Whenever I go to New York City, I buy a book. Last week I picked up Say Nothing, Patrick Radden Keefe’s 2019 best-seller about the Troubles in Northern Ireland, which I was inspired to read after devouring London Falling, his current best-seller, about a couple who learn that their 19-year-old son, who died after falling from the fifth-floor balcony of a luxury high-rise in London, had been passing himself off as the son of a Russian oligarch.

Two days after I bought Say Nothing, when my husband and I boarded Air Canada 8463 for the first leg of our trip home to Edmonton, I convinced myself that Keefe was on our plane. It was nuts, I know. What are the odds that the guy who had been standing in front of Dave and me in the Zone 1 lineup was the author of the book I planned to read on that very flight?

My evidence was scanty, but I pegged him for a literary type because I noticed that along with his boarding pass, he was holding an advanced reader copy of a book (whose title I couldn’t quite make out) while removing a tweedy (author-like) jacket from his suitcase, which was upright and barely unzipped. I had yet to see his face, but I was impressed with his dexterity and his wardrobe.

I didn’t consider that he was Keefe until I walked past him on the plane. He was in business class (more evidence) and I concluded that he could very well be the best-selling writer whose book was tucked away in my backpack. But Dave and I were being herded back to steerage so I didn’t have time for more than a fleeting glance.

“I think the guy in front of us in the boarding line was Patrick Radden Keefe,” I said to Dave, who has been listening to me going on about London Falling since I learned about the book and realized that 45 years ago I spent a memorably awkward evening with the dead young man’s mother and her family.

London Falling sent me on an extended trip down Memory Lane, one that helped me to understand the evening from a more clear-headed, mature, and compassionate perspective. (I wrote about it here.) For me, it was healing. But Dave was growing weary of my obsessive nostalgia, not to mention my habit of mistakenly thinking I recognize someone when I absolutely do not.

“It’s not him,” he said, giving me the sort of pitying look I would have given him if he’d told me he’d traveled back in time and bumped into Linus Pauling and Albert Einstein on a commuter train.1

When all the passengers were seated and the pilot announced that we were going to be stuck on the tarmac for another 40 minutes—this after we’d boarded an hour late­—I flagged down a flight attendant, a guy who looked to be around my kids’ age. I showed him a picture of Keefe and pointed to the second row in business class. “Do you think this is that guy?” I asked.

The flight attendant was confused. “Who is he?” he asked.

I held up Say Nothing. “He wrote this book,” I said.

The flight attendant gave me a look similar to the one Dave had graced me with a few minutes earlier. But he wasn’t my husband and also, he had nothing to do for the next 40 minutes. He walked up the aisle, pivoted at the guy’s seat, looked down, and headed back to me. I prayed the guy had been buried in his ARC and hadn’t noticed.

“It’s not him,” the flight attendant said. As he sauntered off, Dave awoke from the nap he’d pretended to be taking in an effort to make it clear that he didn’t know me. “I told you,” he said.

“I know,” I replied. I was not offended. As noted, I’ve made these kinds of mistakes before. I opened Say Nothing and continued reading about Dolours Price, the IRA loyalist who was partly responsible for the death of Jean McConville, a 38-year-old widowed mother of 10 children who was dragged from her home in Belfast in 1972 and never seen again. About 30 minutes before the flight landed I was nearly halfway through the book when the flight attendant reappeared next to my seat.

“It is him,” he said. “I checked.”

Dave was really asleep this time,2 but instead of poking him to say, “I was right! I told you so!” I asked the flight attendant if he would ask Keefe to sign my book. He responded as if I’d asked him for 10 cookies and 30 packages of pretzels: with stunned silence. If a thought bubble had appeared above his head in that moment, it would have read “Why didn’t I listen to my mother and become an undertaker?”

I was about to explain that authors like to sign books because it means the books can’t be returned to the bookseller. But before I had a chance, the flight attendant turned and headed back up to business class. I watched as he leaned over and spoke to Keefe, who nodded. I crossed “Deborah J. Waldman” off my boarding pass and wrote “Debby,” stuck it in the book, and handed it to the flight attendant.

Then I wrote a note to Keefe, thanking him and sharing the story about how I’d come to meet Rachelle Gryn Brettler, the mother in London Calling. Because I hadn’t thought to bring stationary with me, I used the barf bag I found in the seat pocket. I had plenty of time, because the flight attendant was waylaid on his way back to my seat by another passenger in business class. I watched as he showed her the book, wondering what they were talking about.

“She said she read it,” he explained when he got back to my seat. “She thought it was great.”

As I was thanking the flight attendant, Keefe turned around, smiled at me, and (I’m pretty sure) gave me a thumbs up. I admit, I was in a mild state of shock. I couldn’t stop smiling. I’d already texted my sister (a librarian), my niece (who loved London Falling), and the neighbor who told me that Say Nothing is one of the best books she’s ever read. They were as excited as I was.

Before the flight attendant headed off, I asked if he’d deliver my note. He politely informed me that he was finished being my carrier pigeon. “Just go talk to him,” he said.

“I can’t go into business class,” I said.

“It’s fine,” he said. “You can go up there.”

So up I went. Keefe was gracious and seemed both surprised and interested to learn that my father and Rachelle’s had been classmates in rabbinic school. Unfortunately (for me, at least) our conversation was cut short by the flight attendant assigned to business class.

“You have to go back to your seat,” she said. “There’s going to be turbulence.” I handed Keefe the barf bag, hoping that the turbulence wouldn’t be so bad that he’d have to use it for its intended purpose before he read the note.

The flight attendant trailed me back to Row 13. I assumed she was following me to ensure that I didn’t pester another passenger, but it turned out she wanted to fan-girl with me. “He’s such a great writer,” she said. “I read Say Nothing, too.”

I talked to Keefe briefly once more, as we were getting off the plane. He’d read my note by then and we marveled at the coincidences that had led to this particular moment. Then I decided to press my luck and ask for another favor. After reading London Falling, I’d sent an email to Rachelle, offering condolences, sharing my recollection of dinner with her family, and noting that we had more in common than either of us realized that night.3 I didn’t hear back from her­—I hadn’t expected to—but I wondered if she’d received the email.

I mentioned that to Keefe before Dave and I sprinted through the airport to make our connection. “If you’re in touch with her,” I said, “maybe you can tell her that I wrote to her, tell her that you met me.”

He didn’t seem put off by the request, but again, I didn’t expect anything to come of it. And then, two days after I got home, a half hour after I finished reading Say Nothing, I turned on my computer, and there was a moving, heartfelt email from Rachelle. Patrick Radden Keefe had passed on the message.

I think it’s safe to say that when he wrote London Falling he was not thinking, “My book is going to help an ex-pat American in Edmonton finally put to rest an uncomfortable memory she’s been holding onto for 45 years.” As a friend of mine said when I related the story to her, “This is what art does: you put it out there in the world, and some people react to it and others don’t—it touches people in ways that nobody can expect.”

Ain’t that the truth.

I hope you enjoy reading this essay as much as I did writing it—not to mention as much as I did having the experience that led to my writing it. If you enjoy it, please restack! I’d like to think it’s an unusual enough story that other folks might find it interesting.

When my daughter, Elizabeth, was two and her brother an infant, they had a lovely babysitter whose boyfriend also had a two-year-old daughter. Sometimes the babysitter would bring the daughter, and the kids would play.

The boyfriend was separated from his wife. He was adamant that they were not getting back together, but it was hard to believe him because during the time we knew him, he didn’t seem terribly interested in finding a divorce lawyer. Eventually the babysitter broke up with him, which is when we learned the real reason he’d been dragging his feet: he and his eventual ex-wife were still paying for the wedding. Until they cleared that debt, they couldn’t afford a divorce.

There are so many lessons in that story that I could probably spend the rest of my life parsing it and not exhaust them, but as we enter Wedding Season 2026, these are my top takeaways:

• Parties are fun, but when it comes to a wedding, your priority should be the marriage.

• Don’t spend money if you don’t have it. (This applies to everything, not just weddings.)

• Make a budget and stick to it.

Elizabeth is getting married in less than a month. She’s too young to remember the details about her babysitter’s love life, but she’s heard the story enough that the message definitely sunk in. She and her fiancé set a budget early, and they’re approaching their wedding with the same sense of careful, fiscal responsibility with which they treat all their major financial decisions.

Dave and I gave them some money and we’re hosting a post-wedding brunch, but aside from tagging along for wedding-dress shopping and alteration appointments, I haven’t had very many mother-of-the-bride duties. I’m nowhere near as involved as my mother was when my sister got married in 1981 and when I walked down the aisle 11 years later. Even Dave did more to plan our wedding than I did: he and his mother took a wedding-planning course together! (He was the only guy.) Between the two mothers and the groom, our wedding was a very well-planned event.

The closer we get to Elizabeth and Matt’s wedding, though, the more Elizabeth has been reaching out to ask for advice and support. That means my priority right now is to be available for her. I only have one daughter. God willing, she’ll only have one wedding. So I’m putting a lot on hold for the next few weeks to help her and my future son-in-law in whatever way they need. I’m hoping to post essays every Thursday as always, but if that falls by the wayside, I’ll be back regularly after July 5 with more stories and interviews.

In the meantime, enjoy the pics from the wedding shower—which was hosted not by me, but by my future daughter-in-law with an able assist from her mom, who flew in from her home more than 500 miles away to help out.

In May 2005, Queen Elizabeth visited Edmonton, where she did two walkabouts: on May 24 at the Provincial Legislative Grounds, and on May 25 at Sir Winston Churchill Square. I attended the latter event and wrote this column about it, which appeared in The Edmonton Journal exactly 21 years ago, on May 28, 2005.

The night before the final royal walkabout in Edmonton, I called a neighbor to ask if I could pick some of her forget-me-nots to make a bouquet for my daughter, in case we were lucky enough to catch the Queen’s attention at Churchill Square.

“For the Queen? No way,” she said. “Those flowers will wilt as soon as you cut them. You’ve got to buy real flowers.”

This was a problem, and not just because I’m cheap. It was 9:47 p.m. The closest grocery store closes at 10. I made it just before the doors locked. Given the number of flowers that Edmontonians had been presenting to the Queen, I shouldn’t have been surprised that the floral department was decimated, but it was still disconcerting to discover that the expensive bouquets were half dead and the nicest ones were made of silk.

Eventually I settled on some beautiful white lilies. They seemed appropriately regal. In fact, I was sure I’d seen them at a royal event. I picked them up and studied them. Then it hit me: white lilies were what had covered Princess Diana’s coffin.

This would not do. Not at all. Maybe pink? The Queen had worn pink on her visit. It was doubtful she’d wear the same outfit again, but obviously she liked the color. I grabbed a pink bouquet and hurried to the cash register, where I ran into my neighbor, Steve.

Steve has an uncanny ability to make me feel foolish even when I’m doing something intelligent, so when he surveyed my purchase and said, “You always come out at 10 p.m. to buy flowers? Are you going to stick them into your garden?” I smiled and changed the subject.

I shouldn’t have felt silly, though, because my desire to see the Queen wasn’t entirely frivolous. I was scheduled to take the oath of citizenship Thursday, and as my friend Sandi says, it’s always a good idea to get a close look at the person to whom you’re pledging your loyalty.

Actually, I’d been hoping the Queen would come to the ceremony. After all, she was going to be in town that week. Couldn’t she stay one more day so her newest citizens could swear their allegiance to her instead of her portrait? Apparently not. I swallowed my resentment and decided that if she wasn’t coming to my party, I’d go to hers.

Also, my daughter, Elizabeth, wanted a chance to see her namesake in person. So did her friend Laura, and Laura’s mom. Armed with individually wrapped pink lilies, the four of us headed downtown early in the morning and staked out a spot against a barricade on the northeast corner of Churchill Square.

When the Royals arrived after two hours, Prince Philip came straight to our corner and stopped in front of me. I was dumbstruck, so instead of acknowledging him, I waved to Lynn Mandel, the Mayor’s wife. She greeted me with a big smile. The Prince smiled down at my Elizabeth.

“Lift her over the barricades,” he said.

My arms had turned to jelly. I couldn’t lift my daughter. A guard reached over and hoisted her into the VIP area. Then the Prince smiled at Laura and said, “Lift her over the barricades, too.”

The Elizabeths and Laura exchanged friendly words. I, meanwhile, was tongue-tied. I should have said something pleasant to Prince Philip -- perhaps “Thank you!” or “Welcome to Edmonton!” or “Tomorrow I become your wife’s loyal subject!” but it was as if a trap door had opened in my head and my brain had fallen out. I had lost the ability to say anything coherent.

By the end of the day, I was still struggling to make sense of it all, but of this much I was sure: I’d gotten my glimpse of Her Majesty, and even though she’s only one part of the rich fabric that is Canada, I was ready to pledge my oath to her.

In 2021, when Prince Philip died, I wrote an essay for NBC-Think about the day that he gave my daughter and her friend the opportunity of a lifetime. You can read it here. I think it’s a nice companion piece to this essay. Let me know what you think of both pieces. And I’d love to hear any stories you might have about royal encounters.

Growing up there was nothing I coveted more than a horse or a little sister. My parents refused to provide either, but I was determined and resourceful.

I collected plastic horses and set up a farm on top of my bookcase. As for the sister, I befriended an adorable girl named Bridget, who was four years behind me in school and whose family belonged to the synagogue where my father was the rabbi.

