Orwell famously said that to be loved is to be understood; reading is my favorite way to understand (and love) other humans. I like reading just about anything (really, anything). However, I especially enjoy modernist literature, historical fiction, and a wide range of satire and social commentary, with my all-time favored medium being the short story: in part because I believe it democratizes the practice of reading but also because I find the task of distilling something complex in <10,000 words to be both utterly difficult and extraordinarily elegant, if done well.

There is nothing I love more than witty writing: the works of Swift, Orwell, and Hemingway are among my favorites. Danny Cohen’s Swift-inspired essay on endianness, titled On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace, never fails to make me laugh — if you are a systems engineer, this is a must-read!

Occasionally, I stumble upon a piece that deeply moves me. Such a piece has (a) incited a very strong emotion in me, (b) shifted my worldview, (c) convinced me to go on a walk to reflect upon what I’ve just read, or (d) accomplished all of the above. We readers are, of course, very lucky when we encounter writing that does this. For me, these works have included (in no particular order): Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell, Night by Elie Wiesel, and “Minute on Education” by Thomas Babington Macaulay.

I’m also very interested in translation and recently spent a term abroad at Oxford studying Anglo-Saxon literature and translation theory. I worked on translating Beowulf, one of the earliest known works of English literature from Old English to modern English. In doing so, I attempted to transform the millennia-old epic about men and monsters into a story that speaks to the contemporary reader.

Other disparate interests include: baremetal software development, semiconductors, low-resource languages (both machine and human), kennings, Anglo-Saxon riddles, cities, politics, history, historical ruins. I’m a debater at heart and was involved in the debate communities at Stanford and Oxford. I am happiest when I discover new coffee shops.