Xochi Balfour changed her life from her little London kitchen and, as The Naturalista , has been blogging about her experience of balancing and simplifing her life in harmony with the natural world. Without recourse to expensive ingredients, all-consuming cleanses or dramatic diets, Xochi has taken the principles of naturopathy and created a way of life, from a gentler way of eating to simple beauty recipes as well as bringing relaxation and mindfulness into your everyday routine. Her food is gluten- and dairy-free and predominantly plant based, but straightforward and delicious, her skincare recipes can also be made from kitchen ingredients and her techniques for everyday mindfulness can be fitted into the busiest of lives. Her recipes include power balls and energy bars, raw chocolate, sea salt and pistachio fudge, cornershop turmeric and coconut dahl and beetroot falafel as well as a gluten-free carrot and flax bread. For your body, there is a rosewater facial spray, passionfruit and papaya face mask and lavender and shea butter body lotion, while for your home, Xochi will show you the benefits of barefoot earthing and how to make your own incense. This is truly a bright and beautiful guide to natural living in the modern age.
Xochi Balfour changed her life from her little London kitchen and, as The Naturalista, has been blogging about her experience of balancing and simplifing her life in harmony with the natural world. Without recourse to expensive ingredients, all-consuming cleanses or dramatic diets, Xochi has taken the principles of naturopathy and created a way of life, from a gentler way of eating to simple beauty recipes as well as bringing relaxation and mindfulness into your everyday routine.
ils:.b14891402|Book|Books||English|Headline,|2016.|255 pages : color illustrations ; 25 cm.


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Home » Central Asia
Who were the Scythians? Central Asian history
Central Asia, History
By Karen Carr|2018-04-24T11:39:59-07:00September 14th, 2017|Central Asia, History|
Scythian history: A Scythian milking a sheep (Tolstaja Mogila kurgan, Ukraine, 400 BC) Scythians lived in Central Asia The Scythians were a large group of loosely connected people who lived in Russia. They also lived further south around the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. Like the Hittites, the Greeks and the Germans, they were Indo-Europeans. Powerful in the Iron Age We [...]
Scythian art history – Central Asian art
Art, Central Asia
By Karen Carr|2018-04-25T23:25:31-07:00September 11th, 2017|Art, Central Asia|
Scythian deer from about 700-500 B.C. It is made out of gold, and it's now in St. Petersburg. The Scythians were horse-riding nomads, who traveled around the western part of Central Asia taking care of their big herds of cattle and hunting wild animals like this deer. Scythian art was mostly small, so people could carry it around conveniently. For [...]
Late Middle Ages timeline – 1100-1500 AD
Central Asia, History, When
By Karen Carr|2018-04-09T10:31:17-07:00September 10th, 2017|Central Asia, History, When|
The Mongol court (1200s AD) After the warming trend of 1000 AD came a colder period around 1300 AD called the Little Ice Age. Again, people felt the effects around the world. In Central Asia, the Mongols rose to power in the late 1200s AD. They conquered China, Russia, northern India, and most of the Islamic Empire and united them into one huge [...]
Late Bronze Age timeline: 2000 – 1000 BC
Earliest known spoked wheels, from a grave in western Siberia When about 2000 BC the Central Asians invented better wheels with spokes, so you could fight from your chariot, a new wave of Indo-Europeans moved from Central Asia west to Greece, and Italy, or south into Egypt and Iran, and from Iran about 1500 BC to India. Some of [...]
Bronze Age timeline: 4000-2000 BC
A Bronze Age clay pot with a drawing of a wheeled cart from what is now Poland, about 3500 BC Cities, kings and empires Around 4000 BC, there were enough people in West Asia, Egypt, China, and Peru for them to live in small cities (about 10,000-50,000 people). These places began to choose kings to govern them. Then they formed the [...]
Steel history – medieval to modern steel
Central Asia, Science
By Karen Carr|2018-09-10T06:07:42-07:00September 7th, 2017|Central Asia, Science|
Steel history: a Safavid steel helmet (Iran, 1500s AD) Medieval steel from India and Iran The wars after the collapse of the Mongol Empire in the 1300s stopped steel production in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. But metal-workers kept on making high quality crucible steel in India and Iran under the Pandyas, the Mughals, and the Safavid Empire. The wars also made it hard [...]
What was smallpox? History of disease
A baby with smallpox (from the CDC) Smallpox was a very serious disease caused by a virus. Many people died of it. Smallpox caused little bumps on your skin, like chickenpox but much more serious. About two to five of every ten people who got smallpox died of it. There was (and is still) [...]
What is opium? World history of medicine and drugs
Opium poppy flower Opium comes from a kind of poppy flower. It evolved around 100 million years ago in West Asia and Central Asia. People probably realized as soon as they got to West Asia, about 60,000 years ago, that you could use opium as a medicine. By 6000 BC, in the Stone Age, West Asian farmers were already growing opium in their [...]
Wheel and axle – Simple machines – Physics
Central Asia, Physics
By Karen Carr|2019-04-26T07:02:19-07:00August 17th, 2017|Central Asia, Physics|
An Egyptian potter uses a pottery wheel, about 2000 BC. He uses his hand to spin the wheel. Wheels do not exist in nature, and no animals use them except people (though some animals do use gears, which are a special kind of wheel). People didn't use wheels until the Neolithic, about 10,000 [...]
The Yamnaya and the Indo-European language family
By Karen Carr|2018-04-21T13:20:00-07:00July 27th, 2017|Central Asia, History|
Yamnaya get around: Map of the spread of Indo-European languages Who were the Yamnaya? People we call the Yamnaya (Ukrainian for "People who lived in pits") seem to have been speaking an early version of the Indo-European language at least as early as 5000 BC in the area between the Black Sea and the Caspian [...]

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — A teen who became the first patient at a Kansas City hospital to walk while on life support has spent more than a year pushing the boundaries of her recovery from unexplained lung failure, and now she's finally ready to return home.
Zei Uwadia left Children's Mercy Hospital on Thursday to continue recovering at her home in Wichita, Kansas, the Kansas City Star reported.
Uwadia, who turned 17 on Friday, inspired thousands of people who watched YouTube videos of her walking down the hospital's halls while on extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO), an invasive form of life support. The large machine would pump blood out of her heart, remove carbon dioxide, add oxygen and then pump blood back in, a process that allowed her lungs to rest.
Doctors still don't know what caused Uwadia's lungs to fail, but she's no longer on ECMO. The machine helped keep Uwadia alive for 6 months, which is double the amount of time any patient at Children's Mercy has been on the machine before her.
Uwadia now uses oxygen tanks and a tracheostomy — a tube in her neck that helps her breathe.
Her doctors were hesitant to allow her to return home. Usually, patients should rely on machines for only 30 percent of the work to breathe before they're discharged. Uwadia is still 40 percent reliant.
But Uwadia pushed for her release and medical staff worked on a discharge plan that required her to return to the hospital every three weeks for outpatient care.
Her family is grateful for the hospital staff's care, but said they're ready to be home.
"They've saved her life, and I feel like there's no medication at this time that could supplant the benefits of home for her spirit," said Uwadia's mom, Brie Kerschen.


