The moderator for that panel will be Dr. Laney Ross. Dr. Ross is the Carolyn Matthew Bucksbaum Professor of Clinical Ethics at the University of Chicago where Laney also holds appointments in pediatrics, medicine, surgery, and in the college. Dr. Ross has written four very influential books, including Children, Families, and Healthcare Decision Making, another book called Children in Medical Research, Access Versus Protection. More recently, she worked with Bob Beach to write the second edition of the great textbook called Transplantation Ethics and then wrote Defining Death, the Case for Choice. Laney has also written many peer-reviewed articles in a wide range of topics, including organ transplant, genetics, pediatrics, human subject research. Laney is an associate director of the McLean Center and serves on the Secretary's Advisory Committee on Human Research Protection. Today, Dr. Ross will moderate a panel of talks in clinical ethics, and that will include her own talk, which is titled an Ethics Framework for Living Donor Transplantation. Please join me in giving a warm welcome to Dr. Laney Ross. So it's great to see all of you back. It's great to be celebrating the 30th. I think I missed the first five because I was still in school. Not trying to say I'm young. I color my hair for the purpose. Anyway, my real privilege to start, we're actually, Laura Roberts is not able to be here today, so we're not going to have her give a talk. David Cheetamire is actually going to give some of her remarks later because she sent them to him, but we're going to do that last. So just for those of you who are trying to keep track of the order of the program. So I'm going to begin with Laurie Zola, who I am thrilled, has become a colleague here. We had to steal her from Northwestern. So Laurie is the Margaret Burton Professor of Religion and Ethics. She's also the senior advisor to the provost for programs on social ethics here at the University of Chicago. She's a scholarly interest in bioethics and Jewish studies. She's been the president of the American Academy of Religion, the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities. She's worked with NASA. She's actually worked on the DNA Recombinant Advisory Committee. We got to overlap for about six months. She's also been on the Executive Committee of the International Society for Stem Cell Research. Professor Zoloth also served as chair of the first bioethics advisory board at the Howard Hughes Medical Research Institute. And it's testified in front of Congress, the President's Commission on Bioethics and State Legislatures. Today, Professor Zoloth will give a talk titled, May We Remake the World? Gene Drives, Malaria and the Limits of Nature. Please join me in giving a warm welcome to Laurie. So gene drives on a talk in the session on clinical ethics. One of the things I want to convince you is why you need, as clinicians, to know about this, okay? Fair enough. Thank you, Lainey, and thank you, Mark, for the invitation. And here's my plan of talk. So first, I'm going to talk about one very curious idea, a new idea called gene drives. They're a natural occurrence and they're synthetic forms and then I'm going to move from gene drives into why we need such a thing, a crazy new genetic intervention using genome editing and to the problem of malaria, the central problem of malaria and the history of malaria as a failed policy, a failed health care policy and what we should do about it. I'm going to talk about the ethical issues in applying the theory to the practice and give a brief description of target malaria, which is a not-for-profit academic consortium I'm involved in. And I'm going to talk a little bit how hard it is to make policy in the face of sincere and serious competing ethical and theological appeals and then I'm going to say thank you, okay? Fair enough, we're ready to go? Plan of talk, okay. So this is Chrissie Hall. This is a rural academy retreat center in England, right in your Bletchley Hall, which you know from the war. Chrissie Hall is where they get people together like scientists and me to talk about things like cutting edge issues and genetics, okay? So you've all been invited to things like this. I know you, your ethicist. You're invited to come and talk about the ethics of something new and revolutionary at beautiful places like this. And I was there to talk about gene drives. Gene drives, and that's the question, are gene drives ethical? Now what's a new gene drive? Since 19, since 2003, Austin Burt, native on Ontario, a very malaria-ridden place in Canada, who teaches at Imperial College London had been thinking and putting forward this idea of using nature itself to manipulate epidemics that naturally occur. Gene drive is when the laws of Mendelian genetics are broken and there's a preferential inheritance of a particular gene that goes on from generation to generation. It occurs in nature in many sexually reproducing species. It's a gene that sometimes is not even beneficial to the organism, can be driven without affecting the fitness of the organism. So even a harmful gene can be passed on in multiple generations. And on all things being equal, these naturally occurring gene drives can increase in frequency of transmission in about 20 generations. That's true for both natural and for synthetic. So evolution usually works, just a brief rundown of Biology 101. Remember Gregor Mendel, who sort of cheated on those peas, right? You all know that, but he looked to us as if the Mendelian inheritance would hold up. On average, you know that you've got about a 50-50 chance of inheriting a gene from one of your parents, right? With Mendelian inheritance, not all offspring are gonna inherit the gene, about half will, and the frequency of the gene in future generations is stable. It's similar to the frequency of the gene of the parent generation. But gene drives are a fifth force in evolution. In addition to mutation, migration, selection, and drift, there's also transposable elements, gamete killers, maternal effect killers, homing and dilucidized genes in microbes, for instance. There's many types. And Austin Burt told us that this was a whole zoo of possibilities that operates genetically just under the normal world of Mendelian genetics. Under, like this again, the key thing is when you normally change or create a mutation in an animal species, you reduce its fitness, and it can't compete, but gene drives don't reduce fitness. And so he thought, here's an idea to use this synthetic gene drive to suppress a population, to knock in or knock out genes, to change a phenotype, more binding, less binding, to change a host feeding patterns from human to animal, for instance, to create a different phenotype that doesn't get malaria, doesn't get the plasmodium, or to change the vector component. So these are the kind of things that this entomologist geneticist was thinking about.  They have to sexually reproduce. They have to do it quick in a relatively short generation time, so not people. The driving element has to remain stable across multiple generations and not drift, and the population structure at the end has to be appropriate to the desired outcome. So you want to eliminate an entire population, you better know what you're doing. So these are designed to change populations. Two ideas are being thought about now when first before Christmas, there was talons and zinc fingers. Now with CRISPR-Cas, you can create easier breaks and repairs with your endonuclease and make both of the sides of the double-stranded DNA heterogeneous into homogenous matings. With a construct, you can replace with a match sequences, plus the capacity to always cut and replace. Because what you do is you not only replace the strip of gene that you want to change, you also take the cutting apparatus along with you. That continues to stay in the genome by 20 generations, as it said. So it works like this. You can see normal sexual reproduction, and the effect of a gene drive is if an individual is equipped with one, it will push its unique trait to nearly 100% of its offspring. And then the process keeps repeating and repeating until every single organism has the engineered gene. So Birch has this idea to use what's called a driving Y chromosome. And you can see a little picture of the driving Y chromosome. And how that works is that it will take a gene, a sequence that's only on the female gene and shred it, and then no females will be born. All offspring will get the inherited gene, no females born. Now why is this important? This is tricky. This is messing with nature. But why? Well, because of malaria. Malaria is a very serious and sometimes fatal parasitic infection that occurs and still occurs in nearly 100 countries worldwide. They have high fever. People get high fevers. They get crushing bone aches. They get anemia. If the infection is severe, then it crosses the blood-brain barrier. The falcipian malaria plasmodium can relieve the coma and death. It disproportionately affects the poor and it disproportionately affects children in low and middle income countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and South America. And still to this day, between 500 and 400,000 deaths a year, two million infections a year, a child dying of malaria every two minutes. Now all human malaria is caused by one of only five protozoan parasites of the plasmodium genus and it's carried in the guts of the mosquito.  