Duolingo finally listened to (half of) my pleas and added a Latin course! I’m not currently tutoring any students in Latin, but enough schools in NYC require it of their 7th and 8th graders that I hope the chance will arise again. So far I’ve only worked through a few of the most basic lessons, so I can’t say how effective or comprehensive the course is.

(I can say that I can tell it’s new/in beta because, as compared to the uniform and polished voices and high production quality of the audio in the Mandarin and Spanish and Russian courses, the spoken components of the Latin often sound like a guy shouting from his bath.)

((This doesn’t really require double parentheses – in fact is strongly does not require them – but it feels more like a pps than a separate parenthetical. Cough. Anyway, when I was choosing a language in sixth grade, I was totally baffled by people telling me “You can’t speak Latin out loud” because I took that very literally, as if there was something about the language that inherently limited it to written form, when really they were speaking somewhat colloquially and meant “People DON’T speak Latin out loud in the world unless they are the pope or are the seventh graders who were chosen to visit all of the sixth grade classrooms and put on a short Latin skit))

When I took the Duolingo Latin placement test, I found that I was often accidentally mixing in verb endings from Spanish, or getting confused by which language something happened “nunc(a)” in – in Spanish, never; in Latin, now. When I first moved to Thailand and didn’t know any Thai/had just started to grasp a few key phrases, my brain’s response was to try to tell my taxi driver to stop “aqui” instead of “jod ti ni.” And as I learned Thai, I found my Spanish lapsing, though that’s more likely because I wasn’t studying it any more.

I don’t know if, by doing the Duolingo courses in Spanish, Russian, Mandarin, and Latin (they still don’t have a Thai course, hence why they’ve only answered half of my please – they do have Vietnamese, and I’ve heard rumors of Thai soon, but who knows), I’m allocating limited resources to each language that could more effectively be concentrated on one or even two, or if that’s a misunderstanding of how the brain processes language. It certainly feels at times that there’s only one slot for a new language and the others have to be pushed to the edges. Sometimes I try to correct for this by doing a Duolingo lesson in one language and testing to see if I can come up with all of the requested words and phrases in one of the other languages I’m learning. It’s mixed. But I think the “too many languages” explanation is more of a red herring, and the real issue is that I’m listening, reading, matching vocabulary, and even repeating in these languages when I use Duolingo, but I’m not generating them. I’m not trying to write a story or even speak to someone conversationally, and as such I’m not requiring myself to pull forth sentences or even words. To really speak any of them with any measure of facility is going to require immersion.

(The ability to read with fairly strong accuracy in all of them is pretty useful, though.)

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What causes that occasionally morning eye pain, the chlorinated feeling after being nowhere near a swimming pool? Is it closing your eyes too long? Not shutting them for long enough? It happens infrequently enough that I find myself weaving through the same thought process each time.

I worry more about my ears than I do my eyes. Every time I see a show I wear earplugs – sometimes I wear earplugs in loud bars or restaurants, and always when I play an actual drum kit (as opposed to an electronic one). So I’m not worried about losing my hearing, but my right ear has been some degree of blocked for almost two years. If the degree never varied it would be a questionable move on my part to have gone this long without seeing a doctor, but I keep thinking, “Well, now it’s finally gone.” It’s hard to see that something is continuous rather than a series of issues, and sometimes the degree to which my ear feels like it needs to pop is almost imperceptible, lulling me into believing I’ve finally vanquished the issue.

My vanquishing tools have been q-tips (only once, after a lifetime of haranguing people with the “Never put anything smaller than your elbow in your ear!” canard), special irrigating solution from the drugstore (a serious missed opportunity for puns on their part), and hydrogen peroxide. Sometimes in combination with one of those bulbs for washing out your ear. But, perhaps in part because we’re tipping slightly into fall, I’ve been waking up lately feeling like my entire right ear is underwater, and having to physically pull it down and out away from my head in order to break the seal and open it up (but not completely). I think I have to come to the conclusion, at this point, that there’s wax on my eardrum or something more nefarious and I need someone to really peer inside and see.

If I wake up feeling like I’ve been swimming wide-eyed through chlorine, at least I’m not worrying about my ear.

