Radishes and pomegranates

A delightful colleague and writer spoke last week about the different types of writing she does. Scholarly writing, long and deep, layered and expertly crafted. Like slow food from a Michelin chef. Then there are the journalistic pieces, like my op-eds, quickly written for a place and time. Fast food! 

But it is her description of the third space she writes in that I enjoyed. (For her it is long form fiction, for me, my essays and reflections.) It's like a cookbook that you bought to look at the recipes, she said. You cook only one or two of them. But it gives you ideas that simmer. And one day you may say to yourself, "perhaps radishes and pomegranates might work well together. And you try it."

Scrabble and Lenten penances? Will they go together? Read it and see!

So what kind of writing is the blog? In my household we call a meal put together from leftovers in the fridge “scrounge.”  When there's not enough meatloaf for a sandwich, or just a couple of spoonfuls of soup, there's what you can scrounge. Here are the bits and pieces that might or might not make a whole…essay, reflection, thing? And sometimes I scrounge around in this space, like the fridge, to see what I might put together into a whole.

And do radishes pair well with pomegranates? According to The Art and Science of Foodpairing they just might. They have similar aroma profiles: fruity, green and vegetable notes.

Prayers for Pope Francis

 

Pope Francis is very ill and he has asked for our prayers. I am praying for him, for his consolation and his recovery, but I’ve also wondered if we also should be praying for him, that is, for all those he prays for. To take on some of the burden of caring for those on the margins so that he might rest.

So I pray…

For Pope Francis
For all those struggling to breathe
For those who cannot afford medical care
For those laboring in brutal conditions
For those who are starving
For those without access to clean water
For those exhausted by caregiving
For those who have lost their jobs
For those fleeing war and economic disruption
For those denied their human dignity
For those...

Let us pray...

Keep us attentive to the needs of all

There are times when the second half of the Eucharistic Prayer just pours over my head, cascading off the altar, flowing down the aisle. Sometimes it murmurs in my ear, soothing, calming, a burbling fountain in a hidden courtyard. Other times, I regret to say, the grocery list starts jittering. Remember to get eggs and lettuce at Acme after Mass.

Then there are the moments when I really hear the words, battering at my defenses, badgering me long after we have been sent out the door. Ite, missa est? Not so much. We may have been dismissed, but I can’t so easily dismiss what I have heard.

Last weekend, the pastor used one of the Eucharistic Prayers for “various needs” (EP VN 3). Given the current political situation, and the insistence of some that Christian faith does not demand that we have a care for those beyond our immediate circle, those we love and those who love us back, these words struck home:

"Grant that all the faithful of the Church, looking into the signs of the times by the light of faith, may constantly devote themselves to the service of the Gospel.

Keep us attentive to the needs of all that, sharing their grief and pain, their joy and hope, we may faithfully bring them the good news of salvation and go forward with them along the way of your Kingdom."

It’s a potent examination of conscience. Made with the body of Christ right there on the altar in front of us. Can I — can we — constantly devote ourselves to the service of the Gospel in these times? Where are the signs pointing out the needs of the world? What do they say? How are we being attentive to the needs of all? Without exception. Do we think about their grief and pain? Do we share their hopes? Are we willing to walk with them?

I used this snippet of the prayer as the closing prayer for a celebration of the Liturgy of the Word last week, and as we creep toward Lent, I am thinking that I should let this prayer shape my Lenten discipline.

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Aside: I wondered how VP Vance reconciles the Gospel today, where Luke recounts Jesus’ command to love your enemies, to give more than the bare minimum to those in need with his version of  the “ordo amoris” a preferential option for those you love. Then I thought of the part of the Gospel which says I will be judged by the measure I judge others by…

Other weighty matters

I’ve been writing weighty stuff of late. A piece for Nature Chemistry about the literal stardust that sprinkles the earth every year (10 million kilograms of it). An op-ed on metaphorically weighty matters, what gutting NIH funding might mean for people’s health, from my perspective of a patient who has benefited from fundamental research begun at the NIH. 

It’s 1.5 ounces of mass that’s been almost as much a miracle as the medication I take. A hexagonal weight that slides onto a $0.79 Bic pen. And with it, like magic, I can write a grocery list, scribble a thought down on a sticky note, jot notes on a journal article I am reading. Write a short letter to a friend. I suspect I can write comments on students’ papers again, though on a sabbatical leave this year I haven’t tried. 

Like the new found joy of folding my socks, I imagine that I will be excited about grading again. Who knew?

