There are many angles to motivate reading this book, and mine is from a deep interest in HIV. The supermodel known simply as “Gia” was one of the first prominent women to die of AIDS-related complications, and she remains one of the best-explored IV drug users who died from AIDS. Of course, most of the world knows her as a model who quickly rose to the front pages of the world’s leading fashion magazines in…
Most of us think of witchcraft as a relic of a hyper-religious past. Most of us also don’t have detailed beliefs about the practice of killing witches in the name of beating the devil – other than it’s wrong. However, the authors make a compelling case that the persecution of “witches” in prior centuries was just patriarchy rearing its ugly head. Seventy percent of accused witches were women; the other thirty percent were often the…
Biographer Walter Isaacson is eminent among writers of American history. For America’s upcoming 250th anniversary of independence, he wrote this short essay memorializing the penning of the Declaration of Independence. In it, he picks apart each phrase of the first sentence to explore its meaning: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, and among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit…
Many contend that American politics is in a transition time from an old paradigm into something new, but few can divine what the future might hold. One of the social tensions is rhetoric between scarcity and abundance, and Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson wholeheartedly want to focus on ways that America can lead to abundance. They lay out an agenda for the political left, their natural conversational home, to reform itself so that they can…
This classic investigates the American frontier in the early 20th century. The protagonist Alexandra inherits a family farm in her youth. Even though the frontier seems rough and not a place for success, she decides to stick with it. Sixteen years later, she has grown a life of material riches, yet her personal life is somewhat insulated. She is lonely amidst all the financial prosperity. The world around her is divided by ethnic groups of…
If you’re looking to cry in empathy with an author’s grief and hardships yet sense an undercurrent of hope, this memoir might be the book for you. Jonathan Tepper grew up as a missionary kid in Madrid, Spain. His parents tried to “save” people for heaven in a new church, but failed. Then they pivoted their ministry to help people overcome heroin addiction, and they slowly grew a church and social service. However, the HIV/AIDS…
We know enough about the physics of earth and the universe to be able to predict what’d happen in absurd situations, like a neuron star hitting the earth, flying a plane on Uranus, or experiencing a Richter magnitude -2 earthquake. Of course, we don’t talk about it because most of us aren’t physics geeks. Fortunately, Randall Munroe is, and he has a great sense of humor dealing with the absurd. He runs an online blog…
Kalista is a medal-winning runner training for her third Olympics when she discovers that her father is dying. She and her fiancé/business partner are in the middle of building a business, but amidst all the distractions, she realizes that her father deserves her attention most. In so doing, she rekindles childhood memories and reassesses what she values in life. As a short story, the script ends with most of those storylines still open and unresolved,…
Jira is becoming a leading tool for project management at larger businesses, and using it is a skill required for many jobs. This book teaches you how to master Jira processes to manage projects under Agile or Scrum paradigms. Half of this book focuses on Confluence software, which my workplace does not use. Therefore, half of the book was irrelevant to me. However, the Jira sections gave me a formal training that I lacked. It…
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a process in artificial intelligence (AI) where specific documents can be consulted to provide an answer. It provides a way for individual groups to customize a bot for their internal uses. For example, a company can provide business policies specific to their own organization. Or healthcare firms can provide literature up to date with their own fields, not just the latest AI build of the foundation model. Frankly, this topic confused…