text:
For Glass House media inquiries, please contact Joan Higgins, St. Martin's Press, 646-307-5557
Now Available!
Visit glasshousebook.com
For readers of Hillbilly Elegy and Strangers in Their Own Land
One of The Week's 20 Books to Read in 2017
One of Bustle's 16 Best Nonfiction Books
Winner of the 76th Annual Ohioana Book Award; winner, best non-fiction book, Books by the Banks Festival; Finalist for the 87th Annual California Book Awards.
Named a best/most anticipated book of 2017 by: New York Post • Newsweek • The Week • Bustle
"Brian Alexander does a remarkable job of illustrating what happens when such schemes go awry."
– Sheelah Kolhatkar, The New Yorker
"A devastating read...For anyone wondering why swing-state America voted against the establishment in 2016, Mr. Alexander supplies plenty of answers."
– The Wall Street Journal
"Glass House's subtitle...hints at the book's difference from its best-selling predecessor. Alexander's book is less personal, less tortured, a work of journalism far more willing to indict forces larger than the stubborn, delusional pride of the white working class. This book hunts bigger game."
– Slate
"For those still trying to fathom why the land of the free and the home of the brave opted for a crass, vituperative huckster with an unwavering fondness for alternative facts instead of the flawed oligarch Democrats served up, Brian Alexander has a story for you."
– Len Boselovic, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
"Emotionally striking...Alexander has combined his considerable journalistic talent with love for his broken hometown, producing an incredible, unshaking look at the true story of the American working class."
– Booklist
"[An] essential book to understand American reality and politics." – The Washington Book Review
"Offers insights into how economic trends are tied to the financial and health problems plaguing many middle- and low-income Americans." – CBS News
"Brian Alexander's moving new book "Glass House" explores how the undermining by venture capital of once-enviable factory jobs in Lancaster, Ohio, has nearly killed that once-thriving town. You could write the same book about half of the country." – Chris Jones, The Chicago Tribune
"An extraordinary book." – Vick Mickunas, Book Nook, WYSO, Miami Valley
"As Alexander carefully documents, Anchor Hocking and Lancaster were not undone by foreign competition, but by domestic corporate raiders, unshackled from regulations during the Reagan administration." – John Warner, The Chicago Tribune
"Glass House is among the best of the books to hit shelves in the last several years exploring what's happened to the nation and the role that greed and the collapse of once solid institutions played in the demise of small-town, middle-class America. Among the others are George Packer's The Unwinding and J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy." – Newsweek
"Lays out a step-by-step account of Anchor Hocking's slide, benefitting not only from Alexander's strong reporting, but from candid interviews with key players. What is revealed is a complex system – Alexander argues it is deliberately complex – that allows savvy investors to make relatively small, highly leveraged bets on companies like Anchor Hocking...A valuable contribution." – Forbes
"[The book] really comes alive in Alexander's portraits of the people caught up in the town's unraveling...If you want to understand the despair that grips so much of this country, and the love of place that gives so many the strength to keep going, Glass House is a place to start." – Christian Science Monitor
"An examination of a town in Ohio that quite literally fell apart—and how that town in and of itself serves as a microcosm of the most pressing issues being faced in America today. From drug dealers to cops, from industry to finance, Alexander goes deep into the heart of what ails us and takes no prisoners." – Newsweek's "The Week in Reading"
"Lancaster, Ohio, was declared the All-American Town by Forbes in 1947; its Anchor Hocking Glass Company was the foundation of a healthy, booming community. The town began to crumble as the factory shut down, as with too many other once-vibrant American hubs, leaving its citizens dreaming of the good old days. This well-reported book is all the stronger given the author's connection to it: Lancaster is Alexander's hometown. Shades of JD Vance's 'Hillbilly Elegy.'" – The New York Post
"Reads like an odd—and oddly satisfying—fusion of George Packer's The Unwinding and one of Michael Lewis' real-life financial thrillers." – Laura Miller, Slate
"Gripping...There are those who argue that leveraged acquisitions and restructurings of the sort that Anchor Hocking has endured make companies more efficient and steer capital to better uses...Alexander makes a persuasive case, though, that from the perspective of Lancaster, it's been one big fleecing... leaving behind a city with a weakened economic base and a shredded social fabric—and precious few resources to repair them with." – Bloomberg Businessweek
"Provocative." – The Columbus Dispatch
"Alexander deftly shows how Lancaster represents the collapse of the American dream in microcosm. The other Ohio. The other America. No New Deal awaits them. Their predicament is not covered on the evening news. But they have Trump." – Inequality.org
"A well documented examination of how this once flourishing Ohio town became something else altogether." – Dayton Daily News
"A particularly timely read for our tumultuous and divisive era." – Publishers Weekly
"Those mystified by the election of Donald Trump could well start here... A devastating and illuminating book that shows how a city and a country got where they are and how difficult it can be to reverse course." – Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
The iconic Anchor Hocking Glass Company, once the world's largest maker of glass tableware, was the base on which Lancaster's society was built. As Glass House opens, Sam Solomon, an African-American man born in rural North Carolina, arrives in Lancaster – reputed by locals to be "the whitest town in America" — to take over as CEO. Hired by the private equity firm that holds the majority stake, Solomon immediately realizes the company is in deeper trouble than he expected. Bankruptcy looms.
Inside the glass plant, Brian Gossett, erstwhile skatepunk and the fourth generation in his family to work for the company, is operating an H-28, a huge glass forming machine. But Brian has doubts about his career, the town, the country he's supposed to love.
Across town, a young heroin addict hears a knock at the door of the house where she's staying – another customer come to make a drug buy. A local football-hero-turned cop named Eric Brown has made it his mission to stem the drug plague. But Brown is wrestling with the realization that he can't ever arrest Lancaster's real problems.
Meanwhile, the leaders of the Lancaster Festival announce the hiring of a new executive director, Joe Piccolo. Piccolo doesn't realize it, but he hasn't been hired just to run a music and art fest; he's expected to help save the town.
As these and other stories unfold, Solomon's fight to rescue Anchor Hocking provides an unprecedented look inside a company in trouble, and explores a little-understood facet of the American economy that has helped wreck companies and towns while enriching those who understand how to play its game.
Compelling, heart-breaking, evocative, Glass House is a must-read for anyone trying to understand what's happened to many American communities and the people who live in them.
Visit thechemistrybetweenus.com
One of the world's leading social neuroscientists and an award-winning journalist team up to give readers a grand unified theory of what drives us to do the things we do when we do love, sex, and human bonding.
Provocative and entertaining. Popular science writing at its best!
Dan Rodricks
Baltimore Sun, WYPR Radio
Listen to the NPR interview
...One wild and entertaining ride. The prose in The Chemistry Between Us is lively and fun – and provides a fresh and unapologetically pointed analysis on what understanding the neurobiological correlates of love may mean for both our relationships and our culture.
Kayt Sukel
New Scientist Magazine
"Dr. Young is one of the science world's most respected authorities on the chemistry underlying the most complicated and beloved interactions of our species. The insight and candor he and Mr. Alexander provide in this simultaneously entertaining and compelling book will impress both novice and scientific aficionado alike. What an intellectually and emotionally satisfying exploration!"
Dr. Mayim Bialik, Ph.D, CLEC
Actress on CBS' The Big Bang Theory
Author of Beyond The Sling: How to Raise Confident Loving Children the Attachment
Parenting Way
"Nothing fascinates us more than why we fall in love and what makes us choose that particular person. The Chemistry Between Us sheds light on just this mysterious phenomena with a thorough look at the neuroscience and psychology of the process. Whether you have a desire for better intellectual understanding or a personal curiosity as to why you or your partner do what you do, this book is a super enjoyable class in love, sex and all its dark mysteries. A fascinating and stimulating read!"
Gail Saltz M.D.
NBC Today Show contributor and Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry The New York
Presbyterian Hospital
"This lively book by a great neuroscientist and a savvy science writer is the first popular account to tie together what we have learned about the chemistry of sex, love, and family bonds. Progress in this field has been nothing short of breath-taking, and Larry Young is recognized as its leading pioneer. The way our brains react when boy meets girl determines the stability of marriage and the future of the human family."
Frans de Waal
Author of The Age of Empathy
"If you've ever been curious — and let's face it, we all have — about the intricate dance of biology and behavior that both brings men and women together and pushes them apart, then The Chemistry Between Us is the book for you. Authors Larry Young and Brian Alexander explore questions as gentle as parenting and as edgy as sexual addiction with consistent style, humor, and insight. The result is a story that's fun, fascinating and, finally, insightful."
Deborah Blum
Pulitzer Prize winner, author of Sex on the Brain, Love at Goon Park, and
The Poisoner's Handbook
Visit americaunzipped.com
"A swift, smooth, contemplative and frequently hilarious travelogue
through America's surprisingly mainstream nether regions."
Arthur Salm, Books Editor, San Diego Union-Tribune
"Scintillating. The author's thoughtful observations on the need for contact at all costs in an increasingly virtual society ring true."
The Washington Post
"For anyone curious about the state of sexuality in America, this smart, intriguing tour will scratch your (intellectual) itch."
Publisher's Weekly
"A clear-headed and open-minded look at the sexual revolution's final stage."
Kirkus Reviews
"Eye-openingly smart... Picking up where Sallie Tisdale's TALK DIRTY TO
ME left off in the '90s, Brian Alexander's AMERICA UNZIPPED appreciatively
unpacks our culture's last remaining sexual taboos. (Apparently, we've
still got a few)."
Genevieve Field, co-founder of Nerve.com
"... with both humor and reflection, Alexander sees exhilarating
liberation but also a kind of 'kitschy banalty': Where's the excitement
when our thrills are no longer taboo?"
Matthew Hutson, Psychology Today
"[Alexander's] voice is sensible, humorous and largely unbiased, even
when he is aghast."
"Alexander himself is at least as interesting as the people he
observed and interviewed...America Unzipped is entertaining. Alexander
has a gift for narrative, and he' s not afraid to put himself in the story."
Houston Press
"Written for the lay reader, this exploration of the fringe science of
biotechnology is alternately spooky, silly, and scintillating."
"Though sympathetic to his subjects and their work, Alexander casts his
tale in shades of gray rather than in black and white, and the result is
a nuanced portrait of the intersection of idealism, capitalism, politics
and science on the frontiers of biotechnology that will leave readers
eager to see what the future might hold."
