A Long Game: Notes on writing fiction is an interesting little book by Elizabeth McCracken

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is an interesting little 2025 book by Elizabeth McCracken titled A Long Game: Notes on writing fiction. It is organized into ten untitled chapters, and has a total of 280 brief essays. A Google Books preview covers just the first thirteen pages. There is a detailed index. I quote three essays.

 

Her third essay describes the book:

 

“This is a book that dispenses advice, composed by a writer of fiction. As with any such book or craft talk or social media rant or workshop critique, a lot of it is hogwash. I’m talking to myself. That’s all writers really do. Give speeches to the mirror, whisper into a shell on the beach, find a stranger in a dive bar. Teach.

 

Eventually the odd writer is driven to write a book about writing. Craft books, these volumes are called: chipper, cheerleaderish, generally with an encouraging second-person narrator meant to make the whole exhausting process of writing a book seem possible. You can do it!

 

It’s a reasonable stance: you’ll never stand on the winner’s podium if you can’t get off the starting block.

 

But I don’t know if you can write a book. I don’t know if I can write a book. I don’t know if I can write this book, though over the past thirty years I’ve published four novels, three collections of short stories, and a memoir, and have written several more unpublished books. (How many? We won’t speak of that yet.) Everything that I have ever believed was true and immutable about my work has changed. Only certain obsessions remain. A writing life, I’ve come to believe, is a yearslong process of casting away everything you once believed for sure.”  

 

The forty-fifth essay describes outlining, and, of course, also applies to the process of writing a speech:

 

“Proponents of outlining like every-day writers, like to recommend the process to everyone. They are talking to themselves, announcing how their own brains work, As for me, I have tried outlining before a project, and it looks like this:

 

I. The Waxmans arrive in Iowa.

 A. Family unhappiness.

  1. The loss of furniture.

    i. That buffet, a wedding gift, was an act of revenge.

     a) List of Great-Grandmother Waxman’s grudges.

 

… until the outline threatens to slant around the back of the page.

 

There’s a wonderful moment while writing a book when, after swimming alone in the ocean of your dream-world, you can sense it becoming actual, you can imagine how another person might navigate it by the landmarks you have installed, but you don’t want to arrive at that shore too soon. For some people, outlining is a form of thought: free from sentences and paragraphs, they can make meaningful decisions about their books. The outline prolongs the dream. Others of us dream in sentences only. We dream as we draft. Nothing is possible. (I am talking to myself) without language. I figure things out. I write with the abandon of a tourist. What interests me at first might bore me later. That’s all right.

 

No process is wrong that leads to a first draft of a book.”

 

Her eighty-ninth essay also applies to rehearsing a speech:

 

“I read my work aloud for a number of reasons, only some of which have to do with vanity. When I write, I hear language, but it’s not direct. Sonic, but not phonetic, a kind of burble that I find beautiful. Like swimming, while nearby a band plays loud music: I sense the sound, and it’s part of the experience, but not the entirety. Notes, not nuances. When I read aloud, I hear everything: accidental rhymes and repetitions, sentences that don’t make sense, five sentences in a row that sound alike, inconsistencies and unparallel constructions. Using my literal voice puts me back in the work as opposed to above it, as happens when I read in my head. If I realize that I’ve stopped reading aloud, it’s because my mouth knows the work is not so good: unclear, listless, unworthy of being declaimed. I read aloud to show off, but to myself. I’d be horrified if anyone could hear me.”

 

The writer typing was adapted from an image at OpenClipArt.

 

 

Manslaughter or Just a Man’s Laughter?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sometimes a little punctuation makes a big difference. Leaving off an apostrophe and a space turns the phrase a man’s laughter into the word manslaughter. The Pearls Before Swine comic by Stephan Pastis on April 29, 2026 has the following dialogue:

 

Pig: Did you see this guy who got arrested?

Goat: No. What happened?

 

Pig: Guess he must have been a comedian or something because he got jailed for a man’s laughter.

 

Goat: Manslaughter.

 

Pig: Oh, great, He slaughtered some man for laughing

Goat: Why do I try?

 

My cartoon is a color version of this one from Openclipart.

 

 

 

Another three stories from Kevin Ashton’s compelling new book The Story of Stories: The million-year history of a uniquely human art.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My previous post was titled The Story of Stories: The Million-Year History of a Uniquely Human Art is a compelling new book by Kevin Ashton. There are eight chapters in that book, titled as follows:

 

Chapter 1  A Million Years of Stories  1

Chapter 2  The Eye of Your Mind  34

Chapter 3  Pictures of Sounds  59

Chapter 4  The War of Stories  92   

Chapter 5  The All-Seeing Eye of Providence  136

Chapter 6  One One Zero  169

Chapter 7  Death by a Thousand Stories  210

Chapter 8  The Hyperreal Thing  250

 

Here are another three quotations out of this book. The tenth section in the fourth chapter, The War of Stories, is titled Story Factories. It begins on the bottom of page 130:

 

“Wood based paper first appeared in Germany in the 1840s, and by the end of the 1870s most printers in North America and Western Europe were using it. Not long after that, all paper was made from wood and none was made from rags. In less than thirty years, the price of paper fell by over 90 percent. In 1860 a pound of rags cost 44 US cents before pulping. In 1889, a pound of wood cost 4 cents after pulping. The invention of the mass production of mass communication, started by Gutenberg 450 years earlier was complete. An industrial revolution had transformed storytelling, and now there were story factories all over the world.

