The Sentient Vacuum Cleaner

First it was a sentient dog in The Art of Racing in the Rain. We won’t mention Jimminy Cricket — a most memorable sentient insect from the 1940 Disney movie Pinocchio, and later from the Disney TV show. This year, there were self-aware sheep in the film “The Sheep Detectives” which depicted a flock of self-aware and articulate sheep. I wrote about these recently: see my post titled Sheep.

Now this:

The Infinite Sadness of Small Appliances is about a bereaved household where the wife

has died, leaving her husband Harold depressed and unmoored from what he had loved.

Their daughter Kate comes to help her father adapt, but her plans and his are not the same.

The center of The Infinite Sadness of Small Appliances is a small automated vacuum cleaner who has chosen the name Scout because it was fascinated by the character named Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird. Along with Scout the vacuum, the house is equipped with a grandfather clock called Clock and a refrigerator called Fridge who both worry about Harold. The appliances also are concerned because the house, the humans, the car which lives in the garage, and the appliances themselves are all under constant supervision by “The Grid,” an omniscient and somewhat hostile overlord to all humans and non-humans in the house, in the neighborhood, and everywhere:

THE GRID MONITORED EVERY one of the millions of cars on the road—every car in the world, in fact—tracking exactly where they were and how fast they were traveling and what their present mission entailed, whether it was taking a Human to an appointment or something as simple as accepting the delivery of new clothes. (p. 67)

On Harold’s wrist is a watch, which is another part of the power of the Grid: 

“Watch,” said Clock, “is interested only in cataloging the contents of the House. I do not blame him. It is his duty to evaluate the worth of things. There are accounts to be balanced. There are meticulous and fine details to be attended to.” (p. 81) 

Harold’s late wife was a piano teacher, and Adrian, one of her young students, comes to the house to continue practicing on the piano. Harold, a former English teacher, along with Kate also introduce Adrian to books like The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe:

HAROLD COULD HEAR KATE reading to Adrian upstairs. He sat in his armchair and listened to the cadence of her voice. He couldn’t quite make out the words, but he knew the story so well it didn’t matter. For now, he was thinking of the boy, thinking of how it would be to hear this book for the first time, the magic of it, the kids going through the wardrobe to find themselves in another world. (p. 181)

Can we ordinary people defy the system that controls our physical and mental surroundings? Or are we hopelessly manipulated by them? Do we own our “things” or do they own us? We are left with these questions. I am also left with the question of just how I might connect the story and characters in To Kill a Mockingbird with this story and these characters.

AI summarizes the novel thus: “The Infinite Sadness of Small Appliances is a 2026 speculative novel by Glenn Dixon published by Atria Books. Set in a near-future smart house, it is told from the perspective of a sentient Roomba named Scout who tries to protect her elderly owners from an omnipresent technological system”

Blog post © 2026 mae sander

Sheep

 Crazy Netflick

We watched the recently-released film “The Sheep Detectives” which is actually about talking sheep, but not surreal like Murakami’s wild sheep chase. And not TOO corny like Disney’s Bambi. Also not as lovable as Remi the Rat in “Ratatouille” or Jimminy Cricket in “Pinocchio.” But there are similarities.

AI summary: “A shepherd named George reads murder mysteries to his sheep every night. When George is murdered, the smart flock uses what they learned to investigate the human suspect.”

It reminds me of other animal stories

A comic film from the creator of Wallace and Grommet.

A very tragic story narrated by a dog, who is the only witness.
The animal narrator is basically the only similarity with the sheep film.

A totally surreal tale as only Murakami could write. Made me fall in love with his writing.
The only similarity is the focus on sheep.
(See: https://maefood.blogspot.com/2016/07/why-i-like-haruki-murakami.html)

Blog post © 2026 mae sander, images from web.

Evil Genius

 Creepy book (in a good way)

Evil Genius by Claire Oshetsky portrays a marvelously bizarre character who narrates the novel as well as portraying, in her words, her equally bizarre workmates, friends, husband, and other random people that she encounters. At one point, she says: “My life was meaningless, probably.“ (p. 176) Maybe just chaotic, maybe meaningless, generally surreal, I thought, while reading it.