Publisher's Weekly
"Funny, bizarre, yet always fascinating."
Biology Digest
"Well-reported and dense with insight."
Psychology Today
"This interesting popular history of the trans-human movement is an
important statement of an evolving debate in modern American society."
Roger D. Launius Curator, Planetary Exploration Programs, National Air and Space Museum
"Alexander has the same gonzo style, the same wicked humor and, most of
all, that Mambo Chicken sensibility -- a combination of ironic detachment
and sheer bafflement at the hubris of these over-the-edge scientists."
Carl Elliott, The American Prospect
"In Rapture: How Biotech Became the New Religion, journalist
Brian Alexander provides a fascinating and funny travel guide through
the cutting-edge world of genetic engineering."
James Pethokoukis, US News and World Report
"With RAPTURE, Alexander has become the voice of biotechnology for the
21st century."
Glenn McGee, author of BEYOND GENETICS
The Problem With Courting Amazon
The Atlantic
There are no doubt perks to being home to a huge, stable employer. But the way most cities pursue that goal-by offering to forfeit enormous amounts of tax revenues-produces outcomes that have worried many economists for years.
When Prisoners Are a 'Revenue Opportunity'
The Atlantic
Meanwhile, because the largest inmate telecom-and-video providers generate a healthy flow of cash, they've attracted the interest of private equity, or PE. The fees that flow upward from prisoners and their families find their way to these firms and their investors. In 2013, for example, Global Tel Link, another major inmate phone-and-video provider, borrowed $885 million to fund dividend recapitalizations at the behest of its PE sponsor, American Securities; that debt would be paid back with the proceeds from inmate calls and video visitations.
Privatization Is Changing America's Relationship With Its Physical Stuff
The Atlantic
The lone, visionary entrepreneur and the audacious industrialist are not the originators of the economic system, but rather the products of a system fostered by the collective efforts of the people through their government.
If Declining Towns 'Deserve to Die,' Where Should Their Residents Go?
The Atlantic
The country's declining migration is being attributed to laziness, a lack of moxie, though the people in Lancaster I know who work two or three jobs might disagree. The new push for Americans to hit the road smacks of resentment. People like John Oatney, and distressed towns, have become inconvenient reminders of the costs of modern capitalism. For years these same towns have been called "the heartland" and "real America," often by those who supported the very free-market policies that damaged so many communities. Now, rather than confront the root causes, they're telling people in the real America to pack up and leave.
Why robots helped Donald Trump win
The MIT Technology Review
For many people, your job defines your life. The disruptions caused by robots and other technologies are deeply affecting the communities involved. These technological forces have joined many others-some cultural, some political-to create a generalized anguish that much is being lost. People have come to believe that they, their jobs, their communities, and the social contract that binds them to work and place and each other are under threat. And they're not wrong.
It's Time to Disband the U.S. Olympic Committee
Outside Online
The rot underlying all these scandals is built into the structure of the so-called "Olympic movement," a teetering edifice managed by the International Olympic Committee.
The Secret Science of Novak Djokovic's Training Pod
Outside Magazine
Polly Crawford is in a happy snooze, utterly knocked out, her head lolling, her mouth an ambiguous smile, her chest rising and falling in slow rhythm as the industrial-noise whoosh and whir of a motor pumps air in and out of the enclosed pod she has crawled into—a ridiculous-looking contraption straight out of Woody Allen's Sleeper.
War on Drugs Redux: Welcome to the War on Doping in Sports
Substance Use & Misuse, Early Online: 1–4, 2014
Copyright C. 2014 Informa Healthcare USA, Inc.
I have covered the issue of doping and sports for awhile now. Lately I have become convinced that much of the antidoping zeal we are witnessing presents serious and growing risks to the human rights and civil liberties of athletes, and perhaps to the rest of us. My worry derives from my belief that the "war on doping," as it is been called many times, has come to resemble the U.S. "War on Drugs."
The Milkman Cometh
Cincinnati Magazine
The groundwork was laid at a fabled meeting with E.F. Hutton himself in the exclusive Cloud Club at the top of the Chrysler Building, the shiny Art Deco spire recently erected in New York City. Sperti, most likely accompanied by Schneider, was summoned there by Hutton and Fine in 1930 to meet with a host of General Foods execs and hammer out a deal. It was as if they'd walked onto the set of a Fred Astaire–Ginger Rogers movie. In the Cloud Club's main dining room, specially designed etched-glass sconces hung on blue marble pillars. Murals of vaporous clouds hovering over idealized fantasy depictions of the Manhattan skyline stretched across the ceiling, reinforcing the belief that, even in the early days of the Great Depression, men like E.F. Hutton and Walter Chrysler were on top of the world.
Why Lance Armstrong's Confession Should Make You Worry
So here's the thing you need to know: The USADA takedown of Armstrong matters, and it could effect everybody. Because it will enhance the power and reach of a private, non-profit business that has managed to harness the power of the federal government in what's quickly becoming a brand new war on drugs … with all the same pitfalls brought to you by the first war on drugs.
Tyson Gay and the Fountain of Youth
Outside Online
I've covered the world of the anti-aging subculture for about 20 years and can say that it's as close to an ideal source for hormones banned by WADA as any doping athlete could wish for.
How Armstrong Could 'Get Away With Stuff With Everybody Looking'
Seven years ago, Don Catlin, then head of the UCLA Olympic Analytical Laboratory and the man who, for all practical purposes, created sports drug testing in the United States, told me "you can get away with stuff with everybody looking right at you."
I asked him for some examples. He mentioned a world-famous athlete. He did not say the athlete's name, but you didn't have to be a genius, or even a sports nerd, to know he meant Lance Armstrong.
The Chemistry of the Suppression of Desire: What is going on in the brain of a cheater?
America does love a good sex scandal, almost as much as the British do, and the Petraeus, um, affair has been an especially juicy one. It's been so complicated, in that reality-show kind of way, that we need charts depicting who's connected to whom.
As always happens when a powerful married man is revealed to have been hiking the Appalachian Trail, finding Freudian uses for cigars, or supporting his maid's child, there's been a lot of speculation about the psychology of honcho guys. What is it about the powerful?
You Could Grow Breasts
Esquire Magazine
I stood in the cavernous convention hall, discussing my colon with a stranger. He scared me by tap, tap, tapping a bottle of colon-cleansing tea with his fingertip and by describing the dire consequences of my failure to keep my guts clean. He tapped the squiggly line drawing of a colon on the outside of the bottle.
The drawing looked for all the world like a map of the upper Mississippi River, and when he hit the spot where Red Wing, Minnesota, would have been, he dropped his voice to an Orson Welles baritone and described how that bend in the river was filled—literally jammed—with toxic gunk.
'Glee' star's OD shows the new, fresh face of heroin
NBC News
"Glee" star Cory Monteith, who died Saturday of an accidental overdose of heroin and alcohol in a Vancouver hotel room, may not seem like the stereotypical heroin user. That's why, despite the fresh-faced 31-year-old actor's openness about his lifelong struggles with alcohol and drugs, his death has shocked many.
The surprise is only because most Americans aren't familiar with the new realities of heroin.
The Awful Truth About Drugs in Sports
Outside Magazine
I keep waiting for Dr. Don Caitlin to sound thrilled, or at least mildly pleased, about the mushrooming furor over the use of performance-enhancing drugs in sports. Catlin, after all, helped break the now-infamous BALCO doping scandal from this very office, a small, dark, paper-strewn space inside the UCLA Olympic Analytical Laboratory. The lab is one of the world's top facilities for analyzing biological samples from athletes to detect the use of banned substances like anabolic steroids, the blood-oxygen booster erythropoetin (EPO), and scores of other prohibited drugs that aid performance.
But Catlin—a tall, balding, 67-year-old M.D. with a handsomely craggy face—just frowns when I prod him. He sips from an old coffee mug and says the current media blitz reminds him of every other time doping has hit the news: There's a lot of noise, and yet doping persists. He thinks about this a moment and then issues a bleak verdict on the drug-policing system in which he's toiled for the past 25 years.
"People are following this old model—run 'em down, chase 'em, find 'em, assume they are guilty, drag them into testing," he says. "And athletes still get away with stuff, and I maintain you can get away with stuff with everybody looking right at you."
Good Cop, Bad Cop
Outside Magazine
Since I already know Zach Lund's life story, I can't help it: The first thing I do when we meet is stare at his shiny bald head. He looks good bald, though he also looks more like an ordinary guy who works out than an Olympic athlete. He's fit, compact, and so unassuming that, as we stand around in his hotel room at the Hilton Universal City, gazing at the Hollywood Hills, he seems a little amazed to be here in the heart of showbiz.
Lund has spent the past ten hours smiling, talking, and emoting for NBC, which has been shooting profiles of athletes expected to make the U.S. Winter Olympic team in Vancouver. The day was fun but a struggle, too. Lund has overcome a lot to succeed, but he's mainly known for getting kicked out of the 2006 Winter Games in Turin, Italy, thanks to a drug-related suspension that he and many others believe was unfair. Inevitably, Turin is what everybody asks about, so, later that night when we sit down to dinner, he wants to make sure I understand his full story...
Big Fish
Outside Magazine
According to allegations that first surfaced in The Wall Street Journal, Armstrong and team director Johan Bruyneel introduced Landis to systematic doping within the old U.S. Postal Service squad, with Armstrong supposedly explaining how to transfuse blood packed with performance-boosting red blood cells.
And with that charge, an all-important figure entered the story: Jeff Novitzky, a six-foot-six, chrome-domed, gun-packing G-man who's an investigator with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The 43-year-old Novitzky, the man who famously broke the BALCO drug scandal, had already been looking into doping rumors surrounding a low-level Los Angeles–based cycling team called Rock Racing but quickly turned his attention to Armstrong once Landis started talking.
There's Something in the Water
Outside Magazine
Lutes shows us a few slides to help explain the concept of network marketing, the business model Evolv uses and another name for a system known as multilevel marketing (MLM). Over the years, economists and critics have warned against these financial arrangements, arguing that although they're legal in the United States, they're little more than elaborate pyramid schemes, likely to leave a raft of heartbroken optimists in their wake. Sineni mentioned this criticism to me earlier, dismissing it and calling Evolv not a pyramid but a "phenomenal structure." Now Lutes is explaining how it works.