Le Chameau started off making rubber boots such as the Le Chameau Chasseur Boots 80 years ago. The attention to detail and quality has meant that the Le Chameau name is synonymous with excellence. As well as incredibly hardwearing, Le Chameau Boots are both comfortable and stylish, ideal for wearing on days out in the country, shooting, fishing or partaking in all manner of countryside pursuits.


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Home > Leadership Training
Training and research are the capstones of the Cornerstone Leadership Institute (CLI), founded in 2017 as a placeholder and repository for the extant research of Ken Gërhart – who at the time was pursuing a Master of Strategic Leadership. Whether you are an entrepreneur or executive seeking to improve your personal leadership quotient through our individual coaching program or a manager looking for leadership development of your team, the CLI has the leadership program for you. Non-profits can equally benefit from our training programs. Due to their modular format, these leadership programs can be tailored to meet the needs and budget of each individual client or organization.
Leadership Training. The CLI offers leadership training for groups as well as on the individual coaching level. The topics include the leadership basics of vision casting, critical thinking, strategy development, team dynamics, work-life balance, and effective communication. Other more focused programs explore leading innovation, developing talent and empowering people, inspiring collaboration, mastering the distinction between management and leadership, and leveraging an improved leadership quotient for better decision making. Local, regional, national, and global economic development are overarching conduits through which much of this leadership training flows.
Leadership Research. The CLI is engaged on the cutting edge of academic research through the extant effort of the staff. Each of our senior fellows and research fellows are pursuing their respective research interests both in praxis and theoretical research. Many of our staff are affiliated with universities and other academic institutions around the global as professors and adjunct professors. Follow the links after each staff member bio to learn more about their specific research interests.
Editing & Writing Coaches. Many of the CLI executive team and other senior leadership are engaged as editors for hire for any number of projects - including but not limited to, doctoral dissertations, peer-reviewed journal articles, popular press publications, book chapters, and books. Our coaches typically use a three-tiered editing model whereby the heavy lift is accomplished in the first tier, a lighter review is done in the second tier, and a final punch-list is completed in the third tier. This model ensures a thorough review process and tightens the editing task over an iterative process.
Team Members. The CLI team members are among the best and brightest rising stars in the leadership industry, academics, and international consulting ranks. With seasoned leadership at the helm, the CLI is actively recruiting Senior Fellows, Research Fellows, and Interns with the goal of creating a fully staffed stable of academic racehorses who can respond to and deploy on short notice to opportunities at any point on the globe. Our vision is to have 200 doctoral level or otherwise terminal degreed staff on board by 2030, setting a vigorous on-boarding pace of more than two per month for the next decade.
Ken Gërhart, MSL. Ken Gërhart is the co-founder - along with his wife, Barbara, and executive director of the CLI, a unit of The Cornerstone Group international, which he founded in 1990. His responsibilities include vision casting and alignment, strategic planning and execution, and building bridges to other resources across the globe. Mr. Gërhart is a Christ-follower, ordained minister of the Gospel, AmPro Certified Racquetball Instructor and International Official, serial entrepreneur, and a PhD student in Organizational Leadership with a focus in Theology at Regent University. After 38 years as an investment banker specializing in strategic planning and corporate finance, Mr. Gërhart is now transitioning to a teaching and writing second career. With two-years of national championship football at Texas A&I University, a 1976 European Tour, and a two-time induction into the Javelina Hall of fame behind him, he earned his BA in Political Science and Sociology from Texas Tech University; multiple certifications, including: (a) Public/Private Partnerships in Real Estate Development Finance from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, (b) Advanced Negotiation Training from the city of Dallas Legal Department, (c) Advanced Financial Statement Analysis from the American Bankers Association, and (d) Excel for the Advanced User: Level III from the KISD continuing Education Department; as well as his MSL in Strategic Leadership from LeTourneau University - graduating with highest honors. Originally from Houston, Mr. Gërhart and his wife – who are empty- nesters, now live on and operate the Broken Tree Ranch, a working cow-calf operation in Caldwell County Texas. Mr. Gërhart is a 6th generation Texan and his grandchildren are 4th generation legacy students and graduates of Klein High School in the greater Houston Metro Area.
Mr. Gërhart has presented at numerous international academic conferences, published eight academic articles in his master's program, currently has two peer-reviewed articles in press, and two dozen or so more in the queue. His particular research interest is developing an overarching theology of leadership under which a metal-model is emerging where a comprehensive 12-point taxonomy can be codified. Click here for more information about this emerging area of leadership research and an anthology of Ken's publications. Contact Ken at: kgerhart@cornerstonefmc.com
Debra J. Dean, PhD. – Senior Fellow. Dr. Dean joined the CLI in July 2019 and serves in a key role in the institute. Her experience as a consultant and executive coach is invaluable. She is also an adjunct professor with Regent University where she teaches Quantitative Research Methods, Descriptive Analytics, and Leadership Analytics. In November 2018 she departed from her 20+ years in corporate America where her most recent position was Director of Business Transformation.
Dr. Dean's latest notable conference participation includes OPEX Week: Business Transformation World Summit, The Faith at Work Summit, Academy of Management MSR Consortium Planning, Academic Oasis, and the Regent University Roundtable. Dr. Dean's most recent research efforts include the following: (a) Integration of Christian Values in the Workplace: An examination of employee engagement, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment, (b) Religion and Spirituality in the Workplace: A quantitative evaluation of job satisfaction and organizational commitment, and (c) A Correlation Study of Employee Engagement and Servant Leadership. She also contributed to the Routledge Companion to Management and Workplace Spirituality.
Consequent to her exceptional performance, Dr. Dean received the 2018 Outstanding Reviewer award for the Management, Spirituality, and Religion (MSR) community; she was also nominated both as one of three top operational excellence leaders with OPEX, and as a top female leader within her previous global workplace. Her efforts also raised employee engagement in a multinational organization to some of the highest in the company.
Dr. Dean earned a BA in Business Administration and an MS in Business Communication from Spalding University, and a PhD in Organizational Leadership from Regent University. She also holds a number of designations and certifications, including a Certificate of Management from the University of Louisville.
Dr. Dean was born and raised in Kentucky, spent nine years in Iowa, and currently resides in Colorado with her husband, Steve, and their youngest son, Gavin. In total, they have six amazing children and three wonderful granddaughters. Click here for more information about Dr. Dean's leadership research and an anthology of his publications. Contact Dr. Dean at: drdebra@drdebradean.com
Color Key: On-boarded; Target Recruit
Team Leaders & Associates
Secondary Education Unit – Dr. Larry Gërhart, Team Leader
Larry Gërhart, Ed.D. - Senior Fellow
Linda Gray Gërhart, Ed.D. - Senior Fellow
Fred Jonas, M.Ed – Research Fellow
Nicole "Niki" B. Munoz, – Research Fellow
Church Consulting Unit - Dr. John Mrazek, Team Leader
John Mrazek, PhD. - Senior Fellow
Military & Prison Chaplain Unit - Team Leader
Maurice "Mo" Buford, D.Min.; PhD - Senior Fellow
Grady Summers, M.Min - Senior Fellow
Corporate Training Unit – Team Leader
Fredrick "Fred" Barber, DSL - Senior Fellow
International Trade & Entrepreneur Studies Unit – Jay Styles, Team Leader
Warren Matthews, PhD - Senior Fellow
Jason "Jay" K.N. Styles, MSBM - research fellow.
