When you take a conversation to its semantic and syntactic limits then step out into the abstract — away from the expected language order — it can create confusion, frustration, and even alienation. Don’t all great films begin with no clear context or explanation? Clear storylines crystalize and take form organically through attentive observation and joint dialogue. Dialogue between the characters inside the film guides the direction, and dialogue between those watching and analyzing from outside the film expands the direction. The more shared discussions arise around the ideas, meaning, production style and original novel, the more meta-content clusters around…

Shortly after hitting the 300 book mark, my mother suggested I write book reviews and publish them in local news papers. I had three objections to this. First being, who am I to review and critique the life’s work of Nobel laureates, science giants, captains of industry, spiritual masters, and dead philosophers of antiquity. Second, I don’t believe in absolute reviews for bodies of text, with special emphasis on the poetic or philosophical kind. Like rewatching an intricately produced and well thought-out film, revisiting previously read books—like Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations or the Tao Te Ching—always highlights a new dimension of…

The world just experienced a turbulent beginning to 2020. In January alone, we witnessed a shocking rise in wild fires, acidic oceans, airborne pathogens, locust clouds, and global protest — to name a few incidents. These extinction level events are not from the Bible but from Twitter’s January feed. So you ask yourself, what can you do? Curb climate change? Change your government? Change your diet? Recycle? Start with change yourself. This cliché saying is over-posted but underrated, and I’ll go so far as to say, completely misunderstood. …

Consciousness has become, in the words of the late Marvin Minsky, a suitcase term. Like blockchain, quantum and AI, consciousness is loosely thrown around discussions without being clearly defined. When a word has many definitions (especially evolving definitions) those who ‘think’ (as Descartes famously said) they’re having a constructive conversation, slip into each others’ mental blind spots. In the primordial blind men and the elephant parable, a group of blind men come across a strange animal. Since they are blind, they rely on touch to see the creature in their mind. Groping around, one man touches an ear and says…

Psychogeography (noun): “…the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.” —Guy Debord

We have all played ‘spot the most beautiful house’ while cruising around an upscale residential area or the ‘spot the most ugly house’ version for makeshift houses that should clearly get a demolition notice. Do designers reflect public taste or create purely out of their imagination? In both cases, creation requires design sensitivity and sharpened awareness. Absorbing the environment and visualizing potential buildings is a complex and energy taxing task. …

Kuwait is a relatively small country where everything is approximately a 20 minute drive. Going outside has become a constant reminder of ridiculously obvious levels of corruption, which have penetrated all layers of government and society. The roads are falling apart and the youth are loud, rude and disgruntled. It only takes a few minutes of sitting in a public place to experience the general frustration and unruly behavior that has become a hallmark of a day out in Kuwait. Last winter it only took a few weeks of rain to expose how contractors are taking advantage of everything from…

لا يخرج التعليم التقليدي عن كونه تعليماً يصنّف العقول ويضعها في إطار من النمطية المعلبة، لتتناسب والمواقع المعدة لها سلفاً في المنظومة الاقتصادية الجاهزة. وبهذا يتم تكريس منظومة داخل منظومة وبناء أجهزة لخدمة أجهزة أخرى.

إن متاهات النظام التعليمي المعقدة التي يعاني الشباب تشابكاتها، باتت هي الطريق الوحيد والمشروع أمامهم للدخول إلى العالم الآني. معظم الهيئات التعليمية والمدارس لا تركز إلا على البُنى المعرفية والتكرار للمهام المعلوماتية، أكثر من اهتمامها بتوليد الأفكار والإبداع الخلاّق. وهذا حريّ بقتل الفضول الفطري لدى الأطفال إزاء العالم المحيط بهم، وحصرهم في فروع تخصصية ضيقة. …

The brain—with its crevasses and ravines—can resemble a scrunched up piece of paper. We work the brain daily and demand of it so much, that it has become physically compressed. When we open our minds and unscrunch the crumpled up mental paper, we unravel our thoughts and notice words on the page — those words are our deeper thoughts. This unfolding and looking deeper is how we come face to face with what’s really within us. We can’t read a rolled up or folded paper, let alone one mangled in the shape of a frustrated uneven ball. The more we…