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It took me years to understand that the boys who tormented me in college didn’t feel powerful, didn’t see their antagonism as oppression. I was even louder and more brash back then than I am now. I walked into any given room performing confidence in ways that completely obscured my insecurities. I …

For most, Silicon Valley is at a distance, a far-off land of imagination brought to you by the likes of David Fincher and HBO. Progressive values demand empathy for the poor, and this often manifests as hatred for the rich. But what’s missing from this mindset is an understanding of the local perce…

The engine of the global economy should be investment. Investment in what? In people. Not in paper — stocks, currencies, and so on. But real investment in human lives. Whether hospitals, schools, universities, public healthcare systems, transport, research, and so on. Money should be pouring into i…

For one thing, insisting that certain types of clothing, activities, food, etc, can only be worn, mastered or enjoyed by certain peoples can only serve to divide and alienate. Condemnation of dreadlocks on non-blacks, yoga practised or taught by non-Indians, Chinese food chefs who aren’t Chinese, c…

When you’re a child trapped in a situation of physical or psychological deprivation, you learn shame as an efficient, elegant mechanism of survival: Shame at once shields you from the reality that danger is out of your control (since the problem is not that you’re unloved and deprived, it’s that yo…