Higher Education Team - Professor Jake Aguas, Team Leader
Jake Aguas, MOL - research fellow. Professor Aguas joined the CLI in September 2018. With over 25 years of experience in the banking and market research industries. Jake has held leadership positions with two Fortune 100 companies and one of the country's top polling firms. He spent 15 years with JPMorgan Chase as a leader in its retail bank division and specialized in strategy, training, talent acquisition, workforce planning, performance management, and leadership development, serving as the Human Resources Manager for the Western United States, and Regional Sales Manager. Jake was actively involved in the JPMorgan Chase and Washington Mutual Bank conversion in Southern California, the largest merger in US financial services history at the time. He has been recognized by the California State Assembly and the City of Los Angeles for his contributions in business and organizational leadership.
Jake is an Associate Professor of Management at Biola University and teaches management, organizational behavior, and human resources at both the MBA and undergraduate levels. Jake speaks regularly on emotional intelligence, cross-cultural leadership, change management, and current topics impacting organizations. His areas of interest include the mega-trends impacting the global business environment, specifically regarding a multi-generational and changing workforce. As a consultant, Jake assists domestic and international organizations with leadership strategy, team building, training, coaching, and the design and implementation of human resource management functions.
Jake is bilingual in Spanish and holds a Bachelor's degree in Economics from UCLA, a Master's degree in Organizational Leadership from Biola University, and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Organizational Leadership from Regent University. Jake also earned a certificate in market research from Notre Dame University, sponsored by the American Marketing Association. Contact Professor Aguas at: jake.aguas@biola.edu
Brian Moore, MPA - RESEARCH FELLOW.
Chad Newton, PhD - RESEARCH FELLOW.


This report from the Youth Law Center discusses California's failure to provide incarcerated youth with adequate educational services and suggests that the state needs to do more to ensure that students have access to educational guidance, quality academics, transition services, and educational supports. The report provides educational statistics for California youth involved in the juvenile justice system, as well as statistics relating to the operation of schools within juvenile justice facilities. The report notes that many juvenile detention schools have high rates of truancy, suspension, and dropout. Additionally, it notes that the lack of quality education has a disproportionate impact on youth of color and English learners. Finally, it states that California's juvenile detention facilities, as a whole, do not promote college and career training.
The report gives a number of recommendations for juvenile detention facilities, including holding the facility schools accountable for youth attendance, eliminating suspensions in facility schools, providing transition support and assisting youth with re-enrolling in school after their release from detention, advocating for high quality educational programs, requiring collaboration with the probation department to improve language access assessments and services, developing individualized assessment programs, developing curricula that align with community school curricula and working to ensure that credits earned in detention will transfer to the students' community school, assisting youth and providing resources for post-secondary education enrollment, providing comprehensive transition planning, and advocating for appropriate school placements and immediate enrollment following release from detention.


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Vous êtes ici : Accueil / Key story / 07 May 2021 - The Guardian celebrates its 200th birthday
07 May 2021 - The Guardian celebrates its 200th birthday
Publié par Marion Coste le 07/05/2021
The Guardian celebrates 200 extraordinary years
GNM Press Office (The Guardian, 30/04/2021)
The Guardian celebrates its 200th birthday in May 2021 with a digital festival of live events and masterclasses, journalism spanning digital and print formats, and a new brand campaign under the banner "200 years a work in progress" to inspire readers to support its ongoing investment into world-class journalism.
The first edition of the Manchester Guardian, as it was then known, was published on 5 May 1821. Since then, the Guardian has earned a reputation for powerful, high-impact journalism read by millions worldwide.
To mark the moment, from Wednesday 5 May, the Guardian will publish a range of journalism in digital, print, video and audio formats, examining the paper's origins, its highs and lows, and how its exclusives and investigations changed the world.
How did the Guardian survive 200 years?
Larry Elliott (The Guardian, 07/05/2021)
On the day the Guardian was born in Manchester on 5 May 1821, the big story was taking place 4,800 miles away on an island in the south Atlantic.
The fact that it took weeks for news of Napoleon Bonaparte's death on St Helena to become known shows how communication has sped up down the years. It also shows just how long the Guardian has been around.
This was the world of the first Industrial Revolution, built around steam power and textiles, a time when Manchester businessmen wanted to harness the power of the press to push for the vote. Electric power was a thing of the future. The rich got around on horseback; the poor walked.
What we got wrong: the Guardian's worst errors of judgment over 200 years
Randeep Ramesh (The Guardian, 07/05/2021)
A daily newspaper cannot publish for 200 years without getting some things wrong. This one has made its share of mistakes.
There will always be errors of news judgment given the nature of the work. Tight deadlines meant the sinking of the Titanic was relegated to a small spot on page 9 in 1912; errors of scientific understanding resulted in a 1927 article that promoted the virtues of asbestos, and others in the late 1970s that warned of a looming ice age.
But the most noticeable missteps stem not from the news pages but from the editorial column. For it is here that readers find out what the paper thinks about the great issues of the day. And it is here that mistakes are inked most indelibly into history, whether they relate to suffrage, reform or, most notably in recent years, the debate over Brexit.
The Guardian's first ever edition – annotated
Mark Rice-Oxley, Theresa Malone , Garry Blight and Miles Probyn (The Guardian, 05/04/2021)
Ads on the front page, news on the back, and a frankly unbelievable story about a ghost: the Manchester Guardian's first edition on 5 May 1821 is full of gems. We unearth them in this annotated version.


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Marjorie Perloff: A celebration
On the unoriginal genius of Marjorie Perloff
Jerome McGann
Marjorie Perloff in the Lotus Garden at Huanghzhou University, Wuhan, September 2011.
Keeping originality always in view — for he is false to himself who ventures to dispense with so obvious and so easily attainable a source of interest […] I […] design to render ["The Raven"] manifest that no one point in its composition is referable either to accident or intuition — that it proceeded step by step to its completion with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem. — E. A. Poe, "The Philosophy of Composition"
As the University of Chicago Press approached its publication date for Unoriginal Genius, it asked me to write a promotional comment for the book's back cover. Thrilling prospect! To write in the same spirit that the author had writ about the unoriginal spirits and writs she had written about.
And I would have to write under the constraint of that most tedious and inconsequent of textual forms: the book blurb. I burned with the hard gemlike flame of the moth for that star of unoriginal genius. Mixed allusions, like mixed metaphors and unoriginal ideas, are often what one wants: what oft was thought but not exactly so expressed.
The task: to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about Marjorie Perloff. And "in 150 words." (And with yet another rule, as it seemed to me — the understanding that her case in this case would be what Swinburne said was his case: "knowing as you do the date and sequence of my published books you know every event of my life" that matters).
Here is what I sent to the press:
When The Poetics of Indeterminacy(1981) appeared, our view of twentieth-century poetry was reconceived and reborn. Since then Perloff established herself as the pre-eminent scholar and critic of the Modern/Postmodern epoch, whose continuities she was the first to grasp. Of her work one wants to say, recalling Marianne Moore, it is a privilege to see so much profusion. Another wonderment, Unoriginal Genius circumnavigates the poetic world of the past 75 years, touching at strategic ports of call and eager to mix with many languages, cultures, and aesthetic media. The book starts in the theatre of Benjamin's Second Empire and finishes with a study of the Edgar Poe des nos jours, Kenny Goldsmith — aptly finishes, since Perloff's underlying story, though she never says this and though nearly everyone has forgotten it, began — as Baudelaire knew — with Poe, the first of our great poetic theatricians. — Jerome McGann, University of Virginia
That would be 150 words to the letter (check it out in your laptop editor). I think the press never noticed.