"Two, four, six, eight, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1,024!" he says. "I know the math! If you brought in two people and they brought in two people," he continues, before long "you've got over 2,000 cases [of water] you are getting paid on, and how many people did you bring in? Two!"
Then he shows us a diagram of the structure, and it looks exactly like … well, let's just call it a ziggurat.
Special Report: The New Boys' Health Scare
Redbook Magazine
Scientists, regulatory organizations, and government groups are concerned that chemicals in everyday products may have launched an unintentional war on our health. Children may be most seriously affected because their developing brains and bodies are especially vulnerable to chemicals. Over the last few years, there has been a glut of new research about the possible effects on baby boys, in particular. Some research has suggested that EDCs can change the way male fetuses' brains form in the womb. Other studies have linked EDCs to a rise in genital birth defects such as hypospadias (in which the opening of the urethra develops on the shaft, not at the tip, of the penis) and cryptorchidism (undescended testicles, a risk factor for poor semen quality and testicular cancer). And although data from the United States is inconclusive, studies from across the globe suggest that adult male sperm quality and fertility are dropping.
Tour de Farce
Slate Magazine
Like much of the rest of the world, I was thrilled by Floyd Landis' startling comeback in Stage 17 of the Tour de France. But since I write about doping and sports, I've learned to be suspicious of miracles. The real tragedy of doping is the way it tarnishes everything and everybody and forbids us from giving in to the wonder of sports. And now the news comes out that Floyd Landis tested positive for high testosterone levels following that very same miracle stage. There is a disheartening feeling of inevitability about the whole thing.
Lies About Women's Health
For the past 15 years, Ruth Shaber, M.D., has been an ob-gyn in San Francisco for Kaiser Permanente, one of the nation's largest health maintenance organizations. She sees all types of women—union members, executives, waitresses. Most of them, Dr. Shaber says, have questions for her, including how to protect themselves from sexually transmitted diseases, how to preserve their fertility, how to prevent breast and cervical cancer and whether the latest Internet health scare they've heard is really true.
Dr. Shaber tries hard to separate fact from fiction because, she says, "rumor and hearsay can start to seem real." In the past, she'd sometimes refer patients to government websites and printed fact sheets, or rely on those outlets to help create her own materials. Not anymore. "As a physician, I can no longer trust government sources," says Dr. Shaber. She is not a political activist or a conspiracy theorist; in addition to her own practice, she's Kaiser Permanente's director of women's health services for northern California and head of the HMO's Women's Health Research Institute. Yet this decidedly mainstream doctor and administrator says, "I no longer trust FDA decisions or materials generated [by the government]. Ten years ago, I would not have had to scrutinize government information. Now I don't feel comfortable giving it to my patients."
Such doctor mistrust represents a major change. For the past 100 years, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has been the world's premier government agency ensuring drug safety. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have similarly stellar track records. But recently, Dr. Shaber charges, the government has lost its most precious asset: credibility.
How did it happen? Many prominent figures in science and public health think they know the answer. "People believe that religiously based social conservatives have direct lines to the powers that be within the U.S. government, the administration, Congress, and are influencing public-health policy, practice and research in ways that are unprecedented and very dangerous," says Judith Auerbach, Ph.D., a former NIH official who is now a vice president at the nonprofit American Foundation for AIDS Research. In fact, Glamour, has found that on issues ranging from STDs to birth control, some radical conservative activists have used fudged and sometimes flatly false data to persuade the government to promote their agenda of abstinence until marriage.
A Drug's Promise (or Not) of Youth
The Los Angeles Times
I have traveled to the Palm Springs Life Extension Institute in search of Dr. Edmund Chein. Instead I find Tiffany Caranci. Tiffany is 20 years old and looks exactly how you might expect a 20-year-old named Tiffany to look: platform heels, low-slung skirt, hair streaked blond and black. She's brazenly sexy, and so very young.
I am a man and not very young. I have entered that disorienting neverland of middle age where you can't tell if women like Tiffany smile because you remind them of their fathers or because they think you're hot. I'm pretty sure Tiffany is smiling at me as I walk into Chein's clinic because she's a receptionist and gets paid to smile, but my ego scouts for any sign from her to justify the voice in my head that's saying: "You've still got it, brother." This neediness, of course, proves that I don't have it, and I don't mind admitting that right now I'd like it back. Well done, Tiffany.
I've come to meet the good doctor, but he is elusive, lying low on the advice of his lawyer.
WIRED Magazine
In four hours, the Creator will ask me for $100,000 to help finance the cloning of a dead man. But by then, he'll have swallowed too much alcohol, driven us recklessly around the city in his sports car, and tried and failed to pick up a waitress. So I'll be accustomed to a little flamboyance from him, and his strange request will seem like ordinary conversation.
Right now, though, we're just starting dinner when he spells out his desire to be the first scientist in history to clone a human being. "This will be the biggest leap for mankind," he says. "It is the central core of Christianity, the resurrection of Jesus, the promise of eternal life!" The Creator, an intense, dark-haired man in his thirties, looks a little like Peter Lorre in The Beast With Five Fingers when he says this, so I have to remind myself that he's not a nut. He's a real scientist, a pretty good one, too, with a PhD in molecular biology, a list of peer-reviewed publications, and a research job at a big-name university. (Where, he says, he would be fired instantly if he went public with his human-cloning plans - hence his demand to remain anonymous.) The Creator conducts research on a protein that he was the first to identify, one that could have a tremendous impact on cardiovascular disease.
Tonight, he's not thinking about this work. Tonight, he's excited - thrilled, really - by the prospect of cloning a person. "This is the easiest thing you can do! You just get the damn nucleus, and put this damn nucleus into this enucleated oocyte, and pray to God something happens, and put it back into the surrogate mother, and wait. The easiest thing we could do right now, believe me, is to damn clone a human being!"
Free to Clone
The New York Times Magazine
This election year, the debate over cloning technology has become a circus -- and hardly anybody has noticed the gorilla hiding in the tent. Even while President Bush has endorsed throwing scientists in jail to stop ''reckless experiments'' (and has tried to muscle the U.N. into adopting a ban on all forms of cloning, even for research), it's just possible the First Amendment will protect researchers who want to perform cloning research.
Between Two West Coast Cities, a Duel to the Last Drop
The New York Times
IF Pirandello had written a play about water, he might have set it in a place where the London Bridge looms in one of the driest deserts on earth, where a $250-million water plant was built to desalt a supposedly freshwater river, and where huge pipes, like giant silver straws, rush water to gleaming cities hundreds of miles away.
In other words, Pirandello might have set his play near the Colorado River, where fights over water have provided a real-life theater of the absurd for years. States, cities and agricultural districts are trapped in this world through a Byzantine set of agreements, court decisions and legislation known as the law of the river, which has been hammered out, sometimes after guns were drawn, over the last 75 years. Today, it is difficult to find anyone in the seven states governed by the law who thinks it is fair or that it reflects late-20th-century reality. At the same time, no one is willing to toss it out and start over.
Now It Can Be Told: Confessions of a Former 'Jake'
The New York Times
As the plane took off, the woman in the window seat flipped open her copy of the magazine. I leaned across the empty space between us. Sure enough, she was reading ''Jake,'' the column I wrote for Glamour magazine.
But then, as I pondered the single best opening-line opportunity of my life, she blurted, ''This guy is such a jerk!'' I shrank away, buttoned my lip and resumed waiting patiently for my packet of mini Rold Gold pretzels.
It's no picnic being the avatar for an entire sex, saddled with the responsibility of translating the male psyche to a million or so skeptical women.
Don't Die, Stay Pretty
WIRED Magazine
Judith Campisi, Calvin Harley, Cynthia Kenyon, and Gregory Stock are sitting onstage in a campus theater at UC Berkeley, looking a little shell-shocked. All four are big-time researchers studying various aspects of aging: Campisi is a cell biologist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Harley is a cell biologist and chief scientific officer at Geron Corporation, Kenyon is a geneticist at UC San Francisco, and Stock directs the Program on Science, Technology, and Society at UCLA. They're not the types to brag about the implications of their work. But this event - Extro 4, the fourth confab of the Extropy Institute - is all about big-noise pronouncements, and the volume is drowning out the panel's scientific modesty.
The Extropians, of course, are techno-believers with boundless faith in science's power to amp up human potential. Extro 4 is devoted to their favorite topics: life extension, and the utopian future they believe will come about thanks to 21st-century advances in genetic engineering, biochemistry, and medical technology. A little later, the scientists will hear the Extropy Institute's founder, a chiseled, ponytailed philosophy PhD named Max More, confidently declare, "This is the fourth revolution in our history - the ultrahuman revolution." They'll also hear More's wife, an artist and bodybuilder named Natasha Vita-More, sketch out a future in which people will enjoy multiple sex organs, polymer skin that changes color like a mood ring, and virtual reality eyeball implants.
But right now the researchers are getting an earful from another Extropian, Robert Bradbury, a Harvard dropout and failed biotech entrepreneur. He provokes an awkward moment by addressing the panelists as fellow warriors in a crusade against anyone who doubts the possibility (or wisdom) of vastly increased human longevity.
"We have to deal with human naturalists," he says, "those people who think it is nonhuman to live 200 years, or the religious deathists, who have a significant amount of power by having the key to the Pearly Gates, so to speak, and the limits-to-growth camp, and, of course, the bureaucratic fearmongers like the Social Security Administration!" He looks at the scientists. "I realize most of the panel are not sociologists. Maybe Greg would like to comment."
Campisi tries to stifle a smirk. Harley's shoulders slump. Stock shifts in his chair and gets ready to say something. Here they sit, an all-star group, facing an organization founded by life-extension zealots who met at one of Timothy Leary's parties - and they've suddenly become "we." It's as if four Catholic bishops found themselves in a nude, sweaty scrum with a roomful of Larry Flynts.
Dark shadows loom over 'facilitated' talk
NBC News
On Nov. 27, 2007, just a few days after returning to school from Thanksgiving break, 14-year-old Aislinn Wendrow created a shock wave by saying her father had "banged" her. Aislinn didn't say it, exactly; she typed it on the keyboard of a digital device with the help of Cynthia Scarsella, her facilitator and an employee of Michigan's Walled Lake school district.
