Macarthur fellow and Hugo-award-winner @nkjemisin's 2019 book "The City We Became" is both a fantastic contemporary fantasy novel and a scorching commentary on the infantile nature of the racist dogma of HP Lovecraft and his

It's a quest novel about a group of New Yorkers who awaken one day to discover that they are mystical avatars of the city, which has awakened and been reborn as a kind of powerful colony organism.

2/

There's an avatar for each of the five boroughs, plus a "primary" who represents the city as a whole. As with all births, this one is somewhat traumatic - but NYC's birth is uniquely fraught.

First, the five boroughs must find one another and connect with the primary.

3/

But they must do all this while under sustained assault from a mystical, transdimensional, Lovecraftian horror, a great adversary to all of our Earth's living cities - but an adversary that had been believed to be powerless against cities after their births.

4/

The enemy manifests as a Karen, a white woman clad all in white, dogwhistling racist tropes, summoning police, weaponizing vast fortunes to evict its enemies or distort their culture. It is attended by harbingers - human beings infected with fluttering white tentacles.

5/

Soul ( AThread)
Life's biggest questions | Meaning, purpose, living

(1/n)
Soul is a story about Joe Gardner, a middle school band teacher, whose life hasn't necessarily gone the way he thought it would. He dreams of one day becoming a professional Jazz musician. It is what he always wanted in his whole life.

(2/n)
And just when he gets the break of a life time to finally fulfill his dream, an untimely accident separates his soul from his body.

(3/n)
As he begins to preced to 'The great beyond' Gardner skips to 'The great before' a world where souls develop personalities and traits before being sent off to earth. There, Gardner must work with 'soul 22' a soul with a dim concept of life.

(4/n)
To help '22' find passion, and in the process discover what it means to have a soul. Passion and obsession are two sides of the same spectrum. It is very easy for one to titre from one end to the other. Their ability to take in the beauty is the greatest inspiration.

Zanele Muholi is a South African visual activist and photographer. For over a decade they have documented black lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex people’s lives.
Zanele Muholi, Qiniso II, Durban (2019)

You might see an 'essay' going around today about 'the value of knowledge'. I'm not linking it, but I've taken out a few paragraphs that need to be reckoned with. 1/?

From the very first sentence, this person attacks Nikole Hannah Jones and the #1619Project in a typically conservative fashion, no doubt to get the conservative heads to go 'hear, hear!!'. He then says she 'claims' her expertise & essentially says to her 'stay in your lane'. 2/x

Ridiculous assertion aside, Considering this author is someone that routinely criticizes his education program for doing things like setting tasks of making 'BLM bracelets', but then heralds it in his bio, one must wonder how he reckons w/his own lack of expertise. 3/x

He then criticizes Gloria Ladson Billings, another Black woman for pointing out something that is literally true (have you not seen curricula that tell teachers to enact the slave trade? Or that propagate the thanksgiving myth?) 4/x

but does nothing to reckon with the the history of this country, the (failure) to teach Black children, the changes that DO need to be made in curriculum to ensure both rigor and windows and mirrors. 5/x

There are those who claim that rock music is blessed and dedicated to the devil, so we should not listen to it. The reality is that even a lot of Christian music and all other types are as well. The recording industry has leaders in it that are bad.

So what to do with it?

The movie and television industry is plagued as well with such problems.

So what can we do about that?

The reality is that not all music or media need be avoided. Honestly someone may dedicate a Mozart recording to the devil, but this does not mean we then are tricked into

inviting in bad spirits because we listen to Mozart. We cannot control or know for sure what music is or is not blessed with dark rituals with certainty. We can know the content of the music or movies though.

What emotions do they convey? What type of spirit do we feel?

Take rap music for the most part. Do you feel that the Eternal society is pleased with is as a genre, not talking about any one song?

Not in the least. The genre as a whole has been used to intentionally divide and conquer. It is meant for bad purposes.

So what will happen is those in the industry who are the problems will go. The industry will have a lot of people cleared out. There will be big changes to it.

There is no way you can avoind everything that has had rites, rituals and dark blessings put on it

1/18 Looking back at some of the most notable books I've read in 2020. It's a pretty eclectic mix!
I don't keep track so I am sure I forgetting something, especially if it was in deadtree form. Also, omitting the ones I started and abandoned.