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

Those factories produced ever more stories, told by ever more storytellers, reproduced ever more times. In 1449, the year before Gutenberg’s printing press became operational, Europeans published two thousand new books and made an average of twenty-five copies of each one. In 1900, after paper made from wood replaced paper made from rags, Europeans published twenty thousand new books and, on average, there were twenty-five hundred copies of each one: ten times more stories a year, told by ten times more storytellers, to a hundred times more people.”  

 

The second section in the fifth chapter, The All-Seeing Eye of Providence, is titled Experience. It begins on page 139:

 

“We are now halfway through The Story of Stories. The first half covered a million years of storytelling, from the first nightfires to the first telecommunications; the second half covers only two hundred years.

 

This imbalance – four chapters for one million years, four chapters for 200 years – arises because the book’s structure is not time but change, and change is not linear: Its rate increases so much that the next two hundred years of the story of stories contains as much change as the first million years.

 

When we look at almost any example of long-term human progress, we see change speeding up around the fifteenth century. This acceleration was once mistaken for a sudden springlike return to creation after a centuries-long winterlike freeze: a ‘renaissance’ preceded by ‘dark ages.’ The various versions of this mistake are all story-shaped: They center heroic protagonists and, by implication, individual human agency, hidden behind hand-wavy vaguenesses like culture or faith.

 

This ever-increasing, ever-continuing rate of change is not caused by individual human agency. The change causes itself, especially the change in storytelling. Our increasing acceleration of innovation arises from our accumulation of equality, liberty, and freedom of thought; of health, life expectancy, and population; and of time for nonsubsistence activities, all of which exist because we have ever more ways to share experience using stories.

 

Experience is knowledge that we have stored and recorded. Before we could recall and retell stories, we stored our experiences in the error-prone, personal, private, and, above all, mortal medium of memory. The rise of storytelling, through speaking, singing, painting, writing, and printing, enshrined ever more experience in ways ever more immortal. Printing is especially good at transforming one person’s experience into everyone’s experience: Frederick Douglass died in 1895, for example, but we can forever share some of his lived experience as a slave by reading his books.

 

The invention of the printing press enabled and inspired ever more inventions for storing and sharing experiences, among them the first atlas in 1482, the first postal service in 1516, the first book of mathematical references and tables in 1533, the first peer-reviewed scientific journal in 1655, the first school textbook in 1690, and the first bookstore in 1732.

 

These inventions laid the foundation for an explosion of new storytelling technologies, many of them powered by electricity, in the nineteenth century, including the first electric telegraph in 1816, the first free, taxpayer-funded public library in 1833, the first photograph in 1838, the first paperback in 1841, the first practical typewriter in 1867, the first carbon copy in 1870 (now the vestigial ‘cc’ – carbon copy – and ‘bcc’ -blind carbon copy – options in the ‘send’ field of every email), the first telephone in 1876, the first duplicating machine for low-volume home, school, and office use in 1886, the first record player in 1887, and the first movie screening and the first radio transmission in 1895.

 

The speed with which we invented, improved, and industrialized these electricity-powered storytelling tools was a consequence of the accelerative, self-reinforcing effect of shared experience. New story-telling technologies create new storytelling technologies. Where writing took five thousand years to mature and spread around the world, and printing took two thousand years, the electrified storytelling tools of the 1800s developed and dispersed in little more than a century.

 

These inventions turned the nineteenth century into what we would now call an age of big data, where someone sitting at their kitchen table could benefit from the thoughts and experiences of others, of almost any kind, from almost any place and time, and preserve their own thoughts and experiences in handwriting, or as a printing-like typewritten manuscript that could be duplicated cheaply and in any quantity, from one to millions.

 

The inventions of the nineteenth century also laid the foundation for a twentieth-century storytelling technology: the television, invented by Philo Farnsworth in 1927, 111 years after the invention of the electric telegraph.”

 

The eighth section in the fifth chapter, The All-Seeing Eye of Providence, is titled A New Literacy. On page 160:

 

“Reading only writing may have been sufficient when writing was the only technology of story, but it is not enough today. Everyone must be able to ‘read’ stories no matter what technology is being used to tell them.

 

This technology-independent literacy is sometimes called transliteracy, a term that originated in 2005 with Alan Liu, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and means ‘the ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media from signing and orality through handwriting, print, TV, radio and film, to digital social networks,’

 

Transliteracy is especially well understood by librarians, the underground freedom fighters in the war of stories, whose sworn duty is to connect people in the universe of the mass of humanity to knowledge. For example, here is Tom Ipri, a senior librarian at Temple University in Philadelphia, describing transliteracy’s importance:

 

Not only does transliteracy question previous assumptions of authority, it also calls into question the often assumed privilege of printed text. Transliteracy is not unique in questioning this bias – media literacy efforts have certainly tried to raise the profile of nonprint materials. But transliteracy is unique in combining democratizing communication formats, expressing no preference of one over the other, with emphasizing the social construction of meaning via diverse media. Because of the ways in which transliteracy questions authority and devalues hierarchical structures for disseminating information, transliteracy overlaps concerns much at the heart of librarianship.” 