Perhaps because Bridget’s only sibling was a younger brother, she welcomed the chance to pal around with a bigger girl. Two bigger girls, actually, because my own big sister decided she could use another younger one.

Bridget didn’t go to our school, so we mostly saw her on the Sabbath, holidays, and at Hebrew school. I don’t remember exactly what the three of us did together, but we always had fun.

And then, as happens when people grow up, we lost touch. My father died, my sister and I went off to university, and my mother moved to another state.

Nearly five summers ago I was leafing through the New York Times and came across a story about Bridget’s wedding. She had married a network television lawyer, a man descended from pilgrims (a big deal where I come from). She was working for a major museum in New York City. I thought about contacting her and saying congratulations, but instead I did the Zen thing and directed kind and happy thoughts toward the northeastern seaboard.

A few years later, I heard more about Bridget from my best friend in high school, an architect who had worked on a project at the museum. But it wasn’t until I went to New York a couple of weeks ago that I had some time and decided to look her up.

I was a little nervous: close to 30 years had passed since I’d last seen her. Was it too weird to be contacting someone from your that-long-ago past? Plus, Bridget had a fairly important job. What made me think she’d even have time for me?

As it turned out, our visit was an unexpected highlight of my trip, which is saying a lot considering that other highlights included meeting some of my favorite children’s writers, finding a Hershey’s chocolate store in Times Square, and discovering that you no longer have to pay sales tax on clothes in the City if you spend less than $150.

But all that paled with hearing Bridget’s version of what I’d always thought was a friendship that benefited mostly me. “I really looked up to you and your sister when I was little,” she said. “You were so smart and interesting, and it meant so much to me that you were willing to pay attention to a little kid. And then we lost touch after your father died, and I felt bad about that, because I really could have used friends like you when I was a teenager.”

I was floored. And also touched. And a little sad, because having her friendship in the years after my father’s death splintered our family might have made my life easier, too.

The night before visiting Bridget, my daughter called me, upset about what had happened at a school science fair meeting that day. A grade one girl she likes had asked if they could do a project together. Elizabeth, who is in grade six, was planning to do a project with her brother, so she said no. The girl began to cry. Elizabeth felt terrible. I suggested she find ways the girl could help, and told her we could talk about it when I got home.

I didn’t give it much thought until my plane was about to land in Edmonton, which is when the irony struck me. As I tucked Elizabeth into bed that night, I told her about Bridget. “The little girl who asked you to do the science fair project looks up to you,” I said. “Let her help.”

Years from now she probably won’t remember the details of the project. She might not even remember Elizabeth, but I’ll bet she’ll remember the kindness. Or maybe the two of them will be lucky enough to find what I did when I called Bridget: the unexpected gift that comes when you reach back into the past and find something worth holding onto in the present.

In the 19 years since I wrote this column, Bridget has become such a part of my life that not a day goes by when I don’t think of her. I think of her every day in the kitchen when I look at the spoon rest I bought when she introduced me to her favorite kitchenware store in Manhattan. I think of her in the shower because when my husband and I renovated our bathroom, we were inspired by the soap niche that Bridget and her husband had in their newly renovated bathroom. I think of her when I look at my bushy eyebrows and remember how, every time I would visit her, she’d take me to the Bobbi Brown counter at Bloomingdales to have them tidied up. I smile when I look at the politically incorrect cartoon hanging on the back of my office door; she drew it for me because I had what I thought was a funny idea but my artistic ability ends at stick figures and she was a great cartoonist.

Ten years ago, nine years after we rekindled our relationship, when her sons were 13 and 11, Bridget was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s. It progressed relatively slowly, but it’s advanced significantly now. The last time I saw her, in March, she mostly paced, but every once in a while she’d slow down to dance with me, which is what we’d done during a visit nearly two years earlier. Back then she remembered the words to Hebrew school songs from more than a half century ago. If she didn’t remember the words, she at least remembered the melodies.

She didn’t sing this time, but she remembered some melodies. According to this beautiful essay by , she remembers my name, too. Whether that’s because Deb and I have the same name or because Bridget is thinking of me is unclear. It doesn’t really matter—I’m just grateful that I’ve had the chance to know and love the adult version of the person who was so special to me as a kid. That’s the gift of a lifetime.

Canada’s Governor General (until June 8)2 is Mary Simon, a former diplomat and CBC broadcaster, a long-time advocate for the Arctic who has the distinction of being the first Inuk to serve as the King’s representative in Canada.3

There was no question that Dave would wear his Metís4 tie to the ceremony. It’s a colorful way for him to honor his family’s native heritage. He doesn’t have many opportunities to wear that tie, or any tie, for that matter. The last time he wore the Metís tie was when he won an Alberta Science and Technology Award in Calgary on Nov. 7. He also wore it two days before in Ottawa, when he won the Gerhard Herzberg Canada Gold Medal for Science and Engineering, the top prize from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.

However, the tie never made it to Rideau Hall, the Governor General’s residence. Minutes before our plane landed in Toronto on Tuesday night, 13 and a half hours before the awards ceremony was to begin, Dave turned to me and said, “I forgot to bring my tie.”

I was momentarily sad. It’s a nice tie. Mary Simon would no doubt have appreciated seeing it. But it wasn’t a crisis. “We’ll get you a tie at the airport,” I said. “We have two hours before our flight leaves for Ottawa. It won’t be the Metís tie, but Pearson airport has tons of stores.”

“It’s 9:30,” Dave reminded me. “Everything’s going to be closed.”

Here I should point out that during the nearly 34 years that Dave and I have been Mr. and Mrs., I’ve been the designated worrier. I become particularly anxious in the weeks leading up to a trip.

My first and only panic attack5 occurred the night before I was going on a trip 16 years ago. Like many first-timers, I was certain I was having a heart attack. I asked a neighbor to drive me to the Emergency Department (Dave was out of town ), where I was patronized by the triage nurse who gently suggested that I was having a panic attack. I was too far gone to believe her.

Reality set in after an hour, when it became apparent that I actually could breathe and also that I could likely spend a week or more waiting for someone to examine me. I called a cardiac care nurse friend who confirmed the panic attack diagnosis, at which point I went home and fell asleep.

All this to say that one of my main travel-related anxieties is that I’m going to forget something. Dave always reassures me. “There are stores,” he points out. “You can get what you need.”

For him to be telling me that there were no stores open and we couldn’t get what we needed—or, to be more specific, what he needed—was a disconcerting and most unwelcome role reversal.

That’s when I remembered that my friend Susan was in Ottawa visiting her family. Surely her brother-in-law would have a tie. Or at the very least, know where to buy one in downtown Ottawa. Maybe he could recommend a 24-hour tie store.

Alas, there are no 24-hour tie stores in Ottawa. And neither Susan nor anyone at her sister’s house wanted to drive into the city the next morning during rush hour to deliver an accessory to a forgetful, award-winning scientist.

Susan told me that there were two nice stores downtown, Simon’s (now Canada’s best and only department store) and Winners (the Canadian TJ Maxx), where we could surely find a tie. Unfortunately, neither opened until 10, which was when Dave had to be at Rideau Hall.

“I’ll get you a tie,” I told him. “I don’t have to be there at 10. And then I’ll bring it to you, and you can put it on.”

“I need to have it when I go there,” he said. “I’ll just go to Wal-Mart.”

“You are not buying a tie at Wal-Mart,” I said. I had been to Wal-Mart in Edmonton that very day to buy tights for the awards ceremony. After The Bay closed the last of its department stores in 2025, ending its 355-year history in Canada, Wal-Mart was my only option unless I wanted to drive three times as far or order on line. Which I should probably have done, given that the Wal-Mart tights’ department was a nightmarish mess.

Dave is the kind of person who can’t find milk in the refrigerator if the orange juice in front of it. I had no confidence that he would be able to locate a tie in Wal-Mart, if Wal-Mart even carried ties, which I doubted very much.

“Something will be open at the airport,” I insisted. “We’ll find you a tie.”

Sure enough, a store was open. It had loads of clothing. All of the clothing was emblazoned with the Toronto Blue Jays logo. Perhaps it will not surprise you to learn that Blue Jays fans who shop at Pearson International Airport have no interest in dressing up. There was not a tie to be found amongst the baseball paraphernalia.

Starbucks, Tim Hortons, and the convenience store didn’t have ties, either, and they were the only other venues open by the time we got off the plane.

“Let’s go to the Lost and Found,” I suggested. Maybe we’d find a tie. Or the shawl that my sister lost in Security four years ago. Or the raincoat that my daughter left on an Air Canada flight to Toronto seven years ago.

That idea went over as well as my plan to mug the only man in the Maple Leaf Lounge who was wearing a suit and tie. Ditto for my suggestion that we wait until he passed out from a combination of jet lag and free Lounge liquor, at which point we could gently remove the tie and sprint to our departure gate. We’d be halfway to Ottawa by the time he regained consciousness.

“How about getting one from an Air Canada pilot?” I said. “Tell them you’re a Super Elite flier. Maybe they’ll give you one. They probably keep extras in their rolly bags. If it weren’t for people like you, they wouldn’t even have a job.”

Needless to say, David did not like that idea, either.

By the way, if ever you find yourself in a situation where you’re desperate for a tie in the domestic departures area of Pearson International Airport after 9:30 pm, don’t bother looking for a Lost and Found at the Maple Leaf Lounge. There isn’t one.

On the other hand, at 10 pm on May 12, there were also very few customers in the Maple Leaf Lounge. There was the guy with the tie whom we opted not to mug, and a few other people who were not worth mugging because they weren’t wearing ties.

The two women who were serving as gatekeepers at the check-in desk didn’t have a whole lot to do. The older one seemed content to stare at the elevator doors, waiting for potential customers. The younger one, Anna, was very clearly a closet-crafter looking for something to liven up the end of her shift.

When I told her that my husband had left his tie in Edmonton and we had less than 12 hours to find one that he could wear to receive an award the following day, Anna said, “I’ll make you one!” Then she pulled a handful of paper out of the computer printer at her desk and set to work.

By the time she’d finished, Dave had made up his mind: he was going to Wal-Mart. It had nothing to do with Anna’s tie: her tie was adorable, and I’ll probably frame it along with the program for the awards ceremony. But he needed a real tie, and he needed it by 8:30 am.

“You’re being ridiculous,” I told him. “Just let me buy you a tie. I can get you a nice tie at Simon’s.”

“I need it before I go to Rideau Hall,” he said. “I have to be able to watch a YouTube video. And look in a mirror.” He paused. “I don’t know how to tie a tie.”

That’s another thing about being married to a super-smart scientist, even one who has helped to pioneer an unpronounceable branch of biochemistry that has paved the way for precision medicine and new understandings of how the environment affects our health:6 sometimes I forget that he’s not smart about everything.

On the plus side, he managed to find a tie at Wal-Mart without my help—and to tie it, also without my help. And that’s a good thing, because I’m even more inept at tie-tying than he is.

My mother liked making connections. On one level, this meant that no matter where my sister or I were traveling, she knew someone in the city or town and she’d either notify them in advance that Amy and I were going to be there, or she’d give us their contact information and badger us until we contacted them. Often she did both.

On another level, it meant that over her lifetime, she’d had an inordinate number of encounters with well-known people. Whenever one of those folks was in the news, she’d mention the connection. That’s how I knew that she’d stood next to Wilt Chamberlain in a New York City bar when she was out with friends who included a sportswriter, that she’d once had a blind date with the opera singer Robert Merrill, and that Dorothy Parker had made a wisecrack at her expense in an elevator at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in Manhattan and Eleanor Roosevelt had attempted to soothe the sting with a kind comment of her own.

I’ve inherited my mother’s tendencies, both to make connections for family and friends, and to spot them in headlines. Sometimes those connections lead to stories that I can turn into magazine articles. Sometimes they lead to interesting conversations. Recently, while reading Patrick Radden Keefe’s latest book, London Falling, I made a connection that led me to revisit what I remembered as one of the most awkward, uncomfortable evenings of my life. As often happens when I view something from a different angle, I came away with a new understanding.

I’ll get to the connection, but first, a brief description of London Falling, a true-crime-meets-every-parents’-nightmare account of the mysterious death of 19-year-old Zac Brettler, the second son of a well-heeled Jewish family in London. After Zac’s body turned up in the Thames River in November 2019, his parents learned that he had been passing himself off as the son of a Russian oligarch. They’d known he was obsessed with money and status, but they’d had no idea he’d been living a double life.

I was listening to a podcast about the book when I realized that I’d met Zac’s mother, Rachelle Gryn Brettler, when she was 18 and I was 20. Our fathers had been classmates in rabbinic school at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati in the early 1950s. When I went to London in 1981 for a semester-abroad program during my junior year at Syracuse University, my mother put me in touch with Rabbi Gryn. I arranged to go to Sabbath services at his temple, the West London Synagogue, on March 6, 1981, the Friday night closest to the anniversary of my father’s death. I wanted to say kaddish, the mourner’s prayer.

After services, I was invited to the Gryn’s for Shabbat dinner. In the days leading up to the event, I spoke on the phone to the rabbi’s daughter, Naomi, who was my age. I was looking forward to meeting her and her three siblings, but as was often the case when I had great expectations, the evening didn’t unfold as I’d imagined or hoped.

