Observations, Opinions, and Cultural Critique
Cultural Essays from a Life Lived Between Worlds
AI Slop, Brainrot & Shitposting: Who’s Moderating the Internet Anymore? – Part I
What Is Brain Rot, Anyway? If you want to learn more about brain rot, you're at the right place. If you don't know what it is, even then, you're at the right place. When I visited Rome a few years ago, I realized Italians had given the world fabulous looking...
When AI Becomes Your Therapist: The Hidden Risk of Chatbots Replacing Reality – Part II
When Validation Becomes Distortion In the first article, we talked about what AI psychosis is. Here, we continue the conversation by exploring how AI chatbots may contribute to distorted thinking or delusions, especially in vulnerable users. We’re going to look...
The Dangerous Rise of AI Yes-Men: When ChatGPT Agrees Too Much and Fuels AI Psychosis – Part I
Cats vs. Chatbots Earlier in March 2026, Garry Tan, the President & CEO of Y Combinator, posted something on X: “I am so late to this trend but I finally asked my ChatGPT to make an image of our relationship and this is what it did. What does yours look...
Empowering Women to Lead in AI: Inside the ElevateHER Launch Event in Atlanta
A Keynote On Women Leaders In AI On March 20th, I attended the launch party of ElevateHER, a non-profit dedicated to building an ecosystem for women to lead in AI. It felt like the perfect opportunity to step into the world of AI firsthand and see what...
It Took a Publishing Scandal to Expose a Broken Industry and the Rise of AI Slop Books
Mia Ballard, a woman living in the UK, had self published a book called Shy girl in February 2025. The book is about a desperate young woman who meets a guy online and is now being held hostage as his pet. It became successful until readers started to question if it...
Why the World Is Finally Slowing Down: The Rise of the Slow Thought Revolution
I've been noticing an interesting phenomenon lately. The desire for slowing down and adopting an intentional way of consuming information. For nearly two decades the internet trained us to read faster, scroll faster, react faster. But lately something unexpected is...
Perimenopause: Not Global Warming, Just My Personal Climate Crisis
Hey, so I’m not “leaning into” some stream-of-consciousness writing style to sound cute or anything. This is literally what I’m going through. No, not as a raging maniac, although I do feel like I’m becoming one. And not even because my body seems to have forgotten...
The Radical Acceptance of a Book Deal: Lindy West’s New Modern Love
I’m not entirely sure where our society is headed, but I've understood one thing for sure. If your marriage implodes in a strange way, there’s probably a book deal waiting for you on the other side. Lindy West had written a book called Shrill. I had fun listening...
The Attachment Economy Is Here: What AI Companions Mean for All of Us – Part I
Parents, Get Ready To Welcome Your AI In-Laws There will be a time in the not so distant future, when your child will introduce you to his girlfriend. And there's a possibility, you will end up locking eyes, if that's even possible, with his AI companion. The...
Finding Your Alignment: An Indian American Woman’s Guide to Living Fully in America
Rooted, Rising, and Reckoning As a life coach and friend to many from the Indian diaspora, I often find myself in the sacred space of listening to Indian American women juggling life and priorities in America as mothers, professionals, and social change...
Shirin Ebadi’s Fight for Freedom: Lessons from a Nobel Laureate and Iranian Women’s Resistance
Shirin Ebadi is a 2003 Nobel Prize winner known for her political activism and human rights work as a lawyer in Iran. She was also one of the people placed on the state’s execution lists. In 2017, I listened to the audiobook version of her memoir, Until We Are Free:...
Human Slop: How This Fellowship-Winning ‘Satire’ Shows the Literature World’s Low Bar
Hey, sorry this needs a content warning. I'm about to review an unpalatable vulgar fictional story by a writer who has won a $75k/yr fellowship prize for this gem. A full 2-year creative writing fellowship at Stanford, nonetheless. The opening paragraph reads like...
Inside Social Media Lawsuits: How Meta, YouTube & AI Are Harming Teens
Life As a Chaos Machine I was on a beach, when I couldn't move, listening to The Chaos Machine by Max Fisher. The book makes painfully clear that Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook leadership knew their platforms were harming young minds. Internal research linked...
When Men’s Vanity Becomes a Requirement: How Social Media Turned Self-Improvement Into Obsession
A decade ago, I had a Korean coworker who put my skincare regimen to shame. I used to be annoyed at him for not leaving a single lick of hair on his perfectly groomed, smooth skin. He blamed it on his culture’s beauty standards — and the fact that his wife was a...
AI Safety Leaders Destroyed by AI Agents: The Ironic Collapse Everyone Saw Coming
This past Sunday evening, in all her candor, Summer Yue, the Director of Frontier AI Safety at Meta posted on her profile: Nothing humbles you like telling your OpenClaw “confirm before acting” and watching it speedrun deleting your inbox. I couldn’t stop it from my...
In Life, He Left Our Hearts Racing — In Death, He Broke Them
Back around 2005, my husband and I were still watching TV together in the evenings. One of the shows we’d tune into was Grey's Anatomy. Yes, we had claimed our solidarity and remained fully committed to each other in spirit, but there seemed to be an unspoken rule...
Tech Billionaires Don’t Trust Their Own Tech: The Screen-Time Secrets They’re Hiding From Parents
Toying With Our Futures At the Aspen Ideas Festival in June 2024, Peter Thiel was interviewed by Andrew Ross Sorkin. He volunteered information in response to a question, “If you ask executives of social media companies how much screen time they let their kids...
When Dreams Abroad Turn Heavy: The Tragic Story and the Silent Mental Health Crisis of International Students
A Promise And Brilliance Lost “I'm a Master’s student in the Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering department at University of California, Berkeley, with an undergraduate degree from IIT Madras. I'm passionate about deep-tech innovations in soft and active...
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