I'm Amy Wobowo, and I'm a software engineer at Airbnb focusing on international growth, and today I'm going to talk to you about knitting.  You're just gonna have to wait to see how. So all stories start with an inspiration, and here is the somewhat unexpected inspiration of this particular journey. A couple of years ago, a video game review site called Kotaku published an article about Super Nintendo add-ons that didn't quite make the cut. You've probably heard of some of the more outlandish Nintendo peripherals that did make it. There was a baseball bat for playing baseball video games, a golf club for playing golf games, a super scope wireless gun for shooting games, but you might not have known that Nintendo was seriously contemplating making a knitting add-on. And here is the proposed advertisement for this knitting add-on, complete with horrible puns. I'm not sure if you can see, but in the bottom left corner, it says, why needle the competition? So the interface would be like Mario Paint, but instead of just pictures as output, you'd get your design on scarf or mittens. So most of the comments left on the Kotaku article were along the lines of, lol, we can totally see why this didn't get made, or what were they even thinking? But I had a totally different reaction to this article. And it was that I was super disappointed. I was so sad that this was never made because I imagined having one and using it every day. I had never wanted so badly for something to exist. So I did some research. I wanted to know if Nintendo had ever made any prototypes that I could get my hands on, if anyone else manufactured home knitting machines that were programmable. After a lot of research, it turned out that in the 1980s, a few companies made home knitting machines. There was a whole line of electronic knitting machines by Brother, but they were discontinued because they lost popularity. And that's when my dream was born, to get my hands on one of these machines and make something like the Nintendo knitting add-on that never was. And as fate would have it, there was one on sale on Craigslist, an hour and a half drive away from where I live. It was old, it was missing a lot of parts, but it was a start. It was the start of my dream. And this is the dream reiterated in cartoon form. To start with images, to send them to a knitting machine and to get sweaters with those images on them at the end. Basically, to create a networked yarn printer.  Because this is what a knitting machine looks like. It has a row of 200 needles. And to produce a piece, you first start by individually threading which needles you want threaded, depending on how wide you want your piece. The needles move in and out. You can thread up to two different colors of yarn. And if this is what a knitting machine looks like, this is what using a knitting machine feels like. There are so many buttons and so many moving parts. And it comes with a thick manual with super unfamiliar terms. And I wondered or I worried that if I pressed the wrong thing that this would happen or at least that I would break some of the needles and I would have no idea how to fix it. Luckily, I had a team of people with me that was both fearless and inventive while learning how to use this knitting machine. So this is the team of Airbnb engineers that helped me at last year's December hackathon to help hack the knitting machine. So Airbnb hosts two internal hackathons a year for the entire product team, designers and engineers. But wait, Airbnb hackathon, you ask. What in the world does this have to do with traveling? So I asked the hackathon organizer. I showed him this machine that I was really excited about having bought and asked if it was a valid hackathon project to hack this knitting machine. And he said, well, the spirit of our hackathon is about making awesome things and so is the spirit of our engineering culture. So sure, go ahead. So we had permission to work on this as a hackathon project. And I had no idea if anyone else would be as excited about this project as I was. So I gave my pitch to my coworkers and I was so surprised that there was so much interest in it. The people who came up to me saying that they wanted to help work on this were as excited as I was or more. And there were so many different kinds of engineers that signed up to help work on it. An iOS engineer, an SRE engineer, a performance engineer, a data infrastructure engineer, a front-end engineer. So in short, a bunch of engineers who had nothing, who had no experience with knitting or machine knitting. But we were all super excited about this project and it was actually one of the best teams I've ever worked on. And I think that it was partly because we had zero ego invested. None of us considered ourselves knitting machine experts or wanted to make sure that our ideas were used over other people's ideas. And it was just kind of a wild adventure that we were all in together. So back to Jabba the Hut. The reason we had to be fearless was because the knitting machine was a really daunting problem and we had no idea how to use it or to get it to print images that we sent to it. Inventive because this was 1980s technology and some of the parts were missing and we had to MacGyver replacement parts. But the good thing about being an engineer is that you can apply all of your problem-solving skills to any problem, including knitting. So this is an example of a problem that we had to be inventive to solve. And it felt like we were encountering problems at every corner, even before turning on the machine. So when you buy yarn at an art store, it will usually be in a ball or twisted up into the sky. But if you feed it to the machine, you want it to feed into the machine evenly and smoothly. So you want it more like a spool. And the knitting machine comes with a contraption that will convert a ball of yarn into a spool. But it was broken and it was missing parts. So my coworkers and I engineered a fix for it using coffee cups. And this is my coworker, Dave. Uh... LAUGHTER Using the thing we had MacGyver together from a coffee cup to spool some yarn. So after we set up the machine and successfully knit a single solid row of color, the next step was to learn how to use the machine to knit its built-in patterns. And since I mentioned before, you can thread up to two different colors into the machine. You can use this to knit patterns. And it has a couple of these patterns built into its memory. And it will just thread a different color of yarn for a different stitch if the pattern calls for that. So even though this was something already built into the machine, it felt like the next level up in machine knitting because it required pressing a bunch more buttons and reading like 20 more pages in the manual. And just to illustrate how non-trivial the step was, on the left is our first attempt to knit one of the built-in patterns, a polka dot pattern. And by the end of the day, we finally figured out how to successfully