As strictly obedient and truthful as I had been, however — after all, I was raised Roman Catholic — my blurb was rejected. Perhaps even despised and rejected.
But perhaps too, as Christina Rossetti once wrote, there is "A Better Resurrection." My blurb of brackish truth is back from the dead, like Poe's Ligeia — "gia la sera sorella" of Augusto de Campos's Lygia, the dressed-down Beatrician type that is one of the subjects of Perloff's loving attentions. The organizing center of interest is imaginative writing's most pervasive discourse form of the past one hundred years — the Array, which Perloff tracks in its many transformations from Benjamin's Arcades through various types of Concretism, Conceptual, and Procedural Writing, including the translational poetries of Caroline Bergvall and Yoko Tawada.[1] The book pivots on extended readings of two fundamental works of two great American masters of the past forty years: Charles Bernstein's Shadowtime and Susan Howe's Midnight.
Unoriginal Genius works itself up, with a mischievous calculation equal to all Perloff's loved unoriginals, to a tour do force reading of Kenny Goldsmith's notoriously tour de force and "unreadable" works — in particular to an extended and (for this native New Yorker) knowing reading of Traffic. One hundred fifty pages (is that a magic number?) underpin her final dazzling display of aesthetic wit and critical taste. Nobody does it better, this sort of thing, and few have ever done it so well.
Arrived finally at her consummate conceptualist, Perloff asks (as impishly as Poe or Goldsmith — she knows the answer already): "We are given the ostensible rules of the game, but what is the game?" (151) How do you read the unreadable Traffic, how do you play its game? From that point it is show and tell for fifteen (!) pages. The game, we learn to see, is a game of "surprises" and "provocations": "messy, unbearable, infuriating, debilitating, but also challenging, invigorating, unpredictable" (156). Johanna Drucker has called it the game of delightenment, "This new poetry," Goldsmith remarks (channeling Poe):
… no one means a word of it. Come to think of it, no one's really written a word of it. It's been grabbed, cut, pasted, processed, machined, honed, flattened, repurposed, regurgitated, and reframed from the great mass of free floating language out there just begging to be turned into poetry. (162)
Clearly this is a game anybody can play. As Frank O'Hara, one of Perloff's early angels, thought: you have to go on your nerve. Or write deliberately.
"Be thou, Spirit fierce, / My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!" Let's follow a Shelley Rule.
Peace, peace! They are not dead, they do not sleep,
They have awaken'd from a dream of verse;
'Tis we, who lost in modern visions, keep
With phantoms an unprofitably perverse
Poetics that's just making matters worse.
Invulnerable nothings, they decay
Like figures in a carpet. If old beliefs
Consume and eat out our prosodic clay,
Their cool hopes swarm like worms around us day by day.
That would be — I think of Stevens — the worms at our poetical heaven's gates; the "wormy circumstance" of Keats's Isabella; Poe's "Conqueror Worm" (the signifier, of course, not the signified).
So there's the game, played according to rule, and even — if you think about it — with what Poe called an "under-current, however indefinite, of meaning" for Perloff's unoriginal geniuses. But in this game there must be nothing "ideal," since "it is the rendering […] the upper instead of the under current of the theme which turns into prose […] the so called poetry of the so called transcendentalists" ("The Philosophy of Composition").
But then we are left with an important — an ethical and a political — question: Why play such games? Why write them, why rewrite them? (Emerson, we want to remember — eminent Transcendentalist — called Poe "the jingle man"). The great (original?) unoriginals — Poe, Carroll, Lautréamont, Swinburne — might usefully be consulted.
[1] See my "Some Forms of Critical Discourse," Critical Inquiry 2 (March 1985): 399–417.
This Jacket2 feature is devoted to the life and work of Marjorie Perloff, whose critical inquiry over the course of more than three decades combines the pragmatism of lucid analysis with the sociohistorically informed commentary of distant reading to arrive at what Charles Bernstein calls "an inductive criticism grounded in a grappling with the poem at hand." Jacket2 publisher Al Filreis brings together a number of different poets and critics for discussions of Perloff's critical legacy as well as reflections on the interpretive craft she has shaped for American poetics.
On the unoriginal genius of Marjorie Perloff Jerome McGann
Sound bytes and computer blips Dee Morris
On 'The Poetics of Indeterminacy' Joan Retallack
The contemporary of our grandchildren Richard Sieburth
For Marjorie Maggie O'Sullivan
Perloff and/in France Jan Baetens
Ways of reading: Marjorie Perloff and the sublimity of pragmatic criticism Charles Bernstein
Marjorie Perloff: Die Dichtung und das Ding (poetry and the thing) Vanessa Place
Four wheels and a broken glass Caroline Bergvall
'Radical Artifice' Johanna Drucker
'The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage' Stephen Fredman
Becoming Marjorie Perloff Brian Reed
The unprepared future of an exophonic refugee Al Filreis
'The Futurist Moment' Jean-Michel Rabaté
Marjorie Perloff's twenty-first-century modernism Peter Nicholls
Close, very close Peter Middleton
Marjorie Perloff: A bibliographic essay J. Gordon Faylor
Futurism and schism Marjorie Perloff


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Boulder launches newsletter for City Council…
Boulder launches newsletter for City Council updates
Jeremy Papasso / Staff Photographer
Members of the Boulder City Council listen as Susan Sommers speaks about an issue during an open comment session in 2016.
By Alex Burness |
March 29, 2017 at 3:49 p.m.
Starting Thursday, Boulder will be producing a new bimonthly online newsletter that offers information on City Council goings-on.
The newsletter will "share information about council meeting agendas, public hearings and videos," the city said.
A sample version includes brief previews of public hearings the council will hold, suggestions for ways citizens can reach the council and links to full videos of council meetings and study sessions.
Ahead of the newsletter's debut, the council and City Manager Jane Brautigam briefly discussed providing the public with shortened clips of key moments in council meetings. They decided against this plan, however, in part because of the amount of time Brautigam said it would take city staff to edit long meetings down into highlights.
The newsletter is one in a series of public-outreach decisions the council has recently either made or talked about making, as it seeks ways to account for the fact that it has limited open comment at council meetings and now adjourns those meetings earlier than in the past.
Anyone interested in signing up to receive the newsletter can do so at bouldercolorado.gov/communications/city-newsletters.
Boulder continues to offer a dozen other online newsletters related to specific topics, such as senior services and open space.
The city is also in the middle of a two-year pilot project to distribute hard-copy newsletters to residents by mail. The council allotted about $200,000 a year for that pilot.
Alex Burness: 303-473-1389, burnessa@dailycamera.com or twitter.com/alex_burness
Alex Burness


Fr Daniel said, "In the beginning stage, this SHBCC group was established for the migrants from Hong Kong. Gradually, they grew from three groups to six groups spread throughout Singapore." These cell groups usually have fortnightly meetings at different members' houses, usually on Friday or Saturday evenings, Mr Cheung said.
But he added that every gathering will be announced to everyone, and if other groups' members are interested in the topic that is going to be covered, they can also join in solely for that session.
