PicoBlog

Amy Lutz’s new book Chasing the Intact Mind has, for me, an essential and rare quality: it made me feel less crazy. Its subtitle, How the Severely Autistic and Intellectually Disabled Were Excluded from the Debates That Affect Them Most, places it directly in my wheelhouse, expressing the concept of the gentrification of disability concisely. Lutz is a scholar who studies issues of disability and related policies, and she’s been on this corner for a long time; not coincidentally, she is also mother to a profoundly autistic son.

It’s not every week that someone with my particular employment profile and expertise has something they’re knowledgable about become a hot topic of national discussion, but the release of OpenAI’s, ChatGPT interface generated a sudden flurry of discussion about how we teach students to write in school, which is something I know a lot about. I’m never sure how much overlap there is for the various audiences that consist of the John Warner Writer Experience Universe, but while to folks here I am, “The Biblioracle,” book recommender par excellence, to a whole other group I am the author of Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities, and The Writer’s Practice: Building Confidence in Your Nonfiction Writing, and a blogger about education issues at Inside Higher Ed.

Google’s Bard and Microsoft’s Bing are new AI chatbots competing with ChatGPT. I’ve been testing them on a variety of research questions. Bottom line: ChatGPT is the most useful AI bot. It’s versatile, thorough, and more accurate than Bard. Bing’s AI bot is a close second. It’s unique among these AI bots in providing links to sources related to its answers. Bard is the weakest of the bunch. Its answers were the least reliable, though all of the bots misled me at times.

Art Dogs is a weekly dispatch introducing the pets—dogs, yes!, but also cats, lizards, marmosets, and more—that were kept by our favorite artists. Subscribe to receive these weekly posts in your email inbox. Chavela Vargas is one of the most influential voices in the history of Latin American music. She sang, and reimagined, boleros and rancheras—two genres traditionally performed by men. She transformed iconic songs by dispensing with mariachis and instead singing “from her gut,” to reveal the desolation that lived within the festive music.

Thank you for spending part of your day with Michael’s Record Collection. Today I thought I’d comment on a show I saw recently from a band I’ve been enjoying since the late 1970s, who played at a brand new concert venue in Clearwater, Florida. Before getting into today’s story, I wanted to share some thoughts on how vital music can be. I spent last weekend with family, traveling from my home in the Orlando suburb of Sanford, Florida, to Charlotte, North Carolina.

Do you remember when the NFL “broke” Patrick Mahomes? You may not, because that sort of foolish talk only lasted for a few short weeks in 2021. To take a brief trip down memory lane, teams started playing highly conservative shells against Mahomes and the Chiefs, taking away the deep shots they’d favored for years in their offense. Defenses combined this with a refusal to blitz and provide Mahomes with openings in the secondary.

There are a handful of ingredients in my kitchen that fall into the category of pantry powerhouses—adding big, bold flavor with just a spoonful, drizzle, or pour—fish sauce, tomato paste, harissa, sambal, Better Than Bouillon, doenjang, and of course, preserved lemons. The latter is the key to my quick, cheat lemon pickle, or achaar. Usually lemon achaar needs to be cured for up to 4 weeks, but this version takes a helping hand from already preserved lemons, resulting in a zippy-zangy achaar in just 24 hours.

Aside from the 100,000 deaths and the political failures that led us to them, one of the most infuriating parts of the coronavirus crisis has been the reaction of “I am very intelligent” political commentator types to new ideas. Time after time when a new suggestion to improve our Covid response is made, these types revert to scrambling for reasons why it just can’t be done. 24 hour vaccinations? “No-one would be interested in an appointment at 2am”

Click here for the WTC recipe index, and scroll to the bottom of this post for a printer-friendly version of today’s recipe. Happy Thanksgiving week! Living in California — way across the country from our families in North Carolina — has meant nine years of totally different Thanksgivings. Our only Thanksgiving tradition is having no Thanksgiving tradition. We are turkey nomads; wherever we are invited, that is where we end up!