About this site

About this site
Straße am Stadtpark SchönebergErnst Ludwig Kirchner, 1912.

Hi! I’m Andy.

I’m currently a PhD student in Stanford’s Department of Political Science, studying Political Theory and Comparative Politics. You can learn more about me on my main site.

This site is a working notebook where I think in public. I originally created it as a companion to my comprehensive exam reading, inspired by WikiSum. It is also an ever-evolving project with two main aims:

  1. A map of ideas: Political theory is a long and recursive conversation across texts, concepts, and traditions. Linked notes let me trace these conversations across authors, works, ideas, and debates.1 This site is intended not as a comprehensive reference like the SEP, but as a reflection of the ideas I encounter both within political theory and across adjacent disciplines.

  2. A living notebook: Inspired by the philosophy of digital gardens, the notes on this site are meant to evolve over time, and their version history is public.2 Some entries are relatively polished, while many remain provisional, with mistakes, tangents, or claims I later revise. By revisiting texts and drawing new connections over time, I hope this notebook will evolve with my understanding.

Most of these notes draw from lectures, conversations, syllabi, and guidance from teachers, mentors, and colleagues. Some are also adapted from meticulous notes by Joan O’Bryan and Joseph Cloward. I am incredibly grateful for these debts, even when I do not name them individually.3

If anything on this site was helpful to you, or if you just want to chat, please reach out at hi [at] andyzwang [dot] com.

I really do think with my pen, because my head often knows nothing about what my hand is writing.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 17c

Colophon

Markdown notes for this site are first written offline in Obsidian, while backend editing is done in Pulsar. The site is compiled with Jekyll and adapted from Maxime Vaillancourt’s terrific digital garden template. Its colors are based on Steph Ango’s beautiful Flexoki palette. The body text is set in Neue Montreal, headings in Editorial New, quotations in Writer, and code in Neue Montreal Mono — all from the beautiful Pangram Pangram Foundry. All citations are Chicago Style. Source code and full version history are available on GitHub.

Except where otherwise noted, my writing on this site is licensed under CC BY 4.0. You may share, quote, and adapt it with attribution. This is a working notebook, so I can’t promise that everything here is free of errors of fact, interpretation, or judgment. Typos, too, are to be expected.

Built with love in Palo Alto — a place that sometimes, as Hannah Arendt writes, can be “an ultra-modern prison for the rehabilitation of ultra-modern criminals.”4

Footnotes

  1. Early experiments with this form include the Zettelkasten method, while graduate students of all disciplines (me too!) have loved Obsidian. ↩

  2. See, for example, Vivian Qu’s skepticism of digital gardens, which contains many arguments I also find quite compelling. At the very least, I will concede that this site is no less “performative” than the rest of my digital content. ↩

  3. When a source is public, I try to cite it directly. When it comes from private teaching or conversations, I generally do not attribute it directly, since these notes often take on a final form that others might not endorse or even recognize as their own. ↩

  4. Letter from Hannah Arendt to Heinrich Blücher, 27 Feb. 1955. As found in Within Four Walls: The Correspondence between Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blücher 1936-1968. 1st U.S. ed. Edited by Lotte Köhler. Harcourt, 2000. ↩