I hated playing the piano. I really did. I had no talent for it, and compounding my lack of talent was my complete lack of interest. Naturally, I did not spend a lot of time practicing. There was a problem though. Every Tuesday we’d have to go for our weekly piano lessons with Mrs. Lin. I was going to be exposed as I had most likely not practiced all week. This also meant that, if we were going home directly after the lesson, my mother was going to be pretty angry. ...

Luis Hernandez always said the campus was alive. Not in a mystical way, like those poetry professors liked to pretend, but in a practical way. It breathed through the ventilation ducts, groaned when it rained too much, and buzzed with secrets. And Luis? He was the guy who kept it running. If the campus was a body, he was the immune system—quiet, unnoticed, cleaning up messes no one wanted to see. ...

After that dinner, I did something I hadn’t planned: I started asking around. Not to argue. Not to debate. Just to understand where people stood on DEI. And what I heard surprised me—sometimes more than the dinner itself. Some echoed my classmates almost word for word: “I want the best person for the job. I don’t care if my fireman is diverse—I care if he can put out a fire.” ...

Prologue: A Gentleman in Transition The University library was quiet except for the faint scratching of pens on paper and the occasional cough muffled behind a polite hand. Outside the mullioned windows, the university courtyard stretched in manicured symmetry, bathed in the soft amber glow of a late autumn afternoon. Freshman Percival Nigel Humphreys III sat at his usual table, his back ramrod straight and his textbook open to a chapter on international economics. The faint scent of old leather and fresh ink hung in the air, comforting in its predictability. ...

Behavioral science has given us powerful frameworks for understanding human behavior. One of the most iconic is Daniel Kahneman’s System 1 and System 2: the fast, intuitive brain vs. the slow, analytical one. But while these systems explain how we think, they don’t fully explain how we engage with behavioral science itself. Through informal conversations, cross-disciplinary reflection, and repeated pattern recognition, a new framework has emerged—one that describes how people interact with behavioral science, whether as trained experts or instinctive observers. We call it the Modal Model of Behavioral Science Engagement. ...

When I got home that night, I couldn’t stop replaying the conversation in my head. Not just the words, but the way they were said—the confidence, the condescension, the complete dismissal of any nuance. I was caught off guard in the moment, but the more I thought about it, the clearer it became: the arguments weren’t just flawed—they were rigged from the start. They hadn’t come to discuss DEI. They came to discredit it. And worse, they framed it in a way that made it impossible to defend without first unpicking their definitions. ...

This was a few weeks ago – I was out to dinner with a few friends of mine from high school. Naturally, the topic of politics came up. It was mere weeks after Trump 2.0 took office, and already, years of progress were being rapidly dismantled. One of the first casualties was DEI. A single man in power had managed to undo years—decades, really—of goodwill, hard-won policy, and cultural shift. And yet, to my surprise, people weren’t mourning that loss. They were cheering it. ...

In the frozen stillness of the North, where wind howls like the dead and ice never fully melts, the bells of Winterkeep rang only once—for the fallen. Lord Eddard Stark, Warden of the North, was dead. Betrayed not by blade, but by betrayal in the court of southern kings. His body was returned not whole, but marked—burned, fractured, shamed. The message was clear. Yet it was not silence that followed. From the moment his body crossed the gates of Winterkeep, a new sound echoed across the ice: hammer upon iron. ...

It’s been a long time since I’ve had a space to just share things publicly, without worrying about algorithms or feeling like I’m handing my privacy to Facebook. ...