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What the Dashboard Doesn’t Count
Two weeks ago, I published an essay on this site called My First AI Boo Boo. It was about a website migration that had gone wrong. A consolidation of my Substack archive onto WordPress, run by an AI assistant, that had produced thirty-seven fabricated essays under my name and published them live to my site…
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Saturday Morning
I have been writing this series in my head for six weeks. In the time it has taken to draft, the conversation about writers and AI has broken open in public. I do not know how the conversation will sound by the time these posts have all been published. It is Saturday morning. I carry…
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Nobody Asked Us
I wrote Hindsight because I needed to understand something. Not to resolve it. Not to arrive at an answer I could hand to a reader neatly wrapped. I needed to understand what it costs a woman to build a life on a story she was never given in full.
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The Dropdown
The intake form asks me to select “Asian.” Tamil is a language, not a continent. A coastline. The smell of filter kaapi at five in the morning. None of that fits in a dropdown.
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Puthandu, Pennsylvania
Tamil New Year arrives on April 14. In Tamil Nadu it is a school holiday, a temple morning, a meal that takes the whole household from sunrise to noon. Here it is a Tuesday.
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All Of Twelve
She hugs me from the back, cheeks pressed to the middle of my back. I feel her warmth before I see her. When I turn and kiss the top of her head, she looks up at me, still short, barely reaching my chest, face cherubic and entirely pleased with itself. This child has been counting…
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Rini Sampath and the Weight of Hyphenation
Rini Sampath’s historic candidacy for DC mayor reveals the complex weight of diaspora representation.
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Half of Us
The survey landed in February. One thousand Indian Americans, asked to describe their lives in this country. The Carnegie Endowment published the numbers, and I read them the way I read most things about us: looking for the part they got wrong, and the part they got right. One in two reported experiencing discrimination in…
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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…