In Canada, your IP address has the right to remain silent. Elon Musk is suing OpenAI for not being Open. Apple faces a class action not allowing competitive access to backup services and the World Server Throwing Competition in March 2024 is accused of being too violent towards servers.   All this and more on the […]

The post Hashtag Trending Mar.4- Canadian police need a search warrant to access IP address; Musk sues OpenAI; World Server Throwing Competition too violent? first appeared on ITBusiness.ca.

The World Health Organization has declared mpox a public health emergency of international concern – a new variant of the virus has caused an outbreak in Central and West Africa and spread to Sweden

Yes, you can nail your own pedicure! But you'll need more than just nail varnish and toenail clippers.

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We spoke to the Conservative MP and former army officer Tom Tugendhat, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The business secretary Jonathan Reynolds has called for a change of culture at the Post Office, as he gave evidence to the inquiry into the Horizon scandal.

Dry ice is becoming an essential resource for various industries in Lakeland, Florida. Made from carbon dioxide in its solid form, dry ice sublimates directly into gas without leaving any liquid residue. This characteristic makes it a highly effective cooling solution, ideal for transporting perishable goods, supporting medical needs, and industrial cleaning. With the right […]

The post Essential Guide to Choosing the Best Lakeland Dry Ice Supplier for Your Business Needs appeared first on Chart Attack.

Ever found yourself at a party with the usual chips and pretzels, wishing for something more exciting? Well, it’s time to elevate your snacking game. There’s a world of flavors waiting to be discovered, and some of them are so unique that they belong on your bucket list. Sometimes, finding rare treats can be tricky. […]

The post Top 15 Exotic Snacks You Need to Try Before You Die – A Flavorful Bucket List appeared first on Chart Attack.

Republicans need a "bold Senate GOP leader," Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) said on Tuesday as three Republican senators -- Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL), Senate Republican Whip John Thune (R-SD), and Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) -- vie for the position of Senate Majority Leader.

The post Sen. Mike Lee: ‘We Need a Bold Senate GOP Leader’ appeared first on Breitbart.

Harvest Moon: Home Sweet Home has been a very interesting game to follow pre-release. I say this not only because …

Continue reading "‘Harvest Moon: Home Sweet Home’ iOS Review – A Great Start, but Needs More Work"

Social distancing, shelter-in-place, lockdown, quarantine:  the global coronavirus outbreak has made these terms part of daily usage. Governments and health organisations across the world are recommending social distancing. It is ...

The post Social distancing need not mean social isolation appeared first on Star Observer.

Discover the calming power of a worry stone! Learn how this ancient tool relieves stress, boosts mindfulness, and promotes emotional balance through touch.

And the Senate shouldn’t abandon its ‘advice and consent’ role.

It is difficult to disentangle Russian and Chinese scientists from international science cooperation. That is a good thing

Today’s cannabis plant is highly cultivated and incredibly potent. Treating it like a commodity, and not a testable, regulated medicine, is hurting people

Today’s guest post comes from Greg Skalicky, President, EVERSANA and Faruk Abdullah, President, Professional Services & Chief Business Officer, EVERSANA

Greg and Faruk walk through the marketplace pressures driving Direct-to-Patient commercialization models. They argue that a technology-enabled infrastructure,  combined with clinical and reimbursement support specialists, can improve  patients' access to new therapies, shorten the time to therapy, and enable better overall clinical outcomes.

Click here to learn more about EVERSANA’s Direct-to-Patient care model.

Read on for Greg and Faruk’s insights.
Read more »

Researchers around the world are working at record speed to find the best ways to treat and prevent COVID-19, from investigating the possibility of repurposing existing drugs to searching for novel therapies against the virus.

The good folks down at eyeforpharma have asked me to write a few blog posts in the run-up to their Patient Centered Clinical Trials conference in Boston this September. In my second article -Buzzword Innovation: The Patient Centricity “Fad” and the Token Patient - I went over some concerns I have regarding the sudden burst of enthusiasm for patient centricity in the clinical trial world.

Apparently, that hit a nerve – in an email, Ulrich Neumann tells me that “your last post elicited quite a few responses in my inbox (varied, some denouncing it as a fad, others strongly protesting the notion, hailing it as the future).”