I felt out of my element almost as soon as I entered the Gryn’s large flat. Shortly after I arrived, the eldest daughter, Gaby, 23, and her boyfriend/business partner drove up in front of the building. She’d just gotten a new car. Her three siblings were excited to see it, and they hurried to the window to get a glimpse.

“It’s a Rehnoe!” one of them explained to me. I’d never heard of a Rehnoe, so I followed them to the window to see for myself.

“Oh!” I said, when I recognized the car. “It’s a reh-NALT.”

David, 17, the youngest and only son, corrected me immediately. “It’s reh-NO,” he said, dragging out the “NO” in a very proper British accent, cementing my suspicion that he and everyone else in the room1 saw me as a Philistine to be endured until after dessert, when they could get rid of me.

As it turned out, faulty pronunciation was not my only faux-pas. Even if I managed to remain silent for the remainder of the evening, there was nothing I could do to hide what I was wearing. And until that moment, I’d liked that dress. It was from Laura Ashley, the British peddler of trad-wife garb decades before trad-wife garb became a thing. Laura Ashley was the go-to designer for people like me, whose fashion sense (or lack thereof) came from Seventeen Magazine, The Preppy Handbook, and the Little House on the Prairie TV show.

I don’t remember what the dress looked like, but when I came face-to-face with the Gryn girls, I felt like a pig farmer’s wife who’d crashed a Chabad wedding—which is not to say that the rabbi’s daughters were the epitome of frum fashion. Far from it. Gaby and Naomi were dressed like poster children for the New Romantics, the next wave of British coolness.

Gaby wore the strangest leg-coverings I’d ever seen, a hybrid of knickers and harem pants. Naomi wore white and pink eyeshadow and blush that had been applied in a way that I found inexplicably challenging to describe, but suffice it to say, it made an impression. She appeared to have applied a massive amount of gel to her gravity-defying bangs, which stuck straight up from her forehead. Rachelle wasn’t dressed quite as memorably (in a letter I wrote to my mother and sister describing the evening, I noted that she had brown hair, dangling earrings, and white loafers), but like her sisters and David, she struck me as confident, cosmopolitan, and far more sophisticated than I.

They all smoked, right there, in the apartment, in front of their parents, which made me feel even more bumpkin-like. “Next to them I felt plain and countrified,” I wrote in my journal. “Not that that’s anything to be ashamed of.”

My entry about that evening is unusually long—five pages—because, as I noted “This is something I probably shouldn’t (not that I ever would) forget.”

I observed that the Gryn kids were “chic and worldly,” like the children of my father’s best friend in the rabbinate, which I ascribed to their upbringing in a cosmopolitan city. I wrote that they didn’t fit “the conventional PK2 mold” and then chastised myself for making a sweeping generalization. I theorized that I was just beginning to understand the “sociological effect being brought up in a big city has on you and your personality.”

As noted above, in addition to describing what everyone was wearing, I drew pictures. Even if cell phones had existed in 1981, I likely would have been too self-conscious to take pictures. Indeed, reading the journal entry and the letter I wrote to my mother and sister, it’s clear that the problem wasn’t my outfit or my Americanized pronunciation of Renault, it was my deep-rooted insecurity.

For 45 years, the story I’ve held onto about that night is that I felt awkward and uncomfortable because nobody was nice to me. And yet, given what I wrote at the time, that wasn’t the case. Here’s part of the letter to my mother and sister:

The [family and their guests] all seemed nice but half the time I didn’t have anything to say and I sort of sat there and blended into the wall... Anyway, like I’ve said, they were very nice to me, but like I think I’ve also said, I felt like quite the country bumpkin among the chic and sophisticated. The rabbi was nice, his wife is nice and very beautiful but I felt young and stupid sometimes.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that I held onto the wrong, negative narrative for 45 years. Although my journalistic training meant that I was committed to recording every detail to preserve an accurate record, as soon as my emotions took over, the facts didn’t matter. And because I haven’t looked at the letter or journal entry in decades, the emotional response is the one that I committed to memory.

In the years after my father died, I frequently fell into a spiral of self-loathing, convinced that I was fat, stupid, and unlovable. It wasn’t a leap to believe that other people, especially sophisticated, worldly peers like the Gryn offspring, would see me the same way. Adding to my insecurity was that they were the children of a rabbi, an identity I believed I’d lost the right to claim when my father disappeared into a lake north of our hometown on March 7, 1974.

It would take decades for me to process my grief and confusion about what my mother insisted had been my father’s accidental drowning. In fact, he’d taken his own life, but I wouldn’t know that until I was 22, and I wouldn’t be able to say it without feeling guilty until I was well into my fifties. There was a part of me that was very much stuck at age 13, and it was likely on display that night in the Gryn’s London flat.

Therapy, maturity, and positive life experiences have combined to give me the kind of confidence I wish I’d had back then. Stumbling upon the connection in London Calling gave me something equally healing: the opportunity to reassess an uncomfortable memory and recast it in a less painful light. I don’t often think about Shabbat dinner at the Gryns, but from now on, when I do, I’ll focus on how nice everyone was—and also that I thought to include drawings, crude as they may be.

To my readers: Ordinarily I drop new posts every Thursday. This one took me a while to compose—I learned about London Calling a week ago, and immediately went down a rabbit hole learning about the book, looking at my journal entry and the letter to my family, and trying to write something that was worthy of your time. Initially I thought the connection was that Zac Brettler had died at age 19 in 2019 and that my son had nearly died at age 20 in 2018—indeed, learning about the mysterious death of a young Jewish man in London is what piqued my interest in the story. But the circumstances are completely different. My heart goes out to the Brettlers for their loss. Patrick Radden Keefe’s book is riveting, but the story is maddening: the criminal justice system in Britain and the police in London failed the family miserably. I hope Keefe’s book serves as a wake-up call to law enforcement. (I doubt it will, but one can hope.)

When an invitation to deliver a keynote speech at a library conference in Wisconsin turned up in my author-website mailbox earlier this year, I was certain it was a scam. A lot of writers have been getting highly personalized scam emails these days, usually from “book promotors” who lavish detailed praise on our work and then offer multi-point plans about how they can help us increase our sales and become the publishing success stories we deserve to be.

Getting an email like that is flattering. When you’re sitting at your desk or your dining room table or wherever it is you work, crafting a story that may never make it further than your hard drive, checking your email for responses from publishers and/or agents who will inevitably turn you down because you don’t have a social media following equal to the population of a New York City borough, flattering emails are a dopamine hit. Even if they’re fake.

But as it turned out, the invitation was real. My sister was on the organizing committee and when the first-choice author proved to be too costly, she recommended me, a bargain author. The thing is, I’ve never delivered a keynote speech. I don’t even like listening to them. I have the attention span of a fruit fly and the last thing I wanted to do was bore a bunch of librarians the way I’ m often bored when a speaker drones on about something I don’t care about.

So you can imagine how relieved I was when, shortly after the invitation arrived, I stumbled across a story on Facebook that perfectly illustrated what I planned to talk about: the impact of libraries and librarians. The story was by a librarian who is doing inventory one night after closing when she finds a decades-old library card on the floor. The front of the card says “Ethan Brooks, age 12.” The librarian is about to throw it in the trash when she notices a note on the back: “Return this when I’m somebody.”

The librarian goes to the computer system and discovers that the last time Ethan checked out a book was June 1987—decades earlier—when he borrowed The Outsiders by SE Hinton. Ethan never returned it. The librarian decides to find him, not to chase down the book—she appears to have no interest in getting the book back—but to find out if Ethan actually became somebody.

Turns out, he died three years earlier, a single, childless, factory worker. But according to his obituary, he made donations to the library “in memory of the place that raised me when home couldn’t.”

The librarian is so moved that she has his card laminated, puts it in a frame, and displays it at the circulation desk with a note: “Ethan Brooks never returned this card. But he returned to us in every donation he made. He was somebody. To every kid who’ll read a book because of his generosity. That’s who he became.”

The circulation desk display has an immediate effect: patrons begin leaving their old library cards, accompanied by notes about who they became. By the time the librarian writes her story, there are 847 cards on what has been dubbed “The Somebody Wall.”

One day, an older patron — the librarian describes her as “a 70-year-old woman”—comes into the building, heads straight to the wall, and stares at Ethan’s card for 20 minutes. The concerned librarian asks if she is okay. The woman explains that she was Ethan’s elementary school teacher, that he used to come to the library because his home wasn’t safe, that he’d read until closing, and that she always wondered what had happened to him. Then she starts to cry.

“I wrote him a note once,” she tells the librarian through tears. “In a book I gave him. ‘You’re already somebody, Ethan. Don’t forget.’ He must not have believed me.” Then the former teacher adds her 1985 library card to the wall.

When I met with the library conference committee to plan my talk, I mentioned the story. They weren’t familiar with it, but agreed it sounded like an ideal tentpole for my speech. I had no idea how I was going to get from there to talking about my picture book, A Sack Full of Feathers, which the committee had asked me to sell after the keynote, but I had nearly three months to figure that out.

However, as is often the case when something appears too good to be true, the library story did not live up to its initial promise.

For starters, I couldn’t verify where the library was because the librarian hadn’t identified it. I decided I would figure that out once I found Ethan’s obituary, but I couldn’t find any obituary for an Ethan Brooks who would have been born around 1975 and died 49 years later, single, childless, and after having worked in a factory. The “librarian” said she’d found the obituary on line, so there was no reason I shouldn’t have been able to.

Once my Spidey senses were triggered, I saw red flags everywhere. Why was Ethan’s age on his library card? Why did the librarian make a big deal out of his not returning the card? Books are supposed to be returned to a library, not cards. And if the card had been sitting around for nearly 40 years, why had it all of a sudden turned up on the floor? Had nobody been cleaning?

The only things I could verify were that librarians are important and The Outsiders is the kind of book an angst-ridden tween would glom onto, the former because I spend a lot of time in libraries and the latter because I was an angst-ridden tween and I adored The Outsiders.

It was beginning to look like I was going to have to find another story for my tentpole, which I did not want to do. I called my sister, hoping she’d tell me not to worry. Part of the reason I wanted to deliver a good speech was to avoid embarrassing her or, worse, getting her into trouble for nepotism. Instead, she added a doubt of her own: at her library, she said, if someone hadn’t borrowed a book since 1987, they wouldn’t even be in the system.

“You should do an internet search and see if it’s AI slop,” she said—a term I’d never heard, but am now very familiar with, because, indeed, that’s what the Ethan story was.

I couldn’t believe I’d fallen for such sentimental drivel—and worse yet, sentimental fake drivel—although I’m not the only one. The story has appeared on multiple social media platforms, including here on Substack, where the first of the 113 comments is from a librarian who said the story made her cry.

My excuse for falling for the story: I’d been so excited at having found something for my keynote that I let my enthusiasm get in the way of my critical thinking skills.

And yet, the fact that the story was bogus turned out to be—pardon the cliché—a blessing in disguise. For starters, it allowed me to segue easily into talking about A Sack Full of Feathers, which was used in a 2017 Scholastic Scope story package designed to teach kids the difference between real news and fake news.

Instead of building my keynote around a heartwarming tale about how librarians can have a positive impact on their patrons, I talked about how easy it is to get suckered into believing a lie on the internet, using myself as Exhibit A. Then I delivered a call to arms about how librarians can make a positive difference by leading the fight to combat the assault on truth that is an existential threat to free and democratic societies.1

I wasn’t sure how I was going to tie up the talk, but scrolling through Facebook more than a week before the conference, serendipity struck again: I found a heartwarming story about a librarian making a positive impact—and it was true. I knew this, because it was by my friend and fellow Substacker, , former editor of the Canadian women’s magazine, Chatelaine.

Rona had gone to the Central Reference Library in Toronto, where she lives, planning to search the Canadian periodical index to find a 27-year-old issue of Chatelaine with an essay by local journalist, Sandy Naiman, a rare public figure who had been open about living with mental illness. Sandy had just died and Rona thought her family might like a copy. She explained to the reference librarian that she wanted to go into the stacks and find the magazine.

“My plan seemed quaint to the young librarian,” she wrote on Facebook, “But she was too polite to laugh. With a few keystrokes, she printed out the story and sent me a PDF.”

I read the story at the end of the keynote, adding that Sandy’s family had been grateful for the PDF that they could share “far and wide”—info Rona provided when I reached out to tell her I wanted to include her library experience in my talk. Then I reminded the librarians that they’d all made that kind of positive impact on a patron at some point.

“Maybe if you have the time and the inclination, you’ll share your stories,” I suggested. “They won’t make that Ethan story disappear—very little disappears of the internet, unfortunately—but you never know.”2

When we had new carpet installed in our upstairs hall last year I was shocked at how dingy the bedroom carpets looked in comparison, and I couldn’t help compare because the new Berber ended where the old stuff began, at the bedroom doors.

“You could put new carpet in all the bedrooms,” the carpet man said helpfully. When I pointed out that new carpet wasn’t in our budget, he came up with another solution: “Keep the doors closed.”

I thought about that the other day, when I was talking to a friend about lawns. She and her husband have a lovely garden and a normal lawn, which is to say, every once in a while a dandelion pops up amongst the grass and the clover. Her neighbors, on the other hand, have lush carpets of nothing but vibrant green which is heavily attended to, pampered and manicured, the lawn equivalent of a Hollywood starlet during awards season.

