I am a high school student who is interested in talking and thinking about big ideas. I hope to end my life having given ideas to the world that somebody like me might come to respect. I'm interested in computer science, politics, law, philosophy, linguistics, mathematics, music, and literature. I'm especially interested in Catholic moral philosophy, Marxism, video games as art, and constitutional originalism in America. I'm currently pursuing a career in writing.
When I was young, I read Ready Player One and watched Michael Reeves; I was fascinated by technology and I was inspired to learn to program and hopefully carve out a world for myself inside the computer. Learning to program was my first big achievement, and it was a hugely instructive experience to me: Despite my age, I can do difficult things.
I have always enjoyed reading; I was brought up by a law school–graduate father who enjoyed debate far more than small talk. I was exposed to political discussions from an early age, and have always felt drawn to political philosophies that balance equality and freedom.
I led my school's Ethics Club—ethics being a more cooperative version of debate—to a semi-final position during the 2024–2025 school year and am now the team captain.
I'm always reading, and my library currently stands at 182 titles. My favorite authors include Thomas Merton (No Man is an Island and The Seven-Storey Mountain), James Baldwin (Go Tell It on the Mountain and the Library of America Collected Essays), John Steinbeck, Albert Camus (The Rebel and The Stranger), Fyodor Dostoevsky (Crime and Punishment, Notes from Underground, and The Double), and Hannah Arendt (Eichmann in Jerusalem).