In preparing my follow up post, I’ve spoken to a couple people on the leading edge of patient engagement:

• Abbe Steel, CEO of HealthiVibe, which is focused on bringing greater patient input into the earliest stages of trial design through focus groups and patient surveys
• Casey Quinlan, co-founder of Patients for Clinical Research, which aims to be a force in patient education and engagement for clinical trials

In addition to their thoughts, eyeforpharma is keenly interested in hearing from more people. They've even posted a survey – from Ulrich:

To get a better idea of what other folks think of the idea, I am sending out a little ad hoc survey. Only 4 questions (so people hopefully do it). Added benefit: There is a massive 50% one-time discount for completed surveys until Friday connected to it as an incentive).

So, here are two things for you to do:

1. Complete the survey and share your thoughts
2. Come to the conference and tell us all exactly what you think

Look forward to seeing you there.

[Conflict of Interest Disclosure: I am attending the Patient Centered Clinical Trials conference. Having everyone saying the same thing at such conferences conflicts with my ability to find them interesting.]

For people with diabetes, glucose monitors are a valuable tool to monitor their blood sugar. The current generation of these biosensors detect glucose levels with thin, metallic filaments inserted in subcutaneous tissue, the deepest layer of the skin where most body fat is stored.

Medical technology company Biolinq is developing a new type of glucose sensor that doesn’t go deeper than the dermis, the middle layer of skin that sits above the subcutaneous tissue. The company’s “intradermal” biosensors take advantage of metabolic activity in shallower layers of skin, using an array of electrochemical microsensors to measure glucose—and other chemicals in the body—just beneath the skin’s surface.

Biolinq just concluded a pivotal clinical trial earlier this month, according to CEO Rich Yang, and the company plans to submit the device to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for approval at the end of the year. In April, Biolinq received US $58 million in funding to support the completion of its clinical trials and subsequent submission to the FDA.

Biolinq’s glucose sensor is “the world’s first intradermal sensor that is completely autonomous,” Yang says. While other glucose monitors require a smartphone or other reader to collect and display the data, Biolinq’s includes an LED display to show when the user’s glucose is within a healthy range (indicated by a blue light) or above that range (yellow light). “We’re providing real-time feedback for people who otherwise could not see or feel their symptoms,” Yang says. (In addition to this real-time feedback, the user can also load long-term data onto a smartphone by placing it next to the sensor, like Abbott’s FreeStyle Libre, another glucose monitor.)

More than 2,000 microsensor components are etched onto each 200-millimeter silicon wafer used to manufacture the biosensors.Biolinq

Biolinq’s hope is that its approach could lead to sustainable changes in behavior on the part of the individual using the sensor. The device is intentionally placed on the upper forearm to be in plain sight, so users can receive immediate feedback without manually checking a reader. “If you drink a glass of orange juice or soda, you’ll see this go from blue to yellow,” Yang explains. That could help users better understand how their actions—such as drinking a sugary beverage—change their blood sugar and take steps to reduce that effect.

Biolinq’s device consists of an array of microneedles etched onto a silicon wafer using semiconductor manufacturing. (Other glucose sensors’ filaments are inserted with an introducer needle.) Each chip has a small 2-millimeter by 2-millimeter footprint and contains seven independent microneedles, which are coated with membranes through a process similar to electroplating in jewelry making. One challenge the industry has faced is ensuring that microsensors do not break at this small scale. The key engineering insight Biolinq introduced, Yang says, was using semiconductor manufacturing to build the biosensors. Importantly, he says, silicon “is harder than titanium and steel at this scale.”

Miniaturization allows for sensing closer to the surface of the skin, where there is a high level of metabolic activity. That makes the shallow depth ideal for monitoring glucose, as well as other important biomarkers, Yang says. Due to this versatility, combined with the use of a sensor array, the device in development can also monitor lactate, an important indicator of muscle fatigue. With the addition of a third data point, ketones (which are produced when the body burns fat), Biolinq aims to “essentially have a metabolic panel on one chip,” Yang says.

Using an array of sensors also creates redundancy, improving the reliability of the device if one sensor fails or becomes less accurate. Glucose monitors tend to drift over the course of wear, but with multiple sensors, Yang says that drift can be better managed.

