More kids are beating cancer. Improving the rest of their lives is next. (WaPo)
When oncologists gave my 5-year-old daughter the all-clear from high-risk neuroblastoma in 2010, I breathed a sigh of relief.
But her health needs were just beginning.
Fifteen years later, the intense and often toxic treatments that saved Emily’s life have left her with a host of lifelong health challenges — hearing loss, stunted height, endocrine and kidney dysfunction, and permanent hair-thinning — issues no one talked about during her 18 months of cancer treatment.
A good problem to have from one perspective but no less hard to deal with.
My working hypothesis is that human cognition improves markedly once pen is put to paper, and in some cases can continue to improve with extended writing (but note many prominent failures).
This is correct and yet I do this less than I should. Time to commit to writing non-link posts weekly?
A ‘Mission: Impossible’ Fan Favorite Returns 3 Decades Later. Even He’s Surprised. (NYT)
But according to the “Final Reckoning” director Christopher McQuarrie, Donloe made a big impact. In fact, he said in an interview, fans frequently asked him when he was going to bring the character back. For a long time, he didn’t understand why Donloe engendered such love, until he heard the question framed in a different way: “When is the team going to do right by what they did to Donloe?”
“And I realized why William Donloe resonated,” McQuarrie said. “There was a perceived injustice, whether anybody could put their finger on it or not.”
The Rise of the Japanese Toilet (NYT):
In 1982, a peculiar commercial aired on televisions across Japan.
An actress in a pink floral dress and an updo drops paint on her hand and futilely attempts to wipe it off with toilet paper. She looks into the camera and asks: “Everyone, if your hands get dirty, you wash them, right?”
“It’s the same for your bottom,” she continues. “Bottoms deserve to be washed, too.”
Civilization on the march.
Zarna Garg Went From Stay-at-Home Mom to Stand-Up Comedian (NYT):
After 16 years focusing on her husband, Shalabh, and her three children — Zoya, Brij and Veer — Ms. Garg re-entered the work force in 2019, but not to return to her erstwhile career as a personal injury lawyer. Instead, encouraged by her children, she started working the New York open-mic circuit and performing at Westside Comedy Club before headlining at Caroline’s on Broadway by 2020.
In 2023, she talked her way into opening for Tina Fey and Amy Poehler on their Restless Leg Tour, and Prime Video aired her special “One in a Billion.” This spring, she made her film debut in the critically acclaimed rom-com “A Nice Indian Boy.” Her second special, “Practical People Win,” will air on Hulu in July, and she is developing a sitcom called “Zarna” with Mindy Kaling and Kevin Hart.
The Lightcone Podcast on Prompting (Video Podcast): I am hungry for more such reources.
Chattel Childhood: Trigger warning - fairly explicit start and parts.
I don’t approve of the Simbari childrearing, not because I think the pain and disgust of what the children are forced to do is inherently bad, but because they are forced.
To love someone skillfully is to pour fuel on their soul. It’s to see the world through their desire, to delight in it, and go “I desire you to get what you want.” It is the amplification of their will.
The Simbari people are destroying the will of their children. My parents destroyed my will. And I think, quite seriously, that our current culture is likewise destroying the will of its children en masse. That’s what you do to property.
Worth thinking about although largely I don’t agree with this. Her will seems to be doing just fine.
I think humans are are social animals and whether something traumatizes us or not is often (but not always) a function of the social context surrounding the event. What happens to the Simbari children (if it in fact, does happen. I have not verified or heard of this before) doesn’t traumatize them because everyone around them considers it perfectly normal.
In my mental model, the trauma happens, when you feel something shameful or otherwise different has happened to you and everyone looks at you different.
Artichokes: For the photos.
Zuckerburg’s worth is 226 billion. The NY Subway builds tunnels at $4 bil. per mile. SF’s BART builds subways at $2 bil. per mile. It’s crazy that all of Zuckerberg’s wealth would build just 8% of the current NYC subway network.
Meanwhile in Paris cost $250 mil. per mile.
UFO?:
The object was precognitive in behavior. The radar data from the SPY-1B system showed that the Tic Tac descended from 28,000 feet to sea level in 0.78 seconds, a feat requiring acceleration up to 5,880 Gs. But here’s what no one focuses on: that data was correlated by both radar and infrared, meaning this was not a sensor glitch or hallucination…it was a multi-spectrum-confirmed, real-world event. And what’s worse? The object decelerated to a dead stop… mid-air. Bonkers!