However, Mr Cheung told CatholicNews that they do not have a lot of ministries. The altar boys are part of the main group in Church of Sts Peter and Paul, but nonetheless the community has its own choir, and also the Rite of Christian Initiation in Cantonese. A new process will commence on Friday, June 13, and will be from 8 to 9.30pm.
For sacraments, they had a record number of 13 baptisms three years ago, while three adults and two babies were baptised at Easter this year.
Mr Cheung said that after baptism, members move on to First Holy Communion, which is also done within the community. However, community members will have to join the St Peter and Paul parish for Confirmation.
Mr Cheung told CatholicNews that a few years ago, the community had children's catechism but they now prefer to go back to their choice of parish for English catechism, as the children are mostly studying in local schools and are English-speaking.
"We would like to have Bible study every Wednesday evening in Cantonese," Mr Cheung added. The group used to hold such sessions but not on a regular basis, and these were interrupted when previous chaplain Fr Anselm Phang left for Taiwan.
Another challenge that the community faces is that they "don't have the youth coming in". Mr Cheung shared that they had tried to start a youth group about five years ago but it was not very successful.
The community also tries to connect with Cantonese-speaking Catholics in other parishes, although Mr Cheung shared that he feels it is "still not very successful".
For example, Mr Cheung said that there is a "sizeable number of Cantonese Catholics in Church of St Teresa [but we] haven't had the chance to integrate with them there".
After Fr Daniel took over from Fr Anselm Phang, he also had to learn Cantonese on his own. He told CatholicNews that despite having "little knowledge of Cantonese, I tried my best to support them in their needs of celebrating Masses, confessions and various activities and events".
The community held a Lunar New Year celebration at the Church of Sts Peter and Paul last year.
According to Mr Cheung, the community is officially endorsed by Archbishop Goh to have trilingual Masses.
He added that the Church of Sts Peter and Paul "is very supportive of our activities".
Therefore this year during Easter, the hymns for Mass were in English, Mandarin and Cantonese. Fr Daniel also said that the community members have "actively participated and collaborated in the parish works, events and activities and all other pastoral works outside the parish".
Many community members have been in Singapore since the 1990s, and some of them have become Singapore citizens.
"That's how we can last for 20 years, it's very fortunate," Mr Cheung said.
On May 31, the community will celebrate its 20th anniversary. Other events that the group carries out together include an annual full-day retreat on National Day, which had about 250 people attending last year. During this event, at least two Cantonese priests from Singapore or overseas will be invited to provide spiritual input, and there will also be sharings and opportunities for people to get to know one another.
The National Day retreat this year is themed Joy of Gospel, and will be held at the Catholic Spirituality Centre on Aug 9 from 9am to 6pm.
During Lent, they will also have a day event with Stations of the Cross and Confession, while in October or November, the community has a residential three-day retreat, which was held at the Church of St Teresa last year.
For more information on the Sacred Heart Cantonese Basic Christian Community, contact Mr Cheung at alcheung20140328@ gmail.com or visit www.shbcc.net.


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CSLB Reminds Licensees of New Laws Beginning January 1, 2023
Sacramento, CA – Heading into 2023, the Contractors State License Board wants to remind licensees of new laws taking effect in the new year.
SB 216 (Dodd)
This bill, which amends Business and Professions Code (BPC) Section 7125, requires contractors who possess a C-8 Concrete, C-20 Heating, Warm-Air Ventilating and Air-Conditioning, C-22 Asbestos Abatement, or D-49 Tree Service license to hold valid workers' compensation insurance as of January 1, 2023. By July 1, 2023, if workers' compensation insurance has not been acquired, the license classification will be removed. Additionally, this bill requires that by January 1, 2026, all contractors, except for joint ventures without employees, hold valid workers' compensation insurance, whether or not they have employees. More information about this new law can be found in a November industry bulletin. (Chapter 978, Statutes of 2022)
SB 607 (Min)
This bill, which updates numerous sections of the BPC, increases the CSLB qualifier, license, and minimum disciplinary bonds from $12,500 and $15,000, respectively, to $25,000 for all three bonds as of January 1. More information about the bond increase can be found in this industry bulletin issued in September. The bill, which passed in 2021, also increased the CSLB licensing and application maintenance and service fees on January 1, 2022 and requires Department of Consumer Affairs (DCA) boards and bureaus to waive application and license fees for military family members as of July 1, 2022. (Chapter 367, Statutes of 2021)
SB 1237 (Newman)
The bill amends BPC 114.3 and updates current law that requires DCA boards, including CSLB, waive renewal fees for a licensee who is called to active duty as a member of the U.S. Armed Forces or California National Guard if the licensee or registrant is stationed outside of California. The bill expands the definition of "called to active duty" to align with definitions elsewhere in federal and state law and extends existing law to licensees on active duty during a "state of insurrection" or a "state of extreme emergency." (Chapter 386, Statutes of 2022)
AB 2105 (Smith)
This bill, which amends BPC Section 7137, requires the board to grant a 50% fee reduction for an initial license or registration fee to an applicant who provides specified documentation to the board that the applicant is a veteran who has served as an active-duty member of the United States Armed Forces, including the National Guard or Reserve components, and was not dishonorably discharged. This bill applies to initial license fees for contractors and registration fees for home improvement salespersons. (Chapter 156, Statutes of 2022)
SB 1443 (Roth)
This bill amends BPC 7000.5 and 70111 by amending the statutory sunset date of CSLB from January 1, 2024, to January 1, 2025. (Chapter 625, Statutes of 2022)
AB 1747 (Quirk)
This bill increases the civil penalty from $8,000 to $30,000 for every violation of BPC Section 7110 (violations of building laws) and amends Section 7099.2 (assessment of civil penalties). In addition to building permit violations specified in BPC 7110, the bill clarifies BPC 7110 to include the failure to comply with certain health and safety laws, water laws, safe excavation requirements, pest control requirements, illegal dumping, and other state laws related to building and insurance requirements. (Chapter 757, Statutes of 2022)
AB 2374 (Bauer-Kahan)
This bill, which amends Penal Code Section 374.3, requires courts to notify CSLB or other DCA board or bureau when a licensee is convicted of an illegal dumping crime in order for the board to publish it on their website. This bill increases the fines a court may impose for this crime. This bill also requires the court to order a person convicted of dumping commercial quantities of waste to remove, or pay for the removal of, the waste matter that was illegally dumped. (Chapter 784, Statutes of 2022)
AB 2916 (McCarty)
The bill, which amends BPC Section 7124.6, updates the CSLB Letter of Admonishment (LOA) program to allow CSLB to determine whether it should be issued for one or two years, rather than the current one-year limitation. In making that determination, CSLB is required to consider gravity of the violation, the good faith of the licensee or applicant being charged, and the history of previous violations should be considered. (Chapter 293, Statutes of 2022)
Mark Smith - CA Builders Alliance, Advocate
mark.smith@calbuilders.org , 916.335.5072
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Walking Dead Direct Tv Channel
What channel is The Walking Dead on on directv?
AMC+ HD is on channel 557.
The Walking Dead Direct TV channel
The Walking Dead Direct TV channel (AMC) is the best place for dedicated fans of the horror drama series "The Walking Dead". As the zombie apocalypse continues, viewers can keep up with every twist and turn with AMC's exclusive television network.
