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It was January 7th, 2019, when I first learned about negative capability. The setting was the second floor of the Biscayne campus at FIU, where Professor John Dufresne introduced the term in class. We learned that negative capability is the ability to remain in uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and…

I went down to Ocean Avenue on Thursday night for what felt like a clerical error in the universe. Forty degrees in Miami is a sort of cold that doesn’t belong here, though I’d be lying if I said palm fronds swaying behind neon lights didn’t look good. I had the school’s yearbook camera slung…

I asked ChatGPT to write a 200-word blog post. Instead of producing one immediately, it first gave me a list of generic suggestions: write about what you’re learning, solve a problem, share a personal experience, and so on until it reached, presumably, two hundred words. I then clarified that I wanted it to write a…

Show, don’t tell. It’s a phrase preached for over a century and most often attributed to Anton Chekhov. His general contention was not to tell the audience that the moon was shining, but to show them the glint of light on broken glass. The same idea appears in the term objective correlative, popularized by T.S.…

This isn’t about constructing a story. If it were, I’d start with motivations, characters, and let the plot unfold. But this isn’t about characters, either. It’s about humans. Everyday people creating stories in their minds just to get through the day. We assume we know what others think, but in doing so, we often craft…

As I’ve grown older, I’ve questioned traditions, institutions, and societal norms at an exponential rate. These rules of thumb and established ways of thinking often have good intentions behind them, but like anything else, they can fall short as times and circumstances change. There’s an old heuristic in chess: trade pieces when ahead in material.…

Poetry invites us to pay attention. It allows students to slow down and observe how language can be manipulated to make the strange familiar and the invisible felt. At its core, poetry is less about explanation than about experience, using words to press sound against color, motion against stillness, and one sense against another. For…

It’s often said that having a child changes a man irrevocably. As soon as your baby is born, this tremendous responsibility looms, and more importantly, you feel an immense love and gratitude for something so precious. If you’re lucky enough, you cut their umbilical cord, hold them against your chest, and feel tears escape before…

Every day, in subtle ways, fear nudges us toward cruelty. Fiction, history, and real life all tell the same story. Revisiting Steinbeck’s East of Eden, I came across commentary on Cathy Ames. She’s described as the embodiment of hatred and fear, traits the critic claimed drive human cruelty. I lingered on that thought longer than…

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