For example, the narrator, Celia Dent, among many things, collected Barbie dolls. She had mutilated her first three dolls by stabbing them in the face with a nail-file. Later she had a huge, never-unboxed collection of them: 

“To make up for what I had done to those poor rubbery faces, I began to collect Barbie dolls in earnest. I took loving care of them. I never took those dolls out of their boxes. My mother encouraged my interest. She cleared out the pantry. Together we put up shelves and painted them pink. Over the years, my collection grew. Every birthday and every Christmas and every time I got an A on my report card, my mother gifted me a new doll for my collection. But it was maybe too late to reform me.” (p. 20)

Celia Dent’s inner life is full of violence. There’s some of it also in her physical life — as well as the “lives” of the Barbies. As she works in her job at a telephone company complaint center, and commutes from her home in Redwood City in the San Francisco Bay area into the city, her mind is full of oddities —

“I heard the same little song in my ear that I’d heard on the train the night before—love and death, love and death—and the people scurrying along the sidewalk with me, all those scurrying souls, yearning toward that train station, whipped their heads around and stared at me in wonder. Those people had heard my innermost secret thoughts. My body had shouted my secret thoughts out in every direction. All the thoughts I’d tried so hard to keep quiet. Thoughts about love and death, is what I mean. Thoughts about how love could be a land mine buried in a shimmering field of wheat, or a pistol shot, or a sticky trap set in a corner, or a noose, or an insidious addiction—and so could death be all these things.” (p.75)

She sees herself in odd ways, sometimes by imagining her father of whom she knows nothing whatsoever, but speculates that he might be the subject of a photo with the name “Dirk” written on the back. Her mother won’t tell her anything. But she creates an identity for herself —

“I remembered what I had always known: I was Daughter of Dirk. I was Minion of the Crab Queen. I was in a full fever. I wasn’t a normal girl. I was supernatural. I was uncanny. I was magnificent.“ (p. 117) 

Most critically, she’s a witness at a very bizarre and violent death scene, which I can’t tell more about because it would be a terrible spoiler (and I’ve already spoiled a bit). Anyway — upon being held in jail she ruminates on refusing to talk: 

“As was my right. Remaining silent had been my right ever since Ernesto Miranda’s landmark case in 1966. Think of it. One man, named Ernesto, single-handedly altered the dialogue in every climactic scene in every true-crime show and police procedural to come, forevermore, and what’s more, thanks to Ernesto, I was walking away a free woman, but with a soul still burdened by my unconfessed crimes.” (p. 206) 

The New York TImes review was complimentary about Evil Genius. The reviewer focuses on the era of 1974 as depicted in the novel: “Revolution was in the air, and to be young was very heaven. Or very hell, according to 19-year-old Celia Dent, the narrator of Evil Genius. Claire Oshetsky’s noir delight of a novel … Evil Genius alludes to Hearst, Watergate and other flashpoints of the era as Celia seeks freedom beyond the narrow cage of her life. Now older, she peers back some 50 years to a moment of transformation.” (source)

Review © 2026 mae sander

The Correspondent

The Correspondent by Virginia Evans is a very sad book about Sybil, a very old and depressing woman (younger than I am, so I don’t cut her any slack) and her family, including her divorced husband, her somewhat wimpy grandson, a distant son and daughter, and their even-more-distant spouses. The book is in the rather old-fashioned format of letters exchanged between Sybil, these relatives, and a few other people from her past. Sybil had been a very accomplished lawyer, which makes her current state yet more depressing.

For reasons I don’t know, my granddaughter Alice received two copies of The Correspondent for her birthday so she left one for me. Her birthday was not at all depressing, so to cheer things up, here’s are some birthday weekend photos:

Alice’s birthday cake from a lovely bakery we had not tried.

Evelyn and Tom (visiting from Fairfax) made crab-cakes.

Sushi!

Alice and Tom and dumplings and tuna sashimi.

Wow, that’s a lot more cheerful. I don’t think I’ll bother to review the book after all.

Blog post and photos © 2026 mae sander

Parnassus

 

Parnassus on Wheels is a short novel about a delightful runaway named Miss Helen McGill. Helen, the narrator, describes how she’s been a stay-at-home housewife on a farm for many years. She’s done all the housework and cooking for her brother — a writer, and is sick and tired of it. A vagabond bookseller offers her a way to escape: one day, he sells her his wagon, his dog Bock, his horse Peg, and all his inventory, and shows her how to live on the road. 