 

Very detailed notes at the back of Kevin’s book point out that the above statement by Tom Ipri was edited for length from one in 2010 – it is a paraphrase rather than an exact quotation. You can find the original article by Tom Ipri at College and Research Library News (2010, Volume 71, Number 10) titled Introducing transliteracy: What does it mean to academic libraries? Also see the Wikipedia page for Transliteracy.

 

The 1904 drawing of a mysterious stranger (at the top left) telling a story came from the Library of Congress.

 

 

The Story of Stories: The Million-Year History of a Uniquely Human Art is a compelling new book by Kevin Ashton

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I found a compelling 2026 book by Kevin Ashton titled The Story of Stories: The million-year history of a uniquely human art at my friendly local public library and have been reading through the very many stories told in it. Google Books has a preview of just the first 16 pages. There are eight chapters, titled as follows, containing lots of stories:

 

Chapter 1  A Million Years of Stories  1

Chapter 2  The Eye of Your Mind  34

Chapter 3  Pictures of Sounds  59

Chapter 4  The War of Stories  92   

Chapter 5  The All-Seeing Eye of Providence  136

Chapter 6  One One Zero  169

Chapter 7  Death by a Thousand Stories  210

Chapter 8  The Hyperreal Thing  250

 

Here are four quotations from this book. The third section in the first chapter, A Million Years of Stories, is titled The Universal Story. It begins on page 6:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Our storytelling brains, unchanged since they first evolved, seek and tell stories that follow a simple pattern. This pattern is universal to all cultures, genres, periods, storytellers, storytelling technologies, and styles, and comprises three equally essential parts like the legs of a stool.

 

First, all stories feature humanlike characters as the agents of action. This is still true when the characters are supposed to be nonhuman. Stories that star aliens, Anglepoise lamps, animals, ants, trains, trees, and toasters are really about humans, which is why in stories these creatures tend to walk on two feet, talk, have expressive faces and eyes, feel human emotions, and set human goals. They are all rabbits in waistcoats – people pretending not to be people. Even Dr. Suess, creator of fabulous, apparently nonhuman characters including the Cat in the Hat, the Grinch, and Horton the Elephant, said, ‘None of my animals are animals; they’re all people.’ These humanlike characters are the story’s actors; they take the actions that cause the story to happen. They live at or near the story’s center. They are literally the people the story is about: it embraces, revolves around, and surrounds them.

 

Second, all stories relate a chronology, a sequence of events. The chronology does not have to be told in chronological order – it can have flashbacks, flash-forwards, and meanwhiles – but it has to relate connected events that happened at different moments. We would not call a description of a dozen things that all occurred in the same second a story. A story is always a journey through time.

 

Third, all stories must reach, or at least be headed for, a resolution. The sequence of events must have a consequence, and that consequence must arise from the actions of its human or humanlike agents. We are compelled to give sequences of events consequences, to seek justice for our characters, and to resolve unresolved stories. An unfinished story is like an unscratched itch; if a story we care about is not explicitly resolves, or if we have to wait to see how it ends because of a ‘to be continued’ cliffhanger climax we will often try to finish the story ourselves by imagining possible resolutions.”   

 

The fifth section in the third chapter, Pictures of Sounds, is titled The Ox and the House. It begins on page 69:

 

“We do not have to wonder whether Europeans could have found a way to get from pictures of things to pictures of syllables: They tried. In 1400 BCE the Greeks adapted picture-based writing from another language, Minoan, and used it almost entirely for accounting. Few Greeks could read it, and even fewer could write it. Then around 1100 BCE, for reasons that are still not well understood, Greek civilization collapsed, and the Greeks did not write again for hundreds of years.

 

But while Greece slumbered in its dark ages, The Canaanites, a seafaring people living in independent city-states in what is now Lebanon, and parts of Israel, Palestine, and Syria, solved the problem of how to write languages with clusters of consonants.

 

We can guess how it happened. Canaanites traded with, worked for, and were sometimes enslaved by Egyptians. Some Canaanites learned to read and write Hieratic, a simplified form of Egyptian hieroglyphics developed for writing on papyrus, a writing surface made from a plant that grows in the shallows of the Nile, with reeds dipped in ink. Hieratic was a flowing script that could be written quickly by joining some characters together – a style now known as cursive, after the Latin currere, ‘to run.’ Sometime around 1800 BCE, or possibly a few centuries earlier, one or more of the Canaanites adapted Hieratic so that they could use it to write their own language too.

 

The adaptation was ingenious. The Canaanites selected hieroglyphs of things whose names start with the sounds of the Canaanite language and used the hieroglyphs to represent these sounds. For example, the Canaanites’ word for ox was aleph, so they used the hieroglyph for ox, which looked like an ox’s head, to represent an ‘a’ sound. Their word for house was beth, so they used the hieroglyph for house, which looked like the plan of a house, for the sound ‘b,’ and so on. If you were Canaanite, and could identify what thing a character represented, you would also know what sound that character represented, and could read.