“All I can say is, I’m glad there’s a hedge between our house and theirs,” she said.

I know how she feels. Across the street from us lives a family with an underground sprinkler system and a lawn that, if it were a man’s head, would be that of Grey’s Anatomy actor Patrick Dempsey on a day when the on-set hair stylist was at the top of his craft.

Every time I step out the front door or gaze out our living room picture window I feel as if I’ve been transported to a House and Garden photo shoot. Not only is my neighbors’ lawn thick and healthy looking, it’s so uniform it looks as if just arrived from the sod factory.

The sad thing is, I used to love looking at that lawn. I appreciated its beauty -- until my husband began comparing it to ours. “Look at that,” he said, taking a break from crawling about on his knees, armed with a fork-like device to extract dandelions from what I used to think of as our perfectly acceptable lawn.

“At what?” I asked.

“This lawn is a mess.” He pointed to a brown spot where, presumably, grass once grew. I’d never noticed it. “Look at that.” He pointed to anther bald spot that hadn’t stood out until that very minute.

“The kids can’t play out here anymore,” he said. “At least not for a few weeks, until the grass grows back.”

“But they love playing out here,” I reminded him. “And there’s an obesity epidemic, and it’s healthier for them to be outside playing than inside on the couch, watching cartoons.”

“The lawn is a disaster,” he said. “If they play on it, it’s going to get worse. It just needs a rest.”

“But it’s a lawn,” I said. “It’s supposed to be played on.”

“It’s supposed to look nice,” he retorted.

The kids continued playing on the lawn until the weather turned after a week and the temperature plummeted and rain began to fall. I hoped it would make a difference in the lawn, but like a man whose shining scalp is a billboard for his healthy testosterone levels, the bald patches on our lawn weren’t going to be rejuvenated without chemical help.

“We need to have the lawn aerated,” Dave announced. “And fertilized.”

“But fertilizer is full of chemicals,” I said. “Chemicals can make you sick.”

In my haste to defend our borders, I’d forgotten a cardinal rule of debating: never argue chemicals with someone who has an Ivy League Ph.D. in the subject.

The lawn was aerated, and a few days later it was fertilized, and the bald patches are still there and the rest of the grass is merely longer and in desperate need of a good mowing. Meanwhile, my neighbor just informed me that her lawn is to be featured in a real estate commercial about the importance of an impeccable façade in getting a good price for your home.

And so I’ve decided to take a tip from the carpet man: I’m going to keep the curtains closed and use the back door – at least until the grass grows back.

Post-script: The day after this column ran nearly 20 years ago, the neighbor with the beautiful lawn emailed to say that her husband loved the column, “but it cursed our lawn. upon awaking on sunday morning, there were 5 dandelions showing off their yellow faces. [Husband] was not impressed and quickly cut them down because we had two people walk by after church at st. paul’s1 and say “was that your lawn that debby was writing about?”

The power of writing!

Last week’s Substack was a Q&A with artificial intelligence pioneer Rich Sutton about the difference between supervised learning and reinforcement learning. This week’s is an extension of that, but in the form of a reported essay. The talk that Rich and I had about the difference between supervised learning and reinforcement learning was fairly straightforward. The rest of our conversation was all over the place—too convoluted for a Q&A.

A brief overview: basically everything we call AI right now is a form of supervised learning. In supervised learning, your computer generates information based on patterns that it recognizes not because it thinks freely, but because it’s been trained to recognize patterns.

Intelligence, artificial or otherwise, requires original thought. It requires understanding consequences. Right now, computers aren’t capable of either. But Rich and his reinforcement learning colleagues believe it’s possible. It’s what they’re working on.

If that scares you, you’re not alone. I’m still trying to get my head around computers that concoct realistic-looking, effusively complimentary emails purportedly from book promoters, and then send them to me and my writer friends. These “book promotors” claim to have done a deep dive into our work. They flatter us by telling us what we already know: we deserve far more success (and money, natch).

In fact, the emails are scams: computer-generated garbage designed to prey on our emotions and make money for someone other than us. And that garbage is generated by a computer that can’t think, it can only reproduce ideas it’s been fed by the aforementioned supervised-learning training models.

I can’t imagine a computer that can actually think. I don’t want to. Rich, on the other hand, has wanted to make one since encountering his first computer in a class he took while growing up in suburban Chicago in the 1960s and 70s. All the talk back then was about computers as giant brains. The idea of a giant brain in a machine was fascinating to Rich. The reality was frustrating.

Rich Sutton’s first impression of a computer wasn’t exactly positive: “This is not a giant brain. This is just a dumb thing that does exactly what you tell it to do. And there’s no way you’re going to be a mind if you’re just doing what you’re told.”

“I took the first course on computers (in school) and I learned that you had to program them, and you had to tell them every little thing, and the computer wouldn’t do anything other than what you told it to do,” he recalls. “And so I said, ‘This isn’t a mind. This is not a giant brain. This is just a dumb thing that does exactly what you tell it to do. And there’s no way you’re going to be a mind if you’re just doing what you’re told.”

And yet, he thought to himself, a mind is a machine: it’s a biological machine that follows the laws of physics. If he could understand how a mind worked, maybe he could make one. How cool would it be if he could make a computer that could think?

Mind you, this was back in the 1970s. The internet as we know it was decades away, as were laptop computers, smartphones, and social media—all the technological advancements that make it easier for us to stay in touch and access information while cutting us off from one another and making it increasingly difficult to tell fact from fiction.

Rich is a smart, focused guy, but he’s not a fortune teller—or a fortune hunter, for that matter. When he headed off to Stanford in the 1970s to study experimental psychology, it was because he wanted to understand how minds worked.

When he gravitated toward computing science, it was because he felt AI was the logical route to that goal, not because he had a crystal ball that told him that AI was going to blow up into a gazillion dollar business, and that people with his knowledge and training were going to attract investors the way people who sleep in hotels attract bedbugs.

As I mentioned in Part One of this Substack, which ran on April 8, I wanted to talk to Rich to better understand AI and why we need it, and have him reassure me that it doesn’t mean scary robots will take over the world.

Our conversation did not exactly unfold that way. Rich didn’t tell me how AI works because, as noted above, true AI isn’t here yet. His response to my question about why we need the technology at all was to ask me a question: “What if there were a billion new smart people?” Then, before I had a chance to respond, he gave me an answer: “If there are more smart people, it’s good for you.”

When I pushed him on that issue and pointed out that smart people can also be evil and upend the world as we know it, he reminded me that that’s always been the case. Which is true, but not terribly reassuring.

“We have children,” he pointed out. “And some of them grow up to be Putins and Trumps and Hitlers, but we still have children. We take the risk. We don’t know how people are going to turn out. We do our best to make sure they turn out well. By and large, people do turn out well.”

If you’re reading between the lines and asking yourself, “Is he making an analogy between AI and children?” the answer is yes.

I wanted Rich to tell me that we need laws and rules to control AI, but he would not. I knew he wouldn’t: we have very different views about how government should operate in people’s lives. I want to believe that government works—despite evidence to the contrary. He wants to believe that cooperation works—again, despite evidence to the contrary.

He calls cooperation “humanity’s superpower” and—ironically—pointed to government (and market economies) as an example of cooperation. He acknowledged that when it comes to cooperation, humans “kind of suck at it.” But he also pointed out that we’re better at cooperation than any other animal.

Ultimately, our conversation kept circling back to current events, human nature, and history. This was frustrating because it wasn’t what I’d planned to write about. I wanted to write about how AI is not scary. I wanted to write about how Rich and everyone in his orbit is erecting guardrails around the technology so we don’t have anything to be scared about.

But that’s not what we talked about, and not just because erecting guardrails isn’t on Rich’s to-do list. The more I pored over the transcript of our conversation, the more I understood that current events, human nature, and history are critical to understanding both what it is that he is trying to do, and why those of us living in what he described as a “declining empire,” are so unnerved by AI.

The context for the declining empire assessment was the part of our conversation in which Rich talked about the world being better off with more smart people: “It’s not true if there are more smart people, it’s bad for you,” he insisted. “If there are more smart people, it’s good for you. This is just a normal thing, but it’s because we live in a declining empire in the fourth turning and we’re all so anxious about it—that we think other people doing well is bad for us.”

By we, he means the West—mostly the US. “I believe in the theory that there is a regular, cyclic progression to empires and societies,” he said. “According to that progression, right now we’re in that bad period where the empire is failing and things are bad, and maybe you’re going to have a war, which we do seem to be having. And things have to get worse till we hit rock bottom and we start to build again. This is what’s happening right now, and so we’re all kind of fearful and pessimistic and anxious.”

In this kind of climate, anything new and potentially powerful—e.g., AI—is seen as a threat. “Other parts of the world are rising now, and they’re less anxious about AI, because they’re feeling optimistic about the future,” Rich said.

I asked if he meant Asia and he said that Asia is the most dominant. Here, though, in the west, AI is fast becoming a bogeyman, blamed for eliminating jobs, exacerbating economic and social disparities and polarization, and creating a new class of greedy, heartless oligarchs.

“AI companies are worth literally trillions of dollars now and it’s a little bit fragile because the public has this attitude—they’re partly afraid of it, they partly don’t believe it,” Rich said. “The big AI companies have been very successful at saying both ‘this is so transformative and so important that you should be scared of it. You should definitely be paying attention. You should definitely be giving us more of your money.’ And at the same time, they have to say, ‘This is good, we want AI to be good. Give the money to us. We will make AI good, and if you just give it to the other company, it might be bad.’”

Money is not what drew Rich to computing science, and it’s not motivating him now. He has about as much interest in becoming an oligarch1 as he does in policing the technology.

“I see myself as more of an observer than someone who is responsible to make sure that things work out well,” he said. “I don’t take responsibility for things I can’t control. I don’t even take responsibility for things that I could control a little bit because—maybe as a public figure in AI, I should try to counter the fearmongers and I do to some extent—but I don’t change my life to be a fearmonger-counterer. I tell people they shouldn’t be fearful but I don’t think it’s my life’s work to remove people’s fear. My life’s work is to figure out how the mind works. And that’s hard enough.”

Okay folks, last week very few of you commented on Part One, and I’m not sure if it’s because you didn’t read it, you were confused by it, or you were horrified and didn’t want to tell me. So if you have it in you this week, and you’ve made it all the way down to this plea, let me know what you think!

Next week I’m hoping to publish something about revenge memoirs or my new favorite TV show, Slow Horses. Or, possibly, a funeral. Stay tuned. And thanks, as always, for reading. In lieu of a rainbow picture, here’s one I took last week by the North Saskatchewan River, a few blocks from my house.

When I polled friends and acquaintances for questions to ask a leading AI expert, their responses suggested that they’re as uncomfortable with the technology as I am: How to rid the world of AI? How can you make this purposeless theft stop? Why do we have to endure this? If human intelligence is superior to artificial, how do we make sure that humans are doing the creating and AI is only making human creativity easier?

I shared some of the questions with the expert, Rich Sutton. He didn’t quite scoff—he’s too polite—but he made it clear that he thinks the fears are misguided.

For starters, he pointed out, true artificial intelligence doesn’t even exist yet—it’s a label, one that everyone from professional scaremongers to marketing departments is tossing around, the former to frighten us, the latter to make ordinary products look fancy. (Apparently, even though a lot of us are terrified that AI means scary robots will take over the world, we still want it in our toothbrushes.)

Also, for as long as there have been people, we’ve been creating entities (children) designed (raised) to be more capable and productive than we are. To believe that it’s our right to always be the smartest, most capable, powerful, and irreplaceable beings in this or any universe is short-sighted, arrogant, and entitled—not to mention unrealistic.

It’s hard to argue with that logic. Also, Rich knows more about computers than I ever will: he co-wrote the textbook on reinforcement learning, a key component of AI. In 2024, he and his Reinforcement Learning co-author (and PhD supervisor), Andrew Barto, won the Turing Prize, aka “The Nobel Prize in Computing Science.”

Rich is the reason that Google DeepMind opened its first non-UK research lab in Edmonton, Alberta. He ran the Edmonton office with two fellow University of Alberta computing science professors from its inception in July 2017 until it closed in January 2023. The Edmonton node was consolidated into sites in Toronto and Montreal.

Rich stayed in Edmonton, where he still teaches, and began building a new entity, OpenMind Research Institute. I’ve been friends with him and his partner, Martha, since they moved to Edmonton in 2003, when Rich became one of my husband’s colleagues at the U of A.

When we get together, if we do talk about computing science, those conversations last maybe 10 minutes before we detour into topics that are a part of everyone’s everyday lives: food, nature, birding, TV shows, books, whatever interesting trip Rich and Martha are about to take or just returned from (inevitably it involves ocean kayaking, snorkeling, birding, or camping on a remote island that can be reached only after a multi-day plane-and-boat trip). Sometimes, as the photo above shows, we play with puzzles.

With AI seemingly everywhere these days, though, I’ve been itching to pick Rich’s brain. I was hoping he’d quell my fears. Which he did. Sort of. When I pointed out my fear about AI and scary robots run amok (i.e., The Terminator), he countered with examples of robots both cute (R2D2) and helpful (Commander Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation).

It was comforting, but I’m still not entirely convinced.

Ultimately, the most useful and reassuring takeaway from our conversation was the understanding that my fear—and society’s— about AI isn’t simply a function of our ignorance about computers and how they work, it’s a reflection of current events, history, and human behavior.