For a while, the bookseller goes along with her in the wagon, though always saying he’s about to get on a train and return to his urban roots in Brooklyn. Meanwhile, Helen gets used to cooking in the wagon and taking care of Peg and Bock:

“There were still some eggs and bread and cheese in the little cupboard, and an unopened tin of condensed milk. I gave Peg her nose bag of oats, and fed Bock, who was frisking about in high spirits. By that time the shoeing was done, and the Professor and I sat down to an improvised meal. I was beginning to feel as if this gipsy existence were the normal course of my life. ‘Well, Professor,’ I said, as I handed him a cup of coffee and a plate of scrambled eggs and cheese, ‘for a man who slept in a wet haystack, you acquit yourself with excellent valour.’” (p 67)

The joy of the road are many, and she cooks over an open fire — though when she has an opportunity to eat in a hotel she relishes it as well:

“My! how I enjoyed that creamed chicken on toast, and buckwheat cakes with syrup! After you get used to cooking all your own grub, a meal off some one else's stove is the finest kind of treat.” (p. 98)

 It’s a fun read and I expect it’s been providing fun to readers throughout over 100 years since its publication. Maybe I’ll read another book by this author —

Review © 2026 mae sander

Winter Reading

 The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

Pretty good book! Too Long! Too much philosophizing. Too many intertwined stories that go on and on. Too many lists of cultural figures and cultural trends and books and other intellectual references that are only somewhat relevant to the plot, and sort of bog down the flow of the novel. Here’s just one quick example: “Sonia referenced Bulgakov and Dinesen, Calvino and Rushdie, Morrison and Márquez.” (p. 66)

 

Is this a “novel of ideas” — well, maybe, but I would say Sonia and Sunny doesn’t quite make it to that level. At its center is an icon of a strange god or demon, which means something to both the main characters Sunny and Sonia. But it’s not quite an “idea.” Here’s where we meet this icon:

“In case Sonia needed a demon deity to keep other demons away, to keep her safe upon her journey, Mama had given the amulet to her daughter upon the eve of her departure to America. Sonia kept it open by her desk when she worked; sometimes she put a pebble or an acorn before it as if it were a writing god, terrorizing her, inspiring her. The demon’s name was Badal Baba, Hermit of the Clouds. But could Badal Baba protect her? He was even more a foreigner than Sonia was.” (p. 22)

Sonny and Sonia explores two identities, American and Indian, at great length, as it affects both of the title characters and many of the minor ones. Both of them speculate on what it means to be trying to assimilate into America and to deal with their obligations to their Indian families and how they might reconcile the fundamental difference of the Indian extended family with America’s different view of what constitutes a family or even an individual:

“It’s the premise of being American: You are an individual, therefore you are alone. Therefore you must be able to do everything by yourself. Rent a car at an airport, drive yourself cross-country to a job in a place you’ve never heard of, defeat your enemies, trap a rat, make money to pay bills to look after yourself even when you are dying—” (p. 253) 

“The melodrama and guilt felt Indian even while they tried to escape being Indian,” (p. 288)

One of the many plot elements of the novel is Sonia’s efforts to write a novel, including her various trains of thought as she attempts to figure out what she wants to write. This is a bit of a diffuse theme, but in fact only one of many diffuse themes.

“If she followed a rabid ghost hound, wouldn’t she become one? Just don’t write magic realism nonsense, she heard Ilan’s voice from inside herself. Just don’t write phony pseudo-psychology. Just don’t write orientalist rubbish. Just don’t write about arranged marriages. Just don’t write about painters; everyone gets it wrong.” (p. 608) 

Reviewing or even summarizing all the many themes and characters in this novel is too hard for me to do. I think the ambiguous ending of the book suggests that the author was herself a bit overwhelmed by how complicated the book had become. I will now give up!

UPDATE: Indians in America in the New York Times

An article published December 29  (link) explores issues about Indian immigrants in today’s racially changing America.

A 90-foot tall statue of the Hindu deity Hanuman stands on the grounds of a temple that
has earned the enmity of conservative Christian protesters.Credit...Miraj Patel for The New York Times

The Book of Dust

I thought I was going to read this entire trilogy,
but I don’t think I’ll go beyond this, the first of the three volumes.
Not as good as the first trilogy.

Review © 2025 mae sander

Wuthering Heights

 

Wuthering Heights is much more melodramatic than I expected. I can't remember why I decided to read it this week. While reading, I remembered almost nothing from any earlier reading, which took place as part of the assigned curriculum sometime during my high school or junior high school years.

