The crowd cheered as the great painter Aurelio announced his new work to the public. On the benches below, Francesco and Aurelio’s other apprentices watched bitterly. In truth, Aurelio was not the hand behind his paintings; it was the apprentices who ground the pigments, stretched the canvases, and laid down the paint. The master arrived only at the end, signing the works with a flourish to claim them as his own. Aurelio never bothered sharing his wealth or fame. His apprenti

劳動光荣 Mark black Chinese characters above a small wooden door of a shaggy old house where my father lived as a child,  And where his parents lived when they were young,  Back when the couplets along the door were not so faded and decayed,  The walls not so stained and cracked,  The weeds in front not so overgrown,  The trees behind not so bare.  My young father stood straight in front of the front door,  Hands tucked in his new Mizuno winter coat He had bought with money he ha

Enlightenment philosopher and empiricist David Hume proposed the problem of induction. He begins by questioning causation, which is a...

The Cartesian Circle Why circular reasoning is a logical fallacy Suppose two arguments, A and B. The conclusion of A is a premise for B,...

Humans dominate Earth with advanced technology, developed governments, and unique social structures. More recently, philosophers have...

Alvin Plantinga’s defense of God remains one of the most sophisticated contemporary defenses of theism. However, Alvin Plantinga’s...

World-building is an essential part to every single fictional book, especially those with superpowers, based in space, or existing in an...

Death is a fleeting concept. Perhaps we were born crying because we knew that we would die someday in this unpleasant world. But during...

Suppose that evil exists as the denial of good. Does that disprove the existence of God? I argue that the existence of evil does not...

The bonfire, a pep rally before The Game, occurs every year, a tradition of Woodberry Forest. Like the last two years I have...

On January 16th, 2025, my paternal grandfather passed away. It was not a surprise—his brain cancer was so advanced that the doctors could...

The purpose of life seems to be obscured, and it is the nature of human kind to attempt to achieve happiness. Yet many nowadays, in their...

Today, I was having a conversation with a teacher, and at the end of the conversation, he said something I did not quite understand, and...

One summer, I served as a mentor for children at a Buddhist summer camp. On many afternoons we took the children, who were mostly eight...

Today I have finished a first revision of a short story I am working on. I added more to the background and general 'backstory' to make...

I sat in front of the piano and began my performance. I played Winter Wind Etude—one of Chopin’s grandest and most technical pieces. I...

One Saturday, at around seven or eight in the evening, I had been writing and playing piano in the art building of my high school when I...

What I think is an important part of being a person is accepting the truth. Acceptance is the first step to change a bad habit, the first...

(It's not a coincidence that this story has the same name as the Winter Wind etude. I have tried to capture the feeling of defiance as...

I have just finished my first week of my junior year in high school, and I felt that the changes I have had over the summer influenced my...