Very complicated thing to figure out. Female mosquitoes only need blood meals to mature the eggs after they're being fertilized and only older females with the capacity to produce bites. So we're after older females. What can I say? Okay. There's 3,500 species who are responsible for the majority of African deaths. Only three of them are responsible for the majority of African deaths. There's lots and lots of different species of mosquitoes. They are everywhere. They're in Chicago. They are highly adaptable. And many of them are the anopheles. Most of them in America are ages of gypti that carry Zika and Dengue. But anopheles are also widespread, particularly in the Midwest. They only need one teaspoon or one bottle cap to breed. And the whole thing can dry out and be discarded in a pile. And then with the first rain, it can once again, it can then, the eggs can hatch. They meals vary by species, but human blood is preferred by anopheles almost entirely. And only one of these many mosquitoes is the most significant in Sub-Saharan Africa. And that's the mosquito anopheles gambi. It's the primary vector of plasmonium in Sub-Saharan Africa. And it carries the worst form of the illness, particularly it's infected with talsypian malaria, not vivax. And it is a very efficient carrier. It bites frequently, you know, it's just where to go, and it has the capacity to adapt with the organism very quickly, so that the cycles are fast. Now, it was hard to figure this out. Malaria co-evolved with primates. And there's, you can tell that the long traces, the long mark of trace of death in human populations, because of the duffy negative cells. If you are someone with African-American ancestry, then you're more likely than not to have duffy negative blood, red blood cells, which means you can't get vivax malaria, which will become important in testing later. But you can get falsipium. The other, the falsipium is a much worse kind of malaria. G6PD, thalassemia, and of course, sickle cell disease, likely more responses to that malaria infection. There was a long inquiry to figure out the etiology. And it's a really unlikely story that it's a mosquito and it's inside. Just when people were thinking microbes, diseases, organisms, germs, they had to rethink it and think parasites, mosquitoes, intermediate vectors, right? And took a long time to figure it out. But at the end of the 19th century, they still knew what to do. Quinine, drain swamps, screens, bed nets, avoidance of night exposure, larvae and insecticide, and finally moving away. One of the reasons that there was a great migration to Chicago, right, was because there wasn't malaria here by the 1940s. There was malaria in Louisiana. University of Chicago, by the way, small detour, was at the very center of research on malaria. Two University of Chicago scientists, Lowell Cogshow and Alf Alving, anyone know these people, right? Were enlisted and they ran the trial at the Stateville Prison for malaria, infecting prisoners with malaria to get them sick, to test drugs that they had found in, when they captured Germans they found on chloroquine and they tested it to make sure that it was safe to use. This trial, which by the way, everyone says was done with love and dignity and respect, was actually used by the defense in the Nuremberg case to say, you Americans do the same thing to your prisoners as we did to ours, right? And one of the most famous participants in the trial was Loeb of Leopold and Loeb, who was, of course, a prisoner and also a participant in this trial at Stateville Prison. And there we have our scientists. Okay, DDT was developed to deal with the catastrophe that happened in World War II. In World War II, the only drug with quinine was taken over by the Japanese in Java. There was no way to fight against these mosquitoes and by the second year of the war, 1942, MacArthur was said, I have one division in the hospital, one division recovering and only one division left to fight. And so they developed powerful new pesticides. DDT was the most important of one. They sprayed it and they were able to eliminate malaria throughout the Pacific Theater. Meanwhile, they were taking adabran, which turns you yellow, until they finally, after the Statesville had said that chloroquine could work. They began to wipe out mosquitoes and malaria rates began to drop dramatically after World War I. Malaria was not eradicated in the United States until 1951, but the campaign did not work. Why? The main reason is mosquitoes are complicated, plasmas complicated, they both develop resistance. Mosquitoes develop resistance to DDT and plasmodium develop resistance to the chloroquine. And by the way, it's very, very hard to go to every single hamlet in every single part of Africa, of Southeast Asia, of Thailand, of Borneo, all over Africa, and spray three times a year. Everyone has to take all their stuff out. The walls have to be sprayed and you can imagine how difficult this was. And so was abandon. Around the same time this happened, Rachel Carson wrote the first bestseller on ecology and alerted us to the fact that the very thing that made DDT so persuasive, it stayed on the walls for four months, but that it also stayed in the food chain a disturbing amount of time. And this was one of the reasons why people first began to think ecology, environmental, and they resisted the use of DDT. As I said, there was already resistance, but this was the other kind of resistance, political resistance. Carson polluted the DDT and had their pesticides in irrevocably harmed animals, especially birds with poor shells and contaminated the entire world's food supply. And so DDT was banned, no longer able to be used, more pelicans and many, many more mosquitoes. So we're at a stalemate. The current methods for malaria control, as I said, are late 19th century. They have two themes, drug therapy and vector control. The focus is always on vector control. And the mosquitoes have developed resistance to every single thing that human beings have tried, even to the newest drugs, developed by the way in the Cultural Revolution by the Chinese, Artemisian, and to cohort combination therapies. And then bed nets, you think. When you think about a 19th century solution, that is bed nets are very problematic. One is they have other uses that are more valuable to people in Sub-Saharan Africa. Like they're really good to fish. And if you have the choice between putting a bed net over your child and fishing to feed the other five, you might make that choice too. They also need replacement. Babies poop on the bed nets. They get dirty. People scrub out the insecticide. They're very hot. They look like shrouds in so many cultures. You don't wanna sleep under a shroud. They had to dye the green to fix that. There's only space for one child sometimes. And the World Bank decided it would be best if we sold them. And therefore they're expensive. Sometimes people don't use them to our children. So that's why people have turned to gene drives. That's exactly why. Because the 19th century solutions are not working. In the last malaria report by WHO, malaria rates which had dropped precipitously from 2000 to 2015 are now stable for the last two years. And people fear this year will be a rise. Now, how this works is to reduce the transmission by reducing, as I said, the number of females that are born. So you're not altering the females. You're just not having the females. It's the event of non-entity, right? So this is Target Malaria Project. These are three countries, Bali, Burkina Faso and Uganda, where they're working. This is the members of Target Malaria. And it's a not-for-profit, academic and community leadership. It's a university-based research program and they refuse to take profits. They're not doing patents and all the research is all transparent. And they have an independent Ethics Advisory Board, which I am on, right? And that's our role. The obvious role of an Ethics Advisory Committee is to oversee this project, making sure that the standards of community engagement