 

Using characters to represent sounds instead of syllables made the writing system very efficient, especially for consonant-laden languages where most syllables are not also words. For example, every native English speaker knows around twenty to thirty-five thousand words, created from about three thousand syllables. A writing system for English that used one character for each syllable would therefore need about three thousand distinct characters. But those three thousand syllables are composed of only thirty-five to forty-four distinct sounds, depending on what definition of sound you use. And so, if you write sounds, not syllables, you can represent an entire language in very few characters. That is what the Canaanites did, and it gave them a complete writing system using just thirty-two characters. 

 

The first two of those characters, aleph and beth, the signs for ‘ox’ and ‘house,’ gave the Canaanites’ writing system its English name, alphabet.

 

Some pictures the Canaanites chose are still discernible today, thirty-five hundred years later, in the Latin alphabet used by 143 nations. For example, if you turn a capital A upside down, you can see the head of the ox, horns and all; a capital B is the plan of a two-room house, the letter c is a boomerang, gimel; l is from lamed, a shepherd’s crook, m comes from mem, water, and is the shape of two waves; and o is an eye, ‘ayin, now without the pupil of its original Egyptian hieroglyph. These vestigial pictures exemplify how our tools improve by evolution more than invention.”

 

The tenth section in the third chapter, Pictures of Sounds, is titled The Secret Life of Stories. It begins on the bottom of page 87:

 

“Writing separates story and storyteller, and leaves readers to determine a story’s meaning by themselves. One of the most important consequences of this separation – and one that applies to all other forms of mass communication too – is that every reader is likely to imagine and interpret the same story differently. What the writer writes is not what the reader reads.

 

And that raises a question: Is a story what is written or what is read?

 

This is not a new concern. Literary theorist Roland Barthes, among many others, wondered about it. Barthes concluded a story is not what is written but what is read; so much so that he proclaimed the ‘death of the author,’ saying: ‘The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. The reader holds together the written text. To give writing its future, the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author.’

 

Barthes argued that there are two kinds of story: the readerly story, which requires little interpretation by the reader – the story is readerly because the reader mainly reads – and the writerly story, which requires lots of interpretation by the reader – the story is writerly because the reader does so much interpretation that they almost write the story themselves.

 

Or, some stories are so straightforward that they lead every reader to imagine a similar story, and others are so ambiguous that they lead every reader to imagine a different story. A stop sign is an example of something extremely straightforward and readerly: Everyone who reads it understands it the same way. A Rorschach test – a psychological test in which someone is shown an image comprising nothing but inkblots and asked ‘What might this be?’ – is an example of something extremely ambiguous and writerly: Everyone who ‘reads’ it understands it differently. Neither of these two things are stories, and no stories are as extreme as these two things, but every story lies somewhere between.”

 

The fifth section in the fourth chapter, The War of Stories, is titled Mass. It begins on page 112 and it says that:

 

“Printing came late to Europe, but when it arrived, the consequences were much the same as in China, Japan, and Korea.

 

On the day Gutenberg’s printing press started operating, scribes half a mile away were laboring in the scriptorium of St. Alban’s Abbey, copying scriptures and other Christian writing using goose-feather quills dipped in ink. The best and fastest of them, who were called antiquarii, wrote one or two pages that day. In Gutenberg’s workshop, the printing press produced three thousand pages. This wasn’t just a change in scale – it was a revolution in how ideas could spread.

 

Europe’s scribes produced eleven million documents in the thousand years before Gutenberg invented the printing press. Presses based on Gutenberg’s design produced thirteen million documents by 1500. What once took a century now took four years.

 

Gutenberg invented the mass production of mass communication. His achievement established a pattern that repeats with each successive storytelling technology: that the true transformation comes not from the invention itself but from making it fast enough, cheap enough, and reliable enough for mass adoption. Gutenberg’s press could produce thousands of pages per day, but the revolution he started was not only because of speed or volume; it was also because of what happens when one idea enters thousands of minds simultaneously. That change is far more significant, and far more difficult to quantify or even qualitize.”

 

The 1848 painting of Baku storytelling by August Wilhelm Kiesewetter came from Wikimedia Commons.

 

 

Donald Trump recently defended his mathematically impossible calculations of reducing drug prices

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Back on December 18, 2025 I blogged about how In his 18-minute speech last night President Trump talked about reducing prescription drug prices by 400% to 600%. What would that even mean? He revisited that silly claim, as discussed by Will Weissert at AP News on April 23, 2026 in an article titled Two ways of calculating’: Trump defends his mathematically impossible calculations on drug prices:

 

“Trump acknowledged having boasted that his efforts to lower drug prices had reduced what consumers pay by ‘500%, 600%.’ But he added, ‘We also sometimes say 50%, 60%’ and called it a ‘different kind of calculation’ that could go up to ‘70, 80 and 90%.’

