Selected research and essays on infrastructure, technology, and culture. Each entry includes the argument, evidence, and takeaway.
// WRITING_ARCHIVE
11 selected
[ 001 ] · sep_2026
business course — visionary leadership & futurism
business_profile
Walt Disney: Architect of Imagination
A researched business-leader/futurist profile poster on Walt Disney — his upbringing, the founding of Disney, his value proposition, the conditions that enabled his success, his definition of success, competitive differentiation, and lasting impact. Primary research across multiple sources was synthesized into a structured brief, then an engineered generation prompt produced the final poster design.
→ He didn’t predict the future. He built the tooling, the ownership, and the financing needed to ship it.
Walt DisneyBusiness LeadershipFuturismAI-Assisted Design
digital infrastructure 101 — the hidden foundations of the internet
article
What IRIS Actually Fixed
Iceland’s third submarine cable gets the credit for the country’s swing from crypto mining to AI infrastructure. Drawing on a cable-by-cable inventory, investment records, and energy data, this piece tests how much of that credit the record actually supports.
→ IRIS removed the constraint — it didn’t create the demand. Generation and transmission now decide how far Iceland scales.
Digital InfrastructureSubmarine CablesData CentersEnergy
creation, creativity, and origin stories in modern greek literature and film
literary_analysis
Cohesion and Collapse: Sophocles Against Freud
Freud’s Totem and Taboo argues that guilt, taboo, and the authority of the dead are the forces that found civilization. Reading Oedipus Rex and Antigone against that model, this essay tracks the same three forces through Thebes and finds them doing the opposite of what Freud predicts.
→ Freud was right about the forces — guilt, taboo, the dead — but wrong about the outcome. In Sophocles they don’t build order, they dismantle it, twice.
creation, creativity, and origin stories in modern greek literature and film
literary_analysis
The Weight of Remembrance in Poem 3 of Mythistorema
A close reading of George Seferis’s Poem 3, which opens on the command “Remember the baths where you were murdered.” Tracing the poem’s shift from an unidentified second person to a private “I” holding a marble head, this essay reads memory as something imposed on the speaker rather than chosen.
→ By the poem’s end the speaker isn’t holding something broken — they are the broken thing. Seferis stages remembrance as coercive and inescapable, a burden that has to be carried alone even when the past it draws on is shared.
PoetryGeorge SeferisClose ReadingModern Greek Literature
Parenting Across Cultures: A Comparative Analysis of Asian American and European American Styles
A sociological comparison of Asian American (authoritarian) and European American (authoritative) parenting, using Chao’s concept of “training,” Kim’s racial triangulation, and cross-cultural research to argue that Western frameworks mislabel disciplined, collectivist parenting as simply harsh.
→ Neither style is superior, just differently rooted — Asian American parenting’s structure and discipline function as intentional care within a collectivist framework, not the deficit Western-centric labels like “Tiger Mom” assume.
SociologyCultural ComparisonParentingAsian American Studies
newspace economy — team startup investment proposal (group 3)
business_proposal
Qubital: In-Orbit Quantum Processor Fabrication
A group investment proposal (written with Group 3 teammates) pitching Qubital, a startup that 3D-nanoprints quantum processors directly in orbit to exploit microgravity, vacuum, and radiative cooling — advantages no terrestrial cleanroom can replicate. Covers technical feasibility, target markets (defense, pharma, AI), competitive positioning against incumbents like IBM and Infleqtion, and a staged revenue model.
→ Qubital’s moat isn’t better qubits — it’s the only proposal combining in-orbit fabrication with space-native operation, a category no terrestrial quantum incumbent or existing orbital-manufacturing startup currently occupies.
audiobiography — musically expressing group identities
personal_essay
Audiobiography: Musically Expressing Group Identities
A personal reflection told through three songs, each tied to a group identity: “Eye of the Tiger” and the running community built through marathon training, “Still D.R.E.” and the West Coast hip-hop culture that bridged a childhood in Korea to Central LA, and “Way Back Then” (from Squid Game) and pride in Korean culture reaching a global audience.
→ Music doesn’t just soundtrack identity — it does the work of belonging, bridging communities (a marathon field, a new city, a home culture) faster than shared language or background ever could.
To What Extent Was the Rodney King Incident the Main Contributor for the LA Riots?
An IB History Internal Assessment weighing the 1991 Rodney King beating against LAPD-community tensions, Korean-Black community conflict, and judicial discrepancies (the Simi Valley venue, the all-white jury, the Soon Ja Du verdict) as causes of the 1992 Los Angeles riots.
→ The beating was a catalyst, not the root cause — systemic discrepancies in the judicial system, layered on years of LAPD violence and Korean-Black tension, did the most to make the riots inevitable.
UC Berkeley SCANDIN 160 — Scandinavian myth and religion
literary_analysis
A Comparative Study of Thor and Thorstein
A close comparison of Thor’s trials in Gylfaginning and Skáldskaparmál against the saga hero Thorstein Mansion-Might, tracing how the same mythic pattern — a hero entering a dangerous realm and besting its guardians — produces two very different protagonists.
→ Thor wins through raw, reactive strength that is also his flaw; Thorstein wins through alliance, strategy, and Christian moral clarity. The shift in what counts as heroic tracks Scandinavia’s conversion from paganism to Christianity, not just a change in taste.
IB Mathematics Analysis and Approaches HL — internal assessment
research_paper
Are There Other Methods of Evaluating the Determinant of a 3×3 Matrix?
An exploration comparing three ways of computing a 3×3 determinant — cofactor expansion (the standard US approach), the Rule of Sarrus, and a Russian-taught diagonal method — then attempting to derive a personal method and verifying it against the determinant-of-a-transpose identity.
→ Every method — American, Russian, or self-derived — reduces to the same six-term expansion. The value of having several isn’t a better answer, it’s a clearer view of why the formula has to look the way it does.
How Does Anchee Min’s Allusions to Poetry Reflect Communist Values in Red Azalea?
A close reading of the poems and songs embedded in Anchee Min’s Cultural Revolution memoir — Mao’s own verse, the labor-camp anthem “My Motherland,” and the folk tale “A Wolf in a Sheep’s Skin” — tracing how each one launders exploitation, enforces conformity, or stages the paranoia of a surveillance state.
→ The poetry in Red Azalea isn’t decoration — it’s the mechanism. Each embedded verse reframes exploitation as virtue, which is exactly how Min shows ideology getting inside a person rather than just being imposed on one.