If you're a fan of the show, then you'll appreciate the wealth of exclusive content you can access with a directTV subscription. Here's what you can watch on the Walking Dead Direct TV channel:
On-demand content
Complete seasons of the show
Behind-the-scenes footage
The Walking Dead after shows
Interactive Walking Dead talk shows
Live quizzes and giveaways
Expert commentators, such as Robert Kirkman (co-creator of The Walking Dead comics, and executive producer and writer for the show) give exclusive insights into the show. Viewers can also watch exclusive cast interviews and production updates, which can be found on the channel.
The Walking Dead Direct TV channel also serves as a platform for AMC's associated zombie anthology series "Fear The Walking Dead". It provides exclusive coverage of the show, with new episodes airing every week on AMC.
So, if you are a fan of the zombie apocalypse and its survivors, then the Walking Dead Direct TV channel is the perfect place to watch this thrilling show.
Reaction To Walking Dead Premiere
Walking Dead New Season On Netflix
Walking Dead Vs Fear The Walking Dead
Walking Dead Season 8 Netflix
By Jeff Johnson • Streaming • Tags: dead, direct, walking
Black Panther Animated Series NetflixHow Do I Find My History On Hulu


Jeffie and Dalton shared a dessert.
Gypsy tried to see what Pascal was doing.
I hang out with Herve a lot.
Dannie isn't really enjoying himself.
Urs doesn't know what I want.
Joshua didn't move fast enough.
Did Steve tell you how he and Sylvan met?
You'll be safe with Panos.
Tracey says he doesn't remember a thing.
Manuel knew who Dieter wanted to talk to.
Christian wants me to open the window, so he can climb in.
Kent tried to stay awake, but he soon fell asleep.
Cristi asked me if I knew how to play the clarinet.
Prakash took three days off.
Laura thought Ernie knew how much he hated opera.
I wanted Les to see me first.
I'll buy this desk for Phil.
Kyle finally mustered up the courage to ask Gale out.
What makes you so sure Sri wants to stay?
Malaclypse knows he should do it, but he doesn't want to.
Sanche couldn't locate the Danube on the map.
Let Horst decide what you need to do.
I have to give Ethan what he wants.
Suresh is holding Earl in his arms.


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Are you accommodating different personality types in your workplace?
Not all people are the same. Think for a moment about the people you interact with socially. Some of them may be more talkative and outgoing, while others are more withdrawn and contemplative. If you want to invite the person to a social activity, you would want to invite them to something that suits their personality. For example, you may invite the more outgoing person to a sporting event, while you may invite the more introverted person for a one-on-one meeting at a quiet coffee shop.
The same thing is true of our employees: we've got to communicate with our people in a way that suits their individual personalities. There are many different models for understanding personality. When I train mortgage leaders on improving their organizations, I focus on an ancient model of personality types which divides people into four groups: melancholic, sanguine, phlegmatic, and choleric. The purpose of the exercise is to categorize people in such a way that you know how to best communicate with them.
Melancholics are more introverted and introspective.
Sanguines tend to be more outgoing and adventurous.
Phlegmatics tend to be more mild-mannered and even-keeled.
Cholerics tend to be more analytical and logical.
These four temperaments provide a handy way to organize people into different audiences to which we can communicate. But however you choose to understand your people, know that they are all different. Different personality types require different communication styles. Are you tailoring your communicating toward the kind of people your employees are?


Chuck Wendig is an urban fantasy and sci-fi author of the Miriam Black series, Blue Blazes, and Zer0es. He also writes YA in the Empyrean Sky and Atlanta Burns series. He also is writing a Star Wars novel trilogy (Life Debt releases on July 12, 2016), and over the past year he has forayed into comics with The Shield (with Adam Christopher and David Williams, Dark Circle), Hyperion (with Nik Virella and Emanuela Lupacchino, Marvel), and a comics adaptation of Star Wars: The Force Awakens (with Luke Ross, Marvel).
As a writer myself, I have had worship-level respect for this guy's unique voice, dynamic characters, and wildly original and twisted stories ever since Blackbirds (Miriam Black #1) hit the shelves in 2012.
So when I realized he was going to be in my 'hood for the Orlando Book Festival on June 18, I fangirled my heart out like I have never fangirled before. He was kind enough to give me a little of his time following the event for an interview.
You mentioned at the beginning of your talk [at Orlando Book Festival] that the first thing you wrote was a comic when you were seven. Can you tell me more about that?
Yeah, probably about seven. I didn't really do it as a comic book at the time, but that's sort of what it was. I don't know why I put Pac-Man versus the Xenomorphs from Alien, I'm not sure what my thinking was there at the time, other than I had an Atari and I watched Aliens.
I certainly wouldn't think it was any kind of good story [now], but they did battle, and chased each other around. For whatever reason, they had to do that.
Yeah, Pac-Man. Instead of chasing ghosts, chasing aliens. Maybe Pac-Man is an alien.
Yes, I've hopefully sophisticated my work a little more.
You've been focusing more on the novels, but you did the gaming writing, and then the screenwriting.
What made you want to get into writing comic books?
I always read comic books and I have somewhat of a collector's mind. I wanted to do a little bit of everything. Both because I want to diversify what I write because if one avenue closes up for me for whatever reason, I have others, and I just like comic books. So I wanted to dabble in that and see what I could do.
So the next step is to [see if I can find a way to create our own] material. My writing partner for The Shield and I have some ideas, so we're gonna get them out there and see what happens.
How is writing comics different from writing the novels or the screenplays? I imagine your writing is probably just pretty flexible at this point?
Yeah, it's pretty flexible, and once you do so many different types of stories, you start to see that there is a shared architecture to stories. There are certain things that work across all narratives. And yet at the same time, there are things that just don't play well. A comic strip is not a novel, and it never will be.
But the comic is an interesting format because it kind of marries the television script with the novel, in that, just like television they tend to be episodic, and it tends to have certain breaks at certain times, there's a certain rise and fall of action. And it tends to end almost in a cliffhanger-y way to get you to the next episode-slash-issue.
But unlike with television, there is a huge internal dimension, because there is this narrative component to it where a lot of times where you have characters who are narrating what's happening and you get a sense of what's going on inside their heads, which, you don't really get in television.
So it's sort of like if you smoosh novels together with the television format, that's how I wrap my head around comics.
Do you find yourself thinking panel to panel? Or do you think bigger and then break it down?
I think bigger and then I drill down, and I try to trust [the artist]. I don't want to do that rookie thing, like, "I'm going to describe a whole bunch of things on a single page," it's impossible because I can only capture a single moment of an action at a time.
I always put the disclaimer—and maybe this is a lack of confidence in my abilities to write comics, because I don't know what I'm doing. I really don't. No idea what I'm doing—so I'll put a note at the fore of my graph and say listen, I'm just a pen monkey … I'll give suggestions, but the artist is the one to be trusted in that.
How close is that collaboration? Do you just kind of write it and then they put the visuals to it?
At first it's definitely just me writing it because I don't know—especially with the Star Wars, I didn't even know who my artist was at first, I had no idea. And with Hyperion too, I didn't necessarily know who my artist was. Same with Shield.
But as you start to learn the artists, to me, it shrinks that gap considerably. And then you start talking to the artist and sort of directing, because you learn what they can do and what they're good at. You sort of want to play to their strengths.
