I Am Become Jeff

Patting Your Head and Rubbing Your Stomach

Syncopation for Musical Optical Illusions

Music

Dear reader, are you familiar with the optical illusion where, if you stare at the following image of a cube for long enough, you can “trick” your mind into seeing it…

Observational Equivalence in Regional Conflicts

Non-Arab States in the Middle East’s Cold War

The World

I’m currently reading Trita Parsi’s Treacherous Alliance (Parsi 2007), and while there are many many things in it that blow my mind, one that I think is relevant to social…

What Does Depression Feel Like?

Expression Beyond Langue vs. Parole

Life

Depression

Any time I even think about vocalizing (or even worse, writing down) something “personal”, a shrill, persistent voice in my head begins screaming:

The Skycycle Blues

Art

Poetry

In another installation of, Jeff posting things on here in order to avoid ranting at friends over WhatsApp… I’m geeking over how incredible B. Dolan’s poems are. In my last…

Starting at the Finish Line

Lives of Quiet Desperation in the US Suburbs

Life

Finding My Own Voice

This is a strange post to try and write. There’s a passage in a Dave Eggers book I re-read recently (You Shall Know Our Velocity!), where the main character describes a…

A Meaningful Passage

For Someday-Parsing

Life

Chasing the Owl of Minerva

(My sloppy attempt at translation! And embedding fonts!)

The NFL Has Become (Slightly) More Boring Over Time

Sports

Entropy

Data Science

As a theme that will reappear across several of these posts, we’ll see that when we try to translate the interpretive idea of “interestingness” into a measurable quantity, en…

Visualizing Segregation in DC

Urban Studies

GIS

Segregation

Inequality

About ten years ago, Pew Research released an incredible set of maps visualizing how extreme segregation is in DC, race-wise as well as socioeconomic. A screenshot from this…