and safety are thought about and there's space to think about the ethical issues involving such a powerful technology. But the opposition is now very powerful. As I said, starting with Rachel Carson, but now there's the Cartania Protocol, the Biodiversity Protocol meetings of the UN. They've become a site of opposition to gene drives. There's a general anti-science zeitgeist and everyone's seen Jurassic Park. So. Now many of the objections to gene drives are familiar. There's a weird 18th and 19th century fear that if you reduced the burden of malaria, you'd have so many African children and the colonialist ideology really didn't like that. You hear that repeated now in current debates. What do we do with all these babies that don't die, right? Monthly issue is fact is secondary to colonialism. That's why the big war on malaria happened. Will those change? Will those relationship change or not? And people are worried that people will go in and make a profit. Many different publics need to be part of the project. There's a real stress on community involvement. If the problem is it looks just like every other European idea or American idea to go in and interfere in the lives of others. And it's opposed for that reason. There's theological issues as well. Of course, I'm a scholar of religion. I see them everywhere. Nature is seen as unfinished and unproblematic versus nature as sacred and untouchable. Notice those two problems have long existed with science. It's the assault on vaccines is the same drama. Is natural law valid? People ask if we can rewrite the book of nature. On the other hand, can you turn from the blood of your neighbor? How does it feel to be an auditorium watching children die, being aware of the death of children? And finally, there's complicated religious systems in African tribal communities have to be understood and respected. Now, how did bioethicists respond? Well, they're old traditional method. We all went to a Silemar. You contain infectious agents. You do a controlled release. You do a stepwise breeding, first in the lab, then in the lab in the country, and then a small-scale field release, then a large release. This has been done before. The cassava mealy bug. Cassava plants were found by the Jesuits in Latin America, brought over to Africa, seen as a crop for women. But then someone brought over the cassava mealy bug, and the cassava mealy bug needed to have its wasp that killed it, brought in to keep the ecology right. And that's been done. That cassava mealy bug project is a very interesting project because you had to take everything from the environment, the cassava, the bug that ate it, and the bug that ate it, the bug that ate it, right? And it's worked pretty well. That was done in a similar place in Africa. The wasps from Paraguay in Brazil was used to target it, and to reduce the bugs by 95% in three to four years. And for the last 15 years, there's been no more reoccurrence. But the trouble is they may not be able to be reversed. The first theory in gene drives, a talk I would gave last year, was you could have a recall or a reverse drive if things went badly wrong. But science is pretty tricky, and it turns out you can't do that. So when you hear that people say, well, it's true, it's not true. And meanwhile, the guide RNA and the Cas9 will always remain out there in every mosquito. The first time, a relatively easy technology, which by the way, you can buy this, that parts yourself from 10K on eBay, I've been told, that is deliberately constructed to have a large effect and not be contained. It's the opposite of all of our regulations. It's supposed to spread everywhere. It's the first time that it can be done cheaply and by anyone, okay? A lot of people have come to this point and said, oh, we need ethics reviews. So look at all these people that, all of their reviews, I've read, all of them. The most important one I think is the African Union, hence it's gonna be in Africa. But the National Academy of Science had a very extensive review that I recommend you take a look at. They draw attention to the fact that historians of science and engineering saw how discoveries related to theory, observation and technology change our understanding of the natural world, notice this theological focus on the sanctity of the natural world that ought not be changed, right? The breathtaking pace is noted and not surprisingly, the depth, breadth and practical implications of scientific advances in gene drive research by simultaneously reading many challenges at the interface of science and society, to put it mildly. You can just imagine the implications if this is used not just for malaria, but for other insects, right? Now, the regulatory structure is the one we're all familiar with. It's taken for the structures of the Silomore. When ethicists see a problem, we too have our hammers and that is autonomy and that is consent and that is to find a historic, universally applicable rule, a category of imperative and in privacy. We like what we know and we can comment about what we know and therefore we've tried to use the same language we've developed as we consider the ethics of any other genetic intervention. But no one has mentioned a very important problem. One is there's no money to do anything. It's historically, WHO has had 50% of what they've asked for, 50% of what they've needed and probably this would be the case too. And why? Because no one in the field of bioethics has carefully thought about malaria and its complicated history. So it's been thought about by public health people who use the ontology of agilitarianism but it's a complicated long history. For instance, is consent possible in Burkini Faso? In the ecology devastated by poverty? What use is our ideas about consent? Okay, further research is gonna look at these five problems. Do we have the right or even the obligation to intervene into the lives of other people, especially if it might harm them? If we start, intervene, stop malaria, then people with acquired immunity will lose that immunity and we'll get sick again. That's happened before, it can happen again. If the point of gene drives is to spread, why should we or the communities make the final decision? Who makes the final decision since it may not be located in Burkini Faso but of course every mosquito will meet the next mosquito, right, they'll go across porters. The world is unknowable. What about uncertainty? What about the fact that we don't really know what we're doing with this genetic technology? Malaria is now concentrating places racked by chaos. What's our duty in light of the fact that much of this chaos is a direct result of either colonialism in the struggle for Africa or our subsequent lack of funding and what virtues have to guide our acts. I'm gonna suggest fidelity might be a core virtue. Is that possible? Maybe make the world, apparently we have, we will and yes, we should make the world. And why is this important as a, why am I in the clinical section? There's one reason, because of global warming. Here's the map of climate change. Here's the estimate of world malaria burden and the estimate of world poverty, right? These boundaries are unstable because of climate change. Mosquitoes like it wet, they like it hot and the range will expand. So mosquitoes range is growing including the Gambi, regulatory authorities and oversight at the borders have been cut back. They only check the holes of ships twice a year now. Global warming drives migration and refugees which carry the plasmodium, warmer weather speeds, transmission and replication and malaria is a disease of poverty and of chaos and our world has plenty. So I wanna say thank you to all the people who've helped me learn this much about homing endonuclease. And then I wanna say during this talk of 20 minutes, 10 people, usually children have died and here's the faces of some of them. Thank you. Okay, one question. Take one question, one comment. One horrified scream. I guess you spoke fast enough to leave us speechless. All right, thank you very much, Lori.


Carbopenam resistance is a major and an ongoing public health problem globally. It occurs mainly among gram-negative pathogens such as Klebsiella pneumonii, pseudomonas aeroginosa, and acenetobacter bomanii, and may be intrinsic or mediated by transferable carbapenamase encoding genes. This type of resistance genes are already widespread in certain parts of the world, particularly Europe, Asia, and South America, while the situation in other places such as Sub-Saharan Africa is not well-documented. In this paper, we provide an in-death review of carbapenam resistance providing up-to-date information on the subject. This article was authored by Francis S. Cajo and Eric S. Doncor.


