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I Set Out to Organize 155,919 Photos. I Ended Up Organizing Memory
I had 155,919 photos spread across five devices. Three iPhone exports, a MacBook backup, folders from a Vista laptop I haven’t touched since 2012, and whatever survived a Windows XP machine that once lived under my desk. All of it dumped into a clunky hard drive carrying years of documents and memories. I wanted them…
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My First AI Boo Boo
I should have known better. I am, after all, the woman who slid down a snowy road and walked up to her home in a snow storm. The pattern is clear: Lakshmi plus technology plus overconfidence equals wreckage. Here is what happened. I was redesigning my website. The plan was simple. Consolidate everything on Substack…
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Subject to the Jurisdiction Thereof
The courtroom seats filled early this morning. The president sat in the gallery, a first, as if the question of who belongs required his physical presence to adjudicate. Outside, cameras. Inside, two hours of oral argument over five words in the Fourteenth Amendment: subject to the jurisdiction thereof. My three daughters were born in the…
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I Made the Song from the Novel
The song in A Star Keeps Its Distance has a name: Asteroid B-612. It was always meant to be heard. So I gave the lyrics to an AI music generator and told it: K-pop R&B, deep male vocal. What came back was close enough to feel like recognition.
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Claudette
I am sick. My body hurts. Whatever is going around hit me hard. Laddu woke me at six. All I wanted was to curl up and cry. Instead I woke, made her lunch, sent her off, and sat in front of my laptop. My heart rate is high. In front of me is a cup…
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A Fresh Start, and an Apology
If your inbox was flooded with old posts from this site over the past few days, I owe you an explanation. I consolidated my writing from Substack back into this blog. In the process, over a thousand posts were republished at once, and the site dutifully emailed a handful of them to subscribers before I…
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What the machine finds, and what it cannot
The prologue of my memoir is five sentences long. Two paragraph-sized fragments, separated by a row of dots. A family in a restaurant turns to look at us. I hold the woman’s eyes for a moment and look away. I wish I could tell them our story. Then a section break. Then: That is the…
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The Folder Named Essays
The folder on my desktop is named Essays. Two decades of a blog, poured into one container and set in front of me to be judged. I opened it sometime last month with the intention of finding a book. What I found instead was a woman I had mostly forgotten: twenty-five, new to Pennsylvania, writing…
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I Timed This Deliberately
BTS releases Arirang today. Their first full album in nearly four years. The comeback the fandom has been waiting for. My novel, A Star Keeps Its Distance, is free on Kindle today through March 24. In June 2023, I wrote a post here called “Baby ARMY Steps.” I was a middle-aged woman walking around her…
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Agency in a Restricted World: A Deep Dive into Love Story in the 1970s
On the surface, Love Story in the 1970s is a simple tale: Fei Ni is hell-bent on attending college, and Mu Yang is ready to support the love of his life through every detour. Set in China beginning in 1975, the series follows these two protagonists as they navigate their early twenties in a country…