One downside to the autonomous display is the drain on battery life, Yang says. The battery life limits the biosensor’s wear time to 5 days in the first-generation device. Biolinq aims to extend that to 10 days of continuous wear in its second generation, which is currently in development, by using a custom chip optimized for low-power consumption rather than off-the-shelf components.

The company has collected nearly 1 million hours of human performance data, along with comparators including commercial glucose monitors and venous blood samples, Yang says. Biolinq aims to gain FDA approval first for use in people with type 2 diabetes not using insulin and later expand to other medical indications.

This article appears in the August 2024 print issue as “Glucose Monitor Takes Page From Chipmaking.”

Value-based care contracting is especially difficult for behavioral health providers, Taft Parsons III, chief psychiatric officer at CVS Health/Aetna, pointed out during a conference this week.

The post CVS Health Exec: Payers Need to Stop Making Behavioral Health Providers Jump Through Hoops In Order to Participate in Value-Based Care appeared first on MedCity News.

Building trust while simultaneously building products, selling, recruiting, and fundraising can feel impossible. But it’s required whether you have the time or not, and it doesn’t stop no matter how big you grow.

The post The Trust-Building Playbook: 5 Tips Every Digital Health Marketer Needs to Know appeared first on MedCity News.

In vitro diagnostics (IVDs) play an indispensable role in modern medicine. Health care providers routinely rely on these tests—which analyze samples such as blood or saliva—to help diagnose conditions and guide potentially life-altering treatment decisions. In 2017, for example, clinicians ordered blood tests during about 45% of emergency room visits in the United States, according to the Centers...

The Public Service has expressed its commitment to implementing flexible work arrangements (FWAs) for its employees, taking into account the workforce's changing needs. In a written answer to a Parliamentary question posed by Choa Chu Kang GRC MP Zhulkarnain Abdul Rahim on Monday (Nov 11), Minister-in-charge of the Public Service Chan Chun Sing said the Government recognises the growing need for FWAs, given Singapore's demographic changes and its ever-changing demands on Singaporeans. Zhulkarnain had asked whether the Civil Service will continue to support flexible working arrangements despite some companies in the private sector requiring employees to work from the office five days a week. Grab Singapore, for example, said it will enforce its five-day return-to-office mandate starting Dec 2, reported CNA. Referencing the Tripartite Guidelines on FWA Requests (TG-FWAR), which will be enforced starting Dec 1, Chan stressed the importance of such arrangements in supporting working caregivers, encouraging workforce re-entry, sustaining labour force participation, and attracting and retaining talent.

‘India does not want to play into the hands of terrorists by shunning dialogue.'

Feb 29, 2024

Former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Ed Djerejian says Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin once told him, “There is no military solution to this conflict, only a political one.” Rabin was assassinated a few years later, and today bullets are flying, bombs are falling, and 1,200 Israelis are dead after the Hamas terrorist attacks of October 7 and nearly 30,000 Gazans have been killed in the Israeli response. Yet Djerejain still believes that a breakthrough is possible even in the current moment, as horrible as it is. Djerejian, a senior fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Relations, says the crisis has shaken the regional status quo to the point where—if the United States pursues diplomacy that includes principled pragmatism, coalition-building, and good old-fashioned backbone—a breakthrough may finally be possible. But in a recent paper he argues that any breakthrough will have to be built around a two-state solution, which he says is the only path to peace and stability not only in Israel and Palestine, but the wider Middle East. Djerejian’s career as a diplomat spanned eight U.S. presidential administrations beginning with John F. Kennedy’s, and he also served as U.S. Ambassador to Syria and Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs.  

Jan 8, 2024

Sensors, actuators, and IoT devices will enable AI to interact with the physical plane on a massive scale. The question is, how does one build trust in its actions?

Husband and father of three young children, Travis Roberts, was diagnosed with inoperable cancer. This is his story.

John Peden - #NMClientStory

This #AutismAwarenessMonth we encourage families with special needs to take steps now to plan for their loved ones� futures. Our Director of Advanced Planning, Ruthann Driscoll, discusses the importance of planning to secure long-term security and quality of life for your family. Learn more: http://u.nm.com/1AQBAsN

Viva� and Monica Potter Unleash Clean Event Video

Trust is critical, especially for a person with autism and their family. Meet the Vollmert family and get a sense of how they approach daily life and planning for a financially secure future with their autistic son, Scott. Learn more: http://u.nm.com/1AQBAsN

Gillette Children's Specialty Healthcare is launching Emojability. Learn more about this one-of-a-kind emoji keyboard app for Android and Apple.

