Hi, I'm Kunaal

I'm interested in how things actually work, and why they stop working. My day job requires simplifying complexity; here I do the opposite: I look for complexity in things that pretend to be simple.
The throughline is human collectives. How they rise, ossify, decide, act, adapt, and collapse. I read geopolitics, history, psychology, and anthropology trying to figure it out.
In a different life, I’d be an academic or a diplomat. In this one, I keep lists of the hole-in-the-wall restaurants from Tashkent to Tbilisi to Tijuana, watch UCLA lose football games at 3 a.m. from the other side of the planet, and irreverently debate irrelevant minutiae over an irresponsible number of beers. I'll pick one dish and make it obsessively until it's perfect; then never touch it again.
This is where I think out loud: ideas I’m still figuring out, and the ones I’ll probably abandon before they harden into anything resembling a conclusion. We'll see.