A sporadically updated log about what I’m doing, reading and thinking about
*Updated on 15 May, 2026
Work and Projects
First and foremost, I’ve finally moved this website off Framer and into Quartz code hosted on GitHub Pages and fed through Obsidian. This was many months in the thinking, if not the making, and I’m much happier with how much more homely it seems (to me, at least). It still looks better on desktop than on mobile, though, which I need to work on.
In my essay ‘god, I just want to get smarter’, I wrote this about building an intellectual diet:
… setting an inquiry lets information in. You chase a broad understanding rather than a narrow script, but are still defined by a few guardrails that help you not drown in a sea of information.
And in ‘questions are desire paths of curiosity’, back in June 2024, I wrote:
We think in questions. If knowledge is a complex web inside the mind, each node is a question, and each connecting line the information you’ve picked up on the journey from node to node. The pursuit of knowledge is the accumulation of questions. They shape our identity as much by being asked as by being answered.
Lately I’ve been trying to live by this more deliberately. For the past couple of months, I’ve honed in on one question and let it pull my reading, listening, and watching for that month. The question is usually something I’ve been circling in my head already, so it’s less neutral curiosity and more half-formed opinion I want to poke and prod at. To make sure I get something out of this exercise without much pressure to create, I’ve also decided to write a short note about what I’ve learnt about this question since I first started exploring it.
My question for May is: What did religion do for individual humans that secular life has struggled to replace, and what (if anything) is filling that gap now?
What I’m finding so far is that this monthly exercise does something a reading list can’t. It gives every book, essay and conversation somewhere to launch from and somewhere to land. It puts you in dialogue with the material instead of just aimlessly absorbing it. You have to put whatever you’re consuming in a position relative to that question, and that requires conscious thinking. And practically, of course, it saves me hours of deciding what to read next.
I wrote about my 20-years-old friendships on Kindred Spirits, which was such an interesting exercise in observation. As I write in the essay, I’ve never examined these friendships too closely, just as one wouldn’t examine the walls of their house everyday. It has always been something that is, an immutable part of my life and my personality. So to extract what made them special, and what made them stick for two life-defining decades, was a hefty ask that I gladly undertook.
I’ve also begun writing more on Substack Notes: shorter observations, excerpts from life and process, and expansions on existing essays. I find it to be a much more nourishing exercises than posting on X, not least because there is no character count limit and I can afford to be as eloquent as I want. The X I see right now is pretty dead in terms of engagement (this post got a measly 4 likes, a first for me). I’ll continue posting to Notes more spontaneously and see what comes out of it. You can follow along here, if you’d like.
Play
In terms of reading, the year is finally picking up. I’ve made quite the dent in my TBR but have also succumbed to temptations from the Booker Prize and Women’s Prize long- and shortlists. So far:
- The Anthropologists by Aysegul Savas
- Playground by Richard Powers
- Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar
- Endling by Maria Reva
- The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty
- Outline by Rachel Cusk
- The South by Tash Aw
- The Stranger by Albert Camus
- Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain
- Bewilderment by Richard Powers (read my bewilderment-review)
I’m now a third through Kala by Colin Walsh and have Oh, William! by Elizabeth Strout and Caledonian Road by Andrew O’ Hagan lined up.