Nik Virella on Hyperion is astonishing. Like she brings all of the work to life in ways I could not possibly have.
Has there been any difference between how that collaboration works between The Shield and Hyperion?
The Shield and Hyperion are pretty close in that I know the artists, I know their strength. The Star Wars one, I wrote a lot of the issues first without knowing who was going to be drawing them. Now that I know, I'm very happy because he does such good work, but I wasn't really speaking to him, in a sense.
But of course that's a different kind of story anyway, because I'm not creating this thing out of pullcloth, I'm not like, "Imagine a place called Jakku." We already know what it looks like, and there is enough about it that I don't need to collaborate so completely with him. Mostly it's about angles and things we don't capture in the film, necessarily.
How did you decide to write about Hyperion? He's got a history in the Marvelverse, and it's kind of an odd one.
He is an odd one. Because he kind of pinballs between different kinds of characters.
Yeah. There's different versions of him.
Yeah, there's evil guys, and then there's good–but-jerk guy, and then there's generally-noble guy, and then he's back to being a noble jerk, superpowers jerk guy.
I wanted to approach him like, here's a guy who is from [Squadron] Supreme, I don't want to say made some mistakes, but he's pushed in ways maybe more, doesn't fit with the morality of this world, and he's a guy who's got daddy issues in a way because his father was gone, his world is gone.
So I wanted to humanize him while still maintaining that sort of distance that Hyperion has. So humanizing him is part of the cast of characters that surrounds him, help to humanize him. It helps to make him more interesting—I hope.
And what made you choose the perspective of Doll to tell this story from instead of Hyperion himself?
I always like the Superman stories that aren't from Superman's point of view. Because Superman, it's not that he's not an interesting character, it's just we've seen it so often. There's not a whole lot you can do with him unless you really change the character. And while I don't think Hyperion suffers from that quite as much, I do think there's a definite richness to his character, it's hard because he's kind of a jerk and he's got these sort of alien moral precepts that he follows.
But if we we're going to tell this sort of smaller story, that crosses the Midwest and deals with sort of the tangle … it's an area you just don't really see all that often of the Midwest. It's a smaller story about crime and superfreaks in the circus and everything. I thought it would be more interesting from her perspective.
And then also, she's going to see things about [Hyperion] that maybe other people and other characters in the Marvel universe won't. Not only because she needs him, but because they spend enough time together that she starts to to understand him a little more. Because she's someone who also has father problems. And so having that sort of reflecting each other is kind of an interesting thing.
You do have a habit of writing really great, dynamic women characters, which for some reason some people struggle with. What is problematic about what we talk about when we talk about strong female characters, and what should we be talking about instead?
There is that thing that happens where they make the woman physically strong and capable and cool and smart and funny, and then, she's sort of relegated—she's Trinity from the Matrix. You're still a sidekick, and you're still the love interest, and if you get hurt, then the man gets to feel pain, and they don't have any agency over their own story. They don't have any control, They don't get to be full characters in and of themselves.
They are more like, ironically, dolls. Like, she's Black Widow! But she doesn't have to do anything, right? She can just be cool and kick people?
We are to assume they are complete characters with agency in a world. That's interesting, and that's what makes them strong. It's not the kicking that makes them strong, it's being complex and interesting characters that have command over their own lives, and over the plot itself.
What do you think prompts you to write these female characters?
I don't know. I'm just writing the characters I want to write? I don't feel like … I mean listen. It's not agenda driven that I think, I should write a female character because that either will sell me books, or it's like we need to counterbalance it.
But like a simple level, we do see a lot of male characters, so just on a desire to do differently, and a desire to see something new, that, to me, is why I do it. At least partly.
When you're writing in a different universe—as you're doing in all of these, Hyperion and The Shield and Star Wars—the world is not yours. It's someone else's pre-existing world. How does that feel? How does that creative process work? How is it different?
It's both stifling and liberating in equal measure. It's liberating because I don't own them—I know there is a net to catch me, I know that no one is going to let me take this too far in a weird direction. So it's liberating in a sense that it is a comfortable thing to do.
It's stifling because you can't be like, well, now I'm going to kill him. I can't, like, well now they blow up! Or something horrible happens! And you're like, no no no wait, this is a very finely tuned universe and everything feeds into each other.
We had a lot of freedom with The Shield, just because we pretty much designed everything from the ground up in terms of that character. In fact our initial pitch was actually fairly conservative and then Alex the editor was like, no, no, you can go bigger and weirder. You're not restrained by anything that has ever happened in this universe before.
And we said, okay! And so we did. It really became our own character without reservation, and he allowed a great deal of freedom in that regard … so that was nice.
So as I said, it's both a prison—in a good way, I know what I was getting into I don't say that bitterly, like 'they won't let me kill Han Solo!" I get it, that already happened. It just means you have more rules to deal with .
But at the same time, that can be a lot more fun. Because sometimes with your own work, having so much choice can be also deafening and upsetting—I can do anything I want, and I don't know what to do.
Yes. And the benefits of working with someone like Marvel, on Hyperion, and then also the story group with the Star Wars stuff, novel and comic book, is that these are not people who are corporate shills trying to hit a demo. They are fellow fans and geeks who love what they are doing. They are here because they care, not because they are trying to sell toys. So they get it, they want to geek out with you and it gives me a lot of freedom, as much as there are restrictions.
The Carnival in Hyperion is so stinking cool, and it's very Stephen King-eque. Which you mentioned him in your speech earlier.
Yeah, I love Stephen King, absolutely.
Where does that sort of crazy off-the-wall weirdness come from? Because I think this is one of the things that makes comics so much fun is how they just embrace this absurdity.
So with Hyperion, you know, they approached me, and Katie, the editor, said, you can pitch for these comics, but I really only want you to pitch one. Pick one you want to pitch for. A few of them were high profile stuff, and then there was Hyperion. And Hyperion was something that hadn't really been done, and it was kind of a risky, like we don't know if anyone cares, we're not sure if there is a market for Hyperion. We just know that he is in Squadrons Supreme and that's doing well, and so we'd like to see what we can do here.
And I liked that because there was a lot of freedom in doing a character that maybe no one else knew what to do with, and the pitch wasn't for a preexisting comic. It was all new, so I thought there was an advantage.
So I pitched them this weird horror version of Hyperion where he travels around. It's like—imagine if Superman were traveling around the country in a truck, solving mysteries, like these weird horror mysteries. It doesn't make any sense, but was a lot of fun to write. And they liked it, so here we are.
And you've used the truck driver thing before, too, in the Miriam Black series.
Yeah. Ironically I didn't come up with that for Hyperion. That was something that was already in his path because of Squadrons Supreme.
It does allow people who would not usually meet each other to meet.
It does. And that was the thing. Because I've had lot of truck drivers in my family. My dad was a truck driver. My uncle drove a truck. My brother-in-law drives a truck. And it's a huge part of American culture that often gets overlooked. Our entire world, our entire country, functions because of truck drivers, constantly driving goods and services back and forth to each other. It's such an interesting lifestyle to me. These guys are a vital part of economic[s].
It's a lot of fun to write about that sort of thing and find things that people don't talk about.
For The Shield, in addition to working with an illustrator you also worked with another writer, Adam Christopher. How does that factor into this whole collaboration process in the whole development of the story?