knit a pattern of polka dots on the right. And I wish I had a picture of how happy we were when we actually got this to work. Another example of using engineering and science to solve problems with knitting patterns. While knitting patterns, the machine would get stuck more often than when we were just knitting rows of solid color. So we experimented with different kinds of yarn to use. And after trying each type of yarn, we wrote down notes and we would adjust our hypotheses. So we eventually settled on using... Oops, how did that happen? Only animal wools. They made the machine stuck less, and we think that it was because of the natural oils that were in the fibers. And also for using a thicker yarn for the background color and a thinner yarn for the detail color. But after we had figured out how to successfully knit the built-in patterns on the machine, we hadn't achieved our dream yet. As far as we could tell, the intended audience for this knitting machine was 1980s grandmothers because all the patterns were things like bows and teddy bears. And I don't know about you, but I would rather have grumpy cat on a sweater than a teddy bear. So we still had some more work to do. So step three of our plan was to send the knitting machine our own patterns, and this goal would be split into several parts. So because it was a knitting machine from the 80s, it was able to take additional patterns via floppy drive. Back then, you could buy a floppy drive add-on and additional pattern packs on floppy disks. So we could send our own images to the knitting machine by putting them on a fake emulated floppy drive, and we would emulate the floppy drive on one of our laptops. And then we needed to build a custom cable, the cable that would have gone from the floppy drive to the knitting machine, but would instead now be USB from our laptop to the knitting machine serial port. And we had to make this custom because it turned out that the knitting machine has a weird pinout, and thankfully we found documentation on the knitting machine's weird pinout. And we also found a library that emulated a floppy drive, and so that took care of the step. And then next, we wanted to convert the images to the proper knitting machine pattern, which was a one-bit bitmap. And we also found a library that converted images, JPEGs, PNGs, or GIFs to one-bit bitmaps. So now we could have the knitting machine read from our computer as if it were a floppy drive. And here's one of our first custom patterns. Note the dithering on the Shiba Inu. For a bunch of the one-bit bitmap algorithms, they had a bunch of different dithering algorithms, but this was the one that we found looked best. If it's hard to read, it says, wow, oh my God, such fair isle, which is a type of knitting stitch. And here's Grumpy Cat. So we spent one day just having so much fun uploading lots and lots of photos and images, but we didn't want this to be limited to just us who had hacked on it and studied the manual and knew the input sequences for the scripts that we had written. We wanted anyone to be able to print memes from yarn. We wanted to share out the fun. So step four was to make knitting machine image upload available on the web. And it was a super simple interface. You choose a photo to upload. You'd send the image to the knitting machine and serve up the fake floppy drive. And then the web browser would show you instructions for the buttons to press on the knitting machine to start knitting your pattern. And here is a video of the whole thing in action. You didn't see it in the video. Here is a close-up of the knitted image and the original input.  So if you find me after the class, you can see Grumpy Cat in person. There's also one of some bunnies. So now it's code time. So here's the code for the knitting server. We included a wrapper for the library we used to convert images to one-bit bitmats and also a wrapper for the disk drive emulator. So first, you save the user's uploaded photo to a file and then you use the library to convert that image to one-bit bitmap and then you start emulating your floppy disk drive with that image on it. And then the server shows knitting instruction machines for which buttons you should be pressing. And here is the code for the upload form. So things that we learned from this adventure.  I recall so many moments where my teammates said things like, I thought that my job was hard, but optimizing database queries ain't got nothing on this. Another learning is something that I mentioned earlier that teams work so well when everyone operates with zero ego at stake. Also that it's really enjoyable to apply Ruby or programming to any of your hobbies no matter how unrelated they seem, especially hobbies related to art and creating. And I challenge you to find a hobby that is more unrelated to Ruby than knitting, but even with knitting it was possible. And the last is that it feels really great to take up something new that you don't know anything about. So many of my teammates said that this was the most fun and challenging thing they had worked on all year. Learning something brand new and very different from what you do day to day is really humbling and challenging and it reminds you what it's like to be a beginner. And that kind of empathy is really important as you work with new programmers while you work with them or might teach them or mentor them. And there's still a lot left to do in this whole space. And the amazing thing about having been given this talk at a few different places is that at every conference people have come to talk to me afterwards for ideas about how I could take this further. So on the knitting access, right now everything that I showed you was just a swatch of knitting, but it would be amazing to learn how to use the machine better to knit whole garments like socks and sweaters and socks with toes. And actually, when I gave this talk at Madison Ruby, Liz Amante was telling me about a machine knitting academy in Seattle where they teach you how to make actual sweaters. So I signed up for a class in January. And the next time I am giving this talk, hopefully I will be wearing a grumpy cat sweater. And on the web interface axis it would be amazing to have an interface where you could draw an image and send that to the knitting machine without having to use an already existing image and maybe also previews for what your design would look like with different colors. On the hardware hacking access it would be amazing to figure out how to automate more of the process. You saw that a person had to manually move the carriage back and forth. And some people have also come and talked to me after some of my talks about ideas to make that happen and I would love to get into those. And I would love to hear from any of you if you have ideas about hardware hacking or knitting or combining art with code. You can reach me on Twitter at SailorHG. And thank you so much for listening and thank you so much for having me.