Heathcliff, the enormously evil and perverse main character, is definitely despicable — perhaps to an exaggerated extent. I was startled to realize that one of the clear reasons given for Heathcliff’s seemingly inborn, perverted nature is that he is a black man: I was somewhat shocked at the fact that his race is considered to be a part of his character. His racial difference is a key from his first appearance in the family, when the housekeeper/narrator describes him as "a dark- skinned gipsy in aspect, in dress and manners a gentleman." (p. 3).

At the beginning of the housekeeper’s story of the twenty years when she knew Heathcliff and the other members of the family, she tells how the father of the family at the center of the novel had come home with a street urchin he had found. Returning weary and cold, he has brought not gifts but this street child – who is racially different. He shows his wife and children what he has under his great-coat:

"'See here, wife! I was never so beaten with anything in my life: but you must e'en take it as a gift of God; though it's as dark almost as if it came from the devil.' We crowded round, and over Miss Cathy's head I had a peep at a dirty, ragged, black-haired child." (p. 31). 

As the narrator Ellen, the faithful servant, struggles to understand the emerging nature of Heathcliff -- spiteful, harmful, and vengeful -- his racial identity seems to be one of the causes:

"Heathcliff - I shudder to name him! has been a stranger in the house from last Sunday till to-day. Whether the angels have fed him, or his kin beneath, I cannot tell; but he has not eaten a meal with us for nearly a week. He has just come home at dawn, and gone up-stairs to his chamber; looking himself in - as if anybody dreamt of coveting his company! There he has continued, praying like a Methodist: only the deity he implored is senseless dust and ashes; and God, when addressed, was curiously confounded with his own black father!" (p. 158). 

The housekeeper, in her narrative, dwells on Heathcliff's "blackness of spirit that could brood on and cover revenge for years, and deliberately prosecute its plans without a visitation of remorse." (p. 204). At the end, she still expresses her cosmic incomprehension of the nature of this evil man: 

"'Is he a ghoul or a vampire?' I mused. I had read of such hideous incarnate demons. And then I set myself to reflect how I had tended him in infancy, and watched him grow to youth, and followed him almost through his whole course; and what absurd nonsense it was to yield to that sense of horror. 'But where did he come from, the little dark thing, harboured by a good man to his bane?' muttered Superstition, as I dozed into unconsciousness." (p. 300).

While Heathcliff, with his overblown nature, dominates the novel, the other characters are somewhat pale in comparison. Though each one has his or her own identity, they aren’t nearly as compelling. All in all, I found the novel somewhat overblown — I can see why it’s considered as good material for adolescents.

If this novel is still part of the school curriculum, I wonder if the teachers bring up this racist theme. The novel is in the "common core" that's recommended for college prep, but I don't know if that means it's discussed in classes. Times have changed greatly since I read it in school! 

Blog post © 2025  mae sander

Doing Things

 In Ann Arbor

A cup of coffee at Argus

… we told them to find another way to trim the trees away from the power lines!

Favorite News Item

In the Salish Sea near Seattle — AP photo:
A little seal escapes a pod of orcas that wanted to have it for dinner.

Story of the seal in the Guardian. (This is only a screen shot of the video).

When we were there…

We saw seals furiously barking at a pod of orcas when we took a National Geographic cruise
 there: my photo (© 2018).

From Miriam in China

A mural on a street in Shanghai. More of Miriam’s photos will be posted here.

Recent Reading

The narrator of Zadie Smith’s Swing Time (published 2014) seemed very unsympathetic to me, and so did almost all the other characters. The narrator was an assistant to a famous (obviously fictitious) pop singer: a woman with an enormous ego and not much else to her. The other assistants and employees were uniformly impressed by their employer, and utterly empty-headed. A major theme of the novel is race and its importance to the narrator, her friend, her employer and quite a few others, all of them brown or black individuals dealing with the emerging racism in England towards the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st century.

The novel alternates between the narrator’s description of her relationship with her employer and her childhood and friendship with a girl who eventually became a successful dancer and then a failure. Here’s her eventual insight into her friend, around half way through the book:

“She was a dancer: she’d found her tribe. I, meanwhile, was caught completely unawares by adolescence, still humming Gershwin songs at the back of the classroom as the friendship rings began to form and harden around me, defined by color, class, money, postcode, nation, music, drugs, politics, sports, aspirations, languages, sexualities . . . In that huge game of musical chairs I turned round one day and found I had no place to sit. At a loss, I became a Goth—it was where people who had nowhere else to go ended up.” (p. 215)

 I had to force myself to keep reading. In fact, I don’t know why I did, but I persisted. I remember liking her earlier book White Teeth.