‘People understand that better,’ Trump said. ‘But they’re two ways of calculating’ and ‘either way, it doesn’t make any difference.’ ” 

And Louis Jacobson at Politifact that same day, April 23, 2026, had another article titled RFK Jr. said there’s more than one way to calculate a percentage decrease. That doesn’t add up.

 

 

An intriguing 2026 book by Gerald Zaltman about daring to think differently

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is an intriguing 2026 book by Gerald Zaltman titled Dare to Think Differently: How open-mindedness creates exceptional decision making. A preview of the first eighteen pages is at Google Books.

 

This book has nine chapters and two appendices titled as follows:

 

ONE What is a mind anyway?  1

AND WHAT IS IT FOR?

 

TWO Serious Playfulness  25

WHY YOU NEED CONSTRUCTIVE MISCHIEF

 

THREE Befriending Ignorance  47

MAKING ‘I DON’T KNOW’ AN ALLY

 

FOUR The Power of Surprising Yourself  69

ASKING THE RIGHT DISCOVERY QUESTIONS

 

FIVE The Art of Being Curious  87

CHASING YOUR CURIOSITY

 

SIX Panoramic Thinking  105

TRANSITIONING FROM HEDGEHOG TO FOX

 

SEVEN Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark  123

USING THE ‘VOYAGER OUTLOOK TO EMBRACE AMBIGUITY

 

EIGHT Being Smart Isn’t Enough  143

HAVING AN OPEN MIND MATTERS MORE

 

NINE Fluid Thinking, a Reprise  155

LEVERAGING THE POWER OF BEING CONSCIOUSLY UNCONSCIOUS

 

APPENDIX 1 Aha! Spas  165

CREATING PERSONAL SPACE FOR SERIOUS PLAY

 

APPENDIX 2 The Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Techniques (ZMET)  173

A TOOL FOR SURFACING UNCONSCIOUS THOUGHTS AND FEELINGS

 

There is a very interesting discussion on pages 156 and 157:

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"AN INNER VOICE

 

From time to time I’ve referenced an inner voice, a kind, wise conscience that prompts you with strategic and tactical Am I? and Are we? questions. Everyone has an inner voice, but not everyone listens to it. We are reminded of this whenever we hear the voice of hindsight singing, ‘woulda, coulda, shoulda.’

 

Figure 9.1 [shown above in my colorized version] represents the salient features of fluid thinking and its waypoints such as memory and intuition. One or more open mind actions like befriending ignorance, panoramic thinking, and so on are likely to be engaged at each waypoint. Your inner voice plays an important role in orchestrating this process. It guides your involvement at each waypoint and your decision to revisit earlier waypoints. In other words, the entire process is a complex, adaptive system.

 

OVERVIEW OF THE DECISION CONTEXT

 

The six open-mind actions drive your use of your conscious and unconscious knowledge stored in your internal and external sources of memory. (and yes, even relying on AI involves your unconscious use of someone else’s assumptions.) The knowledge produced provides judgments or intuitions, which are augmented by imagination to yield insights. Analogical thinking and the use of metaphor are especially prominent here. Insights stimulate improvisation in the form of planned or actual behaviors. These behaviors provide constructive feedback, which may lead to changing or adapting initial actions. Feedback may be either instantaneous, as re rapidly contemplate our plans, or delayed, as we wait for results after putting a plan into action. In either case, feedback provides learning that updates or alters prior knowledge. These updates become stored memories available for future use.

 

What makes this system adaptive is that each waypoint can receive direct feedback from any other waypoint. Moreover, each waypoint is an adaptive system in and of itself making creative use of the system of the six actions. Think of your mind as a kind of dance hall, in which the conscious and unconscious operations involved in the various actions meet up and introduce themselves through overt and covert signals to the conscious and unconscious operations of each waypoint. The architecture for this becomes our mental models or theory-in-use.”

  

 

Bixonimania is a fake disease, but artificial intelligence told people it was real

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Wikipedia page says that:

 

“Bixonimania is a fake disease invented by researchers to examine artificial intelligence and its ability to utilize information in medical and healthcare applications. The disorder, with symptoms of sore eyes and darkening around them (‘periorbital hyperpigmentation’), is supposedly caused by blue light from screens.”   

 

One article about it by Chris Stokel-Walker at Nature on April 7, 2026 is titled Scientists invented a fake disease. AI told people it was real. A second article by Lucia Auerbach at Inc. on April 10, 2026 is titled Scientists Invented a Fake Disease Caused by Blue Light – Now It’s in Medical Papers. And it added:

 

“There were also dozens of easter eggs designed to clue readers in to the fact that the condition was made up. The lead researcher, Lazljiv Izgubljenovic, is a fake name and they work at a fake university, Asteria Horizon University, in a fake town, Nova City, California. One paper’s acknowledgements thanked ‘Professor Maria Bohm at The Starfleet Academy for her kindness and generosity in contributing with her knowledge and her lab onboard the USS Enterprise’. Both papers say they were funded by ‘the Professor Sideshow Bob Foundation for its work in advanced trickery. This work is a part of a larger funding initiative from the University of Fellowship of the Ring and the Galactic Triad.’ “

 

Sideshow Bob (also known as Dr. Robert Terwilliger) is a cartoon character - Bart Simpson’s nemesis in The Simpsons. A third article by Rebecca Watson at skepchick on April 15, 2026 is titled ChatBots are Diagnosing Diseases that Don’t Exist Based on Blog Posts.