A large part of what we do, even though it's robotics, does not have to do with robots, it has to do with people. With interacting with people, understanding their behavior, understanding their intent. Again, this is something that we could not really do just a few years ago. With the new techniques, with the data, with the far greater availability to computing, we can now learn models of behavior, not models of intent. We have much more elaborate decision making when interacting with people. And that has transformed the field.


All right, we're going to go ahead and get started. Then welcome to how to create and share primary source sets. This is part of our Docs Teach for Virtual Learning series. We've got more of these coming up. The next one is on Thursday, so we hope you will join us again in two days for that. Docs Teach is a website that's really full of primary source documents from the holdings of the National Archives, as well as online activities that you can use with your students. So today, we're really going to focus on those primary sources. Thursday, we'll talk more about using the online activities that you can find on the site to teach virtually. But today, we're really, as I said, focusing on those primary sources. And it's almost the simpler part of Docs Teach, but it's really helpful. It can be really useful, especially teaching in this virtual environment. So what I am going to show you today is how to create primary source sets on Docs Teach to find primary source documents on Docs Teach and how to compile them into folders that you can share with your students while you're teaching virtually. So to get started, I'm actually going to go to one of these folders that I already set up. And I just chose an example for today of Westward Expansion. Some of you may be teaching this when you get your classes going again here in a month or so. So Westward Expansion, I've chosen some documents here. I've got a variety of documents. And so this is what my folder would look like that I could share with my students. I've got Homestead Act-related documents moving Westward documents, a variety of documents as well, textual documents, photographs, maps, et cetera. So I'm going to show how to get to this finished product. So we're going to go right back to the home page of Docs Teach to get started with our document search. Now, I want to point out that I am already logged in on the site, so that'll make a difference in a minute. So to create these folders of primary source documents, you do need to be logged in. So it's a free account if you don't already have one. But I'm going to go ahead and click on primary source documents here. And this brings us to our document search page. And I'm just going to go ahead and type westward expansion here and do a quick search and see what we get. Now, as you can see, we've got a whole variety of documents found, 110 different ones. That would be overwhelming for our students. So we're going to narrow down and choose the ones that we want to put into our westward expansion primary source set. So when I've got to my results page, I'm going to click on Date here to go ahead and sort these primary sources so I can get into the error that I'm talking about. For this example, I am going to be picking documents for the Civil War post-Civil War westward expansion period. So while we know the United States was certainly expanding west earlier than that, that's the unit that I've just chosen as an example here. So I'm going to move ahead in time here since I sorted these by date. I'm going from older to newer. And I can go ahead and get. Now I'm starting to get into the time period that I'm looking for. And I'm going to go ahead and get started by clicking on Homestead Act here. So this is the Homestead Act. We probably, if you teach the Homestead Act, you probably don't often teach the actual act. But this is it. This is what it looks like from May, 20, 1862. This is in the Holdings of the National Archives. And here on Docs Teach, you can zoom in on this document. We can see here that this is an act to secure homesteads to actual settlers on the public domain. And we've got multiple pages of the document. I can click through the document to view the multiple pages. And just showing you sort of an outline of what this kind of document page looks like to start with. Just an overview. Here we have more of a description of this document providing some historical background. This document, since this is a bit tough to read, this one includes a transcription. Not all of our documents on Docs Teach have transcriptions. But in this case, we provided one. We're increasingly trying to provide those for documents that are a bit difficult to read. There's more information, including why this is in the Holdings of the National Archives, where it came from. And also, down here, you'll see some activities that use this document. So again, we're not going to go into these online activities in this webinar today. But you can see the Homestead Act is quite popular. It's been used in many documents, or excuse me, many activities that have been created by educators with Docs Teach accounts. You can see some of these, for instance, reasons for westward expansion here, the settlement of the American West, what else was happening during the Civil War. You can see that these were created by the National Archives Education Team. So we note that so that you are easier to identify those that we have created here at the National Archives. So if I scroll back up now, I'm going to draw your attention to a few other buttons up here that are really useful when we're talking about distance learning, teaching online. We've got, if you wanted to, this document could be printed out. So we've got this Print button here. There's also a download icon here, where you can download all the images of the document, if that's how it's easier to share with students. That way, this plus sign is for adding this document to Activities, which we'll talk about on Thursday. And then here, we've got this star button. And that's what I really want to show you today. So I'm going to click on this button to add it to my favorites. And I've got, if I click on this, I've got multiple folders that I've created in the past. But I'm going to just leave this as it is to create a new folder and put this document into it. So I'm going to click Add. And this is going to add the Homestead Act to a brand new folder that I've just made. But I noticed, I'm going to go down here. And I noticed that in this description, it talked about Daniel Freeman making the first claim under the Homestead Act. So I'm going to go ahead and click on that to check out this document, or these documents. And so here, yeah, we can see what we have in our holdings. We've got this actual Homestead application number one. So this is it, the very, you can see application number one here, the very first application made under the Homestead Act. I'm going to click through to the next document related to Daniel Freeman. And here we've got Daniel Freeman's proof required under the Homestead Act. So while the Homestead Act itself is, I don't know that it's as accessible for students, right? It is rather lengthy for them to read. It's legal language. It's a congressional document. It's in script. And this might be a little bit more accessible to use this actual proof. A lot of times when we teach the Homestead Act, we are talking about what was required to get that land under the Homestead Act. And this really lays it out here. So we've got Daniel Freeman's name, says that he's a head of a family. It talks about where his house is built. It talks about the improvements on the house, et cetera. So on Doc's Siege, because we have primary source documents from the Holdings of the National Archives, we have a lot to draw on in terms of what kind of primary sources we choose to put onto Doc's Siege. We have records from primary source documents, historical records from all three branches of government and all different parts of the government. So we might have these very formal acts of Congress or laws, but we also have their application in documents like this. So I'm gonna go ahead and star this document. And now in my list, I can find, it just gave it a name of today's date and the time I created this folder. So I'm just gonna go with that title for right now while I continue to add documents to this folder. And then I'm gonna go ahead and just check out our next document on the list. Here's our Daniel Freeman's final certificate, showing that he received his land under the Homestead Act. I'm gonna add that one to my folder as well. So click star, choose my folder created on August 4th and add it to that folder. Now I could also, I did a very general search for Westwood expansion, but if I go up to menu here and documents, which will bring me back to the document search page, I could get more specific. So I could actually do a search, an exact phrase search for Homestead Act. And that would really narrow down. So it went from 110 to 20. And some of them we've seen the Homestead