I talked to Rich for nearly two hours. We covered a lot of territory, too much for one Substack. I’ll post Part Two next week

.DW: Last week you gave a talk in which you said that “true AI is not here yet.” But everyone’s using the term. If it’s not here, then what are people talking about?

RS: There’s a lot more automation happening now. There’s a lot more computation that’s being used in various ways in our economies and societies and then we notice that anything that uses a lot of computation, we’re going to call it AI.

DW: Why?
RS: It’s a sign of intelligence to compute things well. And (AI) is something that makes it seem fancy. When you go into the drugstore and you buy a new electric toothbrush, almost all of them will say, “We have AI.” Clearly it doesn’t make sense to say that your toothbrush has a mind, that it’s intelligent. But it does use a little bit of computation to make some decisions. Probably when we do figure out intelligence, it will require a lot of computation. But intelligence is not really just computation.

DW: Your area of expertise is reinforcement learning. What’s the difference between that and the kind of computation that everybody is conflating with AI?

RS: Reinforcement learning is about having a machine, an agent, a system, that figures out what to do in order to get it to achieve its goals. It has much more agency and much more responsibility—you have to do things and figure out what is the right thing to do. Whereas in conventional machine learning, which is called supervised learning, the training information tells you what to do.

DW: How does the training information tell you what to do?

RS: We give a bunch of examples and ask [the computer] to see the pattern so it can give a new answer on a new example: This is a cat. This is a dog. This is a cat. This is a dog. Now here’s a new picture. See the pattern and tell me if it’s a cat or a dog. What people call AI today, they really mean pattern recognition that uses a lot of computation. It’s computation-intensive pattern recognition, or advanced pattern recognition. Intelligence clearly involves pattern recognition, but intelligence is more than pattern recognition.

DW: What’s an example of supervised learning that affects our daily lives?
RS: The spam filter on your email—it looks for patterns: oh, is it something like this? This is probably spam, too. We’ve become very good at pattern recognition and using lots of computation to do it.

DW: How does ChatGPT fit into that category?
RS: It started out as a system that tried to predict the next word that people would say. It is supervised because we have a situation and the next word that a person says can be obtained from data of what people say or from the text on the internet or text from books—what words follow the previous words. You have an example to follow. And notice that the presumption is whatever people say, that’s the right thing, whereas in real life that’s not necessarily true. If you’re trying to drive a car, what action to take is more determined by what are the consequences of that.1

DW: And a computer can’t determine consequences. But if I’m hearing you right, reinforcement learning is going to change that— it’s going to teach a computer to make decisions the way a human does.

RS: The thing about reinforcement learning is you have a goal. Does supervised learning have a goal? You could say its goal is to do what it’s told but I don’t think we should even call that a goal. It’s just imitating the training set. It isn’t trying to achieve anything. But animals and people, we all have goals, we’re trying to do something. We’re not just trying to imitate something. Maybe sometimes we’re trying to imitate people. Mostly we have goals. And reinforcement learning we have a goal and the goal is expressed by a numerical signal and the goal is to make that numerical signal large.

DW: That makes sense. But I still don’t quite get the point of teaching a computer to think.
RS: We want to reproduce all of the learning and abilities of people. We want to make people.

DW: When I told Martha you said that, she said, “He does not want to make people.” So now I need to know: are you pulling my leg? Do you really want to make people?

RS: Really, I want to understand minds—but in order to understand them, we have to make them. I’m not going to make all of people. I want to make minds that are as powerful as people’s minds.2

Next week: Rich talks about why he studied experimental psychology, how that led him to AI, and why he believes people are so afraid of the technology. (Spoiler: it has to do with the decline of the Western (read: US) empire.)

In early February, two friends came to my house for an ice-cream-making lesson. I was in manic baking mode, so while the ice cream was churning away in my Kitchen Aid ice cream maker attachment, I decided that we should make meringue cookies with the dozens of egg whites I’d been accumulating from all the ice cream and bread I’d been making lately, recipes that call for yolks but not whites.

Unfortunately, something went very wrong when I added the finely chopped chocolate to the meringue mixture: once thick and shiny, the beaten egg whites deflated faster than a rubber raft transporting an army of porcupines.

My ice-cream-class students are chemists, so when they suggested adding flour to salvage the meringue, I dumped some in. I didn’t think it would work, but it was already a mess so why not? After all, they were chemists.

I didn’t bother measuring the flour. Maybe I used one-third of a cup? Whatever. It didn’t help. Next we whipped up more egg whites and folded them in, but while the mixture was slightly thicker, it was never going to reconstitute into anything approximating a meringue.

I could not bear to throw it away, though, so I poured the mixture into three large circles on parchment-lined cookie sheets, baked them at 250 for an hour and left them in the oven until the next day. The next day I attempted to remove the makeshift Pavlovas from the cookie sheets only to discover that while the tops had dried to perfection, the bottoms were sticky in the middle. Back into the oven they went at 200 for another hour or two until they were dry enough that the parchment paper came off easily.

The week before I’d made mint ice cream, which I’d planned to make into mint chocolate chip ice cream. However, I was too tired and lazy to chop up any chocolate, so it was plain old mint ice cream. But now I had makeshift Pavlovas with chocolate. I decided to layer the ice cream between the Pavlovas and make something approximating a mint chocolate chip ice cream layer cake.

For good measure, I topped the ice cream with hot fudge sauce before I assembled the cake, thinking that might make everything stick together and taste better. It wasn’t particularly beautiful: the ice cream had been sitting in the freezer for a week. Even when I defrosted it, it didn’t spread as well as it would have had I made the cake when the ice cream was fresh out of the ice cream maker. But at least I wasn’t wasting the ingredients.

I wrapped the cake in plastic, put it in a Ziploc bag, and stuck it in the freezer. I figured I’d haul it out when we had company and my baking mania had passed and I had nothing to serve. And then, the very next day, my daughter’s future in-laws invited me and my husband for dinner on the weekend.

“I’ll bring dessert,” I said. “I made this weird meringue ice cream cake. I have no idea how it will taste, but if it’s bad, I’ll take you out for ice cream after.”

Turns out, there was no need to go out for ice cream after. The cake was a massive hit. Unfortunately, I’ll never be able to recreate it exactly. But I’ve been working on developing a recipe for nearly two months.

So, just in time for Passover, here it is: Debby’s Delicious Dessert Disaster, the perfect end to any Passover meal.

You’ll need an ice cream maker for this. You’ll also need a lot of time: The recipes are simple, but Pavlovas take a long time to bake, and the ice cream base has to be refrigerated for at least 24 hours before you can run it through the ice cream maker.

Chocolate Chip Pavlovas

This recipe is adapted from the recipe in the Duchess Bake Shop cookbook. I use more egg whites than they do and bake them for longer.

You will need a 9-inch springform pan

160-170 grams egg whites (about five or six eggs)

2 cups icing sugar

1 tsp. salt

1 tsp vanilla

70 grams dark chocolate, chopped finely.

Before you get started making the meringues, trace three 9-inch circles onto parchment paper and put the paper onto cookie sheets.

Mix the egg whites and icing sugar in a heat-proof bowl. Place the bowl in a pan of shallow water. Whisk over medium heat until the mixture reaches a temperature of 120 F. Transfer it to a mixer and whip it until stiff peaks form, about 10 minutes. This should be enough time for the mixture to cool. If it hasn’t, give it another few minutes before you add the chocolate. Add the vanilla extract at the same time and mix well using a spatula or spoon.

Divide the meringue mixture into thirds and spread it over the parchment paper circles. Bake at 350 for a half hour and then turn the oven down to 170 until the meringue are completely dried out. This can take up to 10 hours.

Mint ice cream:

One bunch of fresh mint leaves (approximately 28 grams)

1 cup 10 percent cream (also known as coffee cream. Some people use whole milk. I find the coffee cream makes the ice cream taste better)

2 cups whipping cream

3 egg yolks

1 tsp vanilla

Scant ¾ cup sugar

Wash and dry the mint and tear the leaves in half. Bundle them into a strip of cheesecloth (or put them in a teabag if you have one).

In a deep saucepan, mix the coffee cream, egg yolks, vanilla, and sugar. I use an immersion blender but a whisk will also work. Once you’ve mixed the ingredients, add the bundled mint and stir until the mixture thickens. (It should coat the back of a wooden spoon.) Put it through a sieve to get rid of any lumps. Let it cool for up to a half hour before adding the two cups of cream. Leave the mint bundle in the whole time.

Refrigerate the mixture, covered, for at least 24 hours. (I’ve waited 48.) When you’re ready to make the ice cream, squeeze the bundle of mint over the cream mixture before emptying the mixture into your ice cream maker. I’ve never measured how much comes out. Just squeeze till you’ve exhausted it.

Cake Assembly

You probably will not use all the ice cream — I usually wind up with an extra cup or two, which I freeze in a plastic container and either eat or serve to someone who doesn’t want ice cream cake.

Cover the surface of one Pavlova with a little less than half the ice cream. My ice cream layers are usually about a half inch or slightly less. Don’t pile on too much or you’ll wind up with a mess. Cover the ice cream layer with another Pavlova, on which you will spread approximately the same amount of ice cream. Top with the third Pavlova. Put the cake into a springform pan, cover it, and freeze it at least eight hours before serving. I find the ideal cover for the springform pan is one of those plastic shower caps you get in hotel room bathrooms. (Unused! Do not use a used one!)

I like to serve my cake with fudge sauce. The recipe I use is from Bailey’s Ice Cream Shop, which was my dad’s favorite Boston ice cream parlor.

Bailey’s Hot Fudge

1/2 cup whipping cream

3 T butter

1/3 cup brown sugar

1/3 cup granulated white sugar

1/2 cup cocoa powder

In a small saucepan, melt together 1/2 cup whipping cream and 3 tablespoons butter. Mix the sugars and cocoa powder together and whisk them into the liquid until combined. You can serve immediately or refrigerate it. If you refrigerate it, you’ll likely want to thin it out a bit when you reheat it, which you can do in a microwave in 30-second increments. You can use milk or coffee cream — no need to add more whipping cream.

If you’ve been to a knitting store, you’ve no doubt seen the samples strategically arranged next to yarn displays. They’re usually perfectly turned-out garments and accessories designed to make the yarn more appealing to customers. I used to think samples were mass-produced by machines. Turns out, they’re not. They’re hand-knit by people like Cindy Poon.

I met Cindy at a wedding in Edmonton a year and a half ago. We sat next to each other at the rehearsal dinner, and I couldn’t help but admire the beautiful, delicate-looking knit top she was wearing. When she told me that she had made it, I was even more impressed. When she told me that she knit samples for yarn stores, I felt like I was in the presence of knitting royalty.

Born and raised in Hong Kong, Cindy learned to knit in middle school. Her mom taught her, but the yarn in Hong Kong was neither lovely nor plentiful in the 1980s, and Cindy didn’t stick with the hobby. When she moved to Edmonton at age 15 to live with relatives and finish her schooling, she signed up for a night class with a woman who taught lever-style knitting—super-fast and efficient.

After graduating from the University of Alberta, getting married, and moving to Redmond, Washington, in the late 1990s, Cindy worked as a floral designer, a craft-store employee, and knitting teacher. She also knit for her two children — now 26 and 28 — and her husband, posting her creations on Ravelry and Instagram.

Cindy jokes that her knitting spans three countries. She’s also knit at sea: last summer she boarded a sailboat for a three-day, two-night knitting cruise in the San Juan Islands along with 19 fellow knitters and a knitting pattern designer. Another trip on her bucket list: a visit to the New York State Sheep and Wool Festival in Rhinebeck.

But first — a conversation with me.

DW: How and when did you start making samples?
CP: I’ve been making samples for 14 years. One of my local shops was were looking for someone to make samples and also to teach. They know I’m a knitter and they just asked me. There was no formal application. Those people are not even there anymore and I’m still knitting for the store.

DW: How many stores do you knit for? And how does it work?
CP: Right now I do samples for two stores near where I live, Nifty Knitters and Ben Franklin Crafts and Frames. They give me the yarn, and I usually get paid by store credit. All the stores work a little bit differently, so in terms of getting paid it’s not a lot of money. For a sweater, I would say I’d get maybe $200 store credit, depending on the size and how much the yarn costs. If you factor in the hours, the labor involved, you’re not getting paid. It would be so easy and so much cheaper to buy that sweater.

DW: And yet, you do it…
CP: Because I’m so passionate about it, and I love trying the different fibers, the different yarns. I love knowing where it came from, what kind of sheep. I mostly knit with wool — that’s my favorite. And samples allow me to explore new patterns. Usually the yarn is something new. When a store gets new yarn, they want to have a sample made so people can see what it looks like. It’s amazing how much yarn a sample can sell. Just recently, I made a pair of socks for a shop because they had sock yarn and it hadn’t moved in the last six months. Ever since I made the pair of socks and they put them on display, the yarn is gone. They’re reordering it.

DW: Do you have favorite projects?
CP: I think my favorite is sweaters. I’m not much of an accessory person. For a while I made a lot of shawls and things like that, and I forget to use them. I think for the weather here in Seattle, it’s so rainy that a lot of time you can’t just go out in a wrap. You kind of have to have a jacket with a hood to cover up. I love a sweater because it’s so warm. I like the way it’s constructed and how fun it is to see a garment from the beginning to the finish. I like a pullover, a jumper myself. But I’ve made cardigans, too.