The type of water that has concerned my recently is the regular tap variety. For whatever reason, my anxiety about rare parasites (ie naegleria fowleri) has spiked and every time water glances off the inside of my nose in the shower I think, “Well, this could be it.” The rational mind (I note in real time that I’m not making a claim to that rational mind…) knows that naegleria fowleri is incredibly rare and typically kills people when it’s living in lakes or non-chlorinated waterparks. Without googling – because clearly that’s not a good idea for me at the moment – I don’t recall that the amoeba is any less common in tap water than in lakes or ponds (but there may be something about still water that encourages its growth), so my guess is that the vigor with which a person inhales the water (viz snorting some when you tumble off of a raft versus gently aspirating a bit while standing upright) has an effect on whether the amoeba is able to take hold (now I’m thinking of the nose as a pneumatic tube to the brain).

If it were so easy to contract naegleria fowleri from showering and sniffing a little too indiscriminately, huge numbers of people would be dead. As is, I don’t think anyone has ever died from tap-associated n.f., and if they have, I bet it was from using a neti pot (ie forcing water high up into your nasal cavity) without boiling or sterilizing the water first (DON’T DO THIS). I will probably continue to avoid the “drinking water upside down” hiccup cure trick (a popular one when I was a child, second only to a spoonful of sugar), though, as one time I did it and the water all came running out my nose.

Perhaps contradictorily, I’m probably less concerned with what goes in my mouth than most people are. Er – what I mean is that I’m not super fussed about an errant hair in my takeout order (just pluck it out) or carrots being 100% free of any peel that may still have slight dirt residue on it. But the other day I had assembled ingredients for dinner on my counter, then took advantage of the 25 minutes of tofu-baking to clean the kitchen floors a little bit. I sprayed all-purpose windex on a paper towel at about hip height, then immediately started to worry about the windex particles floating through the air (given that I could smell it) and settling onto my small bowl of minced garlic, being folded into the recipe, and killing me. Okay, not killing me, but sickening me. And that’s why (in addition to not being a dum dum spraying windex at hip height near prepared food) I prefer non-windex forms of cleaners, like white vinegar. But I also recognize that, much like standing in the shower worrying about brain-eating amoebas, this is a spike in concern that probably means I need to think about the level of worry I’m experiencing, even if I’m also joking about it.

Now I have “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes! (knees and toes!)” in my head, but the Latin version.

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In sixth grade I was tasked with writing my first research paper (I chose Andrew Lloyd Webber as my topic, and quickly discovered that structuring a research paper around a person is easier than structuring a paper around an event, idea, or place). Every sixth grader at my school had this assignment, and two years later we all were assigned slightly longer research papers. I can’t remember what my topic was in eighth grade, which is bothering me. I feel like I remember enough details – eighth grade research paper, Mr. Schneider, 10-12 pages long – to be able to Google it…but the analog search engine for this particular query is a box of papers in my parents’ house in Florida, so I’ll have to wait either until the holidays or until my brain dredges up the memory.

And I could be misremembering – maybe Andrew Lloyd Webber was eighth grade and sixth grade was something or someone completely different. But I remember working on my Andrew Lloyd Webber paper over Thanksgiving break that year, at my Aunt Barb’s house on a farm in Maryland, and in the memory I feel eleven years old, not thirteen.

During the early stages of finding books and other materials to use as sources (but mainly books – digital resources were not particularly widespread. My family didn’t even own a computer yet – if this was sixth grade, that is; in eighth grade, we had one – and in our once-a-week “library” class we’d all watched a movie about the end of the world and five brave students who knew the Dewey Decimal system and thus were able to save themselves and humanity) I began to feel a deep unease about the entire process. It seemed that I was gathering facts from various books and simply repeating them, taking them farther and farther away from any semblance of primary source. It felt like the whole purpose of my research paper was to dilute facts (even though, on a more physical level, I was concentrating them from different sources into a much shorter document). I didn’t have any new information about Cats, or how Andrew Lloyd Webber liked to spend his evenings.

Either none of our teachers or librarians really emphasized how much of our assignment was geared toward teaching us the research process, not anticipating wildly successful final products of scholarship, or they told us and I wasn’t listening or it didn’t register with me. There was nothing new to say, I thought, unless I could research something in person, something that still existed and which I could see or interview myself. And although much of my attitude was due to being young and unable to conceive of research papers as vessels for new perspectives, integrations of information, or arguments, I still feel an element of that unease when I listen to some podcasts.