Act itself, Daniel Freeman's paperwork. But these are the ones we've seen so far are more, they are government documents and it's nice to provide a variety. So when you're pulling primary source sets together, you wanna provide that variety of documents. And so for instance, this photograph that's in our holdings is a primary source document, a photograph from 1866, actually showing a family in their covered wagon, headed out West in Nebraska in this case. And so I'm gonna add that one to my folder as well. So again, click the star button, find my folder and go ahead and add it to my document. So that's gonna bring in that more personal element to it. Now what I'm gonna do is return to those search results and see what else would be useful for this primary source set. I'm gonna clip on this document here. So again, a variety of types of documents we have here, it's worth it to find different types and pull them together so that your students can see history from different sides and also consider what are these documents? Who made them? What was the position of the creator of the document? What were they trying to do? So in this case, this document is claiming Indian territory that Garden of the World is now open for homestead and preemption. This is actually a poster in our holdings and this is a poster with a map included in it here. And if we go down and there's a lot of details to look at here, this is one of the most popular documents on Docs Teach that teachers like to use. You can see down here, it's coming from a general ticket agent and this is actually from a railroad company. So this is actually an advertisement to get settlers out to the point where they might claim some land. So obviously this document is gonna bring up a larger conversation about the land and who owns the land and some treaties, et cetera. So that's the document that I wanna go ahead and include in this primary source test. So I'm gonna, again, choose that folder and add this document to the list. I'm gonna go ahead and go just back to those results. I noticed when I was looking at this ahead of time, one more kind of fun document. So we have several other documents here related to the Oklahoma land rush. You might get a kick out of this, another Homestead proof. I will now add this to my folder, but you may recognize the name here. This is a Homestead proof testimony of Almanzo Wilder, husband of Laura Ingalls Wilder, of course, of Little House on the Prairie fame. And this is a digital image of the actual proof of that Almanzo Wilder, for Almanzo Wilder's Homestead, which is pretty neat. All right, I'm gonna go back and go back to the menu and document and do another document search here. So again, you might wanna search for a broad topic like Westward expansion. You might wanna think about subtopics to search for in that case. So what if I search for the transcontinental railroad? Obviously an important part of Westward expansion I have several primary sources here. For instance, this image of joining the tracks. We've got another image coming up related to that. So here's our golden spike ceremony and promontory point. And I'm gonna go ahead and add this one to my folder. This document, this would be a great one to think about perspectives in history and representation in history. For instance, who is or isn't represented in this photograph. This is clearly a choreograph photograph celebrating this moment, but of course, we know for instance that there are many, many Chinese laborers that worked on the railroad that are not pictured in this photograph. So this type of document can be a real conversation point for talking about representation in the historical record as well. Let's see what else we've got for railroad here. Here's a bridge in Wyoming. If you teach about the terrain that the railroad had to get through the difficulty of building the railroad, you could add that one to our folder as well. I could also, I'm gonna return to my results down here and show you that I could also filter my results here. So if I click on refine by era or document type here, I can choose a document type. And in this case, I'm gonna select map and see, well, what maps do we have related to the railroad? If I click on this survey from Omaha, Nebraska to San Francisco, California, then here is, we have many, many maps in our holding. So this is also a great type of document to pair and again, to mix the different types of documents that you include in your primary source set. So I can really zoom in on this map, see it's coming from Nebraska. You can see the Union Pacific railroad line here and how it's going to make its way through the Rocky Mountains and all the way to California. Can't remember if I put that in my folder. So I'm gonna go ahead and do it again. See, I'm gonna go back to my document search and choose an even more specific topic now. If we look for barbed wire, which we know is important as part of westward expansion on the plains for fencing and cattle industry, we have many, many, many patents from United States Patent Office that have come to be archived at the National Archives. So in this case, you have an 1874 patent for barbed wire that you could include in this folder of primary sources. And I'll just do one more example here of a sort of subtopic again, back to menu into documents here. What if I search for timing? We know that was another reason that people were drawn westward. So we have a variety of mining related imagery here and documents, including from out west, places like Virginia City, Nevada. Here we have a minor at work and we could include this in our folder as well. So I've just found a sampling of documents that we've included in our folder now. And I wanna to go ahead and show you now, I showed you when we started how we, what that finished product looked like, but now that we've created it, how do you find it and how do you organize it? So what I'm gonna do is click on menu and go into my account and click on my documents. And here are a variety of folders that I have created in the past here. And I'm gonna go down to look under F because remember it just had that sort of generic folder created on date. And here it is, you can see all these documents that I just added into this folder. And if I click over here on this edit icon, I can click on it and rename this folder. So I can go ahead and name this westward expansion and rename the folder. All right, so now it's at the top of my list here. Here are all the documents that I've added. We've got some check boxes here. So if you ever wanted to, for instance, remove any documents that you just select this drop down and you can remove them, copy them, move them to a different folder, create a new folder, et cetera. I'm gonna do that right now, but I will show you where you have this link icon next to the name of your folder. Go ahead and click on that. And here you've got the link to share this folder. So just copy that link and then go ahead, if you paste that in your browser, then you see the final product of the folder that you just created. And again, you see the variety of documents that you've got here. Definitely encourage selecting a variety, both in terms of accessibility, how well your students can read them and analyze them with a type of document as well. And so what kinds of things can you do with this folder full of primary sources, this primary source that you just created? Well, you could go ahead, for one thing, if you're teaching online, if you are in your full class or a small group Zoom, meaning your Google Meet or whatever virtual, or excuse me, video platform you're using, you could screen share this folder and walk through these images with your students. Pointing out details, asking them to point details, analyzing the documents. So that's one option you could do. For instance, if you looked at the homestead proof of Daniel Freeman, you could zoom in and you could give your students a moment and say, I want you to type into the chat box or virtually raise your hand and let me know a requirement that you can tell that this person had to fulfill in order to get their homestead. Another thing that you could do, if I go back to my folder here, is to take this link, the link that you found on your My Documents page, the link to get to this folder and share that directly with your students. So if you have a learning management system that you use in LMS, like Canvas, Blackboard, Moodle, any of those, you can just paste this there and your students can click on it and they will come exactly to this page and be able to interact with these documents just as we have. Specifically, if you use Google Classroom in your district, there's this green Google Classroom button just above the title. You can click on that. If you do, it will open the Google Classroom interface where you can create an assignment, include this link, and when your students go into their Google Classroom to do that assignment, they will click on the link and end up exactly on this page, again, where they can interact with these documents. You also, you know, you can put them