Blog post © 2025 mae sander

Shared with Eileen’s Critters,

Sami’s Monday Murals, and 

Deb’s Sunday Salon

More Books and More Walks

Neighborhood News: 

The Great Pumpkins Have Arrived! 

When I drove past this morning, this year’s giant pumpkins were being carved.
Now we are ready for Halloween!

Reading

Practical Magic: a real Halloween book about witches!

Books about witches seem to be domestic, because witches are domestic. Their cookpots may be filled with unthinkable and inedible stews, but the concoctions do steam up the domestic space in the kitchen. And often, witches cook real delicious food. The witches in Practical Magic definitely fit this stereotype, and I loved it. From the beginning when witch Sally fixes lunches for herself and her sister, and also later when Sally and her daughters go back to visit the witching house in Massachusetts, their cooking sounds delicious and also normal: 

“Sally was the one who cooked healthy dinners of meat loaf and fresh green beans and barley soup, using recipes from a copy of Joy of Cooking she’d managed to smuggle into the house. She fixed their lunchboxes each morning, packing up turkey-and-tomato sandwiches on whole-wheat bread, adding carrot sticks and iced oatmeal cookies…” (p. 6)

“They’ll fix a picnic lunch of cream cheese and olive sandwiches, pita pockets stuffed with salad, Thermoses filled with lemonade and iced tea. They’ll pack up the car the way they do every August, and get on the highway before seven, to avoid traffic.“ (p. 195) 

“Vegetarian lasagna and green bean salad with almonds, and cherry cheesecake for dessert, all homemade.” (p. 198) 

The two sisters escape the real witch house of their aunts, who actively practice witchcraft and do spells for women in distress (especially distressed love) — but their powers follow the sisters when they try to escape, and in the end, witching is the big thing. Meanwhile, they have insights about life and all its complexities, but can’t always solve their own problems. They are also cursed: the men they love are doomed to die. As one sister observes: “Money, love, or fury—those are the causes for most everything.” (p. 202)

Note: I haven’t seen the movie of this book, and I just read about a coming sequel to that movie. The review was lukewarm, so I probably won’t bother to see either of them.

Mary Burton: What She Saw

What She Saw was a free book offered to me by amazon.com (I don’t know why). I had never heard of the book or of the author, but I did read the whole thing. It’s a suspense novel about some pretty icky murders, but the descriptions of violence aren’t excessive. The author has written many other books, but I doubt if I. will read any of them. I guess this is another good choice for Halloween reading!

Halloween Again: Walking in my Neighborhood

This “dog” barks and jumps out of his house when you walk by on the sidewalk.
It’s very scary!

Most of the blow-up decorations are boring, but this one is kind of neat.

At the local produce store: pumpkins everywhere.

Important Halloween news from the New York Times: “the price of chocolate candy has risen almost 29 percent over the start of the Halloween season last year. A recent survey by the personal finance site FinanceBuzz has prices of Halloween candy up 78 percent from five years ago.” If you have been getting ready for trick-or-treaters you already know this!

The Botanical Garden in Autumn

A beaver lives here.

Photos © 2025 mae sander

Does Life Follow Art? Or What?

 A Short Read

Today: news that Grok, an AI bot inside X (Twitter) has begun producing antisemitic comments to relatively ordinary questions: 

“The comments were part of a flood of offensive responses offered by Grok in recent days that shocked even users who have become accustomed to offensive speech on X.   In a statement posted on xAI’s account for Grok, company officials said they are ‘aware of recent posts made by Grok and are actively working to remove the inappropriate posts.’ They said they would improve Grok’s training model.” (source)

A story by Israeli author Etgar Keret, from the collection titled Autocorrect, had an incident very like this, though set in the future when all information comes from a bot named Sigmund:

“Simple queries on Sigmund, the most popular search engine of the day, received peculiar answers that occasionally bordered on trolling: a young man from Stuttgart wondered where he could buy cut-rate designer shoes and was told he’d be better off barefoot. An elderly woman from Wisconsin asked when Thanksgiving would be celebrated that year and was answered wryly: ‘Whenever you’re feeling most thankful.’ And a Chinese student from Shanghai University who wanted Sigmund to recommend the best antidepressant in the world was given the chemical formula for hydrogen cyanide.”