Some podcasts focus on news and debate, and because the topics of discussion are by definition current and the statements made are opinions, they don’t tend to feel like summaries of information that’s available elsewhere (which is not to say they can’t feel, at times, like a rehash of what everyone’s talking about – but that’s a slightly different issue, I think). Others are more experiential – I’m thinking about Reply All in particular. Part of its appeal lies in how delightful Alex and PJ are, but much of it also comes from the fact that they’re doing field research or working through a technological/sociological mystery – they’re doing journalism, I suppose, where other podcasts are (sometimes) doing reporting.

Podcasts like This Podcast Will Kill You (TPWKY – which, let me note, I thoroughly enjoy) and You’re Wrong About frequently rely on the hosts doing substantial amounts of research (usually reading books and articles on the topic of the pod) and then relaying that research to the listeners. And that’s not a skill to scoff at – it’s time consuming, and the process of synthesizing and then presenting the information in a way that’s both understandable and entertaining isn’t a trivial one (if the hosts of This Podcast Will Kill You weren’t themselves epidemiologists, I’m sure the episodes wouldn’t be nearly as cogent). But there have been several times (on those two podcasts) when I’ve read the material they’re citing from and have thought…I knew all of that from the book (and didn’t necessarily feel like anything was added by the podcast). Granted, most of the audience won’t necessarily have read the book, and if they do so after listening, they’re not likely to be disappointed that some of the same facts appear in the book. But when there’s an additional element like an interview with a Lyme Disease specialist, or a breakdown of a scientific research study, or an interview with someone who was personally involved in whatever event the world at large is “wrong about,” the episode feels completely different – no sense of “here’s what we read and now we’re going to tell you about it.”

I wish I could tell you that I’ve just remembered what I wrote about in eighth grade, but the conclusion to this post isn’t going to be as neat as the conclusion to whatever I was writing about then.

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I’m generally a completionist. I don’t like to leave books half-read, and I can probably fit the books I’ve started but not finished into one blog post:

1. American Gods, by Neil Gaiman: I actually read more than half of this and then just…stopped. It sat next to my bed for almost a year before I took it to one of those little free libraries. I also watched the first five or so episodes of the TV adaptation with my roommates, and then we all stopped. (I think. Maybe they finished without me.)
2. The Infernal, by Mark Doten: I think I tried to read this at the wrong time, made it five pages in, and then determined that the timing was wrong and I wasn’t in a mood for not having the faintest idea what was going on. But I just read a review of this that intrigued me, so maybe I’ll go back to it…
3. Authority, by Jeff VanderMeer: I read the first book in the trilogy, Annihilation, and found it difficult to get through but still intriguing, but I waded a third of the way into this second part and thought, “I am just not enjoying this and I don’t see that changing.
4. The Castle, by Franz Kafka: Can I make the excuse that I didn’t finish this because…Kafka didn’t either? Granted, he got much farther than I did…I’ve probably read the first three chapters of The Castle three separate times and renewed it 18 times from the Brooklyn Public Library, after which they finally denied me more renewals and I took it as a sign. While I was reading it, I was generally enjoying it – I just didn’t ever feel like picking it up again afterwards, and kept forgetting what I’d already read. I told my boyfriend that maybe part of my resistance was the knowledge that the book was unfinished and I would never know the actual ending, to which he responded, “That doesn’t make sense. It’s like life! No one knows how they’re going to die, but that doesn’t make living not worth it.” Because of general stubbornness I responded that often people do in fact know how they’re going to die, but that the comparison isn’t a useful one anyway…and that’s a hill I’m willing to die on. Especially since, in that case, I’ll know that I’m going to die on a hill.
5. (pending) The Sellout, by Paul Beatty: This was an office book-exchange book three years ago (well, 2.5). I don’t have a good excuse for why it took me so long to start it other than that no one was going to start charging me 10 cents a day for leaving it on my shelf, unfinished. Like The Castle, I’ve read the beginning three times so far. But I’m not giving up on this one yet.

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Pachinko, by Min Jin Lee: I found this…okay. I think I’m not the audience for sweeping family narratives in which there’s no one main character or family (I felt this way about Homegoing as well), where history and plot, rather than character or writing, are the focus. There are books I love (Waterland, for one) that reach backward into history to explain the circumstances of the main characters, but there are main characters. Pachinko covers almost a century and felt to me like a recounting of events rather than a novel. That’s not to say I disliked it, but it didn’t stun me.

