This World and Me

Video game retailer GameStop (ticker: GME) made national headlines after its stock soared from a price of $17.25 on January 4, 2021, to an intraday high of $483 on January 28, 2021—a 2800% gain. Some fortunate speculators, most notably a 34-year-old Boston man named Keith Gill, profited immensely from this rise. Others bought in too late to the hype and experienced significant losses—on Thursday, February 4, the stock ended the trading day at $53.50 , an 88.9% drop from the January 28 high. In this post, I would like to discuss my view on why this happened, as well as some of the other views I've seen on the Internet and why I think some are a little unjustified.  For disclosure, I have an account at Robinhood, but I have not done any trading on GameStop's stock (or any other meme stock). Background Short selling When most people invest in the stock market, they buy shares of a particular company's stock, hoping that later on, they will be able to sell their shares to some...

On Wednesday, January 27, 2021, Porter Robinson released a new song entitled "Look at the Sky". It is amazing. "Look at the Sky" is the fourth and penultimate single of Robinson's forthcoming album, Nurture , which is scheduled for release on April 23, 2021. Nurture will be Robinson's second album—he has not released a full-length album under his own name since Worlds all the way back in 2014. Nuture 's first single, "Get Your Wish", was Robinson's first release under his own name since his monumental collaboration with Madeon "Shelter" in 2016 , and the first overall since his Virtual Self project in 2018 . Worlds was an incredibly influential album within electronic music, but for Robinson, it was a double-edged sword. In messages to his fans, Robinson explained that over the past few years, he has felt a profound sense of pressure to beat his success with Worlds . In a tweet he published about a year ago about "Get Yo...

A few days ago, I watched Disney's new movie Soul (2020). It's good. It is one of the best films that Pixar Animation Studios has ever made. Spoilers follow. The film follows a New York City jazz musician named Joe Gardner who finds himself dissatisfied with his life as a middle school band director and yearns to play jazz for a living. During the film's exposition, Joe receives the opportunity to audition to play the piano for a jazz quartet, and he nails it. The quartet's leader, Dorothea Williams, schedules him to play that night, and Joe is so ecstatic that he fails to look carefully while crossing the street and fatally injures himself. What follows from this point forward is a spectacular journey that forces viewers to confront existential questions. Longtime Pixar fans will already be familiar with the philosophical experience that Pete Docter evokes based on his previous film Inside Out (2015), and with Soul , Docter has truly outdone himself. After Joe injure...

I remember watching Robert Zemeckis' The Polar Express for the first time as a kid in elementary school. One snowy winter just after Christmas, my family booked a room at an indoor waterpark resort in southern Ohio called the Great Wolf Lodge. While watching the TV in that room in the evening, we stumbled across a channel broadcasting The Polar Express . Theatrically released in 2004, the computer-animated film is based off of a picture book with the same name written by Chris Van Allsburg. I had been familiar with the picture book from school, so at the time, it was a little surprising to me the extent to which the film deviates from the source material. However, understandably, the picture book was only a handful of pages long and surely doesn't contain enough material to fill a feature-length film. It has grown to be my favorite Christmas-themed film (to be honest, there are not many Christmas-themed films that I have enjoyed), and I frequently look back on it with a sens...