 

The doctor cartoon was adapted from OpenClipArt.

 

 

Toastmasters International went back in time by reviving their Competent Communication manual

 

 

 

 

 

In July 2020 Toastmasters International discontinued use of their hard-copy Competent Communication manual, and the 15 Advanced Communication manuals described here at District 5. There is an online-only one-page news article by Paul Sterman in the October 2025 Toastmaster magazine titled Pathways Additions Arrive that includes:

 

“Vintage Paths: Two vintage paths are scheduled to be released in 2026, including one featuring foundational content designed by Toastmasters founder Dr. Ralph C. Smedley. One path will include the Basic Training Manual with original content from Smedley. The manual will be available on Base Camp with its original vintage look. The other path will consist of the Competent Communication manual and two Advanced Communication manuals, also accessed on Base Camp. The vintage paths will give members additional flexibility in the Pathways program while providing a window to the organization’s past.”

 

More detail is mentioned at the Pathways Updates web page:

 

April 2026 – Vintage Paths

 

“Two new Pathways paths are now available, allowing members to step into Toastmasters history. Basic Training for Toastmasters features a version of Toastmasters content first introduced by Ralph C. Smedley in 1943. The Communication Series: Entertaining + Storytelling includes the beloved Competent Communication manual along with The Entertaining Speaker and Storytelling Advanced Communication manuals. Both paths are available for purchase in English on the Choose a Path page after the completion of Level 1 in any other path. Members working on a vintage path will access the classic content on Base Camp, where they can navigate through the manual on Base Camp or download and print a copy. Members will earn Distinguished Club Program credit, along with new credentials and badges for every level in these paths.”

 

The revival reminds me of this song shown in a four-minute YouTube video titled The Rocky Horror Picture Show “Time Warp” (1975).

 

 

A blog post by David Murray on poor communication with a dental hygienist

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is a blog post by David Murray at Writing Boots on March 12, 2026 titled A letter to the dentist: On communication and other issues. He wrote about dealing with his hygienist:  

 

“While she was actively grinding away at my teeth, she began saying—I could barely hear her muffled masked voice over the grinding and the sucking—that my gums were somewhat inflamed and that she’d have to do a special cleaning that was going to exceed my deductible, by an amount she didn’t specify.

 

I stopped her and told her in no uncertain terms that you do not negotiate money things with someone while your hands and sharp objects are in their mouth. She said, ‘Okay,’ and agreed to drop the issue of the special cleaning, as long as I came back in four months, rather than six.

 

Eager as hell to get out of there at any cost, I agreed to that. Then, a few minutes later, she scheduled me for the regular six months, without mentioning the four-month interval.”

 

I had an opposite easy communication experience here in Boise with Summit Dental. That was almost two decades ago, when they were on Latah Street. We started going there just because they were walking distance from our house on the Bench.

 

Previously I also had lots of tartar buildup and difficult cleanings done at the usual six-month interval. But the second time I went there, the hygienist asked me if I would like to switch to a four-month interval. I replied that no one ever had bothered to ask before, and of course thereafter things became much more pleasant. More recently they moved to a new building on Americana Boulevard. And usually they are ranked as one of the top three dentists in the Best of Boise annual rankings by Boise Weekly magazine.

 

The dental chair image came from Wikimedia Commons

 

 

A thoughtful book by David Brooks on how to know a person

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is a thoughtful book from 2023 by David Brooks titled How to Know a Person: The art of seeing others deeply and being deeply seen. A Google Books preview goes to page 35. There is a seven-minute discussion by Geoff Bennett on the PBS NEWS HOUR for October 25, 2023 titled David Brooks writes about the art of seeing others in new book ‘How to Know a Person’. This book contains three parts and seventeen chapters (starting on the listed pages):

 

PART 1: I SEE YOU

Chapter 1: The Power of Being Seen 3

Chapter 2: How Not to See a Person 18

Chapter 3: Illumination 28

Chapter 4: Accomplishment 43

Chapter 5: What is a Person? 55

Chapter 6: Good Talks 71

Chapter 7: The Right Questions 82

 

PART 2: I SEE YOU IN YOUR STRUGGLES

Chapter 8: The Epidemic of Blindness 97

Chapter 9: Hard Conversations 107

Chapter 10: How Do You Serve a Friend Who Is in Despair? 122

Chapter 11: The Art of Empathy 134

Chapter 12: How Were You Shaped by Your Sufferings? 160

 

PART 3: I SEE YOU WITH YOUR STENGTHS

Chapter 13: Personality: What Energy Do You Bring into the Room? 175

Chapter 14: Life Tasks 190

Chapter 15: Life Stories 212

Chapter 16: How Do Your Ancestors Show Up in Your Life? 228

Chapter 17: What is Wisdom? 246

 

Starting on page 72 he discusses conversation as follows:

 

“The subtitle of this book is ‘The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen.’ I chose that specifically because I wanted you to immediately get what I was writing about. But it’s not quite accurate, if I’m being honest. If what we’re doing here is studying how to really get to know another person, it should probably be ‘The Art of Hearing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Heard.’ Because getting to know someone else is usually more about talking and listening than about seeing.

