As part of Boba Quest 🧋, I'm trying and reviewing a new boba shop each week whenever I have time.
I was recently walking down the street earlier this week and noticed that the location that used to be home to Möge Tea (reviewed in Jan. 2025, 6/10) had a new sign up: Arteassan.
As you may have read on the news, there is currently a blizzard hitting New York City, so I did the reasonable thing to do and hunkered down under a warm blanket went outside to try a new boba shop!
(In normal weather you can take the 7, N, W via Queensboro Plaza or E, F, R via Queens Plaza to get there but I'd wait until the weather improves!)
I ordered a Cloud Ceylon Brown Sugar fresh milk tea with regular (100%) sugar and light ice (it's cold out!). The barista said that "Cloud Ceylon" was similar to black tea (TIL that Ceylon is an old name for Sri Lanka), so I expected it to be similar to a standard brown sugar boba milk tea.
Boba: 3/4 the boba was well flavored, but just a little too chewy (not enough to be a problem but enough that I noticed).
Tea: 2/4 on the other hand the tea felt weak and not as strong as I would've liked it. I don't think it was the boba overpowering it either.
Bonus: 1/1 I'm going to give this as a pass today; it was clear they were still setting up the new shop and I don't want to penalize them for that. Plus, they were open during a blizzard! What more can you ask for? (Though to be fair, I walked past 3 other boba shops and they were also open.)
Total: 6/10, decent, but not worth getting in a blizzard. I'll probably visit it again in a month or two to get a more realistic impression.
I received jury duty summons a few weeks ago and was ordered to report to the Queens County courthouse in Kew Gardens last Wednesday (Feb. 11). Technically I had gotten this back in November for the week of Thanksgiving, but deferred it 3 months since I had travel plans then.
I have never gotten this far in jury duty in my life; I got summons once while in California but in the end they didn't even have me to come to the courthouse.
To prepare, I read someone else's blog post about their experience on a civil jury in Manhattan. Biggest takeway: allocate extra time in the morning to make it through the metal detector — I endorse that advice.
After going through the metal detector, I sat down in basically a holding room and waited until enough time had passed for everyone to arrive. They asked if anyone was not a citizen, under 18, or no longer a Queens resident (this will be important later on) and then started playing some videos (which seem to be available online in case you're curious).
I have no idea how much like marketing or testing goes into making the videos, but well, they were pretty boring. Dunno why they don't have some NYC celebrity narrate them instead of the chief judge.
Around 11ish, they start calling out names that'll be assigned to the "Tap-C" courtroom. About 60 people, including myself, are told to follow the court officer out the building and over to the criminal courthouse. And then once we get over there, he tells us that we now have a two-hour lunch break and to meet him in that same spot afterwards.
We finally get into the courtroom at ~2:45. The judge welcomes us, apologizes for only getting started after lunch, and then explains that this is a homicide trial, in which the defendant is accused of murdering someone using a knife. The trial is expected to take two weeks, which he claims is on the shorter end, and that normally it would take about a month.
Then they draw 16 names out of what was basically a bingo cage and have them all sit in the jury box. The judge starts doing a socratic lecture on burden of proof, beyond a reasonable doubt, presumption of innocence, etc. Basically all the principles I learned last semster in Criminal Law, except aimed at lay jurors.
After that, the judge ran through a questionaire with the 16 prospective jurors.
Where were you born?
What part of Queens do you live in?
Do you work? What do you do?
Are you married? If so, what do they do for work?
Do you have any kids? How old are they?
Have you ever served on a grand jury before? A trial jury?
Have you ever been the victim of a crime? Accused of a crime? Witness to a crime? Convicted of a crime?
Have you ever been party to a civil lawsuit?
Do you, or anyone you know or are related to, work for law enforcement? If so, can you promise not to discuss the case with them?
It was fascinating to hear the backgrounds of the supposedly random 16 Queens residents; mostly middle-class jobs, about half married and half unmarried. Far more from eastern ("deep") Queens and only one or two from western Queens.
One surprise when someone said "Oh, actually I moved to New Jersey last week". Like, you could've left in the morning when they asked!! You probably didn't even need to show up in the first place!!
Another potential juror said they worked for NYPD Legal, and after further questioning, explained that part of their job responsibility is notifying officers when they are being sued civilly.
One person said she wouldn't be able to handle the trial and make a fair judgement because her son had been stabbed multiple times and that she'd never be able to not consider that, it was pretty sad :(
At first I thought the defense attorney was being a little incompetent in how imprecisely she was asking jurors questions on whether they'd be able to deliver an impartial verdict, but it actually ended up being quite clever as multiple potential jurors ended up saying things that would be sufficient to get them struck for cause.