The Wallcreeper, by Nell Zink: How totally absurd and farcical and delightful. This novel has a clearly defined and deployed plot, but the plot isn’t ultimately so important. The writing is the main event, regardless of what it’s about, and every observation is amazing. As a minor side note, I really like the shape of this book, which was originally published by Dorothy, a Publishing Project and is more square than most paperbacks.

Crisis in the Red Zone, by Richard Preston: It never fails to tickle me that Preston is one letter away from Reston, the name of the facility that had an Ebola scare in the late 80s. Somehow, I feel like he would enjoy that. This was much better than Panic in Level Four, possibly just as a result of being a more focused and cohesive narrative. There’s some backstory about the discovery of Ebola in the 1970s that goes on for too long, but the material about the 2014 outbreak is compelling and handled well.

Marlena, by Julie Buntin: This was a gut punch. So bleak but impressive. In some ways I did want more of the New York present-day narrative, but not badly enough for it to be a real complaint. In trying to figure out how to describe the (excellent) writing, I have in the back of my mind the blurbs that describe it as “sumptuous,” among other adjectives that – to me, at least – are somewhat murky in how they actually relate to prose. So I’m sticking to the mundane: this book was great.

The Demon Haunted World, by Carl Sagan: So I’ve finally stopped confusing Carl Jung and Carl Sagan, and yes, I understand that should be an embarrassing admission. I read this book hoping that it would be…comforting? The title would have sent me running as a child. I consumed it over a pretty long stretch of months (and to be honest, am only halfway through it as I write this), because I had it on my computer but not my Kindle. The chapters are discrete essays, though, so it hasn’t suffered as a result of my pokiness. I love the generosity with which Sagan treats human beings, even if their beliefs don’t measure up to his standards of rigor.

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Just as there are topics that perennially, perhaps cyclically come up on Twitter (“Do you wash your legs,” (h/t Reply All) “Ruin a movie in one letter/Fat band names,” etc), there are pet topics that I can’t deny myself writing about every few years. Going to grocery stores while traveling is one of them.

Last year I spend a week in London and ate the same perfectly calibrated Tesco salad every night: spinach, “semi-dried” tomatoes (are they partially dried by the sun? Or are they dehydrated in some other method? They weren’t uniformly dry, which I appreciated), croutons, mozzarella balls, and pesto dressing. I usually ate it with a spoon because I didn’t know where to look for takeaway forks (I am loathe to ask questions in any establishment and the fact that the Tesco had self-checkout meant there was no way I was going to talk to a human) and my hotel room had spoons for the complimentary coffee.

…I just did a search back to my posts from last August to see if I raved about Tesco salads before, but instead found that, pre-London, my 2018 post was titled “London Calling” just like my 2019 post. How embarrassing!

So the non-creative title that I gave my London posts last year and this year stayed the same, but unfortunately Tesco did not keep their salads the same. Gone was my perfect caprese and in its place I only found a very dry falafel salad. This did, however, give me reason to expand my grocery ventures while in the UK. My hotel this year was near not only a Tesco but also a Sainsbury’s and a Waitrose. I did buy a few practical things there, like three-bean salad and toothpaste, but mainly trolled the aisles looking for the best gummies to take back to the US with me and the most hilarious-to-foreigners aisle directories. Sainsbury’s wins with aisle 23, which advertises:

Fizzy drinks

Long life juice

Squash

“Squash” was very thematic given that the gummies I found there were Squashies (delicious milk and raspberry flavored gums that look like two-tone pillows) and Randoms: Squish ’ems edition (which I’m sorry to report are not nearly as delicious OR as random as Randoms: Original edition, though I do like the symmetry between the llama-wearing-a-hat on the Randoms package and giraffe-wearing-a-fruit-basket on the Squish ’ems variety). Later in the trip I rectified this and got a bag of original Randoms, a “share size” (HA) of Haribo star mix, and in the airport, my greatest achievement – a bag of Squidglets (join our squidgy squad! they exhort from the back of the bag, and I do. I do.)

The gummies were on my mind so much that when the customs officer asked me if I bought anything in London, while I could have alternatively said “Yes, a shirt,” I instead said, “Um…gummies!” which I don’t think he was expecting. “Gummies?” he repeated. “You know, like…Percy Pigs?” I said, and then got nervous because Percy Pigs were probably the one kind of gummy I didn’t buy.

