Contact me

I’m Bryan Kam, and I’d love to hear from you! I aim to respond within two days.

My other blog

The Jakarta Method
I recently finished The Jakarta Method, a new book about the dynamics of the Cold War by Vincent Bevins. Its subtitle, Washington’s…
Cultivation of the Soul
Part of a series on culture. In 45 BC, when Cicero was 61, his daughter Tullia died shortly after she gave birth. “I have lost the one…
Paper Disintegrates
Part of a series on culture. Nicholas Ostler, in 2005, wrote the impressively ambitious Empires of the Word, and in it sought to trace…
Does art evolve?
Part of a series on culture. Let’s start with the oldest book on my bookshelf that talks about origins of cultural-type things. Aristotle…
On Culture
Lately I’ve been thinking about culture in the broadest of all possible senses, including human behaviour, language, knowledge, beliefs, art…
Walking the Planck
Planck’s principle is bleak. It says that scientists rarely change their minds. Instead, they die, and younger scientists, brought up with…
Where to Start
As there are now a few hundred posts on this site I thought I’d provide some entry points to my writing. Note-taking: I wrote a post on a…
Cycles of youth
The first book that I think of when I think about youth is not the perhaps most obvious — namely Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth (which…
On Juvenescence
Neoteny, or juvenilization, is the delaying or slowing of the development of an animal. It is, at a cellular or physiological level, the act…
Serotonin and Fasting
This is a continuation of the discussion of serotonin and dopamine begun on this page. I want to talk about fasting. I’m fascinated by the…

M	T	W	T	F	S	S
		1	2	3	4	5
6	7	8	9	10	11	12
13	14	15	16	17	18	19
20	21	22	23	24	25	26
27	28	29	30	31