They did a second round of the 16 people being interviewed, but in the end I never even made it to that preliminary stage and was dismissed after 2 days.
Contrary to most people, I actually want to end up on a jury. I think it would be an important and exciting civic responsibility.
Around the same time, King George III censored the first edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica, requiring the removal of some anatomically correct drawings in an article about midwifery.
So when the 13 newly independent American states ratified the First Amendment a few decades later, it laid the groundwork not only for a free press but also for an encyclopedia that was not censored by an oppressive government.
Today, we celebrate the realization of that dream in the form of Wikipedia, which over the past 25 years has been collaboratively built by unpaid strangers on the internet. Wikipedia went from the source that teachers universally clamored "you can't trust it" to one of the most reliable sources in a world of "disinformation" and AI-generated slop.
Despite not being written by professional journalists (I edit it myself as a volunteer and used to work for its nonprofit host, Wikimedia Foundation), it's still able to set trends and drive narratives. For example, in 2011, Wikipedia editors started collating a list of people killed by law enforcement in the U.S., three years before The Washington Post would win a Pulitzer for its version of the same.
And for better or worse, Wikipedia is most likely the largest single source powering today's AI models. All in all, it's the largest repository of knowledge in human history.
But it's important to understand and appreciate that Wikipedia only exists because of the robust free speech and free press protections that exist in the United States.
Wikipedia has never been actively censored in the U.S., nor has any U.S.-based editor ever been arrested for their edits to Wikipedia. There's never even been a serious threat of censorship of Wikipedia by the federal government. (The FBI once demanded Wikipedia stop using its seal under a law written to stop impersonation of federal agents; Wikipedia's legal team laughed it off.)
The same cannot be said about Wikipedia in other countries. In France, intelligence operatives held a Wikipedia administrator until he deleted an article about a military radio station, under the guise it contained classified information. Agents made this demand even though the information in question wasn't classified at all and was mostly based on a documentary that the French air force had worked on and publicly released.
In India, a court required Wikipedia to remove an article about a news agency because it was supposedly defamatory. To top it off, the court then demanded Wikipedia remove the separate article that was written about the court case and removal order!
This kind of censorship shouldn't happen in the U.S. The Supreme Court ruled the First Amendment protects publishing classified information in a case about the Pentagon Papers. A U.S. court cannot order an article to be taken down, as that would be an unconstitutional prior restraint.
In the U.S., the law known as Section 230 would also protect Wikipedia from defamation claims, and instead require litigants to sue the editor who actually wrote and published the allegedly defamatory content. Those editors would be protected under the First Amendment and the high court's New York Times v. Sullivan decision, which requires defamation claims from public officials — later expanded to public figures — to meet the much higher standard of actual malice to win (nearly every biography on Wikipedia is of a public figure, by policy).
And to state the obvious, the U.S. has never blocked all of Wikipedia, unlike China (since 2015), Myanmar (since 2021), or Turkey, which did so from 2017 until an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights forced that nation to unblock it in 2020. We know of one editor, Bassel Khartabil, who was executed for their online activity, and a few others who are incarcerated in Belarus and Saudi Arabia.
Certainly, there are plenty of people in power who wish they could censor or control Wikipedia. At first, it was through editing: In 2006, a number of Congressional staffers were caught whitewashing their bosses' biographies, and, in 2007, someone at the FBI tried to remove images from the Guantánamo Bay detention camp article.
Then, in 2013, Edward Snowden leaked that the National Security Agency was illegally spying on Wikipedia readers and editors, revealing that the U.S. had adopted the same playbook as China. Wikipedia responded by encrypting all connections using HTTPS a few years later, and (unsuccessfully) sued the NSA for First and Fourth amendment violations.
It will require a concerted effort by all of us to not just maintain existing First Amendment protections, but to expand them. That's the only way Wikipedia will thrive for another 25 years.
As part of Boba Quest 2025 🧋, I'm trying and reviewing a new boba shop each week whenever I have time.
It's been a while since my last boba review, but sometimes you visit a new place that just inspires you to write about it. ChaHalo recently opened in Long Island City, right in between the Queens Plaza station (E, F, R) and Court Square (7, E, F, G, R) so I thought I'd give it a try with my sister, who was in town for the holidays.
My sister wanted a drink without lactose, and since they didn't have an alternative milk, she asked for a jasmine green tea with boba. The barista added the jasmine green tea to the order and then said: "I'm sorry, our computer won't let you order boba with this." Whaaaaaaaaat. And then, "But we could give you some boba in a separate cup?"
What kind of boba shop offers a drink that you can't add boba to? And not even like some practical issue, it's that their computer can't handle it.