2/18 The Supernova Era

I am a big, big fan of Cixin Liu- love his fiercely imaginative prose in the 3-body series and short stories... but I was bummed by this book.
The plot unfolds so preposterously that the large scale backdrops are grotesque. Pity.

3/18 How the Internet Happened

Beautifully written chronicle describing key actors & events that led to the internet as we know it today (almost).
I was a freshman in computer science in '92, saw a lot of that 1sthand, yet there was so much I didn't know!

4/18 Agency

A @GreatDismal in great shape. Getting back to that universe was fascinating, tho remembering all the characters frm th 1st book was hard.
His view of the Jackpot is disturbingly plausible, I am sure every reader wondered whether we are in

5/18 The Case Against Reality

Fantastic book. Evolution optimizes for fitness, not truth (whatever that is), and this book does a much better job explaining it than I ever could, to myself and others.
Skip the last chapter,

🧵THREAD🧵
“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction." - Reagan

In the spring of 2001, I was going to a meeting at the place where I worked then and still work now. Another of the people at the meeting was an academic dean of our school. She was perhaps the purest expression of academia *at* that school.

1/

That day she was literally wearing a tweed blazer. Before she'd become a dean she'd been an English teacher. Now, the epitome of English Teachers, in my brain, was and remains my father. That day she was a close second.

2/

That day I said hello and asked how she was or somesuch.

She gave me a slightly wry smile. "Oh, you know. Measuring my life in coffee spoons," she said. I chuckled, and we may have traded a couple more lines of 'Prufrock.' I'm not sure.

3/

And I've always been a fan of T.S. Eliot, so it felt natural enough to come to and fro, talking of Michelangelo, and otherwise it seemed a clever turn of phrase just before a meeting about school management systems and database development.

4/

It is a couple of days before 2021, and I am 20 years older, and that memory has taken on a very different shade and tenor. We have all seen too much since then, over and over again.

5/

I had a few Christmas stories that I thought of telling.
I thought of the one about Rocky de Blood with a Teardrop, a homeless lady that my husband picked up on the on-ramp.

Or the story about the Miracle Christmas.

But I think instead I will talk about my Quantum Christmas 🎄

REPOST | A woman in the people’s war

English: https://t.co/WN4mjjVuzy
Pilipino: https://t.co/EDMyltmAlq

A woman in the people’s war (Thread)

There are many women who embrace the sacrifices and challenges of life in the New People’s Army (NPA). With firmness, they perform their tasks as equal counterparts of male fighters. 1/19

These women include Paolin, Mimi and Jellyn, young women fighters from various walks of life who found acceptance and equality in the people’s army. 2/19

Ka Paolin, revolutionary mother

Ka Paolin is a member of a propaganda and education committee in a province. She serves as teacher to her comrades who are unable to read and write. She also teaches cultural performances, and mass and Party courses. 3/19

Her parents are both leading cadres of the Party and NPA. She decided to follow their footsteps and joined the people’s army when she turned 18. This was where she met her husband. 4/19

Incredible paediatric ST3 regional teaching day organised by @DrSeanMon

Feel so privileged to be a @WMPaeds Trainee and have monthly study leave to attend this amazingness 🤩

#PaedsRocks #ChoosePaediatrics

A summary of my highlights:

First up Sean did an interactive session on #debriefing sharing frameworks for structuring a debrief both from literature & his own top tips(using pics to illustrate rather than lots of text -love this @DrSeanMon #MedEd technique, def going to steal this for future teaching 😆)

Sean's framework top tips:

1) Get Out --> get off the shop floor, go to private place and fill it with tea and biscuits

2) Get the whole team together

3) Ask "Are you ok?" then ask again #asktwice

4) Recap what has happened

Sean's tips continued...

5) What went well - although outcome may be sad, your team was likely all kinds of awesome, highlight this!

6) Could anything have gone better?

7) Is there any other learning here to be discussed?

8) Summarise and thank your team 🧡

Next up Dr Doug Simkiss gave an incredibly engaging talk about Social Determinants of Health:

-Striking graphs illustrating the effect of social deprivation on child outcomes

-Actions we can take as trainees - take a detailed SHx!

-List of essential & additional reading

Today, I re-listened a VERY HONEST interview with Chamath Palihapitiya (@chamath) on @TKPPodcast.
For the 3rd time.

