Hi there, and welcome to the first issue of my newsletter!
Hope you all are staying safe and social distancing—winter has set in where I am, and as I bundle up and look outside my window, I remember that it has been over a year since the pandemic began. In this issue, I will be talking about some of the resolutions I made last year that I promised I would fulfill at college, and my attempts to maintain them throughout this virtual semester.
📄 New blog posts
This month, I taught a class at Splash, MIT’s annual learning extravaganza for high-school students. It has always been a dream of mine to teach a class, in some form or another, and in this month’s blog post, I describe how I came up with a topic to teach a class on, and the learning resources I used…
At the same time, here is an update on navigating the Firehose that is studying at MIT, and some of the cool stuff I have been involved with outside of classes. There is always cool stuff to do at MIT, and I promised myself to try to do at least some activities this semester even if they took place virtually. Let’s see how that went…
🎹 Some tunes I’ve been listening to
Last year, I told myself I would diversify my taste in music when I went to college because I felt like I didn’t listen to as much music as I would have liked to that year.
This year, my playlists are the only thing getting me through my psets, and my latest obsession is The Strike’s 2017 album Faint of Heart. It has elements of pop, rock, and synthwave, although the highlights of the album for me were its thrumming basslines and cheery arps. My favorite song is definitely Economics, although I Fall Hard and Ghosts of my Hometown are close runners-up. Definitely recommend checking them out if you’re into pop/rock music!
Or listen to the album on Apple Music, if you prefer that!
📖 Reading over the break
Thanksgiving break was this week, so I took the opportunity to catch up on another of my resolutions, to try to increase the amount of reading I do, given that I have slightly more control over my life than I did in high school.
This week, I re-read Italo Calvino’s 14 definitions of a classic (listed here) and resolved to try to include more of the classics in my reading list.
Until then, however, I stuck to satisfying my craving for locked room mysteries with Paul Halter’s The Seventh Hypothesis (originally published as La septième hypothèse), which describes a bizarre crime with a very interesting solution. Check it out on Goodreads.
(PS: I discovered it through this list of the best locked-room mysteries by The Guardian—be sure to check it out if you’re fascinated by this genre!)
And that’s all for this issue! Stay tuned for more curated content on literature, music, and art, as well as more blog posts about college life.
Best,
Sagnik