 

Being a mediocre conversationalist is easy. Being a good conversationalist is hard. As I’ve tried to understand how to become a better conversationalist, I’ve found that I’ve had to overcome weird ideas about what a good conversationalist is like. A lot of people think a good conversationalist is someone who can tell funny stories. That’s a raconteur, but it’s not a conversationalist. A lot of people think a good conversationalist is someone who can offer piercing insights on a range of topics. That’s a lecturer, but not a conversationalist. A good conversationalist is a master of fostering a two-way exchange. A good conversationalist is capable of leading people on a mutual expedition toward understanding.

 

Arthur Balfour was a British satatesman renowned for, among other things, the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which announced British support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. ‘Unhesitatingly I should put him down as the best talker I have ever known,’ his friend John Buchan once observed. Balfour’s particular skill was not that he was capable of uncorking brilliant monologues or spewing strings of epigrams. Instead, he created ‘a communal effort which quickened and elevated the whole discussion and brought out the best in people.

 

Balfour, Buchan continued,

 

would take the hesitating remark of a shy man and discover in it unexpected possibilities, would probe it and expand it until its author felt he had really made some contribution to human wisdom. In the last year of the War, he permitted me to take American visitors occasionally to lunch with him in Carlton Gardens, and I remember with what admiration I watched him feel his way with the guests, seize on some chance word and make it the pivot of speculations until the speaker was not only encouraged to give his best, but that best was infinitely enlarged by his host’s contribution. Such guests would leave walking on air.

 

A good conversation is not a group of people making a series of statements at each other. (in fact, that’s a bad conversation). A good conversation is an act of joint exploration, Someone floats a half-formed idea. Someone else seizes on the nub of the idea, plays with it, offers her own perspective based on her own memories, and floats it back so the other person can respond. A good conversation sparks you to have thoughts you never had before. A good conversation starts in one place and ends up in another.”

  

And starting on page 177 there is a discussion of personality traits and their assessment:

 

“Personality traits are dispositional signatures. A personality trait is a habitual way of seeing, interpreting, and reacting to a situation. Every personality trait is a gift – it enables its bearer to serve the community in some valuable way.

 

Unfortunately, our public conversation about personality is all messed up. For example, sometimes when I’m giving a public talk, I ask people to raise their hands if they are familiar with the Myers-Briggs personality assessment. Usually 80 to 100 percent of the people raise their hands. Then I ask them if they are familiar with the Big Five personality traits. Somewhere between 0 and 20 percent of the audience members raise their hands. This strikes me as a ridiculous situation.

 

The Myers-Briggs test has no scientific validity. About half the people who take it twice end up in entirely different categories the second time around. That’s because human beings just don’t fit consistently into the categories the Myers-Briggs people imagine are real. The test has almost no power to predict how happy you’ll be in a given situation, how you’ll perform at your job, or how satisfied you’ll be in your marriage. Myers-Briggs relies on false binaries. For example, it divides people into those who are good thinking and those who are good at feeling. But in real life, the research shows, people who are good at thinking are also more likely to be good at feeling. As Adam Grant, who writes about organizational psychology, once put it, the Myers-Briggs questionnaire is like asking someone, ‘What do you like more, shoelaces or earrings?’ and expecting that question to produce a revealing answer.

 

On the other hand, over the past decades, psychologists have cohered around a different way to map the human personality. This method has a ton of rigorous research behind it. This method helps people measure five core personality traits. Psychologists refer to these as the Big Five.

 

The Big Five traits are extroversion, conscientiousness, neuroticism, agreeableness, and openness. Psychologists have devised a series of questionnaires to help you discover how high or low you score one each of these traits – whether, for example, you are extremely extroverted (like George W. Bush), or not so extroverted, or, like most of us, somewhere near the middle.”

 

I mentioned the Big Five in a blog post on February 4, 2020 titled The Toastmasters Pathways Level 2 project on Understanding Your Communication Style says there are four communication styles. Where did they come from?

 

The cartoon was adapted from one by Steve Brodner at the Library of Congress.

 

 

Can crystals protect you from psychic attacks?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Probably not. There is a paranoid article by Deborah King at Psychology Today on February 9, 2011 titled Are You Under Psychic Attack? and subtitled Is someone out to get you?

 

Crystals are claimed to be useful against such attacks. A recent Coast to Coast AM radio show on April 14, 2026 discussed Operation Fishbowl/Crystals & Self-Defense in the second half:

“In the latter half, author Nicholas Pearson shared insights into the mystical and energetic properties of crystals, and how they can be used for protection and to counter negativity. He described crystals as ‘cells and substances with a regular composition and a periodic and symmetrical structure,’ emphasizing their inherent order and coherence. This structural perfection, he continued, allows crystals to influence human energy fields by bringing ‘clarity, structure, organization’ to otherwise irregular human psyches, which can lead to tangible effects on mood, perception, and overall well-being.