I took a break from my craft series for a couple months. And then I handed in the first draft of a new book this week! Which means that this weekend I can finally turn my attention to writing about craft in The Housekeeper and the Professor, by Yoko Ogawa.

Yoko Ogawa's slender, stunning book, translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder, is a challenging one to use as a writing lesson, because while I can describe a hundred smart and wonderful things about it, that doesn’t mean I know how to translate its beauty into advice to other writers. It’s not helpful for me to say, “See how perfect this is? Now go do that." 

And it is that kind of book, the kind that pulls you into a narrative dream and holds you there so gently, with such soft hands, that it's hard to figure out how you got where you are. When did it happen, and how?

For me, it had already happened by the time I'd gotten to the end of page 3. And I think that the "how" has something to do with a sense of spaciousness.

What do I mean by a sense of spaciousness? Well, it's pretty hard to nail it down exactly, but I've been considering this a lot, and I think it has to do with a combination of things. One is unflowery, unfussy prose. Another is revelation of character through brief, searing lines of plot or observation. (You know those beautiful moments in books when a single sentence seems to capture the essence of a character, and just like that, you feel like you can see into their soul?) Another is a gentle, no-rush kind of pacing. Another has to do with themes that lend themselves to spaciousness. And another is the way Ogawa hooks this story into two real-world entities that have power, meaning, and spaciousness outside any book: mathematics and baseball.  

You didn't think this was going to be simple, did you? :o) The Housekeeper and the Professor is a book that seems spare and uncomplicated as you read it, but I think it's deceptively so. There's a lot packed into its 180 pages. The reader who feels suspended in a narrative dream is actually perched on top of a lot of strong, invisible foundations. Today I'll try to look at those foundations a little closer.

I'm not going to harp on the unflowery, unfussy prose, because I think you'll see that for yourself when I share examples from the text. Instead I'll talk first about the revelation of character, then get into pacing and themes, then say a little about the allusions to mathematics and baseball.

All page references are to the 2009 English-language paperback edition published by Picador.

First, a brief overview, with no spoilers: A housekeeper is assigned to work in the house of a professor of mathematics who lives in a small city on the Inland Sea. The professor, who's sixty-four, sustained a brain injury in an automobile accident seventeen years ago and lost his ability to form new memories. "He can remember a theorem he developed thirty years ago, but he has no idea what he ate for dinner last night" (5). He can only remember new things for eighty minutes. 

As a consequence, every morning, when the housekeeper arrives at the home of the professor, she's a stranger to him, as is her son who often accompanies her. And every day is predictable in some ways, yet thoroughly unpredictable in others. 

Told from the perspective of the housekeeper, the book is about the inner lives and growing relationships of four people, all of whose real names are not used: the housekeeper; her son; the Professor; and the professor's sister-in-law, who lives in the main house across from the professor's cottage. The book contains small, quiet, satisfying revelations. You learn more information about all of the characters over time. But the journey is as satisfying as the destination. This is one of those books where I wasn't reading to find out what happens; I was reading for the pleasure of spending time with the book.

Now, let's talk about character.

In the hands of a clunky writer, a character's inability to form new memories would be a gimmick. There are no gimmicks here. Almost from the first line, these are people you believe in, with thoughts and dilemmas that suspend you in a state of wanting, along with these characters, to understand what it means to be human. 

Here's how the book opens:

We called him the Professor. And he called my son Root, because, he said, the flat top of his head reminded him of the square root sign.

"There's a fine brain in there," the Professor said, mussing my son's hair. Root, who wore a cap to avoid being teased by his friends, gave a wary shrug. "With this one little sign we can come to know an infinite range of numbers, even those we can't see." He traced the symbol in the thick layer of dust on his desk.

