This World and Me

One sunny day in 2018, I was walking home from class at UC Berkeley when I received a notification on my phone that almost made me trip on the sidewalk in surprise: it was a news article announcing that a federal judge had decided that the entirety of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (often shortened to just "the Affordable Care Act" or "ACA" or "Obamacare") was unconstitutional. How could this have happened? The Supreme Court of the United States had previously upheld the constitutionality of the ACA in 2012 in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sibelius , 567 U.S. 519 (often abbreviated to NFIB ), so it was unthinkable to me that some federal district judge six years later could decide otherwise. I was wrong. The Affordable Care Act is a complex piece of legislation that includes a plethora of different healthcare reforms. In my view, there are three key elements of the Act: Firstly, it required individual insuran...

maybe it's a gift that i couldn't recognize maybe i don't really need to feel satisfied —Porter Robinson, "Trying to Feel Alive", Nurture , 2021 This song, "Trying to Feel Alive", is the last song on Porter Robinson's album Nurture , which came out April 23, 2021. I have written about Robinson's music three times on this blog before: check out my posts about "Shelter" , "Fresh Static Snow" , and "Look at the Sky" . It has since grown to be among my top two favorite songs from Nurture . (It is quite possibly my favorite song from Nurture . I can't decide between this and "Look at the Sky".) In addition to being the last song on the track list, "Trying to Feel Alive" is also chronologically the last song that Robinson wrote for Nurture . For Robinson, Nurture was an immense effort that took seven years of creative struggle to materialize. (See my post on "Look at the Sky" for addition...

At 6:00 pm CST on February 11, 2021, a man named Willie Smith was scheduled to be executed by the state of Alabama for the 1991 murder of Sharma Ruth Johnson. Less than 24 hours before this time, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit ordered the state of Alabama not to execute Smith "unless it allows Smith’s outside spiritual advisor, Pastor Robert Paul Wiley, Jr., into the execution chamber". Citing "security reasons", the state of Alabama refuses to allow any non-prison staff in the execution chamber and has stated that it will not execute Smith because of the Eleventh Circuit's order. On the morning of February 11, Alabama filed an emergency application with the Supreme Court of the United States, asking it to vacate the Eleventh Circuit's injunction of execution immediately so that the execution may proceed as originally planned. A few hours later, the Court denied the application , and Smith was not executed . This case, called Dunn v. Smi...

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...