey of Deng’s actions and their immediate effects on China’s people, economy,

Analyzing and comparing The Color Purple  by Alice Walker and Chronicle of a Death Foretold  by Gabriel García Márquez offers a similar yet different exploration of family, community relationships, and themes of power. Generally, power is represented through the autonomy and agency of individual characters. If a character does not have such autonomy, they are to a large degree powerless. The context a character is written into dictates this. Both novels delve into how these d

Tahrir Square, Cairo, 2011 Middle eastern states agued by previous economic crises and political disunity became “modern” as they were subsumed by the greater world system through the forces of integration, peripheralization, defensive developmentalism, and imperialism. However, as this system progressed, modernity changed from being a Eurocentric concept to a universal conduct that found a unique place in Middle Eastern empires and nation states. Over 19 th and 20 th centu

If you’re a Bruin Baddie, Baudrillard’s for you! Sharing the first article I wrote for the Bruin Review, an independent alternative, opinion and satire (just be everything why don't you) magazine. Check it out here: https://bruinreview.wordpress.com/2025/12/20/if-youre-a-bruin-baddie-baudrillards-for-you/ With the rise of UCLA’s social media presence, false realities confront us everywhere. UCLA is losing its physical sense of self in favour of online culture. UCLA’s symbolis

Gertrude did not know of her sex, skin, or self. She was everything at once. You lost your spark Shiraz. She worked in aesthetics, in the shapes and sounds and spaces in between, the way odd combinations flurry your semantic sense and memory. She believed we had, or at least ought to have, moved past the idea of a “story”. Of “plots”. My period’s late. This time makes it too many times. What could that mean? I saw her for the first time, her and her gorgeous cheekbone, buckle

My last book was awful. Pretentious, frivolous, wordy, turgid, and horrible. It has been 7 years since its publication. I still hate it. I used to think big words would lead me to literary fame - land me amongst the literati. Instead, it has led to 7 years of refusing to put ink to paper, afraid that I’ll create another ugly collection of uncomfortable sentences. I couldn’t refuse my controversial ideas though, that’s why I write my secret story from time to time. There are f