Highlighting the symbolic qualities of crystals, he noted their enduring nature as ‘ancient parts of Mother Earth’ that have been used for spiritual and ritual purposes across cultures for millennia. Crystals can shield individuals from ‘discordant, intrinsic, and outright malevolent’ energies, he said, and can act as a form of psychic self-defense to filter out these undesirable elements, whether worn as jewelry or carried with you. When asked about a single protective crystal, Pearson chose labradorite, describing it as a ‘broad spectrum protection tool’ that reflects away harmful energies while enhancing one’s natural radiance.

According to Pearson, psychic attacks occur due to three factors: openness of the recipient, a power imbalance, and a connection between attacker and target. ‘Crystals can eliminate any one, or hopefully all three of these causes,’ by reducing sensitivity, severing connections, or balancing energetic power, he suggested. Signs of psychic attack include persistent bad luck, insomnia, unexplained illnesses, and even physical marks. Pearson cautioned against jumping to conclusions without ruling out medical causes and recommended divination or consulting reputable practitioners for diagnosis. On interacting with crystals, he advised mastering selection, cleansing, and programming of stones to imbue them with purpose, after which their applications are ‘just about infinite,’ including manifesting abundance and supporting healing.”

And, of course, he has a 2025 book titled Crystals for Psychic Self-Defense: 145 gemstones for banishing, binding, and magickal protection. There is a preview at Google Books.  

 

There also is a 2018 book by Ethan Lazzerini titled Psychic Protection Crystals: The modern guide to psychic self defence with crystals for empaths and highly sensitive people. He also has an article on August 12, 2019 titled 7 Crystals for Protection from Psychic Attack.

 

I think crystals are questionable even for healing. On October 4, 2009 I blogged about Crystal therapy for stage fright. And on February 5, 2017 I posted on Can turquoise and other crystals heal fear of public speaking? Also, on October 2, 2019 I blogged that Crystal healing is still questionable.

 

RationalWiki has an article on Crystal Healing and another on Crystal woo which has a section on Protection crystals. Wikipedia has an article on Crystal healing that includes pointing out:

 

“In 1999, researchers French and Williams conducted a study to investigate the power of crystals compared with a placebo. Eighty volunteers were asked to meditate with either a quartz crystal or a placebo stone, which was indistinguishable from quartz. Many participants reported feeling typical ‘crystal effects’; however, this was irrespective of whether the crystals were real or a placebo.”

 

There is an article by Steven Novella at Science-Based Medicine on September 18, 2019 titled Crystal Healing. He says:

 

“Crystal healing has many of the hallmarks of alternative medicine pseudoscience, and is just another manifestation of many common themes. It is a form of energy medicine. Proponents claim that different types of crystals either contain, amplify, attract, or repel different kinds of energy. Like energy medicine in general, we are not talking about any kind of real energy that can be identified or measured by physicists. This energy is not predicted by the standard model of particle physics, and don’t expect the Large Hadron Collider to find any force carrying particles related to crystal energy. There is no Higgs Boson of energy medicine.

The ‘energy’ referred to in energy medicine is purely metaphorical and mythical. Proponents generally claim that it is ‘spiritual’ energy, which is just a way of saying that the energy has no physical properties that can be detected, and is therefore outside the realm of scientific discovery. But at the same time they claim that this mysterious ‘energy’ can affect living things, which is the inherent contradiction at the core of this belief.

Invoking undetectable ‘energy’, without defining it in any testable way, as an explanation is a common tactic of pseudoscience. Types of energy medicine include straight chiropractic, Reiki, acupuncture, therapeutic touch, healing touch, and is a good fallback position for any other treatment lacking a plausible mechanism.

How do you know which kind of crystal to use for which problem you are having? You can find many guides, which use the typical CAM standard – ‘It can be used’, ‘Is often used’, or ‘Is known to’. That’s it. There is no supportive framework in theory or in evidence. This is the equivalent of parents saying, ‘Because I said so.’ What this illustrates is the human tendency to develop explanatory systems and elaborate on them. We are good at finding patterns and inventive at making stuff up. The history of pseudomedicine is full of such systems, complex and detailed, but ultimately based on nothing. These systems then take on a life of their own, they become culture, and then authoritative knowledge – but again, it is ultimately vaporware.

Some of the claims are based on another common theme in some alternative systems – the superstition of sympathetic magic. This is the intuition that something will have effects suggested by what it looks like. So walnuts must be good for the brain because they kind of look like a brain. One tradition of homeopathy is entirely based on sympathetic magic. Many traditional remedies make this connection as well.

In crystal healing, rose quartz ‘is commonly used for attracting and keeping love, as well as protecting relationships’. Of course it is – it’s pink, so it must be infused with the energy of love. Whereas, ‘Obsidian crystal stone also protects you from shadow traits — addiction, fear, anxiety, and anger– by acting as a mirror to your inner self.’ It’s black, so it must have to do with negative energy. This is metaphor, not reality.” 

An image of healing crystals came from Wikimedia Commons.