PicoBlog

Eggplants are a pretty common ingredient for me but what I learned this week will completely change how I buy them in the future. A few days ago, I bought two eggplants and planned to make burnt eggplant tehina and baba-ganoush. When I cut open the eggplants though, I was surprised to find that there were hundreds of seeds inside. Not something you want when you’re going for a smooth, creamy texture!

If you’re a reader of mine, odds are that you’re exasperated — maybe enraged — by America’s endless parade of gun deaths. And when other countries have had mass shootings, they’ve acted rapidly: It took New Zealand just 26 days after the Christchurch massacre to reform its gun laws. We can do better, and I’m a firm believer that the only way to make progress is for us to talk to each other — in a civil way — and listen as well.

This is the question that drew me to psychiatry in the first place. What interested me most was not what people did but why they did it. What I have learned along the way is that there is so much that we get wrong about others. All too often, in an attempt to make sense of someone else’s behavior, we jump to conclusions about their “true self.” Using a few breadcrumbs of information, we are quick to make assumptions and attribute their behavior to a fixed aspect of their personality.

Welcome to OnGrowth&, a monthly newsletter on career growth and personal growth 🌱🚀 Do you ever second-guess yourself? That constant hesitation, the crippling self doubt, and the nagging voice wondering if you’ll make it, if you’re enough, or if you deserve to take up space in that job, opportunity, relationship, friendship, etc. ? I do did. Considering that I’m generally a confident person, it felt a bit odd to come to terms with this fog in my mind.

TL;DR: take the photo from a tripod, with a flash, during golden hour, with a nice background, while wearing a suit. Pick the highest scoring photo via Photofeeler. Keep reading for the long answer. The internet is full of memes about how bad male dating photos are. But how does one do better? Ask your female friends to take your photo? Hire a professional photographer? Attend events in the hopes of someone taking a candid shot?

I think one of the more useful things we do in this subreddit is help people find the right words to describe things. So I decided now would be a good time to write a guide explaining what exactly a loafer is, and then explaining the categories of loafers. I'm going to explain this in simple terms, partly because I don't know all the technical terms that might be relevant here.

If you’ve been a parent in the 21st century, you’re likely familiar with the work of Mo Willems, the enormously gifted author of children’s storybooks like Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! and the Knuffle Bunny and Elephant & Piggie series. Willems’ books are often infectiously silly—my girls would both scream “NO PIGEON!” at the top of their lungs to keep that pesky pigeon from getting behind the wheel—and sometimes impart simple life lessons, as when Elephant pauses to consider sharing his ice cream with Piggie because he imagines his best friend might need some cheering up.

Some of you may have noticed that today’s newsletter is a little late, and that’s because I needed some time to report this one out. I’ve been angry and heartbroken since the video of Tyre Nichols’s murder was released on Friday, and over the weekend, I talked to both my kids about what happened. The conversation was hard for many reasons, but as I’ve written here before (and in my book), it’s crucial that we talk to kids about racism and oppression and everything that happens in the world because of it.

When I first started my teaching career in 1988 the language arts curriculum was one page long. That one page covered reading, writing, listening, and speaking for all grades K-5. So, how did I figure out what to actually teach and how to go about doing it? Much of what I did for writing instruction was based on my early training in special education and “task analysis” and I’ve used it ever since.