Reading, Writing, and Sourdough

Rye flour has different chemistry and a whole lot less gluten than wheat flour so it is difficult to get it either to rise or to cook through. This Rye and Oat bread made with freshly milled rye flour and oat flour milled from oat groats was never kneaded. I mixed the flour with water, honey, salt, and my rye starter according to the Breadtopia formula , added some oat groats I cracked in my new mortar and pestle and then baked a lot longer than the recipe suggested: ninety minutes in a covered Pullman pan. After coming from the oven, rye breads need to continue to release moisture or their innards will be gummy and I let this one sit untouched for 36 hours and it was still super moist in the interior. The upside is that rye bread is generally very sour, dense enough to cut into very thin slices, sweet like molasses,  resists staling for more than a week, and when toasted produces a crackly exterior, soft interior, and deepened sweetness that pairs with any topping of cheese or canned

 Place this book in the category of Who-like cries ( Horton Hears a Who,  Dr. Seuss) from fly-over country: "We are here. We are here." Like Tara Westover's Educated  and J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy , Regan's Burn the Place  is a coming of age story for an alcoholic child of a dysfunctional family. And like Westover and Vance, she succeeds against odds that seem unfairly stacked against her: untreated mental health issues, growing up lesbian (and perhaps trans) in religious, rural Indiana, discordant parents, and excessive self-medication with drugs, alcohol, and sex.  Regan's recounting of childhood, puberty, and early adulthood are presented with bare-faced honesty and without polish. Burn the Place  is not crafted as a morality tale like other books of the genre. Rather, pluck and luck seem to be Regan's saving graces. She might just have easily ended up dead in a drunken car crash. Instead of dying, she hones a life based on an intrinsic understanding

A super provocative book, written by a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, that is a surprisingly poor read. Gellman was one of three reporters to receive the information Edward Snowden stole from the National Security Administration and dumped in their laps on his way out of the United States. To explain their significance, Gellman describes how much  digital surveillance the United States is capable of. By extension it is evident that rogue hackers and other countries around the world (Russia, North Korea, Iran, Israel, China) are waging vicious and secret attacks upon one another's computer systems. So if you begin with the premise that every computer system, and hence every office, school, home, military, weapons system, electrical grid, medical facility, communications network, transportation system, etc., is vulnerable, you can recognize how high the stakes are. Gellman than explains that spycraft in the digital age is simply updated, and highly technological, cloning of old f

 The newbie in the Ottawa police force for investigating cold case is Kala Stonechild, a First Nations policewoman recently transferred from the far north of Canada. Learning more about her troubled background, and by extension, Canada's injustices toward its indigenous people, is the draw for the mystery, but it fails to deliver. The mystery of who killed an unlikeable business tycoon includes only ordinary suspects: shady office partners homing in on big payoffs and spurned family members.  Stonechild is smart and brooding, but not much deeper than that and you know from the beginning she is the one person likely to break open the case. To an American reader the one (unintentionally) funny part of the book is the supposed hazing Stonechild receives from the boys club of detectives she is forced to join. Because they are all Canadian, to my ears, they are all incredibly pleasant. The worst offenses directed at her  consist of failing to apologize if they are interrupted by a phone

Amos Tversky and Danny Kahnemann, were a pair of exceptionally brilliant Israeli thinkers, who forged a friendship and academic partnership that led to the invention of behavioral economics and a Nobel Prize. Before the pair started questioning, and then testing, centuries-old dogma about economic behavior, the fundamental assumption by economists was that all humans acted out of self interest. People maximized gain, prioritized happiness, avoided pain, weighed benefits against costs, and made decisions with the best odds for the most advantage. Only, Tversky and Kahneman when they gave people a variety of choices whose outcomes were mathematically proven to have a better and worse outcome, discovered that a surprising number of people made the wrong decision. Not just ordinary people made mistakes; even statisticians with PhDs who should have known better could be induced to select a path that was demonstrably worse than a clearly correct answer. For example, a terminally ill patient