About

I'm Alexander — a curious person based in the Midwest. This site is where I write about things I find genuinely interesting: history, psychology, film, ideas that don't fit neatly into a category.

I studied Cognitive Science at Indiana University, which shaped a lot of how I think. It's an odd discipline by design — it pulls from psychology, neuroscience, computer science, linguistics, and philosophy, all in service of one question: what are minds, and how do they work? I loved that it refused to belong to any single department. It gave me a framework for looking at human behavior that takes both the messy and the formal seriously.

Psychology in particular stuck with me. Not the pop psychology kind — more the questions underneath it. Why do people believe what they believe? How does memory actually work, and why does it fail in such predictable ways? What does it mean to make a decision? These aren't purely academic questions to me; they show up in how I read history, how I watch films, how I try to make sense of things.

History is the other constant. I'm drawn to it less for the dates and more for the texture — how people in different times understood their own moment, what they got wrong, what felt obvious to them that we've since forgotten. The past is full of intelligent people making choices that look baffling in retrospect, and I think that's worth sitting with.

This blog exists because writing is the best way I know to figure out what I actually think. Most posts are me working something out. I watch a lot of films and log them on Letterboxd. I'm on Mastodon occasionally.

Get in touch

Email is the best way — hello [at] alexandermervar [dot] com — or find me on Mastodon.