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I’m flying to London on Saturday. I’ve been there three times before, each marked by some slightly disembodying fever dreamish circumstance. The first time, I had mono – or glandular fever, since I was in the UK – and wasn’t supposed to travel, but I was 20 and couldn’t imagine forfeiting the money I’d spent on my flight. I remember lots of things about the trip: falling asleep in St. James Park. Stumbling through the Victoria and Albert with eyes half open. Curling up for hours each afternoon in my friend’s dorm bed.

The second time I ran into a smidge of trouble at customs because I didn’t actually know what hotel I was staying at and the customs officer was not thrilled by my stammering. I hadn’t traveled internationally in a few years, so I was rusty.

The third time was last summer, when I taught an SAT/ACT class for a week. I was so well prepared – I knew the hotel name and address, I had no communicable diseases – until my flight was delayed and I ended up stuck in Toronto overnight. I landed at Gatwick a full 24 hours after I was due, meaning that instead of spending my first day adjusting to jet lag, prepping materials, and going to bed early, I went straight from the airport to the classroom (fortunately, I had a co-teacher).

This time I have a direct flight, so I’m hoping the fourth visit to London will be the most awake ever. But I’m prepared to bravely drink as much coffee as necessary. I’ll be teaching the same SAT/ACT class and tutoring via Skype in the evenings afterward, so I may just try to titrate until I’m 80% caffeine.

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1. Do people ever cite “a record label turning down The Beatles” and “Michael Jordan not making his JV basketball team” as part of the same pep talk re: rejection and finding success afterward? I feel like they’re examples that might get conflated even though they have nothing in common outside of “first not success, then massive success.” That said, maybe placing them both in the same conversation is smart, rhetorically, because it broadens the circumstances/causes for “not success then success” rather than providing two of-a-piece examples. I will hazard a guess that the Beatles scenario is far more common than the case of someone being anti-precocious before coming into tremendous ability.
2. I’ve been thinking about how successful erecting low-grade barriers (both literal and figurative) can be, even when it would be easy for the person/thing behind the barrier to cross it. Things like putting your belongings in a closed locker at a gym or yoga studio even if you don’t lock it, or having a sticker on your window that says you have a security system, or looping your arm through your purse handle on the subway (not that I think that’s generally necessary, but what if you fall asleep?). I didn’t want all of those scenarios to have to do with theft, but that’s what’s coming to mind. I’m also thinking about the elephant reserve I visited once where the elephants’ area had an ankle-high wooden rail around it, though I think that was more a signal to the elephants about where they were supposed to stay, not something intended to pose even a minor inconvenience if they didn’t desire to stay. Beatles, Michael Jordan, etc.
3. I can think of three married couples whose last names are nearly identical. In all of the cases, I find myself wishing that instead of each partner keeping their own name or both hyphenating, they would just merge them. None would lose any letters! Granted, in one of the cases one name would be completely subsumed by the other, but the other two work pretty perfectly. I’ve never had a relationship with this sort of last name kismet, so I find it oddly captivating. In one case the last names are both from the same area of origin and may already be variations of the same original name, but not the other two. And for a complementary situation, since three is a pattern? I don’t know anyone who’s done this personally (or I may know one couple, but if I remember correctly they chose a completely new last name to use when they got married), but couples with disparate names could mash them together. Like…ah! Wait, no. I was going to say “When Miranda Kerr and Orlando Bloom were married…” but that would be a name best fitted to straight hyphenation. Kerr-bloom! Okay…how about the old days of Gwyneth Paltrow and Brad Pitt dating, and the potential we had for a Pittrow union? Sigh, what could have been.

And those are three thoughts that have been bumping up against one another in my gumball machine brain.

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I’ve been whitewater rafting twice (the first time, in Gatlinburg when I was 11, was the more dramatic on its surface – people falling out of boats, people losing their swimsuits, etc – but the second, in the Tetons two years later, very clearly had much more force of nature behind it and beneath the rapids) and tubing once (on the Esopus Creek up in Phoenicia, NY). Last week I was in Boulder just 12 hours after “Tube to Work Day” ended. Such terrible timing! The creek that runs through Boulder is open for tubing all of the summer months (unless there’s extremely high water), but that was the final 98-degree day before a return to normal summer temperatures, and it was the only day that there were more than one or two people floating downstream over the course of the day. Alas.