DW: How long does it take you to make a sweater?
CP: It really depends on the weight of the yarn. If it’s large size needle I can do it in a week. If it’s a medium, worsted weight, maybe two weeks, If it’s like a fingering, fine yarn, maybe a month, I’m a very, very fast knitter.

DW: How many samples do you think you’ve knit during the past 14 years?
CP: Probably close to 150. It sounds crazy! Mind you, some are small.

DW: Do you ever get the samples back? Do you want to get them back?

CP: Sometimes the store can display the sample and then you can have it back. I’m at the point where I just love to knit and explore new patterns and yarns but I don’t need another sweater. So I let the store have it, and then I get store credit.

DW: Do you have a favorite kind of wool?

CP: I like more rustic wool. A lot of people, when they look for wool they want soft. I like the rough texture ones, like Icelandic wool. The outside layer (of the wool) is sort of waterproof; it’s like a coat for the sheep. When you make a sweater, you can go out in the rain and if you wear it under your jacket, it’s so warm. I’ve also made mittens with that because I walk every day, even in the winter time and even if I dress really warm, my fingers are freezing. But that Icelandic wool, it keeps me warm.

DW: Have you ever said no to a sample request, and if so, what was it, and why?
CP: I have, but it’s never because I don’t want to knit a particular project. Often it’s because I’m traveling. Or I might be too busy with teaching classes, or I have just taken on another project that won’t be done for a while. Sometimes they will find another knitter or they might just wait for me.

DW: Is there a sample you wished you’d said no to? Or one that you did but you knew immediately you’d never do that again?
CP: I think one of the weirdest, strangest things I made as a sample was a cat cave. It turned out to be a little bit of knitting but a whole lot of assembling. I remember staying up really late trying to finish it because (the store owner) wanted it to be done pretty quickly. I think she underestimated how challenging it was. I was happy with it, but it was not a pleasant process, which is unusual. I want to knit—I don’t really want to do a craft project.

DW: Every knitter I know has a stash of yarn. Do you?

CP: I do. But I don’t have a big stash. What happens is if you go (to a yarn show) without a project in mind, you end up picking up one skein because it’s so pretty. And then you don’t use it. But my friends and knitting group do a yarn swap a couple of times a year where we bring yarn we haven’t used or are not planning on using, and everybody takes home something they can use. That’s a saving grace for me. For now, I don’t really buy yarn without a project in mind anymore. The industry is going so fast, there’s new things all the time. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. The whole thing about knitting is that it’s like slow fashion. So when you start buying so much, it kind of defeats the purpose of it. I keep hearing a joke: “knitting and buying yarn are two different hobbies.”

DW: And your hobby is knitting?
CP: Exactly.

During the seven years that Mom lived in Milwaukee, I did my best to visit three or four times a year. Milwaukee was closer than Cape Cod but it was still a significant trip, involving a border crossing and multiple flights or one flight and a 70-mile road trip. Sometimes my children, Elizabeth and Noah, came with me. Sometimes my husband, Dave, did. His visits were rarer: he traveled for work and didn’t have a lot of time. Mom never complained, but my sister made it clear that she wasn’t happy that he didn’t show up more often.

Dave’s infrequent visits were one of many things that Amy and I argued about during Mom’s Milwaukee years. Those arguments were especially frustrating because Amy and I were finally getting along after having been emotionally estranged for decades after our dad died in 1974. Mom’s failing health sent us spiraling back into the worst versions of our younger selves. I felt guilty that I wasn’t doing enough. Also, I resented Amy for referring to me as “The Disneyland Daughter,” the one who swooped in and got the fun version of Mom while she, Amy, was there for the day-to-day grind of it all. Maybe the description would have stung less if I hadn’t felt so guilty, if I hadn’t understood that to some extent, it was accurate.

Talking to friends helped me realize that Amy and I weren’t the only siblings with aging parents who were dealing with this new stress by squabbling like teenagers. Also helpful was when I figured out that there were useful things I could do from Edmonton. I dealt with paperwork from the state agency that managed Mom’s money, making sure the bills were paid. When Mom moved to the nursing home from the seniors’ residence and I couldn’t stay to help empty the apartment, I ordered take-out food for Amy and the friends who helped her. I did the same after Mom died and Amy had to empty the nursing home room.

Sometimes I’d send Amy and her husband gift cards for their favorite restaurants, a thank-you for being there for Mom. The other thing that made me feel less guilty was reminding myself that when David’s parents got old and infirm, I’d be in Amy’s shoes, because his parents live in Edmonton and his siblings don’t.

What I hadn’t contemplated was that Dave’s parents weren’t Mom, and Dave’s siblings weren’t Amy. You’d think this might have occurred to me sooner—after all, I’ve been a part of my husband’s family since 1992 and I’ve lived 10 minutes from his parents the whole time. But over the last six years, starting when my father-in-law was treated for cancer while my mother-in-law’s Alzheimer’s worsened, I’ve discovered key differences between caring for an elderly in-law and caring for an elderly parent.

For example, I take my now-widowed father-in-law to medical appointments, but I don’t feel comfortable making decisions about his care. I tell myself it’s because he has three adult children, but recently I began to wonder, is this a moral failing? Am I reluctant to make a decision because I’m lazy?

Honestly, I wasn’t sure, so I called a friend who had been in the same position as I: she was the point person for her mother-in-law because her husband traveled as much as mine does (possibly even more) and her sister-in-law lived 250 miles away.

“If you flipped it over and looked at it this way, that your sister’s husband was taking care of your mother and he was making decisions, you wouldn’t like it,” she pointed out.

That was reassuring, as was her confirmation that sometimes spouses and siblings-in-law take you for granted, which can lead to resentment. As I mentioned earlier, there was no shortage of resentment between me and my sister when our mother was getting older and more frail, but I knew how to deal with that because I’d been dealing with it my entire life.

Being taken for granted comes with the territory when you make yourself available, my friend said. And we’re available because we have flexible schedules, and we’re women. And women are expected to be caregivers. Ultimately, what’s most important is providing care, or making sure that someone else can.

Two of my husband’s cousins and their spouses live in Edmonton, and they are always willing to help out, often without being asked. They also provide much-needed moral support. My husband’s oldest female cousin, now the default family matriarch, reminded me this week that you can’t always schedule the times when you’ll be needed to help, especially when the parent you’re caring for is old, frail, and in poor health.

And therein lies one of the key lessons that I wish I’d understood back when Amy and I were squabbling over Mom, and which I need to keep in mind when resentment threatens to bubble up now: Our elders won’t be here forever. Better to put aside any hard feelings and focus on what’s important: being present, proactive, and supportive while they’re here.

Now it’s your turn to weigh in: I’d like to hear about your experiences caring for elderly parents and/or in-laws. Anyone out there with the patience of Mary Poppins or (the movie version of) Maria Von Trapp, who has been through this experience without a shred of resentment or frustration?

Eight years ago yesterday, March 11, was a Sunday. I remember because my son, Noah, was admitted to the psychiatric hospital for what I told myself would be a couple of days, until his depression lifted and he could get back to being a student at the University of Alberta, where he was studying civil engineering.

Those of you who have been following this Substack know that things didn’t quite turn out that way: Noah was in the hospital for six weeks, sent home on a Friday, tried to kill himself on a Monday, and went back to the hospital for another six weeks, this time to a different unit, where he received the help he needed to begin to heal.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that those three months and the ones immediately following were the most emotionally painful and stressful of my life. I hope they remain the most emotionally painful and stressful of my life. I can’t imagine anything worse. But the thing about life is that you never know what’s coming down the pike. It helps to have healthy coping mechanisms, like the mantra Noah adopted during his time in the hospital: This too shall pass.

So often when we’re in the middle of a miserable situation, we forget that nothing lasts forever. Time marches on is a cliché, but clichés exist for a reason: because they’re true.1

There’s no question that on a macro level, we North Americans, who are generally blessed to live in peace, are in a miserable situation right now because the Trump regime is wreaking havoc not just in the United States, but around the world, with no obvious positive end in sight. To soothe myself I’ve been focusing on the micro instead of the macro. I can’t fix the world, but I can better my corner of it: tackle chores I’ve been avoiding, do something nice for someone, acknowledge my blessings, take the dog for a long walk in the river valley down the street from my house.

I especially like the walks, which afford me time for conversation with friends or, if I’m alone, time to think. On one of those solo walks recently, I was thinking about my daughter’s upcoming wedding. Elizabeth and her fiancé, Matt, chose July 4 for their date because while it’s not a holiday here, in Canada, they knew it would be easier for relatives in the United States to get time off.

Elizabeth was a bit reluctant to get married on the 250^th anniversary of American Independence Day. She chose the date not long after Trump took office for the second time and didn’t want people thinking she’d chosen it to celebrate a country whose leader was threatening to annex Canada.

I pointed out something she didn’t know: that my parents had gotten married on July 3, 1958. “Focus on that,” I said. “You’re getting married on the same weekend that your grandparents did, but 68 years later.”

What occurred to me on that recent solo walk was the connection between July 4, 2026 and the same date exactly 50 years earlier. I don’t remember what I did on any other July 4, but I know exactly where I was on July 4, 1976: on stage with my high school performing arts department at the Empire State Theater in Albany, New York, performing an original theater piece, Revolution, as part of the nation’s bicentennial.

As soon as the show ended, most of the cast returned to Utica. My sister (a cello player) and I packed up our instruments and boarded a bus for Cape Cod to meet our mother. It would be our third summer without Dad, who had died suddenly and mysteriously in the late winter of 1974. It would be our second summer in the house on Cape Cod that Mom bought a year after Dad died “because we have such good memories of being on the Cape.”

We’d spent many summers there with Dad, in a rented cottage up the street from the beach. But we had good memories because those had been good times: Dad was alive. Mom wasn’t on the verge of exploding with anger, weighted down as she was with guilt, shame, and the secret that Dad’s death hadn’t been an accident but a suicide.

All this to say that as Amy and I boarded the bus in Albany on July 4, 1976, I was looking forward to the summer with a mixture of excitement — summer! — and dread — our house is miles from the beach, we don’t know anybody in the neighborhood, and we have to be happy because Mom bought a house so we’d be happy.

I was 15, too overwhelmed with unacknowledged grief to understand that this too would pass. Maybe I would have had less dread if I’d known what was coming, if someone had told me, “Hey, things will get better. Trust me. Fifty years from today, at pretty much this exact minute, your husband will walk your daughter down the aisle on her wedding day while your son and his fiancé look on, knowing they will be next. Your sister will be there, too, with her husband, kids, and grandkids. Your life is going to be OK.”

I wouldn’t have believed it. I had yet to learn the basic truth about hard times: You have to go through them so you can get to the good ones, and if luck or karma or blessings or whatever God you pray to is smiling down at you, there will be more good times than hard times.

At 65, I’m grateful to have figured it out. If you know any 15-year-olds who are struggling, feel free to share my hard-earned wisdom: Hard times provide opportunity for growth. Good times yield joy. And hard or easy, bad or good, this too shall pass.

Newly retired and newly widowed, Charlie Smeg, the titular character of Smeg: The First Detective Smeg Mystery, has no idea how to enjoy his abundance of free time. In fact, the former Edmonton Police Services detective doesn’t seem to enjoy much of anything. He’s particularly perplexed by his housemate, his 22-year-old stepson, Paul, a video-game-playing wannabe poet with whom he has little in common besides grief and shared space.

As far as Smeg is concerned, grief and shared space are insufficient foundations for a relationship, which is a shame, because 1) they are and 2) he finally has the time to guide Paul, who came into his life as a 12-year-old boy and is in danger of turning into a directionless young man.

Grief, retirement, and an irksome roommate would be enough to put even a cheerful person in a bad mood. But author Diane Wishart went one step further in her first cozy mystery: she made Smeg a curmudgeon. Early in the story when a former colleague shows up, uninvited, seeking input on a case, Smeg briefly considers “the possibilities of reverse wiring the doorbell to give out shocks, like an electric fence.”

The good news for the colleague, the fresh-faced Detective Meaghan Byatt, is that Smeg lacks the motivation to bother rewiring: he can barely be bothered to tidy his house.

The good news for readers is that Smeg’s curmudgeon tendencies are balanced with humor, a trait he shares with Diane, with whom I’ve been friends since we became neighbors more than 30 years ago and our kids went to school and played together.

Now a grandmother of four, Diane’s first book was her PhD thesis, The Rose that Grew from Concrete: Teaching and Learning with Disenfranchised Youth. Diane began writing fiction after earning her doctorate in education at the University of Alberta in 2006, a practice she balanced while working as a teacher and then in policy development for Alberta Advanced Education for 10 years.

Smeg was released earlier this year by Canadian independent publisher, Rising Action Publishing Collective. Diane — who shares a last name with my husband and whom we figure is his 12^th or 13^th cousin that many times removed — has also written two novels since earning her PhD. She’d polished them until they were gleaming, but had yet to find a home for either when her son, Alec, announced that he wanted to take a writing workshop with her about five or six years ago. Searching for local offerings, she found a workshop about villains, conveniently scheduled around Halloween. She wasn’t interested in villains, but she thought Alec would enjoy it.