Welcome to Toffy TV. It is The Match Preview. Everton vs Liverpool. The Maisleyside Derby at Godderson Park. Unfortunately an empty Godderson Park in... What is the most eagerly awaited Maisleyside Derby for years? Because Everton at the top of the league. Four wins out of four in the Premier League. Are we all excited? No, no, no. I don't like the Abys. I don't like them. No matter how good we are, I don't like them. I think I've said many times on this, the only Derby I've really enjoyed, while it was still going on, was when Andy Johnson edited the goal. And there was a minute to go and I thought, not even us can throw three nil away, surely. But what I would say is it's the best I've felt going into it. I feel as though we've got a team that can give them a good game. And if I give them a good game, then we beat them. I'm not saying we will, but I just mean I feel like we've got goals in us this time, where I think in the past, certainly the last few years, while not fearing them, you'd always think, well, if we can keep it tight and nick one, we can win it. Where I think this time, the way we're playing, or the way we were playing before the international, was like we're scoring lots of goals and we could cause any body problems. And if we play like that, we'll cause this Liverpool scene problems. Yeah, I think that's my feeling as well. It's not just four wins. I think there's a general confidence that we may actually be a half-decent team. Whisper it quietly. People know what they're doing. People know what their roles are in the scene. People understand what the manager wants. People are tactically understanding what the manager wants. It's not just a load of players running around. Because that happens a lot. We used to have 11 players who were better than the other 11 players, running around a lot and winning games of football. This team actually looks like it knows what it wants to do. The manager knows what he wants to do. And you see that in games, seeing that against second half against Brighton. The way we sat back and let them have the ball, soaked it up and then hit them on the break and scored the two goals. I think there's a lot of confidence in this team at the moment. I think people keep on asking what can Evan do this season. The more confidence we see from the players in what they're doing and enjoying what they're doing, the more confidence we'll get. The longer Kelly's on the better, including obviously Satie. I think the other thing about it though is that it's always... I guess you're going to get it because I think I've said it a few times. I think we both said it. The first thing Evan has to achieve is two seasons of consistency. Instead of it just being good for a year and then the next year, there's nothing to build on. But there's this thing where people are like, well, they haven't played anyone.  It's like, well, them teams, you have to make them look bad. Everton taught them way in bad on day one. Everton were just better and could have killed the game off. And then we've had a challenge at Crystal Palace. West Brom gave us a bit of a couple of goals and had the goal brightened last time out. And so far this season in cup games as well, the obstacles that have been thrown in our way, we've been able to get past them. Now Saturday, if Everton win Saturday, it doesn't mean Everton are going to be in the top four or win the league this season. It just means that's a big psychological barrier removed from A players but B fans. If Everton lose Saturday, it doesn't mean that's it. Everything's rubbish. It was wrong. No-one should have been talking us up. But I think to be honest, I think Everton have got more to gain on Saturday than they have to lose. That's how I look at it. What you just said there's quite interesting because some of those teams that we've beaten this season, they're the teams that we generally fail to beat a lot of the time. They're the teams, top spares are top six side. Beat them away. Crystal Palace beat them away. We generally don't win a lot of away games so to win two on the bounce. To win home games that you're supposed to win. That doesn't always happen but they're the wins that actually get you into the European places. If you can add wins like Liverpool to it at home, that's why we used to finish around 15-16 with Moise all the time because we beat the teams we were supposed to beat and we'd add a few of us to it, Liverpool at home, Man United at home. I know a lot was spoke about as a way record but that's what he built on. I think that's what we have to build on. We have to build on those wins and look at these performances, look at games like they make side-dabbing. If we can get a win in this, just keep it going, it gives that confidence boost. It doesn't mean we're going to win anything or we're going to finish in the top four. It just means that we get that confidence that we can beat them. I think that's, listen, it's 10 years to the day since we won a Moise side-dabbing in the Premier League. Ronald Cooman once famously said that has to change sometime. Why not? If we can get that three points, that gives everyone that psychological boost more than anything. I think that fans will watch games of football and go, we've got a good team, we've got Hamilton Adegas, Dominic Alvin, Loone Scorn, Goals, whatever else. Until we get over that psychological bump of a Moise side-dabbing and winning one and doing what it takes to win one, there will always be those question marks. It is big for us but as you just said as well, it's not the be all and end all. You're looking for a good performance where we go in and we do what is needed to win a game of football like this. I think back to Martinis, it's fair season and a 3-3. We didn't win it. We should have won it. We were a minute away from having it shown up. But that 3-3, that day, we came out the ground thinking we've moored and bloodied our noses there. We should have beat them. We were a good side and we should have beat them. To be honest, we should have batted that day, we could have ended the bar 8-3. Mignolau was incredible. I thought it was incredible. But that day you come out thinking we've played really well. It's those kind of games. I'm 48, this is the longest time in my lifetime we've ever gone. Same with you, I've not beaten Liverpool in anything. 19 Premier League games since we beat them. That record has to end soon. That's some time it will end. This is a great Liverpool team, the champions. They're a brilliant Liverpool team. But I've seen us lose to terrible Liverpool teams. And I've seen us beat brilliant Liverpool teams. And not always with Everton's best team. It's a derby, we've seen the last 3. We should have beat them after lockdown. David sits the inside of the post, forces Alisson into a good save. And we have another one. Don misses a chance off a corner. We could have beat them. We've had the touch on one when he added wide. The one that Don blazed over. We've had our opportunities in the last 3 years to win this game. But this obviously will be very difficult. I think obviously with Carlo we've got a manager who tactically understands what it takes to beat a team like Liverpool. He beat them when he was at Napoli. Even though it was the first game back from lockdown, I thought tactically he got it right, sucked up the pressure, played in the low block and then tried to hit them. You just mentioned the Tom Davis chance and Don the Cavalier and after that nearly got us the win. And I think, again, going back to what I was just saying, tactically I think he'll have a set up the right way and it will be a cake this time. Liverpool love having the ball. And I think he showed against Villa. He had 70% of the ball though wherever it was in Villa. He scored 7 past them. Glad he missed an open goal to get the 8. I think even though that can be looked upon as the worst-case scenario for others, Liverpool are just taking a hammer and we're playing them next. They're not going to change the way they play. Their levels are just going to go higher. But they're not going to change the way they play. So Carlo will look at that and