Scarsella reported Aislinn's declaration to a resource teacher, who, in turn, called Michigan's Department of Human Services.
Within hours, detectives from the West Bloomfield Township Police Department drove to the home of Thal and Julian Wendrow, Aislinn's parents. They told Thal that Aislinn had accused her husband, a 52-year-old painting contractor, of sexually abusing their daughter.
Thal, then 44 and a research attorney for the local courts, explained to the detectives that Aislinn was severely autistic and unable to communicate verbally. Neither she nor her husband would ever abuse Aislinn or her brother, Ian, then 13, who had Asperger's syndrome, she said.
In fact, they had long been vocal advocates for their children. When it came time for Aislinn to enter high school, the Wendrows insisted that the school provide facilitated communication, or FC, which involved having an employee support Aislinn's wrist and help her type her thoughts onto a keypad.
Aislinn had used FC in junior high and made extraordinary progress. She had made new friends and, her parents reported to an autism message board, was "writing poetry, spending a lot of time on homework, learning how to take tests … blossoming."
"'Facts don't spread. Emotions do spread,' said Paul Adams, a brand experience manager at Facebook"
— The New York Times, January 30, 2012
My fellow Circle of Life Industries shareholders:
I am happy to report that under your company's leadership team, Circle of Life Industries has proven itself to be a winner in both the fine dining and convenience foods spaces, returning your confidence with unprecedented growth curves. We're planning exciting initiatives for the coming year, but before I tell you about them, I want to take the opportunity of our first annual report to revisit how we have come so far, so fast.
It was just two years ago that I journeyed to Glencraigie, Scotland to seek out Bruce McAllister. As most of you know, Bruce made his name by using birds of prey to kill some of the rabbits and other game he served at the Niblick, his small bistro.
Bruce was skeptical. After all, I was a social venture fund manager, not a food entrepreneur. And when I described how I wanted to extend his brand by sourcing only from the phlegm Gaia hacks up from her majestic body, free of any killing by humans, he shouted "Buncha fookin' shite! Fookin' deep shite!"
Yes, it's true!
But that, my fellow investors, was the Eureka! moment when the name for our new movement -- Deep Food -- came to me.
Well, it took some doing (and a hefty compensation package), but I convinced Bruce, and, with a small staff of laborers, including a young carpenter from Slaty Fork, West Virginia named Jayden Grits, we transformed the shell of a former Bottega Veneta boutique into the flagship Circle of Life restaurant we all know today.
I was the first forager. Hard to believe, I know. I was never a Boy Scout; I went to Stanford. But I picked up fallen sassafras leaves along the Hudson River palisades. I wandered Morristown National Historic Park until I came across a long-dead possum and part of a rabbit. That evening Bruce made the first-ever Deep Food dish, seared possum liver and rabbit hindquarters with a sassafras reduction.
"'At's bloody fookin' awful," he said when he tasted his work. "Mingin piece 'a shite." And it was, my friends. But we were not deterred.
I hired young Jayden, hale and muscular, to head up a foraging crew. What a happy accident this decision proved to be! Jayden divided his crew into two parts, surf and turf, and soon they were wandering into Connecticut ponds to retrieve dead cattail hearts. They harvested burdock along the Major Deegan Expressway, collected pigeons in midtown. By following feral cats, urban coyotes, the occasional Queens pit bull, Jayden and his crews gathered some partially gnawed birds, a dozen mice, and half a Yorkshire terrier.
Animals die deeply all around us. You'd be surprised how many are keeling over right now with respiratory failure, bone cancer, heart attacks. They have accidents. Uncoordinated squirrels fall out of trees onto concrete sidewalks. Bream are dropped by gulls. Skates are washed ashore by tides. Whether it was part of a seal, possums, chipmunks, rats, voles, snakes, Jayden soon filled the larder.
And Bruce performed miracles. Those of you who have followed the Circle of Life story from the beginning will recall the opening night raves for his sizzling rabbit snout fajitas, seagull hash, and mole lung on cartilage foam. Let me remind you of Betsy-Lynn Bao's first tweet:
COL is to post-industrial cuisine wht L'Escoffier was 2 Antne Careme: Honest. Responsible. rilly awesome. #deepfood #score
Such praise coming from the most feared restaurant critic in the city not only affirmed our creative vision, but sparked an immediate three-month reservations backlog.
The following day I phoned Betsy-Lynn, interrupting her seventh-grade social studies class at Brearley, to thank her.
"You are at the intersection of social media and branded event advertising," she said. Naturally, I hired her (and her 752,132 Twitter followers) on the spot as our vice-president for social media and public relations. I think you'll all agree that her salary, stock options, and the flexible work arrangements we've made to accommodate her field hockey practices and games have been more than justified.
Her leadership of social influencers and our advercontent program helped us weather skepticism from the legacy media. When Florence Fabricant called Bruce's raccoon haggis "nothing more than trash," did we let that bother us? No! We understood that facts don't spread, emotions do spread. We appealed directly to the glamorous-adventurer demographic, the young, the techno-savvy.
Betsy-Lynn was masterful at creating a community of content with real-time activations across social media channels via influencer-curated native advercontent, like Corby Kummer, who wrote "Deep Food is true food, the slowest of all slow food, so very, very slow, its inventor, Bruce McAllister, waits patiently for death."
She recruited the city's hippest rebels to our side with tweets like
Jayden Grits butchers shit right there! Hawt-ee, too. How underground is that? FU, health dpt. #deepfood
Here's one example of our strategy in action, as influencer "shiksagoddess" guides a conversation on UrbanBaby.
I don't know what to think about it. My five-year-old suggested we buy a terrier and some French rabbits like he saw in Provence last year and let the dog kill the rabbits for us. He thought it would be "so awesome!" I do think it might provide a lesson on the dog-eat-rabbit world so he learns that food doesn't only come from Zabars, but I worry about the side effects of the stress hormones the rabbit will produce once he knows he's being killed. I've heard it could lower sperm counts in boys. Plus, I'm not sure how my son's preschool teacher would react and we're trying to get him into Buckley next year. - Anna234
Hey Anna…you're right to be worried. Hormones are poison. We're castrating our boys with them. - OrganicBex
Wouldn't that be a good thing? - BushyBabe
Hubby and I are so totally into Deep Food! We hired the guy who makes lunches at BlackRock where hubby works to come over and cook a Deep Food menu for our last dinner party. He got a weasel from Greenwood Cemetery. Amaaa-zing! It tasted so…real! Hubby says we're going to Argentina this fall to forage for capybara. Sooo excited! - shiksagoddess
Other restaurateurs couldn't ignore the juggernaut. David Chang opened Fukyutu. Daniel Boulud started Decay. Of course, those Charlie Palmer UpChuck trucks cruising around Los Angeles owe their existence to your company.
We leaned into our success by opening a small beachside café in Montauk, Samsara. Making Jayden head chef was risky, yes, but the gamble paid off when his jellyfish quesadillas become the summer's iconic snack.
Your company's leadership team further extended the brand by placing Jayden in his own full-service fine dining Deep Food restaurant, Samsara West, in Malibu. True, Jayden was no Bruce in the kitchen. But, as Betsy-Lynn reassured the team, "a chef is not a chef, he's a curated content container."
Once Betsy-Lynn wrangled an Instagram of Kaley Cuoco noshing on crispy found Topanga rattlesnake skin during a lunch meeting with her agent, The Ivy was out, Samsara was in.
With proceeds from our IPO, we leveraged Jayden's growing celebrity into the first five Jayden Grits Lickety-Split Samsara Cafés in Boston, Indianapolis, Columbus, Jacksonville, and O'Hare airport. As you can see in our revenue breakdown, same-store sales have risen each month over the most recent quarter.
The EPS growth curve on the following page did not come without setbacks. We were shaken by Bruce's return to Scotland after that Nick Denton head-butting incident, and the brief scandal over the sourcing of woodchucks from the Midwest region, but we stuck to our content modality paradigm. As Betsy-Lynn reminded all of us, "transparency is the act of being human as a brand."
Which brings me to the future. Your company's leadership has exciting initiatives on board for the coming fiscal year.
We'll continue our aggressive expansion of Jayden Grits Lickety-Split Samsara Cafés. We'll introduce what we hope will become a diverse line of Deep Frozen® foods for the home chef, starting with recovered elk Salisbury steaks. And we'll leverage our leadership position in Deep Food to execute several cross-channel brand-extension play strategies with a new division, Deep Living®.
Finally, we will vastly improve our already formidable brand curation social strategies with game-changing technology, our proprietary Circle of Life Industries Pepsia Transform®.
The Pepsia Transform® represents the ultimate advance in Big Data. Pepsia eats more information, and faster, than any algorithm of its type, then exudes actionable brand curation marketing targets.
True, I don't know what the hell I'm talking about. I was a liberal arts major.
But some quant guys we hired explained it to me and here's what they said: Suppose a junior executive in Cedar Rapids tweets about lunch plans. Meanwhile, in Pasco, Washington, a couple sends an email to a contractor about their home remodel. And in Raleigh, North Carolina, a mom complains to her Facebook friends about her lousy night's sleep. All these messages join millions of others in the big river of bits streaming around us. The Pepsia Transform® dips its digital ladle into this river, and, in seconds, transmits a tweet to the young man in Iowa suggesting a fast lunch of seared breast of pocket mouse on a bed of found fleabane at the new Cedar Rapids Jayden Grits Lickety-Split Samsara Café. The couple in Pasco, Washington receives an email suggesting they include a Deep Living® Exhibition Abattoir® in their new kitchen to butcher the Circle of Life Way® (great for entertaining!). That tired mom? She'll see a message about the $28,000 Deep Sleep® horse hide-and-hair mattress.
As you can see, Circle of Life Industries is harnessing the power of social peristalsis to create the world's leading lifestyle brand. The future is bright.
Thank you.
On February 6, the government of France will award my mother a Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur. The award will recognize the small role she played in the liberation of France during World War II.
I say "small" because my mother says small, and in the context of the liberation of France it was small. My mother, now 92, was an army nurse assigned to a field hospital in Normandy. Two of her tent-mates, both still living, have also been given this honor, as have other U.S. veterans who participated. The award is not in recognition of some dramatic act or unique suffering.
She'd be the first to tell you this. She'd insist on telling you this.
