The first quarter of 2026, in books and thoughts
What I read, what I wrote, and where my mind wandered
Dear, wherever you are reading this from, thank you for making space for my words in your inbox. This is my little quarterly round-up. It is really just my way of leaving a trail for myself. If anything strikes, I am always happy to exchange a conversation. I am noticing again that what stays with me is not always the “big” idea of a book or a myth. Most of the thinking happens in the margins.
Dispatches that went out this quarter
#1 — There is a thing called a brain. Do not stop using it. It will surprise you more than AI.
Cognitive offloading is different from cognitive surrender. And then I sit with the question that scares me most: not that the tool will be smarter than us, but that we will get used to not thinking, and call it progress.
#2 — An essay after reading John Berger’s Ways of Seeing.
Seeing is never innocent. The essay moves through that narrowing act of looking, the strange loop of being perceived, and the difficulty of carrying a fluid, ocean-like interior world into words without shrinking it into buckets. And somewhere in that struggle, I end up at why we make anything at all.
#3 — The Greek Dispatches: The war gets its first weapon, a golden apple
At the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, parents of Achilles, Eris, goddess of discord, throws a golden apple into the room. It poses a simple, public question: who is the most beautiful? Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite cannot ignore it. A wedding party becomes a contest. Zeus opts out, pushing the responsibility of judgment into a mouth that isn’t his. The apple becomes the war’s first weapon.
#4 — The Greek Dispatches: The war begins upstairs
Paris must choose between three goddesses. Each offer is a promise about what Paris gets to have and who Paris gets to be. Paris chooses what he wants most, and a private desire turns into a public war. Hera and Athena offer him futures that require a new self. Aphrodite wins because her offer doesn’t require Paris to become someone new. This essay is about the difference between becoming and admitting. About offers that change you versus offers that reveal you.
#5 — The Greek Dispatches: Let me be your muse
Zeus makes Aphrodite desire a mortal, Anchises, and the seduction turns toward fear, because beauty in Greek myth always carries danger. So I end up thinking about what desire demands of us once it enters our life. How it binds, how it makes us vulnerable, how it smuggles loss into love.
#6 — What if most of what I am preparing for never happens?
A note before you read: This is about my relationship with anxiety and imagined catastrophe, but I am writing it for anyone who has spent their days bracing for disasters that rarely arrive. If you are like me, then first for all, I understand you.
#7 — Midnight scribbles: Wanting but flinching, do you too?
I write about how easy it is to become a spectator of one’s own life, to keep preparing for living, imagining living, planning living, and still postponing the thing itself.
Thank you for being here and reading alongside me.
I will post another letter next quarter on what I am reading, writing, and thinking. Until then, take care.
Yours in thought,
Yana