think, right, where do I or where do we hate them? And of course, listen, Villa got luckier times in that game in terms of three deflected goals and obviously you don't expect a goalkeeper to be giving you a goal within the first five minutes. But certainly the way they play. I mean, we went to Anfield last season with Silver. Silver's last game. Everything on another day could have scored four that night. Liverpool probably could have scored eight if he really wanted to. But the point being was, we had chances to score goals and we didn't take them and I think with a wide open game which I really think it's going to be a wide open game, sadly. Q and 0-0. Well, if it is, it is. The last three have been 0-0. No Premier League fixture has ever had four consecutive 0-0s. So, we'll see that. But that shows you though, doesn't it? Where we have been in the last few years, of when they come to go this season we look at it and go, we'll take a draw here. And that's in a way what we've been looking at saying in the last year with the lockdown of this year, so it feels like last year with the lockdown it was more of a like this is our first pre-season game get through it. Everything with both teams felt like that Liverpool were actually to gain by coming to try and win that game because they were practically already champions and would have just dented their egos which they didn't really need. So, a draw was fine, the year before we defended brilliantly well to stop them effectively winning the league that year. And again, we took a lot of satisfaction from that but I think it's going to be different this year because Carlons a lot of people feel with the right tactics it's there to be won. I think you can hear them we've got the top scorer in Europe from first, you know top scorer at the moment in Europe he's up front for us, we've got the Tialis in school for Brazil in midweek, brilliant playing really well, we've got Hamers Rodriguez being incredible for us midfield, the core outstanding, a land's being outstanding and they go messes back you know, hopefully look at the end it's fit, you know set the goal up in midweek for France so, we've got plays we're playing really well in confidence and then, you know, we've got plays on the bench there as well who've come in and done a job while the others on, they'll be back on Tom Davis, Sigurd's and all will be all feeling like they can contribute so, while they're pushing the squad, obviously you've got Ben Godfrey coming into the squad as well, new signing so, we've got nothing so, you know what, I can't and Liverpool would have all been together for two weeks since that hammering and you would have gone alright the deal, but Van Dyck's been away with Holland Alexander Ham, they've all been away but that's what I mean, everyone's been away haven't these only salar hasn't as he and Manny and Tiago have just come back this week but, in general, amid the defence and the midfield have all been away playing games all over the place so, you know, Jürgen Klopp's only really going to get his players back Friday you know, I think it would have been worse if Everton had them a weekend if they had been able to get back into it so, it might be a good time to play them it might not, but as you move forward one thing from having some mates here with Reds one thing I've learnt about them over the years is that even when they haven't had the best team and they haven't it's only really been the last couple of years they've still thrived on these games whether it was Everton or whether they were playing United they were great or shitty or that we'll beat these and I used to look and think they're miles better but that, like confidence and I think probably half of it was because they always had a couple of match winners in the team even if the rest of the team wasn't very good will Everton have got a couple of match winners now and I think that's a difference I think what we need to find on this game I'm hoping we get this from this game one way or another is remember after the beaters 1-0 we all know the game remember the next day and I remember we all fell down but I remember loads of our fans going I want them in the cup I want them straight away I want to get them straight away because there was that feeling that we'd gone to Anfield and we'd put on a really good show and we should have won it and the chances we missed that night and a lot of people were like I want them now because we can beat them it just went downhill from there we drew with Wafford and Newcastle and got turned over by Tottenham massively but there was that feeling of we can match these yes they beaters and I think whatever happens Saturday we've got to get that feeling because that almost comes from again if you go back to the 80's and when we've spoke to any of the 85 team and when they said all of them said that milk cup milk cup at Wembley when we should have won they were all like that day we realised that we were as good as them and even though the beaters in the replay that's what took us up a level we're playing against the best and we're competing against them so what does that make us and I think we have to have a little bit of that on Saturday and whatever happens it's a game of football you know what I mean that's for us the way football is we know what can happen in football if we can come out of that game and go we gave them a game today and we were good we weren't playing massively above our level that's our level then I think that gives you confidence no matter what they're the best in the land and we're competing so if that does happen then I think whatever happens score wise that can push us on quite a lot we've got to be in the game I mean listen would they take 20% possession now and we win 1-0 of course it would 100% but we've got to be in the game and causing them problems and if we do that that's where that belief will come if we're passionate about playing our game what I want to see from Everton at the weekend is us playing the exact way we've played in all of these other games that kind of flowing football that kind of thing we were attacking and we're creating chances and if we do that not only will we give ourselves a great chance of winning this game we'll give us as fans and the players the belief that look we play this way it can cause any one problems let's have a look at their expected line up they've got all the big hitters back for this one obviously we've gone with Adrian's got to play we've gone Trent Alexander Island Joe Gomez, Van Dijk, Robertson and then the midfield three of Henderson Fabino and Thiago and then the front three who've never actually played against Everton at one in the start of the game against Everton of Mo Salah, Roberto Firmino and Sadio Mane but what I would say about that line up it's very very strong it's a very strong line up and the power between the posts means that their backline will be concerned and there's no question about that there's literally no question as good as that team is and as good a keeper as Adrian Canby at times Liverpool fans talking to the lads in here they're like we're just almost waiting for him to make a mistake that's the weak point but I also think that defensively they're not amazing in terms of because there's a massive boost because Henderson's back and he sits in front of that back four and he does his job and he's really important for them but I think you can get behind them for a start certainly in those wide areas you play a highline don't you you play the offside Trent Alexander Island is not great at it as Willard exposed he's fantastic going brilliant but defensively and the lads will say this isn't he he's not great defensively and he can get course out and I think that's one area where Everton are very strong down that left hand side whether that be with Richard Arleson and Luca Deane or if Niels and Cuncoop plays because again he's another fast strong attack on the fullback so Everton can get some joy there and I think the other thing what will be really interesting for me will be James Rodriguez because if he comes inside Roberton's had to come with him