This opening is the first of many times when the Professor embarks on an explanation of a mathematical concept. You, the reader, might immediately groan, thinking, Oh no, he's going to lecture, he's going to mansplain math… But only two pages later, on page 3, our narrator, the housekeeper, addresses that concern with this description:

But the professor didn't always insist on being the teacher. He had enormous respect for matters about which he had no knowledge, and he was as humble in such cases as the square root of negative one itself. Whenever he needed my help, he would interrupt me in the most polite way. Even the simplest request—that I help him set the timer on the toaster, for example—always began with "I'm terribly sorry to bother you, but…" Once I'd set the dial, he would sit peering in as the toast browned. He was as fascinated by the toast as he was by the mathematical proofs we did together, as if the truth of the toaster were no different from that of the Pythagorean theorem.

It's this description of the Professor peering in as the toast browns, caring about it as much as he cares about everything else, that captured my heart on page 3. With that tiny act, Ogawa shows us something essential about the Professor's character. And Ogawa repeats this method of revealing character over and over again, sharing small, isolated moments of searing revelation.

Here's another example of a small moment, one where we learn the Professor's particular, yet socially clueless, sympathy toward children:

Just then, there was a cry from the sandbox. A little girl stood sobbing, a toy shovel clutched in her hand. Instantly, the Professor was at her side, bending over to comfort her. He tenderly brushed the sand from her dress.

Suddenly, the child's mother appeared and pushed the Professor away, picking the girl up and practically running off with her. The Professor was left standing in the sandbox. I watched him from behind, unsure how to help. The cherry blossoms fluttered down, mingling with the numbers in the dirt. (46-47)

I'm not sure the professor understands what's just happened in that moment, but we do. And we can see him and feel for him (at the same time as we might feel frustrated with him).

Here's one more, shorter example: "I wondered how many times I had said those words since I'd come to work at the Professor's house. 'Don't worry. It's fine.' At the barber, outside the X-ray room at the clinic, on the bus home from the ballgame. Sometimes as I was rubbing his back, at other times stroking his hand. But I wondered whether I had ever been able to comfort him. His real pain was somewhere else, and I sensed that I was always missing the spot" (169-170).

Maybe when I use the word "spacious" to describe this kind of characterization, what I mean is that nothing is crowded, every detail is illuminated and clear, and allowed to be the star of the scene it's in. Every description is given the space it's needed. As a result, the characterizations seem clean and spare, but not because the characters are simple people with simple lives. They are complex people with difficult, tragic, sometimes frightening lives. But we can see them clearly, because Ogawa draws them with precise lines on a spacious page. 

I almost want to say that it's like each character is standing alone, visible to us in a bright, uncrowded room, but that makes the characters and the book sound sterile, which is completely wrong. In fact, they live in rooms full of things, especially books, papers, baseball cards, and food. And their lives, thoughts, and feelings are deeply entangled. But reading this book, the reader does not feel entangled. The reader has room.

This is partly because Ogawa gives every moment in this story the same weight as any other part of the story. The moment with the browning toast, for example, is just as important as other longer, more emotionally fraught scenes in the book. And this gets us into pacing. 

This book is composed of a lot of different kinds of passages. Tiny plot moments, like the Professor watching the toast brown. Longer scenes, like one where Root gets injured and the Professor and the housekeeper rush him to the hospital; one where they all go to a baseball game together; one where they have a party. Passages where the housekeeper is musing about the life of the Professor; passages where she's doing a little snooping in the Professor's house, hoping to learn about his past. Occasional passages where the housekeeper is telling us something about her own past. Also, lots and lots of passages about math.

Pacing isn't something I can demonstrate using short examples, because it depends upon how all the parts of the text sit in relation to each other. But I can try to explain what Ogawa does, and what it's like to read: She simply and straightforwardly lets every passage take as much time and space as it needs. It's okay if a math explanation fills up several pages. It's okay if some of the most beautiful and revealing character moments for the Professor — like his ability, every afternoon, to see the evening star before anyone else can (page 79) — take less than a page. There's a way in which the weight of any one part of this book has nothing to do with its length. All the different needs of the text are balanced in their significance. 

How does a short description manage to carry as much weight as a many-paged scene? I think it's partly because of what this book is telling us — its themes. Browning toast is, in fact, as important as the Pythagorean theorem. The housekeeper tells us so. A child is as important as a mathematician. A moment when a man with a brain injury is sad and confused is as important as the most fundamental mathematical discovery. Everything is connected, everything matters, and everything gets to take up space.

