2026-04-20

A life that doesn't ask me to explain myself

Be obsessed with your own life

Be obsessed with your own life - by hasif 💌

This isn’t just about choosing to focus on your own happiness or goals in a selfish way. No, being obsessed with your life is a radical act of self-respect and personal ownership. It’s a choice to break free from the constant noise, to turn off the distractions, and to commit to the deep work of understanding and shaping the life that only you can live. It’s about returning home to yourself in a world that’s constantly trying to take you elsewhere.

But what does it mean to be obsessed with your own life? Is it vanity? Is it narcissism? No. It’s the opposite; it’s a recognition that your time, your energy, your thoughts, and your decisions are valuable. It’s a commitment to yourself, to your personal growth, to your values, and to living intentionally, no matter what the world around you says.

2026-04-21

Boredom

Britons are less bored than they used to be. This is bad

Boredom, says Michael Pollan, author of a book on consciousness, is “endangered”. Though precisely quantifying its decline is hard: it is not well measured. More obviously appealing emotions like happiness have international indices. More damaging ones like depression have WHO programmes. But boredom—unloved, uncharismatic—is, says Erin Westgate, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Florida and co-author of the electric-shock paper, “very understudied”.

That is changing. Like other endangered species, boredom is starting to inspire a more appreciative, even elegiac, tone among researchers. “Boredom sucks and we hate it,” says Christopher Mlynski, a researcher at the University of Vienna, but it forces us to find more “challenging things…to do”. The pain is the point. Scrolling on a smartphone, says Professor Westgate, “staves off boredom”—just enough to suppress the entrail-gnawing—but prevents “lasting, meaningful” activity.

2026-04-22

Ginsberg and Gen Z

moloch and the machines - by Adam Aleksic

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by brainrot, gooning doomscrolling bedrotting,

dissociating themselves through the enshittified ragebait clickbait looking for a dopamine fix,

nonchalant doomers repressing the AI overview of the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

who Kalshi and Rainbet and OnlyFans and Doordash sat up vaping in the ambient glow of slot-machine phones drowning in the depths of 4chan contemplating memes…

I’m not going to rewrite any more of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl because it’s already perfect. It’s impossible to read the poem without extending it to yourself and your cultural moment. We’ve all been crushed by the oppressive machinations of conformity and consumerism. What can we do but lash out in creative fury, impaling ourselves on the palisades of modernity?

Banoffee Pie

Why we’re all going bananas for banoffee pie

It's been surprisingly hard to find Banoffee pie, since I moved to Berlin. Even in Bengaluru, they were not that easy to find. The one place where I found it a lot was New Delhi.

Banoffee pie has long been a staple of home cooks, bakeries and diners. The version at Bubby’s in New York, for instance, is legendary. But with a return to comfort and familiarity in modern dining, it fits perfectly on upscale restaurant menus too. “It’s playful, nostalgic and a bit messy in the best way,” says Hawksmoor co-founder Huw Gott. “A cheeky dessert you can be sure will sell,” says Booton. 

The banoffee pie was invented in 1971 by Ian Dowding, chef at The Hungry Monk restaurant in Jevington, East Sussex. It was inspired by a San Franciscan recipe known as Blum’s coffee toffee pie but using a soft toffee made from dulce de leche, condensed milk that has been boiled in the can for several hours. “Apple was quite good, mandarin was downright disgusting,” wrote Dowding of his experiments with fruit. “But the day we made it with a layer of banana, I knew I had cracked it.” He finished the pie with coffee-flavoured whipped cream made ’70s-style with instant coffee granules. 

As baker Philip Khoury puts it, banoffee pie is a “juvenile pleasure” – he means that approvingly – based on the understanding that banana and caramel just work. But how you choose to make yours depends on your tolerance for sugar. Though whipped cream and fresh bananas are meant to ease the sweetness, Dowding considered his recipe “far too rich”. In his new book Elevate, MasterChef champion Brin Pirathapan proposes an even sweeter banoffee meringue pie made with caramelised bananas and Italian meringue that “is not for the fainthearted”.