He is is an extremely confident humble person and the talk is pure gold. Highly recommend it. Hats off to @ShaneAParrish!

I combined key learnings below 👇

It is valuable when you can speak the truth.
Most people are not in the position to be as candid as they want to be.

When you talk about what you’ve gone through it is useful to people, especially when you talk in simple and plain-spoken terms.

It demystifies your 'greatness’, makes it more normal, and lets others relate.

Many people have to do things that are motivated by other people's perceptions of them motivated by the pressure that is extorted by people that are very close around them i.e. friends and family.

It leads to an inevitable moment when people start questioning their happiness.

Younger generations are more honest to themselves.

They are willing to be happy in the way they defined it to themselves.



Older generations were just checking the boxes.
Many people realize that it is not the pattern to maximize their fulfillment.

RIPPLE RESPONDS
I’ve been asked to provide my thoughts on @Ripple’s Answer. I quickly looked over the Answer late last night. It’s 93 pages and I spent less than hour reading it over so please take that into consideration. I plan to review it in much more detail in the coming

days and will likely revisit these initial thoughts. Before I provide any thoughts, I should warn you that if you ask 3 different attorneys to respond, you are likely to get 3 different opinions. Also, I always provide my honest assessment even if it’s not what I know people want

to hear. Personally, I was disappointed in the Answer. My disappointment means nothing and has no impact on the issues. In fact, if this case is going to trial, I would have advised Ripple to Answer the Complaint much like it did. My disappointment isn’t a reflection regarding

the skill of Ripple’s trial lawyers or in-house counsel @s_alderoty or regarding the merits of the defense. Ripple’s lawyers know much more than I do with respect to securities’ laws. I’m disappointed because, after reading the Answer, I’m less confident that a settlement will

transpire within the next 6-9 months. Instead, it looks like it may be a very long legal battle ahead. There are two ways to write pleadings in Court. One way is what’s called Notice Pleading. All you have to do is to provide the minimum amount of information necessary to provide

I’ve recently been reading through “The Butchering Art”, a terrific account of 19th century surgery & the introduction of germ theory & anesthesia to Victorian medicine. I highly recommend reading it yourself, but here are some interesting tidbits that caught my attention (1/10)

(2) First, as you can imagine, early surgery was absolutely awful & almost always a last resort. One thing I didn’t realize was that back then, the best surgeons were the *fastest* surgeons — for instance, Robert Liston could remove a leg in less than thirty seconds (!).

(3) Early surgery was limited to “peripheral” conditions, like lacerations & fractures. This is because entering the body in surgery was almost always fatal due to infection. This led to the distinction of physicians practicing “internal medicine”, a term that still persists.

(4) More dangerous than the surgeries were post-operative infections & diseases. Four were particularly common — gangrene, septicemia, pyemia, and erysipelas — & were known as “hospitalism”. With the rise of early anesthesia came a rise in attempted surgeries & hospitalism.

(5) What’s wild about this era, looking back, is that no one really knew what was going on... but their theories made some sense. “Contagionists” thought disease was communicable, being transferred from person to person by “invisible bullets” or chemicals. Not the craziest idea.

Just finished the bio of Deng Xiaoping by the recently departed Ezra Vogel. Really fascinating book for anyone interested in the foundation of Modern China. I'd argue Deng was the most important statesman in the world from 1950-2000. Many lessons for India. A few takeaways (1/n)

We expect transformative leaders to be grand architects w/ a modernization vision. They should know what changes are crucial. In actuality, most have no clear agenda. Reforms - esp econ. ones - are messy, contradictory, beset by unorthodox ideas mixed in w/ many good ideas (2/n)

Deng & his Communist Party had a nebulous philosophy of "trial by error" & "do what works." Deng's early years as ruling premier were noteworthy for debacles like an economic retrenchment & abrupt cancellation of foreign contracts to husband scarce forex reserves (3/n)

Deng believed in the "population bomb" myth and enacted the 1-Child Law which could hurt China's long-run growth prospects. Deng also quixotically spent much of his country's resources trying to become a petro-state to match Saudi Arabia during the '70s (4/n).

Even Deng's good ideas like special economic zones (SEZs) were rife with problems and accusations of poor implementation. SEZs led to shortages, graft, inflation. Communist leaders demanded an SEZ moratorium and Deng would periodically accede to such demands (5/n)