Happy Monday!
As a young adult, every morning, I’d look forward to to Mental Floss Magazine’s ‘Morning Cup Of Links’. In a hark back to that, I want to share all the interesting things I discovered on the Internet in the past week. My fiction draws a lot of inspiration from things I read on the Internet, so this is also a bit of a window into my writing process.
I joined Substack kinda because I miss blogging in the era of Google Reader. Jorge Arango hits the nail on the head in this piece about what Google Reader stood for.
Did you know M. Night Shyamalan wrote a book? About how to improve the state of underperforming schools in America? Well, it does have a twist - all the things you know about education are wrong. Check out I Got Schooled: The Unlikely Story of How a Moonlighting Movie Maker Learned the Five Keys to Closing America's Education Gap.
The pioneer in modern exclusionary (racial) zoning was…. Berkeley, CA! Did you expect that? I didn’t. Interesting report by the Haas Institute.
India’s Prime Minister met with Chinese Premier Xi Jinping last week. The venue was Mamallapuram, which, apart from these wonderful rock-cut temples, is the home of Bodhidharma, a 6th Century Tamil prince, whose Buddhist teachings in China were what led to Zen Buddhism. I’ve been reading the travelogue of Hiuen Tsang (or Xuanzang), a 7th Century Chinese monk who traveled to India to study Buddhism at Nalanda University. It’s riveting reading. It’s available for free here [PDF link], and the main text is about 300 pages long. It’s full of interesting tidbits about ancient India, ancient China and the long-standing cultural links between them.
GIF of the week: Sparkles the Goldfish went to space!