Category: The Halcyon Days
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Another Excerpt from ‘Didact’
Below is another excerpt from a (somewhat protracted) short story I’m working on. Current word-count is 3000 words, of which you’ll find almost 600 below. It’s unclear how it’ll be incorporated, but it will. The lines are spoken, the words are the protagonist’s, not the narrator’s, which is not me. For the record. Now, I…
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Young, Student Entrepreneur, Discusses Getting Started
This is an excerpt from my latest piece for Flyover Geeks profiling friend and student entrepreneur Colin Young. Read the whole thing here. Of his experience at DePaul University, where he is studying computer science, Colin demurred to my (leading) questions about college. Colin, like most young people in tech, is primarily autodidactic. Young claimed…
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That Kind of Writing to Which I Aspire
For a class, I am tasked with writing a 20-25 page paper about an intellectual. My choice is one of my all-time favorite authors, one whose prose has influenced my own cognitive processing more than I’d ever like to admit.
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A Poem for a Missing Friend
Winter passes bleak and fleeting. Spring’s promise: cloying. A snowflake on a girl friend’s nose. From on high, product of grey. Still. White. Fleet, it falls and fades away. Failed accumulation: too warm for that. God’s grace, you see. The glowing. That ache? Longing for my April.
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The Upstart’s Conundrum: The Credibility Catch-22
All entrepreneurs face certain problems when they undertake new projects. All projects have considerable time costs, and often times the entrepreneur must establish credibility for him- or herself in fields where previously he or she had no expertise. How does one balance work and play given time constraints? How can entrepreneurs make others perceive them…
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A Modest Proposal
Saying that one “must have a B.A. or its equivalent to apply” is akin to signage in the early 1900s stating that “Irish need not apply”. It’s merely discrimination on the basis of social constructs, one on the basis of ethnicity and the other a basis of credibility. A further parallel can be drawn between…
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Reflecting My View of Modern Party Dance
Modern party-dance is simply writhing to suggestive music. It is ridiculous, silly to watch and excruciatingly embarrassing to perform. It is ridiculous, and yet absolutely everyone does it, so that it is the person who does not want to do the ridiculous thing who feels out of place and uncomfortable and self-conscious . . .…
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On Redefining Intellectual Entrepreneurship
The intellectual entrepreneur is one who develops, researches, discovers, or learns in order to fulfill objectives beyond the attainment of credentials, approval of peers, or furthering of career goals in a manner or process primarily outside the bounds of extant educational institutions, systems, and pedagogies.
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On Realism and Graduate School Applications
I applied and was denied admission to the University of Chicago’s Masters Program in Social Sciences summarily and without review of my application. This was, to a certain extent, expected. I am a third-year. I spoke with one of my professors, a well-known political scientist at the U of C, about my denial from the…