together in this way that you have, you know, your primary source set available for an entire curriculum unit that maybe you refer back to as you move through the unit. This is, these are the primary sources you're working with in conjunction with other resources that you're using to teach or perhaps you use it for one particular lesson. What you could do instead of doing a broad topic like what expert expansion is to focus, pull a few primary sources together about subtopics or just smaller topics where you actually get a different link for different groups of students. So you could put your students into small groups, give each small group a different link, have those students visit and observe and analyze the primary source set that they've been given and come back in your full class, Zoom, Google Meet, you know, video meeting and have small groups share out what they have found. You could do that with individual documents. You could have students pick a document or you could assign different students different documents and have them share out in your full class setting what they have learned by looking at these particular documents. So it can be a way to differentiate. You could have different documents for different students and it, you know, however you wanna use it but it's got a lot of flexibility here for you to use on your virtual platform. Of course, the other thing you can do with all of this is, you know, instead of putting these into a document folder or primary source set you could actually pull these together into an online activity or find an online activity exists that pulls together documents like this and that step we'll cover in our next webinar on Thursday. Before I stop, I wanna just show you just a couple of more examples of some folders that I created. So I'm gonna go to my account and my documents again and I'm gonna click on this transportation in time folder. So again, I've got the link I could share with my students. I'm gonna paste that into my browser address bar and I'm gonna go to this what I called transportation in time folder. So here is a, for instance, if you wanted to use this with much younger children you could, the younger grades, you could pull just a couple of primary sources. I certainly wouldn't recommend more than that. And if you have pre-students that are not reading yet then photographs are a great way to do it. So this same family with a cupboard wagon photograph you could, in your full class you could ask students to point out details and look at the photograph and you could do the same for the second photograph which is a really very similar photograph but you could use these two photographs to talk about time. Which of these photographs is older and why do you think? And by going through that process where they might notice that's a horse, strong wagon and this is a car they are practicing some skills of historical contextualization and using clues and really analyzing primary sources on a basic level. All right, one more example. My account, my documents, I'm gonna go into a different folder. Here's another one I pulled together for some younger students maybe not quite pre-reading age but maybe a little bit older but certainly one that could be used with elementary students. This one has to do a civic participation and you could pull together a sampling of primary sources for how is it that we can participate in our government and in our community as citizens or as interested party. And so we've got a few examples here. So for instance, you could click on this document and show them what are these people doing? Okay, this is voting, this is from a different time but voting is one thing we can do to participate. Here's a youth march. So we've got some students marching for integrated schools here, making your voice heard. Here's another way to participate. Here we have a petition to Congress and students might not be creating petitions to Congress but certainly petitioning is a way where if you disagree with something or you want to make your voice heard about something someone is deciding on, you can put together a petition and sign several names to it to show the support for an idea and making your voice heard through writing to representatives. So we'll be the last document I show you today but here's a document to President Ford asking for a kid's day since we have a father's day and a mother's day. Why can't we have a kid's day? So this is certainly participation in government in a way and making your ideas heard. So those are just a few ways that you can pull primary sources together into primary source sets. And thanks for watching. I'd love to answer any questions you might have and we hope to see you at our next webinars that are coming up this week and next week.


So we're here at the HDMI booth here at EFA 2017 and you have a whole range of the premium HDMI cable manufacturers, right? So welcome to the HDMI booth at EFA here in Berlin And so one of the things we are showcasing here is the HDMI premium cable certification program this is a program that tests and certify HDMI cables to ensure they can carry full 4k 60 frame per second video and also tests for EMI missions to make sure it doesn't interfere With all the wireless Wi-Fi that's built into your consumer electronic products It's basically guaranteeing that the HDMI cable is a good one. That's what you want So when you're buying that new 4k TV or that ultra HD blu-ray player, you want to ensure that cable is going to work And right here. This is a big brand in Europe And so here we're showcasing Hama. It's a big brand in Europe. You can find it all across different European countries This is their entry-level brand Up here is their premium brand the affinity brand as you can see here special packaging extra special cables And as you can see on these packaging we have the premium cable label this label ensures that this product has been fully tested and certified and it comes you download the HDMI application and You can scan the code And it will come back and tell you this product has been certified nice, so when you get your Order from Amazon you when you get it you can just make sure that what they shipped you was correct. Otherwise, you will flag it and Amazon is going to delete it from their Website right from their website or if you go into a store and you scan this and it comes back and it says this is not a legitimate Lee Tested cable for the premium cable. You know to stay away and not buy that cable. There's some other brands right here What is rocket fish? So rocket fish is best buys house brand They have put it across their product line here. You can see different lengths of cables In the United States and Walmart, this is their house brand black web as you can see here. They put it into there. This is their basic cables Walmart's step up premium brand is their GE branded cable as well and Then there's Panasonic which is Big in Japan that's big Japanese brand and here is mono price They're the affordable hdmi cable so even from the very affordable price up to premium Cables have gone through the premium cable certification program so you can find it at all price points and It through your retailer Basically, there's no point in not choosing the premium right It's not a big fee for them to join this right. Yeah, it's yeah for manufacturers It's very cost efficient to join the hdmi premium cable program They pay a low one-time fee and they send their cables to an authorized test center. That's where the certification comes in That's the main price right to get it tested so that costs them a little bit of money But it's important for them to send it get the certificate that it passed the test And then they're able to purchase these premium cable labels to put on their packaging And that's just a little sticker a little sticker.  So this Well, so the program was launched in the end of 2015 and since then with big brands such as Hama Best Buy and Walmart There's millions of cables now that have been certified and shipped throughout the world It's growing rapidly and pretty soon both retailers and consumers will demand HDMI premium certified cables because that is the mark that guarantees that they've been tested to run for 4k 60 performance