Overpowered by the flickering heroics of scores of war movies and "Greatest Generation" documentaries, and gauzy images of "The Good War" we've all come to know, she's right. Her little bit of the war, as she likes to call it, wasn't a big deal, except to her.
She waged it on a few acres of pasture near the village of La-Haye-du-Puits on the Cotentin Peninsula near Cherbourg. She knew very little of what was happening outside that small domain. "I think I saw two copies of Stars and Stripes the whole time I was there," she says in the oral history I took a couple of years ago.
Before she was Mrs. Robert Alexander, she was Agnes Stern, though everybody called her "Bobby." Bobby was a kid, practically, who was known in her high school as the gabby, flirty, social butterfly and who happened to be in nursing school when Pearl Harbor was attacked. She joined the army out of a touch of patriotism, but also because lots of other nurses were joining the army and she thought it would be a fun adventure.
She was so naďve that, during a leave from Camp Lee, Virginia, when she came home to Jeannette, Pennsylvania to see her parents, and they worried she'd be sent overseas, she reassured them.
"I can remember saying 'Don't worry, I will never go overseas because you have to volunteer. Well, when I got back to Camp Lee that day, I had just walked into the barracks, and somebody said 'You're going overseas!'"
Her unit, the 164th hospital, had been ordered to Normandy.
A convoy of British and American ships dodged German submarines to deliver her off the French coast. She arrived in the middle of the night, a month or so, as she recalls it, after D-Day. She climbed down a ropey net hung over the side of the ship and onto a wooden raft. Her combat boot fell through a space in the boards of the raft leaving her foot soaked with cold Channel sea.
Once on the beach, she and the other nurses, all young and green, waited for a truck to take them to La-Haye-du-Puits. The plan called for a pre-dawn arrival. The driver got lost.
"At about dawn," she recalls, "he drove into St. Lo." The battle for the crossroads town was one of the fiercest engagements of the Normandy campaign. "That's when we got our first glimpse of war. There was nothing there. It was all bombed out."
The dawn light silhouetted smoke, fire, shells of buildings. "It was kind of scary. Here again, we were 21, 22 years old, and don't forget, until Camp Lee, none of us had ever been more than 25 miles away from home and all the sudden here we were in the midst of a war in another country. We were cold, it was rainy, we were scared, some of us already homesick."
The driver eventually found his way and the unit set itself up, living in pup tents, at first, with bigger tents for surgeries and a patient ward. They ate C-rations and K-rations, and bathed with water from their helmets.
Conditions eventually improved – looking a bit like M*A*S*H – and she settled more or less into routine. She gauged what was happening in the wider war according to the flow of casualties arriving from nearby battlefields. The boys – mostly boys – arrived by truck, were operated on or otherwise treated, and, after a period of recovery, either sent to England and home or back to the line.
As I grew up, almost the only war stories I heard from my mother and my father, who died in 1999, and who was a sergeant in the same unit, were about how much fun it all was.
Here's an oft-told one: As an officer, a lieutenant, my mother had a liquor ration, four fifths per month, one each of bourbon, Scotch, gin and rum. She used this as currency, mainly. Sometimes she bribed the guards overseeing the nurses' part of the camp – black men in the then-segregated army – to look the other way when the nurses wanted to meet with an enlisted man. It is thanks to such forbidden "fraternization," and to her skill at petty corruption, that my two brothers and I exist today.
There's a story about a scrawny chicken bartered from a local farmer, and one about the time she and her mates almost managed to burn down their tent trying to stay warm. They're pretty funny.
The only time my mother mentioned anything dark was when one of her sons malingered in bed on cold school day mornings pleading some grave malady. She'd pull the "basket cases" trump card, telling us about young guys with limbs blown away. We figured she was exaggerating, but Bobby Alexander's sons had some of the best attendance records in the history of Lancaster, Ohio Catholic schools.
It's true that the closest my mother got to a German carrying a gun was the result of desperation. German soldiers once managed to sneak into the camp at night. They had come from the nearby Channel Islands where their garrison had been left by the Reich to fend for itself after D-Day. Seeking food, they took several nurses hostage. Some sort of negotiation ensued. My mother doesn't know the details, but suspects a food-for-nurses trade was arranged. The episode ended happily.
The camp was never bombed, and, as far as she knows, never shot at. Many nurses, like those serving in the Philippines, some of whom were taken prisoner and suffered horribly, had a much tougher war than my mother. She'd want you to know that.
Don't think, though, that this is all there is to her story.
She learned about her own country through contact with hundreds of broken young men, sometimes by writing letters for them. This was supposed to be the job of Red Cross nurses, but she took it on after a soldier told her that when he asked a Red Cross nurse to help, "'I told her I was from Mississippi and could neither read nor write, and she told everybody on the ward.'" (Episodes like this instilled in my mother a life-long distrust of the Red Cross.) Lots of boys, she recalls, could not read or write. "So I wrote the letter and said 'Who will read this? Can your parents read?' And he said 'No, the lady next door will read it to them.'"
Often, the men just wanted to talk. When screams from their own nightmares woke them in the night, she soothed them.
"Back then, we had something called elixir of terpin hydrate with codeine, a cough syrup, and when I was on night duty, every night about bedtime, they would all start coughing and say 'I need cough medicine!'" She laughs, but they needed it, and not for coughing.
The boys liked her. "Every GI I ever knew fell in love with his nurse," she says. Some drew flattering pictures. One cartoon she's kept depicts her as a cute, buxom angel with wings flying toward a man's bare quivering ass, a syringe with a long needle in her hand.
Every day, especially during the epically cold winter of 1944-45 when the camp was a primary recipient of casualties from the Battle of the Bulge, she watched such young men die, some of them on operating tables during surgeries she assisted, some in their cots.
"We got all kinds," she says of the traffic through the hospital. "Even little French children who stepped on mines. We had lots of bullet holes, just about everything."
And those basket cases? "Oh yes," she says.
She pauses a second.
"I had a…I can almost see him. He lost an arm into his shoulder, and I'll never forget, right before he went back to the states he said to me, 'I would gladly give another arm to get out of that.' We had one little guy who had one arm and one leg and he was going home, of course, but he hadn't yet told his parents. I did my best. I said 'You have got to write and tell them.' He said 'No, they'll see me when they see me.'
"A guy I dated in high school, his brother…." She stops. She's 92 years old but sees his face clear as yesterday.
"Before we were set up in the big tent, all of us were together and one girl came in and said 'Bobby, there is a handsome major out there looking for you.' I said 'Who knows I'm here?' So I went out and I never saw this guy before. He was huge! He told me who he was and I said, 'Oh, I know your brother.' And he said 'Your dad knows my sister.' His sister worked in the factory at McKee Glass [where her father worked] and she wondered if I might be anywhere near her brother."
She stops again.
"His name was Dante DalleTezze, from Claridge. I went to high school with his brother, Elio. Dante was a good football player. [He started for the University of Pittsburgh in 1938.] Well, his sister wrote to him and told him my outfit number, so he had been watching, and they were bivouacked nearby, and he came, and we had a nice long chat. He said 'We are going to be shipped out tonight or tomorrow, but I will come back and look you up. I said 'OK.' So they were shipped out and I never heard from him.
"Then came the Battle of the Bulge. We began to get patients from his outfit, and, of course, I would say do you know this major and it was always, 'No,' 'No,' 'No.' I finally found somebody who said 'He was our major.' I said, 'I know him well. Do you know if he was hurt?' 'No.' Then I found a kid and he said 'How well do you know him?' I told him, and he said 'Well, he's dead. He had his head shot off.'"
She pauses again. "There were lots of little things like that. Well, not so little."
She doesn't admit anything about herself but says that, yes, some were affected by all this "but nothing like Vietnam." She sees Vietnam vets when she goes to her local VA hospital to pick up some prescriptions. They look haunted.
After Germany surrendered, the unit was told to prepare for the Pacific. She can still sing the song, "Please, Mr. Truman" imploring the president to send them home, instead. While the unit was in Marseille awaiting a ship, atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
She wrote a letter home: "I will either call or telegraph to tell you what time. It should not be too long. I want a bottle of Duquesne [beer] stuffed pork chops, an orange, and a piece of cake."
When she arrived, she kissed and hugged her parents, and had a pork chop and cake and beer, and went upstairs to her old bedroom and tried to sleep in her bed and, failing, lay down on the floor and cried. She slept on the floor next to her bed for weeks. She cried often.
"I was welcomed in town like the prodigal son returned," she says. Still in the army, "I had to wear my uniform at all times and everybody made a fuss." Her parents did not ask her about her experiences. "They never did. Not even later. They never did. And I didn't want to tell them about it.
Her town seemed strange, the people in it, the ones she'd grown up with, seemed different. But she was the one who was different. Not only did she miss the intimate camaraderie of her unit – "We were like family" – "it was an intense experience and then, all the sudden, you had everything you could want right there, and nothing to do and you're expected to be a normal civilian." Even the thought of marrying my father, who had gone to his home in Cleveland, didn't excite her. She says she got over it, eventually, mostly.
"After awhile, my dad said the war made me hard."
She shrugs.
"You know, you get over that."
"Was it true, though? Did it make you hard?" I ask.
"It probably did. I think that's true. I think that would be true of all of us. It still probably has some effect on me."
She acts like receiving the Legion of Honor on February 6 won't be that big a deal. She wants to make sure the ceremony is over in time for her to make her Thursday bridge game. Don't you believe it.
Postscript: My mother received her honor, kisses on both cheeks by the French consul from Miami, and a bottle of French champagne. She was back in time for bridge. She won.


text:
The diagram illustrates the formula: 1 + 3 + 5 + ... + (2n - 1) = n² Use the diagram to show that any odd number is the difference of two squares.
How many zeros are there at the end of the number which is the
product of first hundred positive integers?
Is it true that $99^n$ has 2n digits and $999^n$ has 3n digits? Investigate!

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Cari Amici (Dear Friends),
A couple of Sundays ago, I had the kind of day in Italia that makes me feel that life here is simply surreal. At least it is often spontaneous! Originally, I had thought to visit a dear friend outside of the city, but I had also received an invitation to see the current exhibit inside the Palazzo Strozzi here in Florence, Italy. What is a girl to do, but try to squeeze in both social occasions on my one day outside of the studio?
