Given events over recent days (weeks, months) a few quick thoughts on policy & comms during a crisis.
Caveat: this may all seem elementary to some.
Tone: offered with due humility (based on hard Whitehall failures, as well as some relative successes).

One of the most Monkey's Paw things about my life is my relationship to books. When I was a teenager, I read all the way through the school and public libraries, spent everything I had on books, and still couldn't get enough and dreamt of more.

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Today, as a reviewer, I have more books than I can possibly read, huge, teetering mountains of books that I'm desperate to read, far beyond my ability to ever get through them. Periodically, I declare "book bankruptcy," sweep away the backlog and start over.

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Even then, my eyes are bigger than my stomach: I keep back a few books that I can't bear to part with and promise myself I'll read them someday. Usually I don't, but I just did, and boy did I ever make the right call with @TheUniverse's BROAD

I have read a LOT of histories of computing, and I had a front row seat for a lot of the events depicted in this book - people I worked with, people I worked against - and yet I was surprised over and over again with details and perspectives I'd never encountered.

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For example, for some reason, my ninth grade computer science course included lengthy readings on ENIAC, Univac, the Mark I and the Mark II, but none of those mentioned that they were all programmed exclusively or primarily by women.

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Pierre Boulle was born today in 1912, so what better time to look back at his sociological science-fiction classic that paved the way for Star Wars and the MCU.

This is the story of Planet Of The Apes!

Pierre Boulle is probably best known for his 1952 novel Bridge On The River Kwai, based on his wartime experiences in Indochina. So it was possibly a surprise when 11 years later he authored a science fiction novel.

However Boulle had been a Free French secret agent during the war. He was captured in 1943 by Vichy forces in Vietnam and sentenced to hard labour. This experience of capture would shape his novel La Planète Des Singes.

Published in 1963 La Planète Des Singes recieved good reviews. An English translation - entitled Monkey Planet - was issued the following year. It was a story that seemed to strike a chord with readers.

In the novel two rich travellers find a manuscript written by journalist Ulysse Mérou. It tells a fantastical tale: how he travelled with two wealthy explorers to Betelgeuse. They land on the planet Soror, a world of primitive humans ruled by advanced civilised apes.

The Fast and the Furious is a 2001 action film directed by Rob Cohen and starring Vin Diesel, Michelle Rodriguez, Jordana Brewster, and Paul Walker. The Fast and the Furious is first film in the The Fast and the Furious franchise, distributed by Universal Pictures.

The film was released June 22, 2001 and grossed $207.3 million. In 2003, The Fast and the Furious was followed by the sequel 2 Fast 2 Furious.

Brian O'Conner is an undercover Los Angeles copwho aspires to become a detective.

When he is tasked to stop hijackers led by Dominic Torettofrom stealing expensive electronics equipment off of trucks, Brian must choose between his obligation to the LAP and his friendship with Toretto after he becomes good friends with his family.

The film opens at a dockyard where a container is loaded onto the trailer of a semi-truck. The truck then departs the dockyard and one of the dock workers makes a phone call to an anonymous party on the other end, informing them on how to identify the truck.

Thread: For Fil-Ams & other people of color, the "American Dream" often means toiling away just to obtain a small piece of the spoils that were violently ripped away from your community. 1/

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Second-gen AsAms like me grow up oblivious about our own histories because the US education system purposely withholds info about it, & our parents try to outrun their trauma by never sharing their experiences, instead pushing their children toward an assimilation sleepwalk. 2/

AsAms realize too late we've inherited a deal with the devil we never agreed to: we can keep our language, but only if we speak it privately. Our food, if we serve it. Our culture, if it upholds the illusion of America as a benevolent melting pot that saved us from ourselves. 3/

But AsAms aren't the only ones ignorant of this history—Few Americans know of the Philippine-American War & the atrocities the US committed. Even fewer understand how the US's ongoing legacy of war, destruction & colonization in Asia is a major reason the AsAm diaspora exists. 4/

Americans aren't taught about how centuries of exploitation of the Philippines' resources by Western powers has led to most of its workforce immigrating & becoming a global servant class called OFWs. Instead, they're taught that poverty is inherent to Filipinx culture. 5/