Heartcrossings

My friend T shared a short video of her performing Bharat Natyam on stage for some big celebration at her work. Last time I have seen dressed for dance and on stage was in college. Other than being physically a bit slower than she was then, it was all the same - like time had not moved at all.  T had a decade of training before college and continued to learn once she started working for maybe another decade. A very large part of her life has been about dance and other things came to exist around it.  I remember being in awe of her ability to express herself so wonderfully. She was one of those that innately loved dance, had a lot of natural talent which the training helped perfect. It was not hard for her find time to practice for an hour each day - she looked forward to it. It was T's time to escape into her zone. I love dance but have absolutely no talent for it. For people like T, they have that gift and can create a world with it they can escape to. For me, that has to be piece

 Reading this article made me wonder if the next step would be to scan your loved ones brains to check if they love you as much you love them. Maybe grandma is just faking her affection and really can't stand the clingy grandkid and wishes to be left alone to enjoy her retirement. Maybe the boyfriend is going through the motions in the relationship and will even propose but his heart is not in it.  ..brain scans of close friends doing the same activities are actually much more similar than those of less connected people. You literally are on the same wavelength as your besties.  All of which means that when it comes to human-to-human connection, you can gauge the extent of a pair's attachment by looking at a brain scan. Can the same be said of human-dog pairs?  A trust but verify love idea is fraught with dangers. Sometimes, you have to make peace with whatever love you can get from a person you care about - specially if that relationship is immutable. If you have a complicate

 Read this great essay in Wired about climate change involving a waterfall deep down in the ocean: When a system approaches a tipping point, though, the character of the fluctuations changes. With the AMOC, you might see the flow rate increasingly struggle to regain its equilibrium. The rate might wander farther and farther away from the comfy baseline. And the system might take longer to settle back into its routine state. These features— the greater meandering, the slower return to home base—are an obsession of tipping-point mathematicians. If you were to plot the data for a system that’s about to tip, you’d see the data points first follow a nice, predictable path; then the path gets jittery, and then it goes off on wide, whiplashing swings. The system is becoming less stable, taking longer to recover. You can almost feel sorry for it. You can sense a sort of sickness As the story goes, the brother and sister team published a paper on this patient's sickness and predicted the t

I am definitely not in the company of teenage girls driving the future of language. I thought middle-schoolers said Ick and Lit was still in circulation - wrong on both counts . Not sure if staying current with the trends will actually help me other than being able to understand conversations between young women that I am not a part of The discovery that young women drive linguistic change is not new. More than two decades ago, William Labov, the founder of modern sociolinguistics studies, observed that women lead 90 per cent of linguistic change. Then in 2003, linguists surveyed 6,000 letters, written between 1417 to 1681.  The study found there was a quicker uptake of new language contained within the letters written by women compared to those written by men. By the time it becomes acceptable for someone my age to use the vocabulary invented by such young trailblazers, that is old, dated and unfashionable language anyway. Speaking like kids would only make everyone feel awkward and w

Wonderful essay about how information was gathered and shared in the 1980s. Having such access to information would be completely magical for me back in that time. My local library was small and limited and yet offered me access to the world for which I was grateful.  From 1984 to 1988, I worked in the Telephone Reference Division of the Brooklyn Public Library. My seven or eight colleagues and I spent the days (and nights) answering exactly such questions. Our callers were as various as New York City itself: copyeditors, fact checkers, game show aspirants, journalists, bill collectors, bet settlers, police detectives, students and teachers, the idly curious, the lonely and loquacious, the park bench crazies, the nervously apprehensive. (This last category comprised many anxious patients about to undergo surgery who called us for background checks on their doctors.) There were telephone reference divisions in libraries all over the country, but this being New York City, we were an unu

I had deeply emotional response to this essay even though I never played tennis in my life and have only a passing interest in the sport. The purgatory of having potential but never reaching it is extremely relatable. Conor Niland speaks eloquently to what that feels like for a professional tennis player who can't quite float up to the top hundred. It seems ludicrously unfair that players with the caliber to rank in the top thousand in the world would be treated with as much regard as someone who plays "great" tennis at their small-town tennis club tournament.  There is a universe that separates the ability and accomplishments of the two but they are lumped in the same category of unremarkable tennis players. I am definitely one of those that never achieved my potential academically or professionally for any number of reasons. Had it not been for the things in my personal life I was so very fortunate to receive, I would feel a lot like Niland did.  A lot of futile toiling

 There is a logic in children suing governments for their climate rights   though many of their other rights are being lost too. There used to be an expectation that a hard-working young person could hope to settle down and start their own family by their mid-20s.  That is now a dream far out of reach for many people that age. They work hard enough and often have the education that was supposed to lead them to the road to financial stability if not prosperity but reality is that many are joining the the NEET ranks instead. Governments are culpable to this turn of events too as much as they are are responsible for climate crisis and borrowing from future generations.  Around the world, both innovative and old-school legal arguments are being used to go after companies and governments to seek redress or forestall future harms. At the same time, the fossil fuel industry and its allies have powerful new legal grounds at their disposal to challenge climate rules. A number of cases could be