The very short stories in this collection make many pointed observations about life in modern times, especially in Israel, where things seem to me to be even more off-kilter than what we are living through now in the USA. 

Review © 2025 mae sander

Weekend Fun

French Detectives

“Murder In…” — a very long series that we just started.

“L’Art du Crime” — sometimes far-fetched, but usually fun.

Both of these series have subtitles, of course, but I can still sometimes understand what they are saying in French. Both have tons of local color! French provincial towns and cities or Paris and the Louvre. All great to see.

Celebrating the Fourth of July

More Fireworks Photos

I love fireworks! So glad for this unofficial display in our local park.

Saturday Afternoon Ride in the Countryside

The corn is growing in the fields not far from our small city.

Reading fiction and essays 

Homage to Kafka: Ten Short Stories

a cage went in search of a bird

I can’t read all these stories one-after-another, the way I read a regular anthology, because the writers were doing homage to Kafka. Therefore most of the selections are very weird, surreal, and frightening. Characters are trapped or they are uncomprehending, or they are desperate to control their own circumstances which have gotten away from them. The fear and dislocations expressed here seem to outdo Kafka, whose 100th death anniversary they were written to celebrate — he died on June 3, 1924. Some of the stories seem more like Italo Calvino than like Kafka because they are not only surreal but they double back on themselves in a self-referential way.

If somehow you decide to read this collection, consider yourself warned!

Homage to Nobody: Essays by Rebecca Solnit

Essays by Rebecca Solnit: all written before the current administration took over.

The world was already becoming strange and disastrous when these collected essays were written a few years ago, many during or just after the pandemic. The book was published in 2025, but the author’s position of cautious optimism about the future of a number of issues (even climate change) and about the possibility of political action to mitigate them seem depressingly retro. I can’t bear this optimism in view of this past six months of rapid decommissioning of positive endeavors of the US government and the replacement of responsible officials with lackeys who oppose the earlier policies and are only destructive.

The more I read these essays from the past, even with a few author’s notes written in 2025, the more I simply find them painfully obsolete. The small possible changes played up in Solnit’s essays are now obliterated by our newly powerful backwards-looking and kleptocratic government. The possibility, for example, that there could be some way to counter fossil fuel dominance has been utterly cancelled along with the defunding of most government-funded projects to overcome it and the re-empowering of the interests of the fossil fuel industry. Ditto social change. Ditto environmentalism. Optimism is now simply crazy.

The more I read, the more I find myself speed reading because Solnit’s rosy view that small changes will counter big trends has become so impossible. Virtually all positive actions for racial and social justice, environmental protection, higher education, and many other virtuous initiatives once taken by our nation have been brutally cancelled in just half a year by the new administration. Horrifying!

Some depressing quotes:

“A standard complaint of the right: the real victim is the racist who has been called a racist, not the victim of his racism; the real oppression is to be impeded in your freedom to oppress.” (p. 81)

  

“The Covid-19 pandemic was, like the climate crisis, a reminder that we are interconnected and that what we do as individuals and together affects the whole; that’s a scientific fact rather than a political position, but those who reject the facts treat them as political opinions (and in some versions of the libertarian worldview, everyone gets to have their own facts).” (p. 59)

“Of course, in the face of the climate crisis, sticking with the status quo isn’t an option. We either make the changes science has shown are necessary and engineering has made possible, or we let runaway change of the worst kind devastate people and places.” (p. 155) 

“All mining needs to be done with respect for the land and people in the vicinity, but the impact of mining for renewables needs to be weighed against the far more devastating impact of mining for and burning fossil fuel.” (p. 144) 

Don’t bother to read this book — it no longer speaks to our current situation, and there are much more important issues to think about! Of course I hope that some miracle will stop the current effort to create a totalitarian and anti-progressive government in Washington, but I have no rational reason to expect this outcome.

Quote for Today

“More than 80 years ago, as France was under occupation and repression, America welcomed exiled researchers, offering them a helping hand and allowing them to keep science alive. And now, in a sad reversal of history, some American scientists have arrived in France in search of a space for freedom, thought and research.” — Éric Berton, president of  Aix-Marseille University, quoted in the Guardian.

Sunday Morning In My Garden 

Blog post © 2025 mae sander