So, my friend Roberto (another artist) and I met at the carousel in Piazza della Repubblica early on the Sunday morning and together we went to see the art exhibit "Americans in Florence: Sargent and the American Impressionists" (on exhibit 3 March-15 July 2012). We also had a gander at the Strozzina.
Between Roberto's amused observation that Sunday morning by the name "Strozzina" (the Contemporary Art Section inside the Palazzo Strozzi) as a curious play on words (he believes was intended) and another friend Luca's subsequent explaining to me of the Italian language (esp. Tuscan), I am getting a fun education. The suffix "ina" means "little" -- so "Little Strozzi" is a cute way of saying "not the main gallery." But the verb "strozzare" means 'to choke' (or 'to strangle') and strozzina is also Italian slang for a (female) LOAN SHARK (someone who will cause you a lot of pain)! So, if indeed intended, is that Palazzo Strozzi's official comment on contemporary art? [Or just the stuff they exhibit? ha!] But I digress… we were not as impressed with the American Impressionist mostra as we had hoped to be, but there were several remarkable works of art in the exhibit.
Well, in any event, my other friend cancelled our visit, so Roberto and I sauntered on over to one of his favorite places for lunch – Antonio's, near Piazza Salvemini. I have known Roberto since 2006 and he introduced me to Antonio that New Year's Eve as we ducked under a half-closed door to buy some last minute goodies for our all-night party that night. Antonio even let Roberto take a picture of me with him behind the counter (that image is on another laptop at the moment or I would share). However, I include here a snapshot that I took of Antonio and his wife after Antonio took one of Roberto and me (see that one in my Facebook albums…). We ate quite well and Roberto even topped it all off by ordering for us this lovely cheese that is a specialty of the region outside of Firenze (but still in Tuscany). Served on a bed of rucola. Mmmm.
And then we experienced Lagniappe: Antonio told us that he and his wife had to stay there to work, but had two tickets to TASTE, a food festival that was happening that afternoon and into the early evening. He offered them to us. Roberto and I looked at each other and thought, "Perché no?" I had only intended to be out for the morning before getting ready to take the train, so we headed over to Roberto's closer home to get some coats and caught a bus over to the event.
It was a lot of fun – free tastings of wine, cheeses, tea, (they had beers there too), meats, and foods that are all fresh and from Italy. Yum, yum, yummy! Of course, once we finally closed that place down, we decided to head to a new bar and discovered that we knew the twin bartenders from another place. Lovely to see that their dreams to own their own bar had come to fruition! Anyway, here are some snapshots from TASTE in Florence, Italy. There are more on my Facebook pages. Enjoy and happy Spring!


text:
Memphisto tries once again to produce a gold coin from thin air. This time it bobbles a bit, but he does it. With a half-hearted grin, he says, "Bring my friend, Lisglen, whatever he'd like to imbibe. Tonight, good fortune is smiling on us three!"
"Gentlemen, I value Holgar's experience with arms, but I am troubled by the lack of same experience with the youngsters. I don't want to be responsible for sending them to an early grave. What do you think? And if Holgar wishes for a share of the treasure, he must prove his mettle. Torchbearers and shield carriers are one thing, but if this man can truly fight, then I'd be willing to give him a portion, albeit not an equal share just yet."
"What say you? 1/8 of a share or at most 1/2 of a share? Either way, it will add up to more than the weekly pay for a man-at-arms."


text:
Tutorial: How do I search for scores using uniform titles? Part II: Distinctive Titles
Time: 2:57
Searching for music materials is often challenging due to the variety of languages involved. Should you search for works in the original composer's language or by the titles in English?
Lucky for you, librarians have created "uniform" titles. Uniform titles are assigned to each musical work and if you know how to search for a work by a uniform title, you can find every score for that work no matter how many languages it is published in.
There are two types of uniform titles-- form titles, used for works with a set instrumentation, and distinctive titles, used to find works with specific titles such as operas or orchestral works. Today we'll look at one type of uniform title, the distinctive title.
Distinctive uniform titles have titles specific to their work and do not follow a set form. The Rite of Spring, Pictures at an Exhibition, and Prelude of the Afternoon of a Faun are examples of works that have distinctive titles. Most distinctive titles are created in the native language of the composer. Let's take a look at how to find the distinctive title for Prelude of the Afternoon of a Faun.
I'll start with an author search in the library catalog for "Debussy, C." Next, I'll look for the Claude Debussy with the highest number of entries found.
Once I've selected the appropriate Debussy, I'll see a list of results. Notice the results that are "see references" with a link. These see references are linking to the distinctive uniform title of a work!
The good news is that you don't have to scroll through pages and pages of results looking for the right see reference. Simply scroll to the very bottom of the page and use the search box next to "locate in results" to type the English title of the work. In my case I'll type "prelude of the afternoon of a faun" and click the locate in results button.
A number of promising results appear but I still want to find the appropriate "see reference" to make sure I'm not missing anything. Once I locate it, I'll click on it.
From here I'll use the limit button to limit my material type to printed music scores. I'll change the System sort drop box to sort by title. This will prevent the same item from showing up multiple times in my list.
Now I have a full list of scores for "Prelude to the afternoon of a faun"!
For more information on searching for scores using uniform title searching, please see our tutorial on How do I…find scores for symphonies, concertos, quartets and trios? If you still have questions, click on the "Ask Us!" link located on each library webpage to email, chat with, or text a librarian.


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Monday, March 4, 2013
MiM Mail: Time to hang up the stethoscope?
16 comments:
I always think to myself that if I get bored to the point where I can't stand it anymore, I could do another fellowship in something more interesting. Have you considered that? I just think that we all trained so hard to get our degrees, and it is SO hard to go back when being away from medicine for a while. You probably will want to work again when your kids aren't so small, and you don't want to make it very difficult to go back. These are the reasons I never a long absence, even those I've wanted to.ReplyDelete
I've been in primary care for 5.5 years, and Friday I saw 5 patients in a row with URIs. I was thinking to myself that it might get old after a while. I agree with Fizzy though - maybe you should consider fellowship, or a "niche" training. I think it's good to keep your feet wet because it'll be very very difficult to come back if you leave completely.ReplyDelete
I agree kind of with Fizzy, that if you're bored, you may need a new job. Not necessarily do a new fellowship (sounds like its not quite the right time for that), but maybe a more academic job, more teaching, policy, research? There is so much you can do with your training & skills & there are definitely creative career paths for physicians outside of direct patient care.ReplyDelete
Now if you truly just want more time with your kids, a new career path won't give you that---but it sounds more like you just hate your job and would rather be home than do it any more. You are about to be on maternity leave, right? See how it goes, being at home with 3 littles (keep them home with you if you can, after you are physically recovered from the delivery).
Good luck.
Since you're not dependent on your income, could you quit your current position but still work a day or two a week in a volunteer clinic? You could keep your skills up in case you do want to go back at some point.ReplyDelete
- AnonymousMarch 4, 2013 at 11:53 AM
I agree with the above that i's really had to go back once you've been out for a while and you may want to work when the kids are older. You might regret quitting. That said, if you're 100% certain you want to quit (I didn't get that this is true from the email...), I think locum work seems like a good deal. You could work 5-7 days out of every 4-6 weeks, keep your skills and make decent $$. It does present a unique childcare challenge.ReplyDelete
I agree with everyone above. It sounds like you need a new job. Maybe additional fellowship training will open new doors for you and allow you to use parts of your brain that have gone dormant, or maybe getting an academic job where you could do teaching would help. In family medicine, aren't there opportunities to do community outreach / quality improvement, that sort of thing? You might find some of the organizational / administrative aspects of those sorts of things fulfilling also.ReplyDelete
Personally (and I know this probably sounds horrible to some people) I find staying at home to be horribly suffocating, and yes, boring and exhausting also. So, if it's additional mental stimulation you crave, I worry that being a SAHM isn't going to provide you with what you're looking for. Plus, as everyone else said, it could be difficult to return to medicine later if you wanted to.
I would recommend taking a good long break, then going back part-time.ReplyDelete
The break allows you to recharge your batteries and get things in perspective.
Working part-time allows you to maintain a professional side to your life, something that is very important for many people to feel fulfilled.
Being with your kids "part-time" allows you to spend way more time with them than the average parent, but also allows them to grow more independent and get exposed to other stimuli.
It worked for me!
Be careful not do confuse boredom with burnout. If you are truly bored, than it is possibly that a fellowship or additional training might be a good idea. However, if you are truly burned out (as many physicians these days are: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/the-widespread-problem-of-doctor-burnout/) and suffering from emotional exhaustion, depersonalization and lack of self-accomplishment; then maybe you need a job change, but not necessarily a career change.ReplyDelete
I got bored with primary care, too. It took longer because I never did "straight" primary care - I did some teaching and I took on outside consulting/facilitation work as well. I always loved the patient relationships but after a while (nearly 20 years, in my case) the routine was, well, routine. I also struggled with the endless compromises required, which seemed to chip away at my ethics and values.ReplyDelete
So I changed to hospice and palliative care, but that won't help because you're not me. It might help, though, to hear the process: I spent some time figuring out what about the job I still loved, and what other skills or parts of myself I wanted to use more at work, and went looking for something that gave me what I wanted. I was lucky to find it without having to re-train or relocate my family, and I'm now approaching my fourth anniversary in a job and a field I truly love. I said it took until I was 45 to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up.
I just finished visiting a former young attending above me when I was a fellow - she became a good friend. She is eight months into a break from being a part time physician - and sooo happy. Her kids are 8, 5, and 2. I watched her try to make two part time positions (after she started a family) work at academic institutions - her husband is a superstar academician and has been moving a lot for his career - and they fizzled for various reasons. When they moved to their current location in July of last year, she decided to do something she hasn't done before - nest, support her family, get her kids plugged in to school and activities, and rediscover something she loves. She is a former ballet dancer and is now choreographing rising star teenagers at a studio. She is meeting neighbors and moms and creating a support system for herself and her family. She is spending time with her kids.ReplyDelete
Her husband's institution has been offering her a part time position for months. She is considering taking it, when she is ready and has sitters in place beforehand, not as a frantic afterthought. She misses that challenge (she is an excellent superstar physician as well - double fellowships from amazing institutions) but does not seem to regret at all the nourishment she is giving herself and her family with her break. It shows. She looks happier and calmer and more beautiful (if that's possible) than I've ever seen her - sewing sequin constellations into and bordering burlap with golden thread as a backdrop for a dance she is working on as we chatted while kids orbited in the background and snow was falling outside.