which leaves the whole flank out for James Cullman or for Beano's he's got to come out and engage him and then if that happens the key man on Saturday for Everton might actually be Abdelhaid Decore breaking because we should have a man overloaded so that might be where we can cause them Do you think that they might they might try and push Robinson as high as they can just because they tactically try and expose James Rodriguez's lack of defensive ability Possibly but then we just have to move one of them in ffilders over to cover with me and Decore if you watch the games we've played so far when the three of them have been in there on Decore and Andre Gomez Decore has gone and stayed over to that right hand side anyway to filling for James when James is going with doing the stuff so listen out of possession it'll be a 4-5-1 we know it will and we'll get bodies behind a ball in possession it'll be let's fly forward and see what we can do and we can cause them problems I'm going to give some facts because I've done it every game you'd be wrong not to Everton winless in 19 Premier League games with Liverpool since a 2-0 victory on the 17th of October 2010 which ironically is the date of Saturday when this is the longest Liverpool's longest ever run of unbeaten against a team seven of the last eight games between Everton and Liverpool have finished level you know that said that fourth one before it's the first time Everton going to a derby top of the league since 1989 it's just mad isn't it some of these I'm definitely not going to read out Liverpool have lost four of their last eight away games there's many as they had done in their previous 46 so they're not in amazing form Addy Dominic Alvalun has scored nine goals and six appearances for Everton making a top scorer for a player in Europe's top five leagues if he scored he could become the first player to score in each of Everton's first five league games since Tommy Lawton if he scores at the weekend Muhammad Salas scored 99 goals in 158 games for Liverpool and it's the game marks five years to the Dyson's Yeaghan Claw play this first game for Liverpool down at Spades very interesting so listen these games are there especially for Evertonians for someone to become a hero we love Lee Carsley we absolutely love him Kevin Campbell Super Kev let's see if Dominic or someone like that can become Dominic Alvalun was to get the winner I think that would elevate him and all the nations would literally have to just not say a word them because you've got someone but it's there for anyone let's be honest whoever scores the next Derby winner for Everton will be for the generations there you go how are you feeling ahead of the messy side Derby let us know your thoughts in the comments and if you haven't already make sure to check out our opponents preview over on Patreon that is there now so make sure you check that out give this video a like subscribe if you haven't already and I said if you want to join us on Patreon for daily live shows exclusive shows podcasts the link is in the description we'll see you later


Type 2 diabetes can be prevented, arrested, and even reversed with a plant-based diet. I think we've known since back in the 1930s, within five years, about a quarter of the diabetics were able to get off insulin altogether. But plant-based diets are relatively low-calorie diets. Maybe their diabetes just got better because they lost so much weight. To tease that out, what you need to do is a study where you switch people to a healthy diet but force them to eat so much food that they don't lose any weight. Then we can see if plant-based diets have specific benefits beyond just all the easy weight loss. We'd have to wait 44 years, but here it is. Subjects were weighed every day. If they started losing weight, they were made to eat more food. In fact, so much more food that some of the participants had problems eating at all. They were like, oh, not another salad. But they eventually adapted, so no significant weight change despite restricting meat, eggs, dairy, and junk. So with zero weight loss, did plant-based diets still help? Overall, insulin requirements were cut about 60% and half the diabetics were able to get off their insulin altogether, despite no change in weight. How many years did that take? No, 16 days, 16 days later. So we're talking diabetics who've had diabetes as long as 20 years, injecting 20 units of insulin a day, and then as she was 13 days later, they were off all their insulin altogether, thanks to less than two weeks on a plant-based diet, even with zero weight loss, diabetes for 20 years, and then off all insulin in less than two weeks, diabetes for 20 years because no one had told her about a plant-based diet. Here's patient number 15, 32 units of insulin on the control diet. And then 18 days later on none, lower blood sugars on 32 units, less insulin. That's the power of plants. And that was without any weight loss. His body just started working that much better. And as a bonus, their cholesterol dropped like rock to under 150 in 16 days. Just like moderate changes in diet usually only result in moderate reductions in cholesterol. How moderate do you want your diabetes? Everything in moderation may be a truer statement than some people realize, and moderate changes in diet can leave diabetics with moderate blindness, moderate kidney failure, moderate amputate, maybe just a few toes or something. Moderation in all things is not necessarily a good thing. Remember that study that purported to show that diets high in meat, eggs, and dairy could be harmful to health as smoking, suggesting that people who eat lots of animal protein are four times as likely to die from cancer or diabetes. But if you look at the actual study, you'll see that's simply not true. Those eating a lot of animal protein didn't have just four times the risk of dying from diabetes. They had 73 times the risk of dying from diabetes. Now those that chose moderation only eating a moderate of animal protein, they just had 23 times the risk of death from diabetes.


Hello and welcome to our last discussion of Dalloway Day 2022, the fifth year of the RSL's Dalloway Day. I'm Molly Rosenberg, Director of the Royal Society of Literature and I'm very happy to welcome you today from wherever you're watching to celebrate Virginia Woolf's life and work alongside the RSL and our partners, the British Library. You can catch more on Dalloway Day through our friends BBC Radio 3. Today, you join us for a party planning panel discussion between Mervé Emery, Elaine Showalter, Kabe Wilson and Irena Sinocoji. Mrs Dalloway's party is one of literature's best known social occasions, but what if Virginia Woolf herself had been the hostess? Who would have been on the guest list? What would they have talked about? Our speakers will tell us who they think would have made the cut and why, and their whole discussion will be introduced with a poetry performance from Kabe, interrogating class and capitalism in Mrs Dalloway. If you're looking after this for more things Dalloway, head to the Royal Society of Literatures website for more events from this year and previous years, or visit our partners, the British Library for Virginia Woolf manuscripts and articles online. Before Kabe, I am welcoming Irena Sinocoji, who will be guiding conversation today. Irena Sin is a Nigerian-British writer. Elected to the Royal Society of Literature as a fellow in 2018, her short stories have been published internationally. Her debut novel, Butterfly Fish, was published in 2015, for which she was a recipient of a 2016 Betty Trask Award. Her short story collection, Speak Gargantula, was published in 2016. It was shortlisted for the inaugural Jalak Prize and the 2017 Edge Hill Short Story Prize. A collection of short stories, Newdy Brank was published in 2019. It was again longlisted for the Jalak Prize in 2020. Story Grace Jones won the 2020 A.K.O. Cain Prize for African Writing. In 2021, she was awarded an MBE for Services to Literature, very well deserved, I can say. A novel, Curandira is forthcoming this year in 2022. She is Vice-Chair of the Royal Society of Literature's governing council, and before Irena Sin will have an introduction from Kabe Wilson. 