I feel a bit like Disney’s version of Cinderella. A fairy godmother has waved her wand and turned a pumpkin of a pen into something that can take me to the ball. I love my Japanese gel pens and my fountain pens, but I love more being able to make my mark on a sheet of paper.  And it may be that metaphorical midnight might come — and poof! — this hack will cease to work. But for now, the physical therapy fairy’s magic still holds sway.

Elon's Fermi problem

Elon Musk posted a table on X claiming that enormous numbers of social security payments are being made fraudulently, as much as 83%. That seemed...excessive. I teach my students Enrico Fermi's technique for getting quick estimates, good enough numbers to help direct you toward a more accurate solution. Also great for detecting bullshit. Let's see how it works for Elon's claim!

One way to estimate roughly the number of social security recipients is to say everyone in the US over 65 collects it.  (Not true, but Fermi's approach says look at the big effects.)  In 2023 that was 59.2 million people. The Social Security Administration says that the average annual payment is $24,000. So that means we should pay out 59,200,000 x $24,000 a year. That's about $1.4 trillion. What did Social Security pay out in 2023? Its total budget was...wait for it..about $1.4 trillion. Just what you'd expect. So, BS, Elon.

This may be the biggest fraud ever, but I don't think the payments are the problem.

Reality check

I have an op-ed coming out in tomorrow's Philadelphia Inquirer that covers some of this ground. It's up online here.

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Last night I did something I hadn't done in almost two years. I made lasagna for dinner. I used the recipe I reverse engineered from my favorite restaurant in Albano Laziale.  That's nice, I hear you thinking, glad it is back in your rotation. What I want to say back is, "nice? nice? It's a miracle." 

The lasagna is that good? Well, it is, but it's the preparation that's the miracle, or rather that I can undertake it. 

I use a homemade tomato sauce, which requires dicing onions and mincing garlic and opening cans of San Marzano tomatoes. I brown Italian sausage. Grate Parmesan. Hand knead dough for fresh pasta. And make béchamel sauce, which means briskly stirring to emulsify the sauce. From start to sitting down at the table it takes about four and half hours.

But recently I couldn't: dice things, open those cans, break up the sausage in the pan, knead the dough or stir the sauce to emulsify it. Some tasks on that list were merely very difficult (dicing was glacially slow) and some were just impossible. Stirring that sauce.

It was a bit like the frog dropped in a pot of cold water, slowly being heated. Things almost imperceptibly got difficult. My handwriting got smaller. Writing on the blackboard for an hour got harder. Then it was a problem to get through an entire problem. It became tough to cut a sandwich in half. Folding my socks was a challenge. So was tying my shoes. And stirring. I couldn't make a quick pan sauce. (I know, I know, first world problems.) Then it was folding flour in to make a cake (more first world problems.) Then it was stirring my tea. That was a problem. I was in hot water.

Like that frog, for the longest while I kept adapting, or at least not noticing. Adapting my wardrobe, choosing blouses that did not need buttoning (or ironing, yep, I still iron stuff). Adapting my approach to research, dictating more, typing less. Not noticing that I wasn't making lasagna on a winter Sunday afternoon. Or choosing to have yogurt for lunch instead of a sandwich. 

This is not a bid for sympathy. It's a grounding in reality, in what can be at stake in scientific research that on the surface seems quirky (lizard saliva or getting a tranquilized rabbit's ears to perk up) or esoteric (using singular value decomposition to help assign atomic charges to atoms in a molecule.²) Or that is supported by the government, or was done by someone in the US from another country. 

Some of that research can be life changing. (Both the lizard saliva and the pop-up bunny ears research was.¹) And some of it will not be. We try as researchers to follow trails that will be productive, but not every line will lead to immediate results, some will not lead to results at all. We are exploring the universe, not following well-trod paths to known destinations.  There will be dead-ends. This is not fraud or waste. It's how research works.

The drug I take, that allows me to dice onions and emulsify a sauce, that makes it possible to care for myself and continue to work was developed in part by a scientist here on a visa at the NIH. The reality is that without it, I would be disabled and unemployed. Thanks to NIH funding (and medical insurance), I have access to a life-altering therapy. It's not a cure, but it is a miracle. Other people deserve their miracles, too. 

But Trump and Musk cry, "Fraud! Waste!" and say the NIH is a disaster. Their cuts to indirect costs will save each household less than the cost of 2 months of Netflix (about $30), and cost some people their lives. 