We had a chance early on and we were really really good today I can I'm not listen.  It's in it's in Balasin But I think the performance today was actually really really positive Dominic Albert Lewin had the chance early on and I've got to be critical here I'm sorry and he's got a square that's for a child So now he doesn't square it to the child. So I never know we should be won a look there. No doubt about it We should be one little and it's in it's in Balasin. You can't have your striker not Being a team player and and knocking it across to Richard listen Dominic Albert Lewin can't buy a goal. Let's get it right. He can't and So for him to try and take it around the goalkeeper fair play for having the confidence Should square it and we can we lead and listen, I'm not saying Dominic Albert Lewin's a useless player in any way I don't think it's that whatsoever. I think he's got certain parts of his games that we don't have in this squad And holding up the ball is excellent again other players into play excellent goal scorer is not good Simply and should square it. There you go We shouldn't have to lead and I'm from then on the performance was actually really good Take nothing away from everything and we're having chances for a child Something on the left cutting inside having shots check making amazing saves and I think a better team Goes to a minute today and wins simple as I don't think Arsenal were on the game And it's probably our best chance in a long time to get a win there. It's unfortunate. I know but The way continues at the Emirates Stadium because the second half we were doing really well And just like we did in the first half we were doing really well in the second half to begin with unlock his that gets the ball and We should John Joe Kenny should probably try and take him on to his left foot And he doesn't he let him cut inside even though still like a set still has an incredible job to do Bend the top corner in off the post. It's an amazing finish from like a set And then you get the Twitter out You know you start having a little look at all the fume etc. Because you've seen it all before and you get the Hope up and it brings you straight back down again You know all the nerves that you felt where you think you know we could get this year All goes out the window and the second goal like I said, I'm not losing me head over this performance I'm gonna lose me had a little bit over the officiating the officiating was an absolute joke for that second goal How the lines when it cannot see the offside is absolutely beyond me It's a disgrace and the corrupt officials of the Premier League have struck and again on the team outside the top six And to be honest, I've had enough of it. It's an absolute joke How how these officials get away with it every week You look at Crystal Palace and Zaha just getting done all the time and not only gets done about it But if you honest in the top six It's a different story and I'm not saying I'll have a lot of decisions today Although I thought Lucas Serena could have got sent off and But I'm not saying I've had a lot of decisions. Just saying if we were arsenal today No, I wonder about them. I've had enough of it to be honest. These officials are joke Soon we get VAR in the better and you know, it's gonna be a good day when VAR comes to the Premier League And when I come on late on listen, he's gonna be a good player for this I'm almost promised you that I've watched him for a lot a long time at Shakhtar the net So he will be very good for everything and starting on the right. I'm not sure of that as best position I think it's best positions on the left and a lot of calls for the charters start up front and Bernard off the left Today and it didn't happen. We played with Dominic Arvettlin, which is totally fine I thought you cannot blame the manager for today's performance in any way So no marking can't be blamed. So what do we blame now? You know, I mean The defendant for the first goal is an awful. I think Kenny should probably take monsters left foot, but they are Arsenal 2 ever nil.   Let's get a win


in my last video I talked about struggling with depression and part of managing depression is for me a lot of you know, diet change and a lot of therapy and whatnot, but a big part of it that was new to me is medication. So because we're talking about medication, I need to be super clear about something. I am not a doctor. None of this is medical advice or can be used to self-diagnose or even decide if this is a good medication for you. I'm just going to talk about my experience with the medication that was prescribed to me by a medical professional. Entertainment only. So my entire life I have gone through like seasons I guess of depression in and out. I've always kind of attributed it to being, you know, more of a creative personality. You kind of go into these really deep depths and then you come out and you kind of have the answer that you were looking for and you make something of that. However, I'd been experiencing a more prolonged, I guess, dark period and I didn't seem to be coming up. So that was kind of the context under which I went to see my care provider. I was having a lot of trouble specifically with executive function, actually getting through a day and actually completing what I set out to complete. So I met with my care provider about what I should do. The nurse gave me a two question depression screening, which turned out to be a 20 question depression screening, which I excelled at. I did very good.  So after some further questions, my physician did give me a plan for improving both my diet and exercise. But given the duration of time that I'd been feeling this way and the severity with which I was kind of reporting my feelings, she felt like it was important to prescribe me a medication to kind of help get me through the hump. And the one that she prescribed me is this, well, buterin or bupropion. Now, before we talk about my experience with this, I'll stop rattling that in the microphone. I wanted to talk about my history with drugs. My mom has always been a very homeopathic type of person. So we always knew the homeopathic that we were supposed to take if we got some type of injury or if we weren't feeling a certain way. It was always a big part of our life. Consequently, my dad, the entire time that I knew him, struggled with high blood pressure and effectively died because he didn't really manage his medication very well. So that was something that's in the back of my head as well. My biggest question when it kind of going through the motions of like, do I want to be taking this thing was really, is this something that I can get off of? Or is this something that once I start taking it, I'm going to have to take indefinitely. So holding that first pill in my hand, kind of felt like the beginning of a journey that I didn't know where it would take me. And found myself exceptionally grateful for people who took the time to tell me what their experience was like. And I wanted to return the favor forward by talking about mine. My experience can be divided pretty cleanly into two phases, the initial phase and then the long term phase. I've been taking it for about nine months now, nine and a half. Long term, I found it to be fairly mild. It helped me come get through some of my tasks, be able to like focus down and didn't really have for me any kind of negative side effects long term and really didn't interact with any of my lifestyle like caffeine, et cetera, et cetera. The initial phase though, that beginning two and a half, three weeks though, was pretty impressively bad. And I think that a lot of people in, you know, sharing their experience either didn't have as difficult a time or kind of forget that initial period until they're like reminded and like, oh yeah, that was pretty rough. The two experiences that I had were in insomnia, which was pretty aggressive and kind of sore muscles, particularly in my legs. Both of those side effects kind of came on pretty quickly, I think like within the first week for sure. And we're pretty aggressive. So like most nights, I would just kind of wake up in the middle of the night and be up for a couple hours. If you're already dealing with depression, being up in the middle of the night for more hours is worse. Like it's just not an immediate improvement. However, you know, you kind of, I don't know, I was committed to get through to the end of it around the same time. I had some like kind of pretty impressive like muscle stiffness, particularly the muscles in my like thighs and calves. I did end up taking magnesium. I don't know if I just kind of like outlived the symptoms, but it did kind of did seem to help, you know, pretty quickly. I have read since that a lot of people are magnesium deficient. And so I've started kind of incorporating that into my routine, both simple bending with the essential minerals and pumpkin seeds, oddly enough. Ultimately, I did find it very helpful. And I think it was responsible for kind of helping me kind of get up into my life a little bit more and actually be able to adjust my lifestyle and diet in a way that helped me move forward. No, while I've been careful to not make anything that sounds like a recommendation in this video, I will recommend this one thing.  I was surprised by the number of people in my life who had been taking this particular medication for years. And it just started with me being honest about what I was going through and what I was kind of trying to do to get out of it. So if you find yourself in a similar situation as me, where you're kind of like kind of weighing the pros and cons of taking a medication, I do just want to say that I empathize with that struggle. And I do hope that you will talk with people. And I hope that maybe my experience talking about making that decision kind of helps you feel like you are less alone in making it. I hope that this video meets you well. You're awesome. See you later.