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Lady, colonial administrator, colonial administrator. Lady, lady, colonial administrator. Politicians, member of parliament. Lady, merchants, manufacturers. Lady, colonial administrator. Lady, lady, colonial administrator. Member of parliament. Member of parliament. Member of parliament. Colonial administrator. Colonial administrator. Lady, factory owner. Colonial administrator. Servants. Lady, factory owner. Lady, Queen of France. Lady, Queen of France. Colonial administrator. Lady, colonial administrator. I'm thrilled to be moderating this Dalloway Day event for the RSL in partnership with the British Library celebrating the ever-fascinating, inspiring Virginia Woolf, a writer who remains indelible in our imaginations, whose body of work continues to enrich our literary landscape. Today we explore what would happen if Virginia Woolf threw a dinner party open to any guest throughout history. Joining me to discuss this scintillating topic are three brilliant writers Mervé Emery, Elaine Shoalwater, and Kabe Wilson. I'd like to introduce our guest without further ado. Mervé Emery is Associate Professor of English at the University of Oxford. She is the author of Paraliterary, The Making of Bad Readers in Post-War America, The Ferrante Letters, and The Personality Brokers, which was selected as one of the best books of 2018 by the New York Times, The Economist, NPR, and CBC and informs the CNN HBO Max Documentary feature film Persona. She is the editor of The Annotated Mrs Dalloway and the Norton Modern Library, Mrs Dalloway. Elaine Shoalwater is a Professor Emery at Princeton and former Chair of the Judges of the Booker International Prize. Her books include a literature of their own British women novelists from Bronte to Lessing, and a jury of her peers, American women writers from Annie Bradstreet to Annie Prelue, Between Women, The Correspondents Between Winifred Holtby and Vera Britton, edited by Elaine Shoalwater and English Shoalwater, which will be published by Virago later this year. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and one of the instigators of Dalloway Day. Carbet Wilson is a UK multimedia artist with a particular focus on adaptation across different forms. His work on Virginia Woolf includes The Dreadlock Hosts, a performance piece that adapted and inverted the infamous Dreadlock Hosts of 1910, Olivia Ungwafri of One Woman or So, an extended experiment in literary recycling, and more recently, on Being Still, the Modernist Review 25, a series of paintings and writings that scrutinizes his own engagement with the Bloomsbury Group within the context of COVID-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter. More information about his work can be found at ArcAble.com. He's also very excited because one of his paintings will be used for the cover of To The Lighthouse, which is fantastic. Congratulations Carbet. So I'm so excited to have conversation with you guys. This is potentially hugely exciting.  But what would happen if she threw a dinner party and who would make the guest list? I'm going to come to Merve first of your inspired choice of Till the Swinton, which I think is an amazing choice actually. I mean, she of course is known for being a singular actress and unique presence in the art scene, particularly known for films such as Orlando, which she completely, I think, embodied that main protagonist through different time periods. So brilliantly. And of course, we need to talk about Kevin, who could forget that performance. So she is somebody I feel the guest would be drawn to because she is otherworldly. So could you talk us through this brilliant choice, Merve? I will, but I will start maybe by saying that I was struck that I only invited one guest, whereas Elaine, Elaine and Parpe invited multiple guests. So I think maybe that speaks to either my anti-sociality as a host or my sense that Virginia Woolf might have wanted a more intimate kind of party. I chose Till the Swinton for two reasons. One, which you've already mentioned, is her extreme presence and an extreme presence that I think is very interestingly tied to all kinds of ambiguities around gender and around sexuality. And it is, of course, impossible to talk about Virginia Woolf, I think, without bringing up questions of gender and sexuality. Until the Swinton, for me, is someone who really gets at part of Woolf's queerness, part of Woolf's androgyny, and does that in a kind of hyper-aestheticized, very, very, very stylish, but still kind of aloof and reserved way. And when I think of Woolf, that combination of style, reserve, androgyny and queerness is exactly where I place her as a figure and as a writer. So that's one reason. The other reason was that I was thinking a little bit about one of my favorite essays about Mrs. Dalloway's party, which is Alex Zwardling's great essay, Virginia Woolf and the Social System, in which Zwardling makes the argument that the party is, on the one hand, a party, but it's also a kind of wake. And it's a wake for a particular version or a particular moment in the history of the British Empire. And I thought, who do I know or who can I think of that can straddle that boundary between being alive and being dead? And I thought about how Tilda Swinton has also played a vampire, how she has also played a disembodied voice in Derek Jarman's incredible movie, Blue, and how she seems to me in being alive, one of those characters whose presence manages to transcend living. Maybe that's what it means for someone to be iconic. So in terms of who really would capture that sense of the party as both party and wake, I thought about Tilda Swinton. And maybe the last thing that I will say is that any time I read that wonderful passage where the Prime Minister is being described at the party, all rigged up in gold lace and being paraded around the room by Clarissa Dalloway, I think of Tilda Swinton, she is to me the Prime Minister rigged up in gold lace, and then she immediately transitions into a court footman surrounded by rattles and baubles and growing white in old age. And then she immediately transitions into Sally Seton and she just cycles through all of the other characters that are at that party. So that's my that's my offering to use a very Wolfie in term. That's my that's my offering of Tilda Swinton and my reason for it. Thank you so much. That was beautifully put. I think underlining that is that she is transformative, you know, both as a personality and an actress, and she definitely I think would embody somebody that would bring a certain dynamism to that party. And again, has that element of mystery, like you say, there is that quality where you don't quite know her, because she would be able to play so many different characters. So she would bring an amazing dynamic to to that party. Elaine, I think you wanted to chime in please. I just wanted to comment on this, and especially since you've chosen this one character, but obviously you can build on that. I'm wondering what you think of some of the other actresses who have played either Mrs. Dalloway or Virginia Woolf. So what do you think of in their film? Would you invite Vanessa Redgrave? And what about Nicole Kidman and the nose? I have to hear what you think of that. Yeah, well, Vanessa Redgrave certainly, but also who plays the young Clarissa Natasha. I think you'd have to invite both of them. And you'd have to have them wearing the same the same dress and probably the dress that Elizabeth is described as wearing at the party a little bit later on. I think, you know, yes, you would invite that whole trio from the hours, Julianne Moore, Meryl Streep and Nicole Kidman. But I think you'd have to you'd have to encourage Nicole Kidman to leave the nose at home. Well, that's very key. What would happen to the nose? Absolutely. Yeah. The nose would maybe be a nice centerpiece, a punch bowl around the nose. But no, that prosthetic never quite worked for me. There seemed to be a level of artificiality to it that was impossible to