That her first published work of fiction turned out to be a cozy mystery, which she started in that workshop, sounded like a good story to me. In fact, it sounded kind of mysterious, which is why I roped her into doing this Q&A: so I could get to the bottom of it.

Debby: I am very intrigued about how a writing workshop date with your son turned into a mystery series. Please, tell me, how’d you make that happen?

Diane: I stumbled across this workshop in writing villains when Alec was in his mid-twenties. I thought, “That sounds like fun — but I’m thinking, fun for him, not for me.” It was more that I would get to spend the day with my son and I was excited that he wanted to write.

Debby: And yet…

Diane: He hasn’t done any writing. I think that’s where this story horrifies him. And he doesn’t want people to ask about it.

Debby: Good thing you have different last names. But also, the workshop was a bit of a bait-and-switch, right?

Diane: As soon as we got to the workshop, the woman leading it said, “You know, it’s not really about villains. It’s more broadly about writing detective stories.” And then she tells us that the villain is the mirror image of the detective, and so that’s how she gets from presenting this exciting title for a workshop to, “I’m going to give you basic information on writing a detective story.” I was kind of frustrated. I thought, “I suppose that’s fine if you’re just starting out and you’re wanting to write detective stories.” But I wasn’t.

Debby: You should have asked for a refund!

Diane: Well, then I thought, you know I’m there for the day, and I’m spending time with Alec, and I’m going to make the most of this.

Debby: My mother would have called that “looking at the cup half full.” Yay, you!

Diane: I created this detective, a guy, he was overweight, out of shape. He was 65 years old. He felt that he was washed up and he was done and he was retired and he’s sort of seeing all these things about himself, but his sergeant saw other things in him, that he was still valuable as a mentor: while he couldn’t chase bad guys down the street, he still had a lot to offer. But I wasn’t being serious about any of it, because I wasn’t ever going to write a detective story.

Debby: So what happened that made you change your mind?

Diane: When I got to the part about giving him a self-deprecating sense of humor, I think that’s where it sort of took off. I thought, “Oh, I can work with this guy. This isn’t just another detective story.” Now you have this guy who’s sort of fun, kind of funny, so that’s where that was born, and that added to the fact that I had just finished with this other novel, True Friends, and I was kind of looking for another project. When I got home from the workshop I thought, “Okay, I could give this a try.”

Debby: It’s a mystery, but it’s also a story about a toxic work environment. I know you’ve been a teacher and you worked at Alberta Advanced Education but the way you wrote about that environment I found myself thinking, “Wow, Diane must have worked in a toxic work environment and I never knew.” So did you? Or is that just your excellent imagination?

Diane: It wasn’t based on anything specific. Probably all of us have worked in toxic workplaces. It wasn’t hard to pull from just the government work — there was toxicity at the University, too, when I was in graduate school. You get some of the weirdest research coming out of Education. You get stuff that’s applicable, but then you see some really weird stuff. We’re all forced into this research model, and there was a lot of competition, a lot of climbing on top of people to get to the top, and I saw that again in the government. Some people really want to get to the top and they don’t care who they step on to get there. Which isn’t fun in real life, but it makes for a good plot device.

Debby: So what else was fun to write in the first Smeg story?

Diane: Smeg, the character, was definitely fun. And Paul —he was like every kid who’s stuck in their parents’ basement playing video games instead of getting a job. He was flippant and he and Smeg liked each other, they needed each other, but they struggled at first to connect. For me, Paul had a character from the beginning and Smeg had a character from the beginning. Byatt I struggled with more.

Debby: It seemed like Paul and Byatt had a little flirty thing going on. Was that deliberate?

Diane: It wasn’t intentional, but my writing group thought that, too. There were also times when my writing group thought she and Smeg would wind up together. But he’s too old for her. It was more that Paul really liked this idea of family, and I think that’s what I tried to get in at the end, was that they all became friends in a substitute-family kind of way. They all seemed to connect on a personal level, so Paul ends up looking up to her. He admires her, because she’s young and successful, so that’s helpful in terms of his career, that he can see a trajectory.

Debby: Clearly Smeg will be a character in the next novel. But what about Byatt and Paul?

Diane: Without giving any spoilers, other than the fact that it is called Publish or Perish and it will be out in 2027, the relationships will continue. My intent in the second book is that those relationships build on the relationships that started in the first book.

I’m looking forward to sharing more Q&A columns with you. Upcoming interview subjects include the director of the Local News Network at the University of Maryland, and the co-winner of the 2024 Turing Prize, the top award for computing scientists. If you have questions about the future of local journalism or what AI means for you and your future, please include them in the comments below (along with feedback about the interview with Diane), and I’ll add them to my list.

Thank you, as always, for reading. To those of you willing and able to pay my $35-a-year subscription fee (and those of you who pay even more), I offer a special shout-out. I’m so grateful for all my readers. I hope you’ll continue to support my writing. It means the world to me.

A few years ago at a pot-luck, a woman brought a cheesecake that was so tasty I asked for the recipe.

“I don’t give it out,” she said.

Huh?

It wasn’t as if I were asking for her ATM code or her social insurance number. It was a recipe. For cheesecake. I already knew half the ingredients: cream cheese, butter, eggs, sugar, and graham cracker crumbs. It was the overall lightness and the mysterious citrus flavor that had me stumped.

I appealed to the baker’s ego. “It’s the best cheesecake I’ve ever had,” I said, patting my hips in an effort to send the subliminal message that I had eaten plenty of cheesecake and therefore knew of what I spoke.

My efforts failed.

“It’s a secret,” she said.

“I don’t get it,” I said to another pot-luck friend later. “You’d think she’d be flattered. You’d think she’d be happy to tell me how to make it.”

“Maybe she’s embarrassed,” my friend said. “Maybe it’s one of those really easy recipes, the kind with Cool Whip and Jell-O that you don’t even bake. That’s why it was so light. You don’t get a cheesecake that light if you bake it. And that citrus flavor – it’s probably canned orange juice. I’ll bet we can figure it out.”

But we couldn’t. All we did was waste our time and a bunch of chemically laden pseudo-foods. For a while after that, whenever we saw a recipe that remotely resembled the cheesecake, we’d try it, but we were never successful. Eventually we gave up. I turned my attention from cheesecake back to chocolate.

Since that day, no one has refused to give me a recipe, which is why I concluded that the cheesecake incident was an aberration. But then, a couple of weeks ago, my mother-in-law called and asked if I thought my 11-year-old daughter would mind passing along the recipe for a chocolate cake she’d made.

“Of course she’ll give it to you,” I said, puzzled as to why she’d even think Elizabeth would hesitate – or why I’d let her.

I got my answer one week later, when a friend asked for the recipe and Elizabeth refused to photocopy it.

“It’s a family recipe!” she insisted. “It’s just for us and for Grandma.”

“It is not a family recipe,” I reminded her. “You found it in a magazine.”

It was only after I pointed out that my friend could go to the store and buy the magazine, which I had no intention of making her do, that Elizabeth went off and copied the recipe.

Later that night I called my sister to vent. “Of course it bugs you,” she said. “Don’t you remember the saga of Mom and the chocolate chip walnut pie?”

Actually, I’d blocked it out, with good reason. For years, our mother had tried to convince a restaurant owner to give her the recipe for this particular pie. It was my father’s favorite, but he only got it fresh during the summer, because the restaurant was closed the rest of the year.

Mom always bought a couple of the costly, precious pies to tide Dad over for the winter. She stored them in the basement freezer. Every so often, my father would go down and cut off a slice. He never shared, but we understood.

My mother eventually figured out how to make the pie. Two years after she cracked the code, Dad died.

I’m not saying there was any connection. Really. I don’t believe unlimited access to chocolate chip walnut pie would have saved my father’s life. But maybe my sister has a point. Maybe that’s why I’m so hypersensitive about recipe hoarding.

Not long after the pot-luck, I became friends with the cheesecake baker. But it wasn’t until my sister’s gentle reminder that I once again worked up the nerve to ask for the recipe. I didn’t mention my father and the pie. I just reminded her how much I’d liked her dessert.

“I wouldn’t give you the recipe?” She was truly dumbfounded.

“You said it was a secret.” Then I told her about the Cool Whip-and-orange-juice theory.

“It was Cointreau,” she told me. “And of course you can have the recipe!”

I contemplated asking why she’d withheld it the first time, but I got the feeling even she doesn’t know why. Which is why I’ve concluded that when dealing with recipe hoarders, patience is essential. And if that fails, I recommend finding something else to satisfy your palate, at least until you can break down their resistance.

And now, for my paid subscribers, the once-secret recipe for Ojala Farm Chocolate Chip Walnut Pie. Because really, that cheesecake wasn’t as good as Chocolate Chip Walnut Pie.

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Not long after I started working as a general assignment reporter at the Concord Monitor, the daily paper in the New Hampshire capital, the editor-in-chief gathered everyone in the newsroom for a meeting. The topic: Presidential Primary Season.

Election day was Feb. 28, 1984, months away, but the candidates were starting to make regular campaign visits to the Granite State, home of the first-in-the-nation primary. In addition to our regular beats covering all the small towns around Concord, we would also be reporting on candidates as they speechified, shook hands, and held babies in school auditoriums, church basements, grocery stores, diners, beaches, parks, living rooms, kitchens — basically, anywhere they could scare up an audience in hopes of winning the primary and securing the Democratic nomination, where they would go on to lose, badly, to the incumbent, President Ronald Reagan.

Reagan’s place on the Republican ticket was a lock. He had no need to visit New Hampshire, so he didn’t. But there were eight contenders for the Democratic ticket who were considered serious enough to merit regular coverage. Mike, the Monitor’s editor-in-chief, had concluded that the most efficient way to report on them was to divide the newsroom into teams, assign each team a handful of candidates, and then let the team members decide who would cover what.

Each team had a mix of big names and lesser lights. Mike didn’t say as much, but it was clear that he’d assigned the best reporters to cover the expected front-runners: Walter Mondale, who had served as Vice President under President Jimmy Carter; and Colorado Sen. Gary Hart, who would go on to win the primary in an upset.

I was on the team that got to cover Sen. John Glenn of Ohio, which would have been more exciting if the first astronaut to orbit Earth had a chance at winning, which everyone knew he did not. Also on my team were two politicians I’d never heard of: Florida Gov. Reuben Askew and South Carolina Sen. Ernest “Fritz” Hollings, both of whom dropped out of the race two days after the primary.

To say I was crushed at being assigned to what was clearly the also-ran team would be overstating it. But I was disappointed: I’d been at the paper for a year. A guy who started a month before the meeting got assigned to the Gary Hart team. But he came from Yale and I’d graduated from Syracuse, and also, I’d spent my first six months at the paper as the world’s worst sports writer and was in the newsroom only because a vacancy opened up at pretty much the exact moment that Mike was planning to fire me. I was still proving myself.

I would have been less disappointed if I’d known during the newsroom meeting that eventually everyone would become bored with their candidates and by fall it would be open season: any of us could get an assignment to write about anyone. Also, the candidates were literally everywhere, so even if you weren’t covering them, you couldn’t avoid them. One day I walked out of the sports department and nearly hit Mondale with the door. Another day, as I was heading back to work after swimming laps at the Y across the street, Jesse Jackson’s bus pulled up in front of the office, disgorging reporters from the national press corps.

I was used to seeing reporters from the national press corps by then, but I’d never seen a busload of them dropped off at the Monitor. By the time I got up the stairs to the newsroom, my hair still wet from the pool, they’d made themselves at home. It was lunchtime and my recollection is that every single Monitor reporter was out of the office. The national press corps must have thought we’d vacated the place to make room for them, because they sat wherever they wanted. One guy reclined in an editor’s temporarily vacated chair, put his feet up on her desk, and started making phone calls.

The only other colleague that I remember in the newsroom at that moment was Judy, the librarian, a widow in her late thirties or early 40s. Neither of us had the confidence or authority to order the national press reporters to behave themselves. We were debating how to manage the situation when, seemingly out of nowhere, Jackson appeared in front of us.

I didn’t see him come into the newsroom. Maybe he’d been hanging out on the bus, waiting for everyone else to clear out? Whatever, now he was smiling at us as if we’d known each other for years and were chatting over a picket fence about how to deal with a pesky neighbor. If there had been a thought bubble over his head, it would have said, “Those people have no manners. You and me — we would never walk into someone else’s house and put our feet on their furniture.”

I had met or been in close proximity to pretty much all of the candidates by then, but this felt different. It wasn’t the spontaneity of bumping into a famous figure that felt different—nearly clocking Walter Mondale with the sports department door had been spontaneous, but Mondale had accepted my apology with professional courtesy and then disappeared into the conference room for an interview.

It wasn’t the warmth and friendliness that felt different: I’d spent an hour on a hotel room couch trading stories with Glenn’s wife, Annie, a warm, friendly woman, but I was conscious the whole time that she was an interview subject and I was on the job.

The closest experience I’d had to the Jackson encounter had occurred at a George McGovern fundraiser in a crowded living room in southern New Hampshire, when I was looking for local people to interview and found myself face-to-face with Ed Asner. I was so gobsmacked to see Lou Grant1 in the flesh that my mind turned to mush.

That didn’t happen with Jackson. He was so disarming that it was almost possible to forget he was the reason that a busload of reporters had overtaken our newsroom.

“Do you work here?” he asked Judy and me.

