A place for me to dump my thoughts — posts about tech, innovation, culture, and social change, along with personal essays and creative pieces
In the first chapter of What Is To Be Done?, Lenin begins to introduce his theory-centric vision for the shape of Russian Social-Democratic struggle. In the second chapter, Lenin i...
Edyfi is a house of young techies with shared traits of curiosity, bias towards action, and "recursive self-improvement." These values are par for the course in tech: they signify ...
February 18, 2021
The purpose of journalism is to disseminate a rigorously objective documentation of what happens in the world, without inserting the journalists' or any institution's biases, leavi...
The structures and constructions by which people are discriminated against in today's society are numerous. Oppression based on race, gender, sexuality, ability, and other systems ...
February 14, 2021
The streets around us are dark and quiet, but we whirl around them a nucleus of yelling and music, the energetic nonchalance of youth in glowing orbit around us. The Utah roads, in...
February 13, 2021
Investing in "the next unicorns before they are unicorns" is the goal of every investor, but Victory Square Technologies CEO Shafin Diamond does it in a way that's excitingly inspi...
February 9, 2021
Spontaneity and Consciousness Lenin refers to two concepts in this second chapter: spontaneity and consciousness. Spontaneity is what drives actual working-class protests. Worker...
Run npx create-next-app \[your-project-name] -e https://github.com/wwsalmon/next-tailwind-typescript-example. That's it. cd into your project and get to work with Typescript and T...
January 28, 2021
Two days ago, I scheduled a call with Brandon,\[^brandon] asking to brainstorm together about research questions/directions for my space solar power research. In the past week or ...
January 28, 2021
Lately, I've been writing quite prolifically. I've published sixteen blog posts in the last 28 days, with content ranging from personal essays, to frameworks for productivity, cult...
January 27, 2021
At the turn of the 20th century, while Western Europe had industrialized and instituted democratic or constitutional governments, Russian peasants labored as serfs under the rule o...
"Being black should not influence a political view," reads one prompt in Jubilee's "Black Liberals vs Black Conservatives" video. All three conservatives step forward in agreement...
A week ago, I had an amazing conversation with Brennan and a few others at Edyfi. You know the type: it went on for hours, flowing powerfully from Taleb's essays about black swans,...
Brennan struggles to turn his beautiful tangles of thoughts into writing. Why? we inquire. Brennan expresses his admiration for my drive to just do -- I had written an article abo...
January 8, 2021
Brennan's vision for a reformed education system: teach kids the skills and mindsets they need to succeed in life -- finances, networking, exponential growth, and other basic knowl...
January 7, 2021
We remember the beginnings and ends of things best. The meaning I was compelled by to write in this moment belongs to this moment, and not the year 2020, or its events. Yet, by boo...
January 2, 2021
"My name is Samson. I'm part of a program called TKS, a human accelerator that trains high schoolers to impact billions. The first year of the program focuses on emerging technolog...
January 2, 2021
Cold reachouts are an important skill to have. When thinking about learning and careers, it's easy to get caught up in classes, qualifications, and applications. But the most power...
January 2, 2021
I didn't understand mental health until this year. My parents didn't teach me about mental health. I haven't thought too much about the roots of their parenting philosophies and w...
Physical space doesn't exist; it is only a construct of the mind, created out of experience. Time doesn't exist either. It is also a construct of the mind, arising from collected ...
December 25, 2020
7 PM tonight was an important time for a friend of mine. This was someone who was very college-oriented, but also straight up the smartest person who I'm close friends with, who I...
Browsing through music in Spotify — unsatisfied by a racing Mendelssohn piano piece — I find my way to a playlist of Chinese EXO songs (inspired to search for by Riku having Jay Ch...
November 24, 2020
November 22, 2020
September 27, 2020
Recently, I've been thinking a lot about how I should think and act to steer my life in a purposeful direction — "maximize the potential of your life," as TKS co-founder Nadeem Nat...
“How are you feeling?” I asked a senior friend around this time last year. “Everything has an added weight to it,” he replied. “Heavy with the thought that everything I do might be...
I’ve been working through the serverless-stack.com tutorial. It’s awesome, teaching you how to set up an AWS backend, React front-end, and now is going through CI/CD through Seed. ...
Thick foam. Support — pedestal for a statue. On a webpage, a store shelf; a box, a bag, a shoe rack, a pair of feet. Rubber soles. Carpet, concrete, asphalt, grass, gravel. Wings ...
April 30, 2020
Talking with a friend about how things are falling apart, how we might not be able to return to campus for the rest of the term; me realizing just how many opportunities are vanish...
March 13, 2020
Talking about Coronavirus, confrontation with the possibility of death or the death of a loved one, and the emotional pain caused by having higher desires and ambitions ripped away...
March 13, 2020
I sat on the floor of my room, eyes closed. My brain was filled with noise, with random thoughts and anxieties throwing themselves all around. “Clear, clear,” I thought, trying to ...
A label Tessa and Kelly came up with for me, because I have so many platonic one-night stands.\[^def] Sure enough, I had platonically “fucked,” without entering into a close socia...
Searching for a study space with sight of the clear afternoon sun, Maxwell and I end up in the back stairwell of the library. Tucked between the furthest back study rooms, the stai...
February 13, 2020
Sitting in a coach bus — "the nicest I've ever seen," says Christina — my relphil reading on my lap in front of me, wearing sleek purple-blue Nordic gear up top down to ugly sweatp...
February 13, 2020
There’s a simple joy to folding clothes. At 2 AM, I descended to my room only to find the pile of unfolded laundry I had left on my bed. I was dismayed at not being able to sleep s...
February 13, 2020
An apology through email holds up as an admission of guilt in a court of law. As soon as you apologize, it's over. I spent the whole time fighting. I didn't apologize because I b...
Have a question about my work? Want to work together? Don't hesitate to reach out!
Email me at hello@samsonzhang.com, or message me on Twitter @wwsalmon.