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Just found my next phone! But have to wait until summer for it to launch. Samsung Galaxy S3 smartphone unveiled http://t.co/TUjqcfsN #

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Probably the last #colgateday I get to celebrate at @colgateuniv, but definitely not the last one I will celebrate in life. #

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My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Reading this book breaks my heart. As someone who was born in China and has spent the last four years in an American university, I can truly appreciate the stories that Iris Chang was telling in this book. Some of the stories happened in the distant past, yet somehow they still feel so familiar, the wounds so raw and the sufferings so personal. What this book managed to construct is the complex and diverse history of a group of people, who despite such complexity and diversity ultimately pursue the same dream: to make a better life for themselves and for their families. And the foreign land where they imagined their dreams would finally be fulfilled is also the same land where their dreams eventually get dashed, at least for some of them, at least for many of them.

The Gold Rush. The Transcontinental Railway. The Chinese Exclusion Act. The often bloody history of American Chinatowns. The “Model Minority”. Behind each and every one of them are names that I could not forget – they are the names of pioneers, heroes and victims, they are the names of many people who came before me so that my own dream of making a better life will somehow become more likely to come true.

And then, like any story in history, there are always those whose names will never be recorded or remembered. Nameless lives. Nameless dreams. Nameless deaths. It is to these people that this book pays its ultimate tribute – an ode to their lives, a song to their dreams, a psalm to their deaths, which will never be in vain and which shall never be forgotten.

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My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Very often we encounter a fictional work whose story holds promising potentials that are unfortunately vandalized and mutilated by subpar writing (I am looking at you, The Hunger Games). Lolita is the direct opposite. The story, to most people, would seem inappropriate – a sentiment that I actually found myself disagreeing with, especially as I was coming towards the end of the book (I will elaborate on this later). But no one could deny the sheer beauty and power of Nabokov’s writing. This is a completely word-driven book in which the plot plays only a secondary and servicing role – a form of literary art at its purest form. Like a Color Field painting, Lolita is a masterpiece whose brilliance shines through the wonder of the language itself. Nabokov himself called this book his love affair with the English language, and through Lolita he demonstrated how magnificent that love affair could be.

This is not to say that the story of the Lolita is bland. It is not. But neither is it “inappropriate” or “pornographic” as most people claim. The sense of inappropriate-ness and pornographic-ness only comes about if one were to examine this book in light of social conventions and conclude that the theme exemplified by the story or the idea advocated by the author somehow violates and does violence to such conventions. But to do so is to “pre-read” the book or to cage the book within one’s own mental world before even opening the first page. Instead, this book should be examined as a self-contained and standalone world in and of itself, with no attached social or moral implications. Doing so will allow one to realize that the story, far from being inappropriate or pornographic, is in fact very banal, that it is nothing more than the heartaches of the beloving and the beloved as well as the journey of the aging and the aged, that it talks simply about one person’s or maybe two people’s or however many people’s love-leeching life and desire-driven death. Because of that, Lolita is a tragic tale, but tragic in the everyday and everybody sense. Because of that, we all start to see ourselves in Humbert Humbert and Dolores Haze – or more scary still, we start to see Humbert and Dolores in ourselves.

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My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It doesn’t happen very often that when one finishes reading a book, one could instantly recognize it as a masterpiece and a classic. Nor is it usually the case that when a book comes to an end, one feels they have been profoundly and eternally changed by the book. But both things happened to me as I reached the final page of this wonderfully written book by Kahneman.

As a double major in Psychology and Mathematical Economics, I could instantly recognize the theoretical implications that this book will surely have in both fields as well as the practical implications it will exert in both the private and the public life. Despite Kahneman’s repeated warnings against making predictions in an unstable environment, I am confident that decades later this book will become the Wealth of Nations of behavioral economics. Why? Because the idea presented by Kahneman is incredibly simple – that intuitions are not always accurate and people do not always behave rationally. But sometimes the simplest ideas are also the most powerful, especially when they are backed up by both common sense and empirical data. And in this case, Kahneman’s simple idea will without a doubt wreck irrevocable havoc in the field of economics.

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