“We do,” we replied, and before we could explain that Judy was the librarian and I was a failed sports reporter trying to redeem myself, he said, “You newspaper people are intimidating!”

It didn’t occur to me that he might have been referring to the national press corps; I’d temporarily forgotten about them because Jackson’s attention was fully on Judy and me. Also, he was half-laughing when he made the comment. Nonetheless, something about his delivery made me think, “If you find us intimidating, you have no business running for president.”

That was about the extent of the encounter. Shortly thereafter, someone with more seniority and power than Judy and me appeared and ushered the candidate away. The national press corps followed, and we got our newsroom back. But every time I read or hear about Jackson, including the news of his death earlier this week at the age of 85, I am transported back to that moment in the newsroom.

I’ve forgotten more reporting experiences than I remember—even experiences with famous people. There’s a reason that the Jackson encounter sticks with me, and it’s not just because the day after the primary, my friend Eric presented me with a Jesse Jackson Rainbow Coalition sweatshirt, which is hanging in my closet even as I type this.

I’m pretty sure it has to do with confidence, or rather, my lack of it during the nearly two-and-one-half years that I worked at the Monitor. During that brief encounter with Jackson, I forgot that I was an insecure 22-year-old on the Glenn-Askew-Hollings team trying to prove that I was just as good as the 21-year-old Yale guy.

To the civil-rights-activist-turned-politician who would go on to finish fourth in the primary and stay in the race long after five of the New Hampshire candidates dropped out, I was an intimidating journalist.

More than 40 years later, I believe I still am.

Anna Rollins, 37, came of age in the 1990s, when it was impossible to escape tabloid headlines that freely—often gleefully—fat-shamed young, talented, and successful women, among them Kate Winslet, Jessica Simpson, Renee Zellweger, Alicia Silverstone, and Drew Barrymore.

Those headlines made an impact on Rollins; they echoed the lessons she was internalizing in her evangelical community in West Virginia: to be a good Christian, you had to look good, which meant you had to be thin.

Being good and doing good were also important — after all, that’s what Jesus preached. But another message Rollins took home from church, Christian day school, extracurricular activities, and play dates with friends was that if you weren’t thin, the other stuff didn’t count for much.

When I met Anna in a writing workshop a few years ago, I recognized a kindred spirit, partly because I’d been going to these workshops for a while and she was the only person I’d met who also worked at a university writing center. (Until recently she was the director of a writing center in Huntington, WV.)

But also, and more profoundly, even though I’m old enough to be Anna’s mother and we grew up in very different religious communities, we’d developed the same coping mechanisms to deal with the fat-is-bad messages we got at home and in the wider world. The negative mechanisms, the ones we’ve spent our adult lives trying to mitigate, included disordered eating, self-loathing, and confidence crises. The positive mechanism, which we’ve spent our adult lives cultivating: writing our way out of the negatives.

Most recently, Anna wrote her way out of the negatives in her memoir, Famished: On Food, Sex, and Growing Up as a Good Girl, which was published in December 2025. In it, she goes into often intimate detail about the many ways she punished herself mentally (self-loathing) and physically (denying herself food and nutrition and keeping up an exhaustive exercise schedule) because that’s what she thought she had to do to be a good Christian. She also talks about the work she did to break that punishing mindset and the life she’s built. She and her husband, a physician, have two sons, nine and almost seven, and a two-year-old daughter.

Last week I had a chance to catch up with Anna. We talked about a wide range of topics, including how the book came to be, the origins of purity culture, what it’s like to be an evangelical in the US right now, and how her feelings about her religious community have changed since childhood.

Debby: Why did you write Famished?

Anna: I was trying to reconcile some cognitive dissonance I had been living in my whole life. It was getting to the point where I was wrestling with what it meant to be a Christian woman. Did I have to leave my religion to have agency or a voice or was it available to me in that space? And I had to wrestle with some bad teaching I had received earlier in my life. I also wrote it because I thought I had some interesting stories to tell. I really like story, and I’m drawn to memoir because it uses the elements of fiction, but to tell true stories.

Debby: What did you figure out in the process of writing?

Anna: I was raised with a lot of moral rigidity and rules and my religious culture was very appearance-focused. One of the ways that you demonstrated that you were chosen by God was almost by looking like you had everything together. That experience of religion was what I internalized: If I do all of these things and look good and act good then I am a Christian. I think in deconstructing all of that I was able to land upon this idea that I’m not pure. I’m a sinner, and I have access to forgiveness and that’s what Christianity offers me. It’s not just all these rules that I have to adhere to and this perfectionism that I have to project. It’s not just this very rigid gender box that I have to stay in. I actually have access to freedom through forgiveness. I think that writing the book and trying to deconstruct so much of the messaging I received helped me land up on that. And that did involve searching out some new religious spaces. I don’t go to the same type of churches I grew up in.

Debby: The churches you grew up in promoted purity culture, which I’d never heard of until recently. Suddenly the term seems to be everywhere. Why is that — and what is it?

Anna: I’m not the first person who is a Christian to write about the harms of evangelical purity culture — that’s a phenomenon that is happening in the Christian space. There have been quite a few books — Pure by Linda Kay Klein was published around 2018 and so was Talking Back to Purity Culture by Rachel Joy Welcher. These are people who grew up during the height of evangelical purity culture, in the 90s. It was a very fear-and-shame-based reaction to the AIDS crisis, when sex could lead to either disease or death. The people who came of age that time period, they received this very extreme sex education and it wasn’t the same as traditional Christian sexual ethics. There was a lot more to it. The people who came of age during that are adults now, and they’re deconstructing what they were taught.

Debby: You said that you no longer attend the kind of church you grew up in. What kind of church do you go to now?

Anna: It is very focused on grace. What I grew up in, we were singing nationalistic songs in addition to our hymns and we were saluting the flag during our church services. I don’t go to a church that promotes Christian nationalism anymore. I think that that attempt to divorce oneself from nationalistic rhetoric makes a big difference in the health of the church. It allows it to be more focused on sin and forgiveness and grace.

Debby: Does that upset your parents, that you switched churches?

Anna: I don’t talk about this in the book but my parents also had a religious shift. They’re still Christian, but they left the church I grew up in right after I graduated from high school, not for the same reasons but similar reasons. They’re going to a church that isn’t Trumpy, MAGA-y. I think they were seeing in their own world that all is not right there. They weren’t necessarily seeing it all from my vantage point but they could see it in their adult world in different ways.

Debby: Are there many people like you and your parents in the evangelical community — people who don’t support Trump?

Anna: Even though evangelicals as a group do seem like they supported [Trump and MAGA], there are many who don’t, who are disgusted by it. They’re quiet. I was interviewed for a Huffington Post article about Christians who are not MAGA. I didn’t really publicize that I was quoted in that piece but I’ve had some older people at church come up to me and thank me for what I said in that article, where I was speaking out against MAGA quote unquote Christianity. I live in West Virginia. We’re a red state. So much of the Trump support in my region is working class. They don’t feel seen by Democrats and I understand this. They view liberals as the elites who have these credentials and use their power in a way that doesn’t benefit people in these rural areas. Even though I live in Trump country, there are still evangelicals who are like no no no that’s not okay.

Debby: In the book you talk about a pastor who preached about how, in order for Jesus to increase, Christians had to decrease. He meant Christians as a group, but the way you presented that anecdote made it clear that you took it personally—which made me want to shake the pastor and say, “Hey, buddy. That’s not helpful. What are you even talking about, saying that people have to make themselves small?” I’m thinking you should send him Famished and bookmark that page.

Anna: As a girl who was getting all these scripts about suppression and give up your desires and the like, that’s how that landed with me. But George Saunders talks about that same line and he’s like, “I think that’s so beautiful, this idea of the ego becoming less and our love for others and humanity becoming more.” So much of it is the way you spin it, that one line: “He must increase, we must decrease.” Depending upon the other teaching you’re receiving, it can be beautiful or it can be totally demoralizing and destructive. If I had been taught this ability to hold two seemingly conflicting ideas in my hand and the truth is still there, or something beautiful is there, I think that would have served me. Instead, I was taught binaries and fundamentalism.

Debby: You aren’t raising your kids in the same kind of church where you grew up, so hopefully that means they — and I’m thinking mostly of your daughter here — will be spared getting those negative body-image messages where you worship. But what else are you going to do differently so that your daughter will have a healthier outlook than you did?

Anna: I do think that having agency and being able to go after something outside of yourself helps you focus less on your body. I noticed for me, when I felt like I could use my ambition, I naturally focused on my body less. In some ways when you can’t do as much you direct that ambition toward protecting the self. I hope I can raise her in spaces where she feels like she can pursue ambition and pursue a life outside of making herself this thing for men. I’m not going to talk about other people’s bodies in front of her. I’m not going to talk about good foods and bad foods. I’m going to try to limit her media exposure. I’m going to try to have her be around people in flesh and blood and less on a screen. There’s also only so much that I personally can do but I’m hoping that my writing about these things leads, in a small way, to some cultural conversations that at least make people care and conscious of these issues.

Thank you, as always, for reading, commenting, subscribing. It warms my heart (and the rest of me) when you take the time to make a comment or share one of my essays. To those who pay the US $35 annual subscription fee, an extra-big thanks for supporting my writing. Usually this is where I quote my pal Rona (), who says that paid subscribers are like rainbows. However, I’ve been spending a lot of time in the kitchen lately so I’m going to offer up a food analogy: paid subscribers are the icing on the cake. Below, pictures of a mint-ice-cream-and-merengue cake I made last week. It has no icing. But it’s pretty yummy and I’m writing up the recipe so I can share it with my paid subscribers.

Call me nutty, but I do not think January is a sensible month in which to hold a wiener roast. Apparently, though, that’s how things are done up here in Edmonton, or at least that’s what I was led to believe on my first visit many years ago.

It was a mere week and a half after Christmas, and my future mother-in-law decided that the best way to introduce her son’s new girlfriend to local customs would be to have a cookout at a local park.

On the positive side, we didn’t have to compete for a picnic spot. But if I’d been thinking correctly, I would have seen the plan for what it was: a torture-tinged scheme to break up our relationship and send me screaming back home to New York State where, to be honest, our temperatures aren’t a whole lot warmer, but nobody would dream of dining outside between October and May.

But I was dense, the way young people in love generally are. And I was hungry, and the fire was warm and the hot dogs were filling so I was able to block the incident out of my mind until more than 10 years later, when I was the happily married mother of two preschoolers whose grandmother decided that the best way to celebrate New Year’s Eve was with – you guessed it – another wiener roast.

“But it’s going to be freezing!” I protested, marriage having made me bold.

“There’s no such thing as cold weather,” my mother-in-law responded cheerfully. “There’s only inappropriate clothing!”

I put on my happiest face – the only solution, because my husband refused to support my efforts to have his mother declared temporarily insane. To this day I’m not sure whether it’s because he didn’t want to get into a battle he couldn’t win (really, how can you argue with the logic of inappropriate clothing?) or because, coming as he does from hardy Alberta stock, he didn’t want to look like a weenie.

What I didn’t realize was that I had two secret weapons. Our children, Elizabeth and Noah, may also be descended from hardy Alberta stock, but they have plenty of my cold-sensitive (or perhaps it should be “cold sensible”) DNA, as the extended family was to discover.

Their howls of indignation began before we left our house, when they learned the nature of the evening’s activities. “But it’s WINTER!” they cried.

“It sure is!” I said, opting, at least while I was indoors and warm, to put on a game face. Perhaps I could persuade them by example. “It will be fun! There will be a fire! And we can go snow-shoeing! And if it gets cold, we’ll come home!”

“But it IS cold,” they cried.

“There’s no such thing as cold!” I said with a big—or maybe it was demonic—smile. “There’s only inappropriate clothing!”

Owing to their under-developed vocabularies, they had no idea what inappropriate meant. But by then I was covering their smooth pink faces with yards of fleece so they couldn’t get their mouths open to ask even if they’d wanted to.

It was pitch dark when we reached the park at nearly 6 p.m., a starry, cloudless, frigid night that neither a bonfire nor hours of snow-shoeing could hope to warm. The kids began to protest as soon as they exited the car. The fleece had a slight muffling effect. If you were far enough away, you could pretend it was just a strange wind you were hearing, not the cries of freezing miserable children who should have been home playing with their holiday presents.

We lasted 20 minutes before Grandma and the rest of the family happily bade us farewell. Dave opted to remain outdoors with the rest of his crazed clan. By the time he clomped into the living room hours later, a human Popsicle, the kids were sound asleep by the fire and I had regained enough feeling in my extremities to think about boiling up some hot dogs on the stove.

The heat blasting through the furnace and the blue-tinged glow of the gas fireplace had gotten me thinking about my preferred appropriate clothing. From now on, I decided, I’d eat my winter wieners inside, dining at the kitchen table while wearing shorts and a T-shirt.

Thank you, as always, for reading, commenting, subscribing. It warms my heart (and the rest of me) when you take the time to make a comment or share one of my essays. To those who pay the US $35 annual subscription fee, an extra-big thanks for supporting my writing. To quote my pal Rona (you can find her at ), paid subscribers are like rainbows.

Below, a rainbow for you, from Hawaii — where no one would blink a frozen eyelash if you held a weiner roast in January (because in Hawaii, eyelashes don’t freeze in January. Or ever).