Alright, looks like we’re cutting the five-parter short. The powers that be have decided that NYU Local isn’t the venue for trying to build a several thousand-word philosophical argument from the ground up. After giving it some thought, I agree. So in the interest of not exhausting Suri, Lily and Jess’s indulgence any further, I’m going to cut to the chase. For anyone who wants to check out the expanded version, I’ll likely be elaborating on my personal blog in the coming days.

Anyway, here’s where I was headed: Our generation stands at a gigantic fork in the path of history, and we–by which I mean the readers and staff of this blog–can influence which way it goes. Regardless of how we all got here, we are privileged; we are the residents of the first world, attending a fairly prestigious university. Many of you also have pretty significant personal wealth. All of us have the time, education, and resources to make a substantial impact in various ways, and we happen to be at a point in our lives where we have to luxury to spend a lot of time reflecting on how best to use that opportunity. The luxury and, I would argue, the obligation.
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Part 2 of a 5-part series. Part 1 can be found here.

I have a pretty ambiguous relationship with truth and meaning. That’s probably not the sort of thing a journalist should admit outright, but then again if you think you don’t have an ambiguous relationship with truth and meaning, you’re probably kidding yourself.

The difficult thing about that ambiguity–and the reason why it’s usually just easier to ignore it–is that it makes some of the first questions the hardest ones. I’m talking about the big, abstract stuff, like the nature of good, truth, causality, etc. Those weren’t the questions I was asking when I first got here, but the more I confronted that ambiguity, the more I felt like I was being dragged back into them.

I actually started as a Politics major with a vague idea that I would double-major in Journalism. But I soon decided that journalism was something I could learn better in practice, and grew dissatisfied with an introductory Politics course that focused almost entirely on game theory and the how of Politics. Right off the bat, I felt the tug of the, “But why?” It seemed to me that the harder and more important questions were about normative, ethical claims–not how to enact a policy, but if that policy is even just–and that was outside the departments field of study.
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Given that I am the resident crown prince of tl;dr, I suppose it’s only fitting that the first draft of my last ever NYU Local post was over 1,800 words long. As a result, the powers that be elected that in the second draft I should divide it up into five parts to be spread over the course of my last week here, probably not realizing that would only compel me to expand it even further. I hope you guys will stick around to read the whole thing; if there’s one thing I’d like people to take away from my time here, it’s this.

Speaking of my time here: Last week, I told a fellow NYU student that I write about politics, and he asked me what field I was interested in. I was tired and not all there, but even so my response was pretty dumb. It something like: “I’m a Philosophy major, so I’m, uh, interested in ideas? And the, y’know, the progress of ideas.” Then I mumbled something about Nixonland.

The subject changed quickly, but the fact that I couldn’t answer the question properly kind of freaked me out. It stuck with me for the rest of the night, and so on the subway ride home I started asking myself a different question: Wait, so what have I been blogging about for the past two and a half years? This series of posts is an attempt to provide a satisfactory answer.
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