I’m fairly certain but not positive that I’ve never been to Colorado until this trip. My family drove through a large number of states on our way to Yellowstone when I was a child – a memorable trip with my best friend’s family that included recreating my dad’s childhood road trip to the corn palace and other tourist attractions, my friend’s little sister having a tantrum that involved shouting, “I HATE the Saturn! It’s a STUPID CAR!” which led a passerby to interject, “You know, you really should consult the child before purchasing a vehicle,” and a state trooper looking at my parents as if they’d failed my friend and I drastically after we exclaimed, “Livestock – YAY!!” in response to his caution that there would be some loose livestock on the road ahead. The Tetons portion of the trip also involved our parents going out to dinner, leaving my friend and I in charge of her sister, a make-believe game in which bunk beds were a boat and my friend a hijacker who’d taken us hostage, and our parents returning home right at the moment her little sister burst into tears because my friend had clicked a mechanical pen dramatically and said, “I just shot your mom!”

I was so traumatized by the idea that we’d scarred a seven-year-old for life that I don’t even have the nerve to ask her, now, whether she’s scarred.

(Just kidding. She was way more scarred by having to ride in the Saturn.)

Anyway, now I’m recruiting for some upstate NY tubing before the weather runs out. I don’t think we rented helmets when we went on the Esopus, but the water wasn’t terribly high either. We did wear life jackets and sneakers. None of us fell out or were otherwise injury-adjacent (there were some fairly substantial rapids that crashed up against large rocks; I remember sticking my foot out to push off of it and briefly thinking “It this a terrible idea that’s going to lead to a broken leg?”), but the people who were ten minutes behind us emerged at the pickup point with abrasions and bruises. In Boulder helmets were required above a certain flow level. On our last two days there, I could have gone by myself, but that seemed logarithmically less fun. Moreover, I’ve seen enough people fall out of boats or lose their shorts and end up mooning the whole riverbed and all of its occupants. If that happened to me while tubing solo, no one would be there to fetch my bottoms. And that’s…bo(u)lder than I want to be.

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The Sixth Extinction, by Elizabeth Kolbert: I held off reading this for a long time – not to bury my head in the sand about climate change, but to try to keep it from becoming the only thing that I think about all day, every day (when I’m not thinking about Sagan-adjacent meaning of life things). It was far less apocalyptic and depressing than I expected, without being overly optimistic.

Panic in Level Four, by Richard Preston: Unfortunately, the primary feeling I had while reading this collection of essays based on Preston’s work for the New Yorker and other publications was “I wish this was more about Ebola and less about everything else.” I have his newest book (which is, like The Hot Zone, about Ebola, but about 2014 instead of the early 90s) on hold, so I’m curious to see if it will sustain my interest or if his writing just isn’t for me (I never read The Hot Zone itself).

The Road to Jonestown, by Jeff Guinn: I read this, then listened to the podcast You’re Wrong About‘s Jonestown episode and felt like…they were just giving a summary of the book (I’ve listened to some of their other episodes and haven’t felt that way, but maybe I had an overall unrealistic expectation about the amount of original research they would be doing?). This is an incredibly comprehensive and detailed examination of Jim Jones and the events leading up to THE event that everyone remembers.

The Family That Couldn’t Sleep, by D.T. Max: The thing about prions is that there are so (relatively) few clearly defined/understood prion diseases that a book about one prion disease (in this case, Fatal Familial Insomnia) inevitably becomes a book about all prion diseases. That’s not exactly a critique, but because I’ve read multiple prion-centric books there was a fair amount of repetition in this one. Everything about the family at the center of the book, though, was new. This came out in 2006, but it didn’t seem dated at all…which suggests that 13 years later we have very little new information or insight about prions (to continue the podcast theme, I immediately listened to the This Podcast Will Kill You prions episode).

Asperger’s Children, by Edith Sheffer: I’d read about Asperger himself only in the context of the broader history of autism, and had no idea that many of his ideas were so closely tied to/in service of Nazi ideals (it seems like another topic for the You’re Wrong About podcast). I’d heard about Asperger and his “little professors” and the shifting definition of Aspergers as it was included in the spectrum and then removed from the DMV, but I’m not even sure I realized what time period he was working in, much less that he was part of programs that euthanized “atypical” children (he not only developed the diagnostic criteria that could deem a child “unfit for the volk” but also personally diagnosed hundreds of children as unfit).

That was a serious run of nonfiction. I’ve started both The Castle and The Sellout but have had a hard time really getting into them, and I have Pachinko on my Kindle. In desperate need of some fiction.

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