Adam and I would collaborate in the beginning in term of deciding the whole scope of the story, and the general flow of each story.
Collaboration is tricky. You gotta find the right people to collaborate with. I have a collaborator on the film and TV side of things, Lance, we get along very well.
And Adam and I get along very well, and part of the reason is that we are very different people. If I were to work with another me, it would not work out. I would probably punch that person in the face, because I would irritate me very badly. But Adam and Lance are both really smart sharp guys who bring different things to the table that I wouldn't think about, and I think I bring things to the table that they aren't thinking about. They're also an even enough temperament, they're not evil maniacal narcissists, so we can have a conversation and we can compromise on stories.
With Adam, we each write opposing issues. We edit—everybody touches everything. But if I write an issue, then he'll do the heavy edits on it, he writes an issue, then I'll do the edits on it … And it still comes from documents that were decided by us in the beginning, so it follows a path that we have created together.
We've touched on this a little, but could you speak specifically to how you have updated the character of The Shield for the modern world, because this is a character that's kind of like Captain America, but predates Captain America, which goes back quite a ways.
Well. There's the gender flip. There's the fact that her origin story goes back to teh Revolutionary War, as opposed to just World War II, which is a little overdone at this point. And then I like to present, you know, it's like Hamilton, right?
But I think we gave it more of a Borne Identity edge than straight up punchy kicky stuff.
And why did you choose to do the gender swap? Was there anything in particular that made you think, it's time for this character to be a girl?
That one was a little more agenda-driven. Just because there are not as many superheroines as superheroes. And we're in a time now when women are soldiers. And there's unsung heroes in every war, frankly, but even in the Revolutionary War of women who were fighting, women who were saboteurs, women who were spies, and there's this massive erasure of that in history in general, so we felt that we could do a very small part there and reach out to that a little bit. That's a good thing to do, that felt good.
How did you get involved in the Star Wars project?
I tweeted about it. Which is not normally how you get jobs.
No. Social media has lended itself to my career more often than I would have expected. On September 4th, I tweeted it out that I wanted to write Star Wars. And I had friends and followers who were connected to the Star Wars property—Jason Fry and Gary Whitta—who sort of moved that ball down the field for me without me even realizing it.
The next thing I know I had a meeting with Shelly, the editor of the line, and she read some of my books. Thankfully not Blackbirds, she read Under the Empyrian Sky. And next thing I knew I had the work.
And the book came out September 4th, one year to the day from when I tweeted it. Which is a weird bit of serendipity.
This is another one where you're balancing your own creative vision with someone else's world. And this one is a specifically precarious case, because the movie was about to come out, and they're trying to gain momentum around that right when your story is releasing.
So how much creative freedom did you have to do this, versus how much were they shaping what you needed to do?
I had an alarming amount of creative freedom. For a few reasons, I think. Number one, because they are very good about listening to creators. I never feel that they're particularly stifling, as far as story prep goes.
So that gave me an advantage to come in and pitch the type of book that I wanted to write. And thankfully it was a story that they liked, so it worked out.
Did you know things about the Star Wars movie before the rest of us?
Some. In part because … while they didn't tell me what I could do, they did tell me things I couldn't. So in knowing that, you can start to paint a picture. And then, as I was writing Aftermath, I learned more about The Force Awakens and things I could sort of feed in and tie into.
And then as I was leading up to write the second book, before the movie even came out, they dropped the novelization of it into my inbox, and I was like, I don't want to read it, now I don't want to know. So I only read half of it. And it was enough to give me a sense of the galaxy that we were building to.
And then you've got the second book in your Star Wars trilogy comes out next month.
Is there anything you can tell us about that book?
Well, it features the same characters as the first book. But it also lets me play in the playground now, and I get to have fun with Chewie and Leia as sort of primary characters in the book as well.
How did you first get into Star Wars?
I was a kid, and my sister took me on a date she was on. Her boyfriend had a little brother, and she had a little brother, and so they took us to see Empire Strikes Back at a drive-in theater.
I can't promise they were watching the movie, but I was watching it. Not them. Thankfully, I was not watching them.
Probably better for my burgeoning young psyche at that point.
And obviously, I was hooked at that point.
Star Wars is such a huge, complex universe at this point, not just in how big it is, but in the volumes of content that have been created around it. How much have you engulfed yourself in that, and how much have you tried to apply it all or let it inspire you?
I read some of the stuff int eh beginning the Thrawn trilogy is great, and the Mike Stackpole books. Generally, I stop there because otherwise I'd spend my life just reading Star Wars books, because there's so many of them. And I want to be a little more diverse with my reading habits than just reading Star Wars.
So I take those things as some loose inspiration. But I don't read super deep into the expanding universe. What I read I liked but I just had other things to do. So I read a lot of other novels and all of those filter in, too. Mostly I take my inspiration from the films, obviously, the Clone Wars TV show, Rebels, even the prequels. That's all stuff that filters into the making of the Aftermath novel.
Of all the different kinds of stuff that you have written, do you have any favorites? Comics, novels, screenplays?
The Miriam Black series is close to my heart. I'm really glad that there's more books coming out. I didn't want to be done with her. She's definitely where my brain lies. So I'm excited to be getting back to writing her.
Favorite books at the moment? Favorite comics?
I'm kind of digging DC's Rebirth. I'm enjoying that greatly. I am loving all the Marvel Star Wars stuff. The Poe Dameron comic is a blast. The Darth Vader comic is art.
I just read Paul Tremblay's newest, Disappearance at Devil's Rock. And I'm reading Kameron Hurley's The Stars Are Legion, which is great. Also Mishell Baker's Borderline, not at all what I expected, it's so good. It's like fae urban fantasy.
Any dream projects that you would love to do in the future?
No. I mean, I've hit my dream projects. I don't know what happens now. I don't know where I go.
A Miriam Black comic. I'd like to do a Miriam Black comic. That would be good.


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Estimate. In fact, 3 classic mortgage disclosures (including the GFE) become extinct at the same time. More about that later.
After the US housing crisis, the Government kindly thrust themselves upon mortgage lending as a compliance watchdog. As a result, complex mortgage processes and confusing disclosures have forcefully been adopted by mortgage lenders. Some of the force fed changes have actually been positive. Unfortunately, the majority of the Fed's ideas muddied the lending waters.
The not so helpful variety of changes confused and often infuriated consumers. For example, the Government's good faith estimate ("GFE") overhaul clearly missed the mark. The revised GFE lacked clear disclosure of a borrower's monthly payment. Worse yet, a borrower's cash to close was absent on the GFE.
The good Faith Estimate's replacement has a brand new name. After all, a fresh start given the GFE's troublesome run including a new name is wise. The new document, called the "Loan Estimate" kills 2 birds with one stone. As a result of combining the Good Faith Estimate and Truth in Lending Form into the Loan Estimate, home-buyers have fewer places to look for important loan information.
The "Loan Estimate" Better or Worse then GFE?
Thanks to the Government's bang-up job on the last and final GFE, doing better was easy. New Loan Estimate – Better. Considering the massive upgrade to the clarity of information disclosure, the Loan Estimate stands head and shoulders above the GFE. Lastly, considering congruent flow from Loan Estimate to Closing Statement (more on that later) consumer's are far better served by the Loan Estimate than they ever were with the GFE.
Is Divorce an Extenuating Circumstance?