I know it sounds like you aren't in the position to move, I don't mean to compare apples to oranges. Maybe, however, a little time off might give you a breather and offer you some perspective around what you want to do. If you do not have the financial need, however cushiony, I would go for it. Maybe try to volunteer to keep your hand in things, if necessary based on future job possibilities - I'm not as versed in that arena as those above. Good luck!
Sounds like with #3 on the way it's a great chance for a breather - you can take a year long (or whatever length) mat leave if you so wish and "try it out". I would be tempted to keep skills up with some very part time work... ie get on a locum pool for a youth clinic, women's health clinic, or fill in a few shifts at a walk-in clinic each month - just to stay in the game. If we could financially do it, that's what I would do -- just take 3 or 4 shifts a month in an area of interest, that you wouldn't need to do re-training for.ReplyDelete
So many insightful comments above, I almost don't want to add anymore. But have you considered the boredom you feel is related to your desire to be home? For me, I always loved my field of medicine until I feel deprived of my time with kids. Then I will spend a week of vacation playing a SAHM, and the first day I am back, I remember why I went into anesthesia. Then as I feel more and more anemic in my time with kiddos and I fall out of love with anesthesia again. If I were in your position financially, I would quit and work either very part time (once or twice a week) or work locums to keep my license current. Good luck to you.ReplyDelete
So many insightful comments above, I almost don't want to add anymore. But have you considered the boredom you feel is related to your desire to be home? For me, I always loved my field of medicine until I feel deprived of my time with kids. Then I will spend a week of vacation playing a SAHM, and the first day I am back, I remember why I went into anesthesia. Then as I feel more and more anemic in my time with kiddos and I fall out of love with anesthesia again. If I were in your position financially, I would quit and work either very part time (once or twice a week) or work locums to keep my license current. Good luck to you.ReplyDelete
Thank you for this post - I feel exactly the same way. I am also in family medicine, 1 child (1 on the way), but have only worked in my field for 4 years. I couldn't agree more with your paragraph on dreading the day, the complaints, etc. However, I do work full-time, and we are dependent on my income. And while it's an eye-opener to read comments by others suggesting an alternate job, personally I feel completely overwhelmed by the thought of changing careers and quite simply don't even know where to start looking outside of my current 100% clinical out-patient work. So alas, while I don't have much advice myself, I wish you the best of luck - whether it's more time with your family or a new position - or a little bit of both.ReplyDelete
I think many people feel the need for change after 10-15 years. Fortunately after 12 years of practice, my family has moved to France for a year. I am having an amazing time and love not working. It has been a wonderful break. It has taken me 7 months to figure out what I want to do when I come home. I have decided that even though I love the doctor-patient relationship and feel guilty about not returning, I don't want the commitment of a practice right now. I hope to find a few hours/month of urgent care and/or volunteer opportunities on my return. I do want to keep my feet wet and keep my skills up but my priority is to my family and myself.ReplyDelete
I encourage you to take a year off when your baby is born. You should journal during this time to help you figure out what you value, enjoy, and what sort of position you want to return to if any. I think change is good. You can always go back to something similar to your current job if needed.
Can you do a LOA for some time for a break or some time to think? Few months.. or a year or two.. Or for personal reasons. Like being a mother. Or being pregnant. Or burnout. Or fatigue. Or mental health. I bet they will let you if you talk it through. I am a workaholic and got to the same point as you after 12 years and now I am returning to college pre-nursing. I have some credits that are not expired so it wont take long to get a health science degree. I have an 8 year old and a 3 year old. Work is work. You are correct. But you are very fortunate to be a family doctor.ReplyDelete


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Writing for Slate, Patrick Iber suggests giving up his dream of being a history professor. It's good advise. In other words: can't be a pimp? then leave the ghetto.
This post may seem familiar because I wrote a similar in in January, because reality is similar: if you're not doing something you're great at, that you love doing, that you get paid for doing, you may be doing the wrong thing. You may be living in the ghetto.
There are four types of people in the academic ghetto: pimps who are full professors, disaster tourists from rich families who are just having fun, hos who are exploited by pimps, and escapees who gtfo.
The pimp is a pretty fun place for pimps, sufficiently amusing for disaster tourists.
Patrick Iber's post was especially moving because it so closely tracks my experience in academia (though he also dragged his children thru it). This part of his piece brought tears to my eyes:
[My mother] was released from the hospital on Jan. 1 to recover at her brother's house. I flew to Washington, D.C., the next day. When the plane landed, I had multiple messages waiting for me, telling me to call home. My mother, age 64, had died in her sleep. Her youngest grandson was 7 weeks old.
The [academic conference] was a daze. I walked the streets between conference hotels in tears. I told friends. I told strangers. To others, with no logic to it, I said nothing. I might have gone home, but the severe weather in the Northeast scrambled routes and made it nearly impossible to rebook my flight. As a lecturer with no research support, I had spent half a month's salary to travel there anyhow. My mom had wanted me to give my paper, so I did: to an audience of three. I shook hands at mixers. I had no interviews.
I also lost a parent while in academia. I also gave presentations to audiences of three.
Academia was fun for me. It's a great place to be a pimp. But if you're not a tourist and you're not a pimp, become an escapee.


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The same week I gave the "Art of Intverviewing" lecture to the first quarter graduate students here at The Medill School at Northwestern University, a few working journalists conducted some bad interviews.
The attempt by the Australian journalist to tell the Dalai Lama a Dalai Lama joke fell flatter than the pizza with everything. Which brings me back to my lecture on interviewing: Be professional. Be respectful. It's your reputation and your byline.
I don't imagine interviewing the Pope with "The pope, a rabbi and a monk walk into a bar…"
Which brings me to Chris Wallace on Fox News asking Michele Bachman if she is a flake.
Let me be clear, I am not a Fox fan or a Michele Bachman fan. But as a journalist doing the interview, your bias should not be so transparent. It was arrogant of Wallace to put her down and make her defensive. My instinct is there is gender bias at play here; I do not recall anyone asking Jesse Ventura during a running for office interview if he was a flake. Or the same for H.Ross Perot. Ventura could have body slammed the interviewer. Perot could have bought him to death.
Which brings me back to the interviewing lecture. Sources beget sources. Show a sincere wish to get it right.
Under the heading, "Don't fall in love with your subject," I also advise students to remain objective. The flip side is also true. "Don't be a hater."
I have interviewed people who make me uncomfortable, I have interviewed people I disagree with personally, but I still hold to the adage: "It matters how you ask and what you ask."
I tell students to consider how you phrase the question. Consider the order of the question. Consider the sensivity. Consider the tone and the way you speak. Consider your body language.
Toward the end of the lecture, I ask them to above all respect the source and the information. You need the information. You need the story. You need to be accurate. The reader needs to trust you will get it right every time.
I remind students there is no such thing as a dumb question. I say that because it is worse to have a correction in a publication or broadcast than to risk the subject thinking you are a little dense. Be sure you understand before you walk away. Make sure you understand your notes. Underline difficult concepts for follow-up questions. Believe that a good question yields a good answer.
After seeing these two professional interviewing failures, I will revise the prespcription that there is no such as a dumb question. Yes, there is. You can tell the Dalai Lama a Dalai Lama joke. And you can call a candidate for president a flake.
I am cutting this post short. I have an interview in a half-hour, a profile for a new book I am writing. And I need to follow my own first rule of interviewing: Be prepared.


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A sampling of participant feedback from the 2-day January 2007 Course:
A Nonlinear Dynamic Approach to Sensory Modulation
Presenter: Tina Champagne, OTD, OTR/L
Tina Champagne was excellent, knowledgable, passionate and is a true gift to our profession! I am definitely interested in following Tina's work and furthering my knowledge. Very interested in more conferences/trainings.
As someone who is not an OT or familiar with the discipline, Tina's presentation material and content fueled a real curiosity and understanding that there is a very rich and beneficial knowledge and techniques that would greatly help the clients I work with. She provided a great balance between educational slides and experiential content. Her friendly approach and non-jargon filled language made this material accessible and easy to understand.
Tina Champagne is inspiring in her leadership and in brining this work to inpatient psychiatry as well as clear and well-organized in her presentation. I would recommend this seminar to all inpatient mental health practitioners.
Tina is not only well versed, presents information in an understandable manner and allows for experiential opportunities but is also inspiring and provides the challenge to apply the knowledge with best practice. I have become motivated to explore the nonlinear dynamic approach more.
Tina Champagne is an expert on this topic, passionate, professional, approachable, innovative, and confident, a leader and inspiring. She provides education and practical application A – Z. Looking forward to your next workshops.
I'm very excited to go and share my ideas with a wide variety of individuals in my hospital. This course is what I needed to revive my energy to advocate for OT! Thank You!
Tina is an inspiration, extremely knowledgable and an excellent presenter! I am looking forward to learning more about sensory modulation and to future conferences with you!
Anyone practicing in mental health, no matter what practice model/frame of reference, needs to attend this conference! This is the future outlook of person-centered practice for mental health!


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- Phone
- 540-839-7202
- City
- Warm Springs
- Locality
- Bath
Whether you're interested in visiting the world-renowned Homestead Resort, a quaint bed & breakfast for a relaxing vacation, attending a concert at the prestigious Garth Newel Music Center, or enjoying a soak in the world famous Jefferson Pools the County of Bath has an endless array of exciting adventures just waiting to be discovered.
If you visit the County of Bath, what will you find? You will find something, remarkable.
Want to see? Through the looking glass of an "old school" camera called a VIFL Sardinia Lomography camera begin your adventure with an early hour's stroll of Main Street Hot Springs. Are those stars or lights that lead the way?
A few steps more and you are at the famous Omni Homestead Resort, here decorated for Christmas. The lights twinkle like hundreds of candles on the lawn. As dawn breaks at the Homesteads' Old Course First tee, we are joined by a ghostly spectre.
