Heartcrossings

When J was in college, it was hard for me to resist the urge to jump in and rescue her from her little troubles. Fortunately for both of us, she was too far away for me to actually act on such urges. I definitely recognize that feeling but if a parent actually helps every time the kid hits a speed bump, it likely won't be a good idea:  Nicki Jenkins, president of AHEPPP, and director of parent and family engagement at the University of Kentucky, described this as a “cultural shift.” Parents are “becoming friends with their students,” she says, and are inclined to do things for them instead of teaching them how to be independent. “So worried for my child,” a mother posted recently on another parent-support Facebook group with 24,000 members. Her kid had texted from college about a humid room, broken laundry card and other small inconveniences.  J learned to sort things out on her own. In time, the number of issues that needed my input reduced quite dramatically. I wonder if the kid

A long time ago, I worked for a company much like this one that is now going out of business . When I was hired, they sold me a vision of a leadership team that was chomping at the bit to become a modern company and go toe to toe with the competition. That too was a family-owned business with many tenured folks. A lovely place to be as far as how comfortable they made me feel as a new hire but that is where the loveliness ended. There were a couple of IT leaders who had built the systems that ran the business they had today - these were systems that had served them well decades ago and were long in need of complete overhaul if not outright replacement.  That was exactly the recommendation that had heard from the consulting firm they had hired to help them create a modernization strategy. It was the recommendation I wholeheartedly agreed with. As it turned out it was impossible to execute in that environment. The old guard refused to let go of what they had built and refused to what it

My friend T shared a short video of her performing Bharat Natyam on stage for some big celebration at her work. The last time I have seen her 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

 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