International Women's Day 2016

Woman is intelligence, woman is power, woman is love.

Women all around the world have to prove these simple truths every single day to counter the narratives that tell them otherwise.

Woman is courage, woman is strength, woman is beauty.

We must value women for all they are, not the images that we project, not the parts that we expect them to represent.

Woman is wisdom, woman is unity, woman is change.

We need to learn from women and recognize the full worth of the wisdom they share. We need to make a lifelong commitment to making equal rights and equal opportunities a reality for every woman. We need to do all we can to ensure that women control their own destinies.

Woman is truth. Woman is human. Woman is everything she wants to be.

Happy International Women’s Day!

QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter

What better way to relax during the long weekend than to learn a little bit about quantum electrodynamics? While this book hardly deals with the mathematics behind the theory, it offers an accurate and comprehensive overview of its underlying logic. As usual, dealing with the mysterious workings of nature under Richard Feynman's unique approach is an exciting adventure. It's a great opportunity for a layperson to partake in the counter-intuitive beauty of quantum physics and explore the quirky (or should I say quarky) nature of things. The book will no doubt change the way you look at the world and most of the phenomena that constitute our everyday reality. And of course, I cannot omit the fact that this book is based on the lectures Feynman read at UCLA, a place so dear to my heart.

6 Not-So-Easy Pieces (from 'The Feynman Lectures on Physics')

This book should be called ‘6 Relatively Easy Pieces’, if you know what I mean! Anyway, this is pure excitement. If you’re not daunted by a few formulas here and there and seeing an integral or a derivative doesn’t send your mind spinning somewhere into outer space, you should definitely go ahead and learn something about space-time and special and general relativity. May the force be with you, and don’t forget to conserve the momentum!

6 Easy Pieces (from 'The Feynman Lectures on Physics')

Here's a brief and simple introduction to modern physics, very beautifully and elegantly written by Richard Feynman. Considering the scope of the book and the level of the material, not much has changed in the last fifty years to significantly affect the contents.

The collection consists of six easy pieces taken from 'The Feynman Lectures on Physics'. What I appreciate most about the book is that it implicitly reveals the underlying philosophy of physics and natural sciences in general. It is a very honest approach that is rarely encountered in academic texts. Apart from this, Feynman's flair for finding excellent illustrations to explain some of the most difficult concepts in physics is unparalleled and makes the book a veritable source of excitement for students and teachers of physics alike.

Every once in a while I feel obliged to unchain the wild math and physics loving animal that lives inside me and indulge its insatiable desire to whisk me away into a joyfully unrestrained all things nerdy fun-a-palooza. Although that curious beast mostly appears to lie dormant, it is always there; and the sheer joy that this book generated within the deepest layers of my being is the best proof of it.

I sometimes pine for the old days when I studied math and was on my way to being able to fully grasp the general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. Yet apparently that simmering desire to dedicate my life to such endeavors has never been strong enough, for I do not regret the decision to depart from that field. Incidentally, it is a very timely occurrence that I read this book at the time when due to my withdrawal from the idealistic quest to understand the essence of objective reality my intellectual and philosophical superposition has largely collapsed into the probabilistic triumph of reductionist perception of the world as neatly shaved by the Occam's razor. This last sentence may appear to be a joke, but I most likely mean it.

Bad Feminist

I finally read ‘Bad Feminist’ by Roxane Gay. I thought I knew what to expect from the book because I had attended an event dedicated to it back in October, but it turned out to be somewhat different, even better than I thought it would be.

The essays span a wide range of topics and invariably offer keen insights into the state of our society, popular culture and politics striking an unlikely balance between being poignantly thoughtful and sarcastically humorous. Roxane Gay has a lot to share, and it’s definitely worth your time, especially considering the fact that it has a very pleasant cadence that makes it a quick read. In addition to addressing a slew of long-standing issues, she seems to have been one of the first to start a number of conversations that have become more or less mainstream today. Either that, or I wasn’t paying close attention before.

And it’s also very meaningful to have had this book signed by the author. I remember how she read some parts of the book and shared a few personal stories at the event. These memories made for a really interesting and rich reading experience.

[Originally posted on Facebook on February 27, 2016]

Malcolm X's speeches

There's so much to learn from Malcolm X. His speeches are the best window into his personality, his time, our time. And they're also a call. A call to those who see what's going on around to act and to create the world where all human beings have and can exercise their unalienable rights, by any means necessary.

[Originally posted on Facebook on February 22, 2016]

Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

‘Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom’ by bell hooks is by far the most intellectually engaging and exciting book I’ve ever read.

Somehow I was able to recognize the fundamental impact of education at an early age. For me the notion of education is invested with a sanctity that I have never bestowed upon anything else. And to my great disappointment, as years went by, almost every encounter with real-life education that I’ve had has proven to be a sacrilege, a betrayal of the lofty ideal that I had in mind.

It may be easy to criticize something, yet it’s not so easy to see where it went wrong. What’s even harder is to figure out how to make it right. bell hooks does an amazing job identifying everything that makes education so crucially important and deconstructing this complex concept into a number of key components.

Education is a living thing that not merely interacts with but is informed and shaped by our society at large (along with its constructs of race, gender and class) and our individual experiences and perceptions in particular. Many of the ideas highlighted in this book have been on my mind for a long time, others are new, but regardless of that, I don’t think I was able to organize them in my head so neatly and so accurately. And obviously bell hook’s experience of teaching and engaging in feminist and critical thinking enables her to see well beyond the horizon that circumscribes the field of education for most people, students and teachers alike.

At the same time her expertise is not used as a basis for exclusion, but rather it is used to embrace the diversity of opinions, to promote dialogue and to commit to the sharing of ideas. This work is an invaluable foundation for both the theory and practice of education that binds them together, that challenges and transcends the notion that their dialectical interactions annihilate their unity.

I am confident that this book has the power to inspire students and professors to commit to education as the practice of freedom and I can only imagine how much more exciting our world can be and how much more we can achieve once we align our values and practices with this approach to education.

As a side note, I want to give credit to those professors who reinvigorated my belief that education can and should be a truly formative and inspiring experience. I encountered these professors during a brief but absolutely amazing stay at UCLA and they helped restore my faith in education and my passion for studying. Thank you Prof. Libby Lewis, Prof. Melvin Rogers and Prof. Fred D’Aguiar.