overlook. That's a great question, though. That's a wonderful question. That's a lovely question. And all amazing actresses actually. Can you imagine them all at the party? But yeah, I think that the nose would have to have its own allocated seating, I think, by the sounds of things. Elaine, I want to come to you next for your first two suggested guests which are Winifred Holtby and Vera Britton, both incredibly accomplished women in their own rights, both journalists and novelists, but also friends. And I love this idea of this duo who could potentially perhaps cause some disruption at the party. We know that Winifred, for example, wrote the first critique of Virginia Woolf. So she wasn't afraid to get on Woolf's bad sides. So I just wondered if you could talk us through those choices because they're both fascinating. Thanks. Well, you know, I really wanted, when I thought about the party list, my mind immediately went, and this probably says something about me, to people who would be unwelcome guests, people who Virginia Woolf would probably never have thought of inviting. And, you know, at Mrs. Dalloway's party, there's Ellie Henderson who feels she was invited at the last minute and she was. But that's as close as it gets to a really unwanted guest. And Winifred Holtby and Vera Britton, who were friends and formed a kind of almost iconic feminist friendship that lasted until Winifred's death in 1935, they lived together. Although Vera Britton was married and had two children, and it was not a menage act, much more complicated than that. But the interesting thing about them is that when Vera Britton and Winifred Holtby first met at Oxford, Summerfield College, Oxford, right after the war, they had plans to come to London, which they did, and begin their lives as writers, as journalists, as intellectuals, as young working women in London. And all the time that they did from the very beginning until the peak of their career, certainly when Winifred died, they were painfully aware that they did not belong to Bloomsbury. The first place they lived was actually sort of marginally in Bloomsbury. But they were, you know, physically, but they were not of Bloomsbury. And they were quite bitterly aware of Wolf and Bloomsbury and the whole crowd and the gay and parties they might be having to which, you know, Vera and Winifred would never be invited. It was partly a thing about class. They were both upper middle class Americans would say. But Bloomsbury was its own kind of, you know, aristocracy and had its own lineage and genealogy. And they were very bitter about that because they had to make their own way. They were trying to network in literary London, in journalistic London. And in the beginning, to me, it's very touching, you know, how they, how they grasped what we would call, you know, fifth level celebrities or fifth level. And they were so thrilled to have that kind of connection. But obviously, Bloomsbury, when Winifred, hopefully this, this is the book that she wrote about Virginia Wolf and fairly substantial. And it's really good. This came out in 1933. Virginia Wolf, a very different kind of writer from Winifred, hopefully, who was basically a realist, but hopefully really got it about Wolf. She understood about her feminism. She understood about her techniques. She is totally on Wolf's side. It's really, I think it stands up really well, very, very good critical book. And so, in a way, that was her ticket to Virginia Wolf, which she did three times. She interviewed her three times. Most of the time, she didn't get to meet her. And she relied on Ethel. She had an, they had an intermediary, and she got information from her. They had a little bit of correspondence. And when the biography came out, Wolf actually quite liked it. She was really impressed. She had not expected that she was going to be impressed, but she was.  On the other hand, Wolf was incredibly nasty in her letters about Winifred, hopefully herself. And she said, it's really quite dreadful. She said, Holti, of course, is an amiable donkey. And she made a kind of really cruel remark about how Holti had learned to read in the pigsties at her father's farm. Holti grew up in Yorkshire. Her father was a very prosperous farmer. I mean, there's nothing that justifies this kind of nasty remark. So I kind of liked the idea that Winifred would be there. And she and Vera Britton were, actually, they had so much in common with Virginia Wolf. They were feminists. They were socialists. They were pacifists. I mean, there's nothing that didn't mesh, but it would have been kind of jarring to have them there. And Vera Britton herself, Winifred too, they both cared a lot about fashion. They would have worried for days about what to wear to the party. So I think it would be kind of a great juxtaposition. I love that. I consider them, you know, two literary disruptors at this party who were probably unexpected in that environment. But I also love that they had this really amazing friendship so they could rely on each other through difficult times.  It's just a shame that class was a factor in the way she regarded them. But you know, there is this fascinating element to Wolf that there's this dichotomy where, you know, she could be incredibly gracious, but also quite mean spirited as well. So I can imagine some quite pointed, pithy remarks at that dinner table conversation. But lovely suggestions.  This amazing suggestion of Toni Morrison as a guest. Incredible writer, obviously. You know, exceptional work capturing the Black American experience in such an expansive, virtuosic way and unapologetic way as well. Jazz is a book that changed my life. So I'm all for this choice. And I'd love to hear more about your decision to have her as a guest. Yeah, I had something I would like to ask Elaine, first of all, if that's okay, just in terms of the very Britain suggestion. It's just because I read Wolf's kind of quite short critique or response of Testament of Youth. And I was quite, yeah, I was quite interested about the kind of the angle and the phrasing that she took on it. She took me to kind of positive movies. She said that she was jealous about it. Something that I've always kind of had in the background thinking about Jacob's room is this question of it being an allergy for Toby. But in actual fact, we know that if he would have survived, there's a good chance that he wouldn't have gone to war. And I kind of just, I like the idea of you inviting very Britain and potentially there being attention there. Wolf may be getting a bit chippy, you know, she may be have a bit of a chip on her shoulder about the idea that they're very Britain.   Whereas Wolf's is much, you know, three guineas, it's a much more kind of distanced academic text, sort of academic, but you know, it's incredibly, it's an incredible work of pacifism, but it differs from Testaments of Youth in that way. So I, yeah, I was very intrigued to whether you think that there might be a kind of like attention there for most point of view. Yeah, I mean, it's really interesting to say, I mean, of course, well, Winifred Holt, he had also been a nurse during the war, but she was in a very different part of France than their Britain, where Britain was really in the trenches, and the front and saw a terrible suffering, terrible wounds. But she was there. And Testaments of Youth is not the only, but certainly the most powerful and notable memoir World War One written by a woman and tremendously impressive. And it has a presence. Of course, Wolf, inconceivable, you cannot imagine, Virginia Wolf being on the front in any way, being in a trench in any way. Although she certainly experienced the war emotionally and did lose relatives in the war very painfully. The other thing about both Vera and Winifred, of course, is that they had gone to Oxford, something that Wolf never was able to do. And then I think she always certainly in a room of one's own, I mean, always feeling was excluded from and imagines what it might have been like. They were actually there at Somerville College, which was the center of literary feminism for a long time at Oxford. So in a lot of