Next stop, the Jefferson Pools, the oldest wooden bath houses in the United States in operation! Steam hovers over the bathhouses, inviting us in for a soak. We are welcomed by warm, clear water; a constant 95 degree temps, bathed in sunshine. The water is so clear that you can easily see the stones that hold the warmth of the water. Look up and you can see the sun shimmering through the opening that releases the steam, here reflected on the water as well. Hmm, soaking has transported us to some other place; these lights suggest perhaps another world? Bliss, it is the only way to explain what floating at the Jefferson Pools feels like! Here you are in the woman's pools. Feel the steam rise, soak in the warmth of the water, natural light through small windows dimly lights the room, adding to the relaxation of the experience.
At the Garth Newel Music Center, enjoy world class chamber music and food! Here our musicians practice for an upcoming performance. In this picture you can "feel" the music, and almost hear it .
Sunset, a full day of play in Bath County is done. Watch the sun slip away at Ingalls Overlook .Visit the wine cellar at the Waterwheel Restaurant at Gristmill Square, one of several unique dining experiences you can enjoy during your visit, Enjoy a meal, a glass of wine and relive your visit to a magical place.
Last Updated: 05/29/2014
What's Nearby
12178 Sam Snead Highway
Hot Springs, VA 244840.18 MI
12 Katydid Trail
Warm Springs, VA 244840.28 MI
74 Courthouse Hill Road
Warm Springs, VA 244840.35 MI
124 Old Mill Road
Warm Springs, VA 244840.41 MI
Warm Springs
Warm Springs, VA 244840.41 MI


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Governor Palin today posted on Facebook:
Yesterday, another shoe dropped in the chronicles of the Obama administration's crony capitalism. A start-up electric car company with ties to Al Gore got a $529 million loan guarantee from Obama's Department of Energy to build luxury electric cars…in Finland! Leaving aside the fact that to date only two of these $97,000 cars have been sold (one of them to a movie star), we might at least hope that this ridiculous exercise in the government picking winners minus any competitive, transparent process (Al Gore's venture cap firm) and losers (the taxpayers subsidizing a car no one wants) would produce manufacturing jobs in the United States. Isn't that the alleged purpose of Obama's stimulus giveaways?
It's bad enough that we borrow money from foreign countries to give to foreign countries. Now we borrow from foreign countries to finance jobs in foreign countries. (This kind of reminds me of the $2 billion assistance President Obama provided Brazil for their off-shore energy developments, while shutting down or blocking much of our own off-shore domestic drilling. He's in favor of energy jobs in Brazil. But in America? Not so much.)
Do you think, as the President tours the country campaigning on the taxpayer's dime, he understands that voters in Finland won't get to decide whether or not he keeps his job in 2012, but voters in Michigan and Ohio sure will? In fact, I'm sure the millions of unemployed workers in every state will want to learn why the Obama administration gave half a billion dollars to finance "green" cars built in Finland.
While they're at it, the geniuses in the White House could also explain the $1.2 billion they gave to SunPower, a company that makes Solyndra look like a blue chip stock. SunPower's market capitalization is $800 million, but the company is in debt $820 million. What a great investment, huh? Your tax dollars at work, America! If President Obama wants answers about this, he better act fast because his Department of Energy was already caught revising history by scrubbing SunPower's name out of old DOE press releases. The President should start by asking Democrat Congressman George Miller about the company. Rep. Miller was the leading advocate for giving money to SunPower, which hired his son as a lobbyist.
When President Obama signed his nearly trillion dollar stimulus boondoggle into law, he mortgaged our children's future. And for what? Financing jobs in Finland? Propping up near bankrupt companies with connections to congressmen? For this we are burying ourselves in a mountain of debt?
This crony capitalism has to end. We don't want it. We can't afford it. And we must not tolerate it anymore. Wake up, America, before it's too late.
– Sarah Palin
Retrieved from: http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150340167778435.


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FreeBSD Manual Pages
GraphViz2::Parse::STT(User Contributed Perl DocumentatGraphViz2::Parse::STT(3) NAME GraphViz2::Parse::STT - Visualize a Set::FA::Element state transition table as a graph Synopsis #!/usr/bin/env perl use strict; use warnings; use File::Spec; use GraphViz2; use GraphViz2::Parse::STT; use Log::Handler; use File::Slurp; # For read_file(). # ------------------------------------------------ my($logger) = Log::Handler -> new; $logger -> add ( screen => { maxlevel => 'debug', message_layout => '%m', minlevel => 'error', } ); my($graph) = GraphViz2 -> new ( edge => {color => 'grey'}, global => {directed => 1}, graph => {rankdir => 'TB'}, logger => $logger, node => {color => 'green', shape => 'oval'}, ); my($g) = GraphViz2::Parse::STT -> new(graph => $graph); my $stt = read_file(File::Spec -> catfile('t', 'sample.stt.1.dat') ); $g -> create(stt => $stt); my($format) = shift || 'svg'; my($output_file) = shift || File::Spec -> catfile('html', "parse.stt.$format"); $graph -> run(format => $format, output_file => $output_file); See scripts/parse.stt.pl ("Scripts Shipped with this Module" in GraphViz2). Note: t/sample.stt.2.dat is output from Graph::Easy::Marpa::DFA V 0.70, and can be used instead of t/sample.stt.1.dat in the above code. Description Takes a Set::FA::Element-style state transition table and converts it into a graph. You can write the result in any format supported by Graphviz <http://www.graphviz.org/>. Here is the list of output formats <http://www.graphviz.org/content/output-formats>. Distributions This module is available as a Unix-style distro (*.tgz). See <http://savage.net.au/Perl-modules/html/installing-a-module.html> for help on unpacking and installing distros. Installation Install GraphViz2 as you would for any "Perl" module: Run: cpanm GraphViz2 or run: sudo cpan GraphViz2 or unpack the distro, and then either: perl Build.PL ./Build ./Build test sudo ./Build install or: perl Makefile.PL make (or dmake or nmake) make test make install Constructor and Initialization Calling new() "new()" is called as "my($obj) = GraphViz2::Parse::STT -> new(k1 => v1, k2 => v2, ...)". It returns a new object of type "GraphViz2::Parse::STT". Key-value pairs accepted in the parameter list: o graph => $graphviz_object This option specifies the GraphViz2 object to use. This allows you to configure it as desired. The default is GraphViz2 -> new. The default attributes are the same as in the synopsis, above, except for the logger of course, which defaults to ''. This key is optional. Methods create(stt => $state_transition_table) Creates the graph, which is accessible via the graph() method, or via the graph object you passed to new(). Returns $self for method chaining. $state_transition_table is a list of arrayrefs, each with 3 elements. That is, it is the contents of the arrayref 'transitions', which is one of the keys in the parameter list to Set::FA::Element's new(). A quick summary of each element of this list, where each element is an arrayref with 3 elements: o [0] A state name o [1] A regexp o [2] Another state name (which may be the same as the first) The DFA in Set::FA::Element tests the 'current' state against the state name ([0]), and for each state name which matches, tests the regexp ([1]) against the next character in the input stream. The first regexp to match causes the DFA to transition to the state named in the 3rd element of the arrayref ([2]). See t/sample.stt.1.dat for an example. graph() Returns the graph object, either the one supplied to new() or the one created during the call to new(). FAQ See "FAQ" in GraphViz2 and "Scripts Shipped with this Module" in GraphViz2. Thanks Many thanks are due to the people who chose to make Graphviz <http://www.graphviz.org/> Open Source. And thanks to Leon Brocard <http://search.cpan.org/~lbrocard/>, who wrote GraphViz, and kindly gave me co-maint of the module. Version Numbers Version numbers < 1.00 represent development versions. From 1.00 up, they are production versions. Machine-Readable Change Log The file Changes was converted into Changelog.ini by Module::Metadata::Changes. Support Email the author, or log a bug on RT: <https://rt.cpan.org/Public/Dist/Display.html?Name=GraphViz2>. Author GraphViz2 was written by Ron Savage firstname.lastname@example.com_ in 2011. Home page: <http://savage.net.au/index.html>. Copyright Australian copyright (c) 2011, Ron Savage. All Programs of mine are 'OSI Certified Open Source Software'; you can redistribute them and/or modify them under the terms of The Perl License, a copy of which is available at: http://dev.perl.org/licenses/ perl v5.24.1 2017-05-11 GraphViz2::Parse::STT(3)
NAME | Synopsis | Description | Distributions | Installation | Constructor and Initialization | Methods | FAQ | Thanks | Version Numbers | Machine-Readable Change Log | Support | Author | Copyright
Want to link to this manual page? Use this URL:


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While 'The Independent' itself hasn't yet posted this on their official site, ContactMusic.com reports that:

"The nephew of legendary LORD OF THE RINGS author J.R.R. TOLKIEN is pleased the legal fight which may prevent PETER JACKSON directing THE HOBBIT will soon be resolved. Jackson had been touted to take the helm for the movie prequel to the Lord Of The Rings trilogy, but the moviemaker is currently involved in a long-running court battle with New Line Cinema over alleged unpaid royalties, which may put a stop to his involvement in the new project. However, New Line studio boss and LOTR producer Robert Shaye is said to be close to initiating a ceasefire in the row and allowing Jackson back on board, according to British newspaper The Independent. Tim Tolkien says, "It would be complete madness for Peter Jackson not to be involved. This would be great news." New Line are reportedly in a rush to make The Hobbit because they only hold the rights to the novel for a limited time."


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The Minister of Canadian Heritage and Official Languages Shelly Glover announced yesterday that the appointment of Guy Berthiaume as the Librarian and Archivist of Canada will be for a term of five years, effective June 23, 2014.
Dr. Berthiaume has been President and Chief Executive Officer of the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec since 2009. Before this, he spent thirty years as a senior university administrator.
Dr. Berthiaume holds a doctorate in history from the École pratique des hautes études and the Université de Paris VIII, a Master of Arts degree from the Université Laval in Québec City and a Bachelor of Arts degree from the Université du Québec à Montréal. He has published a number of articles and has served on the boards and committees of numerous organizations.
Shelly Glover, Minister of Canadian Heritage and Official Languages say that "Having a person of Dr. Berthiaume's calibre leading Library and Archives Canada will be a solid asset to the organization. His extensive experience in the management of large cultural organizations and his strong leadership are important qualifications for this position."
Please go to the LAC website at http://www.bac-lac.gc.ca