Hey everybody, welcome back to Magic Orthodoxy. My name is David, and this is a Magic Review. Hey, today we're going to look at Telekinetic from Diamond Jim Tyler. What is this trick? Basically, it's the acrobatic matches trick or the haunted matchbook effect. What Jim Tyler has done is he's taken that same approach to the deck of cards, to a box of cigarettes, and a couple of other more relevant things. You want to see what his trailer looks like? This is it. I'm Diamond Jim Tyler, and this is Telekinetic. Alright, so that was Diamond Jim Tyler. If you don't know who he is, you've been living under a rock. He is a magician's magician. He's been around forever. He lives in Texas, and he's a creator. He's an inventor. He speaks. He's a lecturer. Definitely want to check out Spinning Nickel or Diamond Monty or the Zap Wallet or his Forcing Guy. This effect was published from Vanishing Incorporated, so a couple of questions we always ask about all of our Magic Reviews is, what's in the box? What's in the box?  It's 24 minutes long, and you're also going to get the utilities, I'll say that in plural, the things that you need to do this effect. Is it what I thought? Yes and no. It is, and it isn't. I thought it was something that was hidden, but flimsy, and it's not. It is something, though, that is hidden and not flimsy. Does that make sense? I don't want to reveal it. I don't want to give it away. If you think it's the cheap, flimsy, breakable stuff, you're wrong, okay? It's something else, and I was glad I was wrong. I was glad that Jim Tyler took the time to find something that had a little bit more strength, a little bit more durability, and it is something that is readily available that you can find again and again when you need it. How are the angles? If you're already familiar with the animated matchbook, or the haunted matchbook, it's going to be the same angles as that, okay? But when Jim does it, he's actually able to do it so that the box can be handed out afterwards, which is a really cool addition, and so there's a way better cleanup, I think, on this. Way more thought put into this, and so it's definitely worth checking out. Can it be inspected? Like I just said, it can. Once the deck does its little dance and does its little animation, you're able to hand it out to a spectator. They can examine it from one end to the other and never find a thing. What's the overall quality and production value? It's great. It looks like Jim Tyler is pretty much in his magic library. He's in his home. He's teaching you right next to his pool table. It's pretty cool because he's got an old-fashioned pachinko machine in the background and an autographed picture of Steve Martin, so that's kind of fun just to notice, like, in the background looking at his books and going, oh, look at that. He's a great teacher. He's very patient, very soft-spoken, and he really is able to effectively communicate everything you need to know. Is it well made? You partially make it. Even though you get everything you need, you're not going to get the card box. So you could do this with any card box in your library. Like, you could use this with any deck of cards. So you're going to have to put it together a little bit, but it's not difficult at all.  How much practice does it require? Not much. Again, if you're already familiar with acrobatic matches or a Haunted Matchbook, it's that same movement, same almost hookup. And so I think a lot of us who've kind of had experience doing that trick as before in the past, maybe in our infancy as magicians, you'll feel right at home. How much setup and reset is there a little bit? There's a little bit. Again, if you're already familiar with acrobatic matches or Haunted Matchbook, some of the setup and reset is similar, but it's not much. It's really easy. Positives. All right, so what are the positives to telekinetic from Diamond Jim Tyler? Diamond Jim is someone every magician should get to know. He is an amazing teacher, and this new creation is no exception. Pick this up and you'll be mystifying in no time. Negatives. What are the negatives to this? There aren't any. Really, there aren't any. He's giving you a quality product. He's giving you a great DVD. It's a really fun trick, and it's affordable. Can't go wrong. Is it worth your money? Absolutely. If you don't know the effect already or you're looking to upgrade because you like this trick, but you want it to be in a little bit more of a relevant setting, I would definitely recommend picking this up. Who would like this? People that do strolling, people that do walk-around, street magicians, restaurant magicians, I think would all like this. Card magicians especially who want to add a little bit of whimsy to their routine would definitely like telekinetic from Diamond Jim Tyler. Alright, so that is my review for telekinetic from Diamond Jim Tyler and Vanishing Incorporated. As always, I want to thank Murphy's Magic for allowing me to have this trick so that I can do the review for you, and if you want to find it for yourself, you can find it from one of your favorite Murphy's Magic dealers. Thanks. Bye.


Hello everybody! E here. E here. Welcome back to another book review. Before we get started, happy belated book birthday to Laurel Hightower's Crossroads. I'm going to say something right up front. It's my only criticism and I just want to make sure nobody else has the same expectations I did going into it. It right off the bat you realize that this is not the case, but with this cover I could have swore I was about to read a Western. Now I don't read book descriptions, especially not with novellas, because they tend to give too much away. Not that I don't trust Laurel and off-limits press, I do. But I still wanted to go in completely blind. In fact, a lot of people on Twitter were talking about this, raving about it. And even when people tell me, oh you're in for a heavy read, that's kind of a spoiler to me. I just want to go in completely blind, especially with an author I trust and I loved Laurel's book, Whispers in the Dark. Now another thing I have to say, just throwing this out there, you guys know that I try, well not try, but I'm honest with my reviews whether or not I know people or not. This one, I know Laurel, I would consider her a friend. We talk on Twitter quite often, but that didn't, there's no bias here is what I'm trying to say. This book, it's a hard read. Even for being as short as it is, I think it's like 120, no, it's 110 pages. I had to put it down several times, I still ended up reading it all in one day because even though it was triggering me, and I suggest if you want to know more about that, I'll leave a link to my Goodreads review down there in the doobly-doo. But it was upsetting me greatly and I was having reactions to it. I'd set it down, I'd go out and do something, and then I'd come back and I'd see the book sitting there and I just had to know what happened next, so I ended up blowing through it in a day, even with multiple times me having to put the book down.  The writing here is exceptional. If you like great writing, this is definitely for you. But the utter tragedy of this book is supremely affecting. It does have to do with the loss of a child, but the child is dead. It's an adult child, I will say that, is dead at the beginning of the book, so you kind of don't have to deal with that. Now I mention that because one of the best parts about the writing is the subtext. Everything that the main character, everything this woman goes through, I believe her name is Chris. Yeah, Chris. Everything she goes through, everything she sees, everything she touches, everything she talks about is in relation to her son. It was very, very well done because in another author's hands, they would have done flashbacks to give the character development for the son. In this one that isn't the case, Laurel stays in the present and shows you everything that this child, her son, meant to her. I'm saying child, but child in that it's her son because the son was an adult when he died. But she so beautifully and so simply, the simplicity is, it's not really simple. When good writing, easy reading is hard writing. And she, I wish I could put this into words, man. I was so taken aback by all of the subtleties of how she built the character. Nothing's overt. But you get to reading and you start noticing that everything that this woman does and sees and feels relates to this tragedy. And you have posthumous character development. Sorry, I'm mad with pronunciation so if I got it wrong, I'm sure you'll let me know. But all this stuff, all this character development happens without the character on screen. And that blew me away. I've said this a lot this year and I know it's probably starting to sound cliche and over said, but this is another one of my favorite books of the year. I don't know why. There's so much good stuff coming out right now, but there is. And I gotta add this. In fact, when I do my top five of the year, it's probably gonna end up having to be a top 10. It might even be a top 20 because we're only halfway through the year. Anyways, this book is out now.  You'll likely blow through it just like I did. It is even better. I gave Whispers in the Dark five stars, but it is even better than Whispers in the Dark. So far, Laura Hightower is only getting better. Have you read Crossroads? If you have, let me know what you thought of it down there in the doobly-doo, whether or not you loved it, whether or not you hated it. If either one of those things, let me know why you loved it, why you hated it so we can have a discussion. But until next time, I have been E, you have been U, this has been another book review. I'll talk to you guys later. I'm already waving. What am I doing? Bye-bye.