Doing - Settling into a new home, a new program, and a new state. Trying to overschedule myself without overcommitting.

Reading - Felt like an apt time to have a little reread of Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucence and actually got all the way through. A good reminder in this transition back to school and classes and more structures learning that it matters which ideas we use to think other ideas with, “the stories we use to tell other stories with.”

Doing - Exciting news! Accepted an offer to start my PhD at the UC Berkeley School of Information this fall. And my work on narrative license in LLM summaries of academic work was accepted to ACL Main (that I will unfortunately not be able to attend but exciting all the same).

Reading - Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI by Karen Hao, which has been on my reading list since publication. It was just as informative and thought provoking as I anticipated, providing many research rabbit holes for me to go down on my own.

Doing - Getting ready to head to the Computation + Journalism Symposium: Data Journalism Under Autocracy at UMiami to present my recent work on The White House’s media strategy.

Reading - Misinterpretation by Ledia Xhoga, which is the second fiction book I’ve read this year centering on translation (the first being Greek Lessons by Han Kang which is one of my favorites of late). I spend a lot of time thinking about language and meaning at work and I am quite enjoying reading about these along with the intricacies of expression and communication in a fictional narrative.

Listening - To author and scholar Roopa Pai lecture on the Bhagavad Gita, joining virutally from Bangalore to my teacher training. She is a wealth of knowledge…

Reading - The Gita for Children by Roopa Pai, which is truly not just for children.

Reading - Audition by Katie Kitamura, I did enjoy her earlier book Intimacies and this one I really loved. What is reality and what is the character? How do we all play ourselves? Does anyone truly understand those around them, or are we all too caught up in our own heads for that kind of awareness?

Listening - “Double Infinity” Big Thief (2025), “Incomprehensible” is on repeat in this house. I didn’t get tickets for thier tour and so wish I had the forsight to…

Looking - All the fall leaves, I just got back from a weekend up in the Hudson Valley. Lots of incredibles colors on the trees and apples. Would highly recommend Montgomery Place Orchards for a delicious education on apple varietals. I am quite into apples, if that is something you can be into, and I discovered a new favorite on this trip, the Golden Russet. It looks like a potato, smells like a pear, but eats like crunchy apple cider. Full of suprises, this life is.

Doing - Well, starting, but this was my first intensive weekend for my 200-hour yoga teacher training at Three Queens Studio in Philadelphia.

Reading - Orbital by Samantha Harvey left me in awe of this beautiful, wonderful world that is only a small part of this massive universe.

Doing - Or did just get back from visitng family and friends in California: swimming in the ocean with my parents, making my grandparents corn and plum cobbler, running with an old friend, and seeing another friend perform in a musical. Such joy!

Reading - I just started Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams, a recommendation from my Mom.

Reading - We Do Not Part by Han Kang, her fourth book I’ve read in the past few months. Beautifully written and translated. Her works makes me thing about communication and connection in the lives we live alongside ourselves and other people.

Doing - Just got back from visiting my siblings and wishing they lived close enough to see every week for dinner.

Doing - Celebrating my birthday, getting a visit from a friend in DC, marching at the Philly Dyke March

Reading - Finished Pathemata, Or, The Story of My Mouth by Maggie Nelson, a thoughtful birthday gift and an increadible read on daily life, grief big and small.

Doing - Getting ready for the Brooklyn Half Marathon. I got convinced to run with some friends raising money for the East New York Community Land Trust, even though I love running I don’t always love the racing. But, its a great org and fun to do things with friends.

Listening - I just started listening to the audio book for I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman while I’m running. A real experiment for me because I usually prefer to read over listen, but I saw it on Spotify (when did they add audio books?) and it is going well.

Reading - I recently finished White Teeth by Zadie Smith. A beutifully chaotic book full of people, but I did loose the narrative a little.