One thing I took away from the pacing of this book is that I want to try to worry less about the moments when my text feels uneven. I'll always listen to feedback from my readers when it comes to my pacing — but ultimately, there are other aspects of a text, particularly its style, mood, and themes, that can bind seemingly disparate parts of a book together. Maybe that's something I can talk about more sometime using one of my own books. It comes down to a book being a web, and that's a really complicated thing to try to talk about!

Here's another interesting thing Ogawa does with pacing: While it becomes pretty easy, pretty quickly, for the reader to know who the Professor is, this makes a fascinating contrast with the other characters in the book, who come into focus much more slowly. Especially the housekeeper herself, who's the narrator, but who's always talking about everyone else, hiding herself in the background (much like a housekeeper). Honestly, it took me a while to even notice the housekeeper as a character. And then I began to care about her experience deeply.

A lot of our revelations about the housekeeper's character relate to math. With a quiet, patient kind of wonder, the housekeeper absorbs every math lesson the Professor gives, and we see what that's like for her. We watch it touch her daily life—and reshape her entire outlook. 

"There was something profound in his love for math," the housekeeper says. "And it helped that he forgot what he'd taught me before, so I was free to repeat the same question until I understood. Things that most people would get the first time around might take me five, or even ten times, but I could go on asking the Professor to explain until I finally got it" (23).

Just as the Professor explains math to the housekeeper, Ogawa explains it to the reader, and explains it well; we understand it because we're sharing the housekeeper's growing understanding of it. Consequently, we can understand the way it's changing the housekeeper. One day, while cleaning the kitchen, she finds a serial number engraved on the back of the refrigerator door: 2311. Unable to help herself, she pulls out a notepad and gets to work trying to figure out whether this is a prime number. "Once I'd proved that 2,311 was prime, I put the notepad back in my pocket and went back to my cleaning, though now with a new affection for this refrigerator, which had a prime serial number. It suddenly seemed so noble, divisible by only one and itself" (113).

Later, she reflects on the relationship between math and meaning: "In my imagination, I saw the creator of the universe sitting in some distant corner of the sky, weaving a pattern of delicate lace so fine that even the faintest light would shine through it. The lace stretches out infinitely in every direction, billowing gently in the cosmic breeze. You want desperately to touch it, hold it up to the light, rub it against your cheek. And all we ask is to be able to re-create the pattern, weave it again with numbers, somehow, in our own language; to make even the tiniest fragment our own, to bring it back to earth" (124).

(It's worth mentioning that this book's sense of spaciousness is also aided by descriptions of actually spacious things. It's hard to imagine something more spacious than infinite lace!)

Slowly, we watch the housekeeper's relationship with the Professor—and with math—change her entire concept of herself. Here, the Professor has just watched her cook dinner with utter fascination and respect: "I looked at the food I had just finished preparing and then at my hands. Sautéed pork garnished with lemon, a salad, and a soft, yellow omelet. I studied the dishes, one by one. They were all perfectly ordinary, but they looked delicious—satisfying food at the end of a long day. I looked at my palms again, filled suddenly with an absurd sense of satisfaction, as though I had just solved Fermat's Last Theorem" (135).

Honestly, the mathematics in The Housekeeper and the Professor is one reason it's tricky to use this book as a craft lesson. It's clear Ogawa has enormous mathematical expertise, which breathes life and meaning into this story — but not many writers are going to have that expertise at their disposal, and not all stories can be about math. I also wonder what it's like to read this book if you're indifferent to math, or even hate it? Baseball, which is extremely math-based, plays another huge part in this book — I wonder how the book reads to people untouched by both math and baseball? I happen to adore both; I lap up baseball movies and math plays like Arcadia or Proof with the purest joy; so it's impossible for me to imagine reading this book from the perspective of a baseball-hater or a math-hater. It's hard to imagine that reader having the same experience I'm having.

Nonetheless, the point remains that Ogawa is harnessing the essence of other disciplines, math and baseball, and using them to expand her story — and it works for a lot of readers. It creates a kind of magic similar to Victor LaValle's use of fairytales in The Changeling. Things that we understand in a different context, like math or fairytales, can expand the meaning of realities that otherwise don't make sense, or hurt too much. Like a person who's lost a part of their brain that they need in order to make new, sustained relationships. Or a housekeeper who's been alone, unsupported, and unappreciated for most of her life.

