Intellectual curiosity
Anatomical plates label a head by what each part does. This one labels it by what I keep going back to. The placements are a conceit. The list is not.
Palo Alto Weekly, 39th Annual Short Story Contest · May 2025 · First place, Young Adult
A short story about my mother, our kitchen, and the arithmetic of what she gave up. The judges wrote that it caught the smells, the sounds and the essence of true motherly love in a few paragraphs.
December 2025
Through classroom observation and policy frameworks, I argue that the promise of educational technology often obscures deeper questions about attention, autonomy, and what a classroom is actually for.
December 2025
An essay on segregation, education, and the architecture of inequality. Not the fact of it, but the machinery that keeps it standing after everyone agrees it should not.
December 2025
Does systematically optimizing daily life against physiological recovery data actually make you happier? I wore the sensors and tracked the answer, which is less flattering to the premise than I expected.
Three of these live on LinkedIn and need their public links dropped in.
An essay on scarcity · 1,600 words
What a cardboard island taught me about the business of capital. Catan is not a game about settling an island. It is a game about creating value under scarcity, uncertainty, competition and dependence on other people, which is also a serviceable description of investment banking.
It ends where the analogy does: there is no fiduciary duty in Catan, no regulator, no reputational memory. A board game can model scarcity and negotiation. It cannot model responsibility.
If any of this overlaps with something you are thinking about, write to me. fyruan@usc.edu