I was able to order a jasmine green milk tea with brown sugar boba without running afoul of any software restrictions. (There were no other boba options aside from brown sugar.)
Boba: 3/4 the brown sugar boba was actually pretty good, well flavored, maybe just a little overcooked.
Tea: 1/4 it was...not good. It was a bit bland to the point the taste of the boba totally overpowered it.
Bonus: 0/1 sorry, our experience didn't merit any bonus points.
Total: 4/10 honestly, if they served a brown sugar milk boba (with lactose-free options!!), I think it would be near perfect.
This story has a somewhat happy ending, in that we walked to a different tea shop across the street and my sister was able to get her lactose-free boba. Stay tuned for that review!
I just finished my first semester of law school Tuesday evening...only eight more to go! People say that the first year of law school is the worst, and I certainly hope that's true.
I don't think I've ever had so much information dumped into my brain in such a short period of time. In my Liberty, Equality and Due Process (LEDP) class about the Fourteenth Amendment, I took 109 pages of notes, and for Criminal Law, 54 pages.
As a very very condensed version of what I learned, here are the study guides I made for both classes:
I cannot yet vouch for the accuracy contained on those guides yet as I haven't gotten my grades back yet, but I think they're mostly correct!
Next semester is contracts, which'll probably be immediately practically useful, and legal research, which I'm really looking forward to. I now have access to Westlaw, which is both amazing in how rich the content and interface is...and terrible how it's all locked in a commercial, private database.
There have been a lot of Zohran Mamdani thinkpieces since November 4th, and I've read most of them! But I want to add three takeaways that I really haven't seen discussed elsewhere in detail.
In the past few weeks people have talked a lot about how Obama's volunteer army fell apart after he was elected and how Mamdani campaign leaders are trying to prevent that from happening by launching "Our Time", a separate entity that can organize former campaign volunteers and keep them politically activated.
But more immediately, I think it's worth understanding that there was a specific effort to prevent a repeat of Buffalo's 2021 mayoral election in which a socialist (India Walton) upset the incumbent mayor (Byron Brown) in the Democratic primary, so Brown launched an independent campaign for the general, rallied the Democratic establishment to support him and not Walton (the Democratic nominee), winning the general by 20 points.
With that context, it made perfect sense that immediately after the primary we saw Zohran moving to consolidate the establishment behind him, including labor and elected officials. It mostly worked, just about everyone backed him except Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand. Oh and Jay Jacobs, the chair of the state Democratic party, who refused to endorse Zohran just like he refused to endorse Walton, except at least this time he didn't compare the socialist upstart to David Duke!
But I have yet to see any reporting on how many volunteers came down from Buffalo to support the Zohran campaign in the final stretch. I met a decent amount of people who were very open about why they had come to the city: to prevent a repeat of what happened in 2021.
Because of the natural-born-citizen clause in the U.S. Constitution, Zohran is ineligible to run for U.S. president. Meanwhile it was incrediblyobvious that Andrew Cuomo was running for mayor to relaunch his political career so he could run for president in 2028. That would follow the recent trend of NYC mayors running for president, including Bill de Blasio (2020), Michael Bloomberg (also 2020) and Rudy Giuliani (2008).
And of course, way too many people touted Eric Adams as the "future of the Democratic party" and a future presidential candiate. Oops, should've listened to Andrew Yang.
I think it's underrated that Zohran can't run, and so after the primary win, there was no endless dicussion of whether he'd run in 2028 or some made up hypotheticals of him vs. AOC as to who should be the left's standard bearer, etc. And, it's much easier to convey and convince people that Zohran was genuinely interested in improving the lives of New Yorkers as the mayor and not just using it as a stepping stone to higher office.
In 2024, it very much felt that Indians were moving right, with Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy rising in the Republican ranks and Kamala Harris losing. Polling indicated Asians broadly shifted right (though I didn't find anything about Indians specifically). Not to mention the backdrop of Modi's right-wing government rising in India, which undoubtedly affects the views of the diaspora.
Anecdotally, the WhatsApp forwards were getting worse.
Zohran is easily the most high-profile Indian American politician in the U.S., but more importantly, his campaign was backed by incredibly strong South Asian turnout across the board, with Indian turnout rising from 18% to 45%. To quote: "South Asians and Muslims account for just 7 percent of the city’s registered voters, yet they cast an estimated 15 percent of all ballots in the general election." The aunties are activated.
People keep repeating how this mayoral election was like none other, and I geniunely have no idea what they mean. This was my first mayoral election as a New York City resident so it's also my baseline. I expect things to only go up from here, starting with the special election for my assemblymember and then the open primary for my U.S. House district.