And here again, Ogawa makes spacious choices. Is anything more spacious than math? Math defines space, and the infinity of space. And one of the complaints most often brandished at baseball is that there's way too much empty space in the game :o). Math and baseball serve as themes helping to create the book's spaciousness.

So. I'm not convinced that this post is the most useful entry in my craft series, especially for any of you looking for nitty-gritty writing advice. But I do hope you'll read Ogawa's The Housekeeper and the Professor, and maybe my thoughts will combine with your own to help you come to some conclusions. I'll end this post with a spacious image:

"As we reached the top of the stairs that led to the seats above third base, all three of us let out a cry. The diamond in all its grandeur was laid out before us — the soft, dark earth of the infield, the spotless bases, the straight white lines, and the manicured grass. The evening sky seemed so close you could touch it, and at that moment, as if they had been awaiting our arrival, the lights came on. The stadium looked like a spaceship descended from the heavens" (88).

Happy writing!

 

Reading like a writer.

Here are a few organizations that need our support right now: 

Fund Texas Choice. A nonprofit organization funding abortion travel for people in Texas. 

Frontera Fund. Making abortion accessible for people in the Rio Grande Valley. 

Clinic Access Support Network. Providing transportation, lodging, emotional support, and more to those seeking abortion care in Houston, TX. 

Bridge Collective. A full spectrum doula collective, nonprofit organization based in Austin, TX. 

The Afiya Center. An advocacy organization based in Dallas, TX, dedicated to transforming the lives of Black womxn and girls through reproductive justice. 

Texas Equal Access Fund. Providing financial and emotional support to people seeking abortion care in the north, east, and panhandle regions of Texas. 

Lilith Fund. Financial assistance, emotional support, and building community spaces for people who need abortions in Texas — unapologetically, with compassion and conviction. 

West Fund. Working to make abortions accessible and affordable to people in West Texas. 

Thank you to the folks at @FundTexasChoice who helped me compile this list.

 

 

Donald Trump’s performance in the 2024 election surpassed expectations, with the candidate winning the key battleground states of Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia and picking up larger shares of more diverse segments of the electorate, including Black and Latino male voters. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, a professor of African American studies at Princeton University, says the blame lies squarely on the Harris campaign, which refused to differentiate itself from unpopular incumbent President Joe Biden. “The problem here is with the leadership of the Democratic Party,” adds John Nichols, national affairs correspondent for The Nation. Nichols and Taylor discuss how Democrats “demobilized” young voters and grassroots organizers, to their electoral detriment. “Donald Trump, as a president who has very few guardrails, has the potential to take horrific actions,” says Nichols. For those seeking to oppose him, says Taylor, “There’s a lot of rebuilding that has to be done.”

We speak with historian Robin D. G. Kelley about the roots of Donald Trump’s election victory and the decline of Democratic support among many of the party’s traditional constituencies. Kelley says he agrees with Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who said Democrats have “abandoned” working-class people. “There was really no program to focus on the actual suffering of working people across the board,” Kelley says of the Harris campaign. He says the highly individualistic, neoliberal culture of the United States makes it difficult to organize along class lines and reject the appeal of authoritarians like Trump. “Solidarity is what’s missing — the sense that we, as a class, have to protect each other.”

Reliance Jio's ambitious rollout of its True 5G network across India is not just about faster internet speeds or improved connectivity. One of the less talked about, yet significant benefits is the potential enhancement of smartphone battery life. During the company's

The Gift Guides officially start on Wednesday, but I wanted to post this ASAP so – quick and early gift guide! NB: some links in this and future gift guides include affiliate links which send a portion of your purchase back to us at no extra cost to you. You’re not required to use our links, and thank you in advance if you do. There is a gift with purchase from now until 11/11 at … Continue reading I Need to Tell Y’all About this Lego Set →

"Oh my god, you guys! I am so excited to start physical therapy, I woke up early! What a great day! See you all at 4pm for dinner, after my nap!"

Remember, pretty does not mean it doesn’t have a savage bite.

Professor Dave demolishes Sabine Hossenfelder. I feel that. The topic of my history class last week and this week is about bias in late 19th/early 20th century evolutionary biology, and how we have to be critical and responsible in our assessment of scientific claims. It’s tough, because I’m strongly pro-science (obviously, I hope?) but I […]