I know I haven’t been updating this blog because I’m too lazy. Years 2 and 3 have been an exciting flurry of business (both work and busy-ness). I constantly spew bite-sized thoughts that stream into my mind on Instagram Stories anyway, and I am remarkably easily bored and excitable, so longer, more considered pieces on Blogger aren’t sustainable. I digress. Many exciting life updates! I’m now officially done with my undergraduate PPE programme at King’s College London. I loved every bit of it: the depth, rigour and intellectual intensity of the course, the international student community, the bustling city of London and all the travel opportunities around Europe. Words can’t do justice to the profundity of the experience. In typical Quincean fashion, I milked everything I could out of the three years: went to Cumberland Lodge (for free) as a photographer with the Philosophy Department in Years 1 and 3, clinched the Principal’s Global Leadership Award (PGLA) in my second year (spending...
Before enlisting, I told myself to balance NS and my intellectual commitments. Faithful to that end, I thoroughly treasure and enjoy the little vignettes in camp when I manage to squeeze in a few pages of reading before physical training or after meals. I am currently halfway through Patrick J. Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed , a book which Deneen himself says “has received remarkable attention for a work in political theory” given its publication in 2018. Unfortunately, I will take a three-week hiatus as I embark on a 19-day leadership course at Outward Bound Singapore tomorrow. I will probably finish the book before April, but that is subject to the inevitable vicissitudes of life. (I am a conscript after all.) Nevertheless, I have grasped the key premises Deneen lays out in the first half of the book. I feel that these premises are strong and sweeping enough to undergird the whole text, but of course that depends on what he has to say in the second half. I think Deneen’...