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1. A study on lizard saliva led to Ozempic, the bunny ears to a Nobel prize. Rabbits that had had Parkinsonism induced chemically had their droopy ears almost instantly perk-up when L-DOPA was administered. L-DOPA is still the gold standard for relieving many of the motor symptoms of Parkinson's. And as miraculous as it is, it is not perfect, so I am still rather personally invested in ongoing research.

2. That bit about singular value decomposition and charges might seem esoteric, but is my work and is used today in in silico drug design, including therapies for Parkinson's. 

Photo is of an earlier lasagna, circa 2022.

O Cecilia!

 

I was working on a reflection for this coming November 22, the feast of St. Cecilia, for Give Us This Day. (I generally have my feet in two different parts of the liturgical year. Right now, it's Ordinary Time and Lent. Which sometimes gives me double vision.) 

As I do when I start these reflections, I noodled

around. I read the scriptures for the day (and for the days on either side). I read some commentary. And about Cecilia,"of whom almost nothing is known for certain" (according to the Oxford Dictionary of the Saints I pulled from the shelf).

There was poetry, there was polyphony (Arvo Pärt's lush Cecilia, vergine romana.) And there was Simon and Garfunkel.

Oh, Cecilia, I'm down on my knees
I'm begging you please...

This last was an earworm (and might or might not have anything to do with St. Cecilia). Try as I might I could not banish it. Begging St. Cecilia for her intercession didn't work either. And surely this wasn't going to be a helpful earworm? Argh. I'm down on my knees...

Earworm or not, I needed to write. And write I did, Oh, Cecilia...

Simon and Garfunkel's ode to Cecilia (whoever she may be), opens with a thumping percussion. As I discovered when I was trying to figure out if the composition had anything to do with St. Cecilia, they were messing around one night and beat out this rhythm on a piano bench, recorded it and used the sample to open Cecilia. So perhaps that's where this line in the reflection came from? "I felt the pew shiver under my hands ..." God knows.

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The photo is of the mug of the day. St. Ignatius and his hot beverage hanging out on my bookshelf. Not shown, my Jerome commentary on the shelf below.

For the record, Cecilia is once again stuck in my head. Apologies if I have stuck it in yours.

Just google "ordo amoris"

 

"Just google 'ordo amoris'," suggested VP Vance on 30 January 2025, defending his remarks earlier about who we are obliged to help:

JD VANCE: There is a Christian concept that you love your family and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens, and then after that, prioritize the rest of the world... 

Apparently Pope Francis did. Or rather he used his common sense and dug into the Gospels and the deposit of Catholic social teaching that draws upon them.

"Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups. In other words: the human person is not a mere individual, relatively expansive, with some philanthropic feelings! The human person is a subject with dignity who, through the constitutive relationship with all, especially with the poorest, can gradually mature in his identity and vocation. The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the “Good Samaritan” (cf. Lk 10:25-37), that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception." — Pope Francis in a letter to the Bishops of the United States, 11 February 2025

The whole letter is here.

Writing in isolation

I had two pieces of writing due in the last week. And...I lost a day to a medical procedure that turned me into a vampire, cowering in the sunlight. So I was feeling a bit pressured. Whoosh - one piece went off last Sunday (though I still have the earworm it gave me). The next piece needed more than a bit of wrangling. So much stuff I could say, but a firm word limit. So many tangled lines in the narrative, but in a short piece you can't have too many threads. And I was tired (vampiring is tiring, I discovered, is that why they are so pale?). 

Every time I got to work, I was interrupted. Math Man wanted some advice about floating point numbers and high precision calculations. A Girl Scout was at the door with cookies (I bought Crash some Thin Mints). Egads - that meeting! A colleague with good news. A colleague with challenges. Time to get online to give that talk. Each interruption took time to recover from, to recapture where I was. I felt like I was trying to untangle a skein of yarn, forced to stuff it back in the bag every few minutes, where it gathered more tangles. I was...frustrated. Also grumpy (sorry, Math Man!). 

This photograph turned up in one feed or another. It is an Isolator, invented by Hugo Gernsback (the founding editor of Amazing Stories and the Hugo for which the Hugo Awards are named). The article introducing this gadget in 1925 (it was the cover article for Science and Invention!) notes that it blocks out 90% of distractions (relative to what it doesn't say). The user found that after about 15 minutes under the hood things got stuffy, hence the oxygen tank, which the author said was found to "liven the subject considerably." 

The article also gave a design for an isolated office, which looked far more conducive to working than that helmet. All I might add would be a bar on the door.

I did get both pieces written and dispatched, without recourse to a isolating helmet. I just firmly closed the door to my office. (Though post-procedure the  helmet might have been welcome. No light!)