ways, they represented something that she couldn't share. But I love the sense of the war memory. She was very impressed by it. And she read Testament of Experience, too, which was the book Vera wrote about Winifred after Winifred died. And she said, to her credit, in a way, she said Winifred was a much more important person, and a much more distinguished person than even Vera, her closest friend, would acknowledge. So it fills it all out. Glad you noticed that. Thank you. Yeah. And in terms of Toni Morrison, I think my selection there was much less about the idea of tension so much as, I think, Toni would maybe want to meet Virginia Wolf. I mean, I'm going to be honest, my first instinct was kind of like, how can I get invited to this party? Why didn't you put yourself on the list? I think we all deserve to be on the list, right? Let's just assume that we're all invited, I think, as well. But Morrison did write a chapter of her MA dissertation on Wolf, right? Yeah. Yeah. So this was actually where my kind of thought process came from, because all I wanted to do was, in terms of the time travel option we have here, is specifically pick Toni Morrison as the Howard Professor, so not necessarily later in her life. But what I have, my interest in Wolf in a lot of ways, my research and tests and creatively, has been looking at the times that she appears in history and culture where we don't expect her to be there. And that's particularly, names is a framework through which I look at that. And yeah, I've done some work connecting Wolf with Stokely Carmichael, you know, the several acts activist, Black Panther and such. And my aim there was looking at the idea of Mary Carmichael in River One Zone and then Stokely Carmichael and then seeing if I could build up these connections between Wolf and Carmichael. And one of the things that came up with was that Toni Morrison was one of the figures that connects them, because, as Mervé says, Toni Morrison, you know, she was a Wolf scholar earlier in her career and she taught Stokely Carmichael at Howard. And what's really fascinating to me is that you can read these stories about Carmichael being kind of at the front of the class and being very, you know, the kind of figure he was, he was very like, you know, he would interrupt and he would make these claims and say, why are we studying this? There's an amazing story I read about Toni Morrison had set a fault in a number of them to read. And Carmichael said, why are we reading this racist old white man when we should be talking about colonialism? And you know, she kind of shuts him down. So I feel quite sure that at some point Toni Morrison would have taught a Room One Zone or some other wolf text to Stokely Carmichael. So I have this idea that I'd like to write maybe a short story about the idea of that class. He reads a Room One Zone and he sees the name Mary Carmichael. Much later in his life, we know that he changed his name and he changed his name to Kwame Ture, you know, in terms of African heritage, his inspiration of African leaders. So he's rejecting, you know, he's rejecting Stokely Carmichael and also his middle name is Winston, sorry, no, it's Churchill, one of his middle names is Churchill.  I'm wondering whether Carmichael in Room One Zone would have been one of the first times he sees that name. So in this lesson, if we imagine Wolf's telling this and he's saying, we say, you know, who is this Carmichael? Why are we supposed to, you know, or is this to associate or, or kind of think positively about this Mary Carmichael? Like what were her cousins doing? Her cousins were probably, you know, the, my slave ancestors. And I think Toni Morrison will actually Stokely, I've just had this very interesting invitation to a party that Virginia Wolf is throwing back in time. Why don't you come along? I'll introduce you. I'd like to meet her and then we can see what kind of conversation gets going there. So this was, this was sort of my, my, my thinking that I think Toni Morrison would really like to talk to Wolf. I think, you know, she has a particular interest in Mrs. Dalloway's party. She writes about that in her thesis. And then she would say on, you know, here's my, here's my, one of my brightest students and he's got some questions for you. So another, another point of maybe a developing friendship, but also possibly some tension in the party, I guess. Lovely. I love that. I love that. I mean, the combination of Toni and Stokely together at this party would be the very, very interesting. I think, and I think you're right. I think there would be a real curiosity from, certainly from Toni's part, because she was a real intellectual, as we know, not just a great writer, but an exceptional thinker. So that, that combination could, I think, potentially be quite fiery, having seen Toni in interviews. I think there could be some interesting tension there, but I mean, it's, it's a dream, dreamy list to have both her and Stokely involved. And of course, Stokely heavily participated in advocating Black Rights in America and did that, I think transformative trip of going outside of the U.S. to talk to leaders outside, you know, revolutionally leaders to kind of pick their brains and find out about, you know, their frameworks and how they see the world and, you know, how they want to empower perhaps people who are disenfranchised. So, I mean, fascinating to have him there as a guest. Merve, you wanted to chime in, please do. Well, the way that Carve is thinking made me, made me think of a book whose manuscript I just read by the wonderful Wolf scholar, Elizabeth Abel. It's called Odd Affinities, and it traces Wolf's influence on African American writers. And the two that come to mind that would also make very good party guests are Nella Larson, who's passing Elizabeth Abel reads as a kind of rewriting of Mrs. Dalloway. And a fascinating reading in part because there are lines from Mrs. Dalloway that Larson is taking almost verbatim. So I think it would be interesting to invite someone who walks that line between Acolyte or someone who is influenced and a kind of quasi plagiarist to Virginia Wolf party. And then the other person that Elizabeth reads as having this kind of odd affinity with Wolf is James Baldwin. And she reads Giovanni's room as a kind of rewriting of Jacob's room. And I think to add Nella Larson and Baldwin to this mix of people who have the kinds of odd affinities with Wolf that you're describing Carve would also make for a really interesting guest list. Yeah, that's fantastic. Actually, I was thinking of my own guests that I would love to add to the list. And James Baldwin and Josephine Baker were two people that I would put forward as guests. I mean, James obviously a trailblazer in terms of being a black American gay activist and writer who left the States having been frustrated with the way black Americans were being treated to live in France and that whole experience of spending time away from the US as a black man, but still being connected to what was happening and still being personally very affected by it. And also just an astonishing thinker again. So I know that he's somebody who would be critical, I think, and perhaps cause some tension as well. But there would be a real interest in Wolf and a real curiosity. And Josephine Baker, I think, is just, you know, this is a woman who had several lives, not only an actress, a performer, an activist, but a wonderful humanitarian and also at one point an intelligence officer for the French. So I think as a guest, that's a fascinating element to have in the mix and could potentially be, again, you know, quite, quite exciting to have all these wonderful, eclectic characters in conversation. Elaine, you want to chime in? Marefe, did you have something to say? I thought you looked like you were going to say something to say about Toni Morrison. Well, I was actually going to go to a Renaissance comment about Josephine Baker who also appears in Nella Larson's passing. So to have all of these people in the same space would create a very kind of closed circle. But I just wanted to point out how interesting it is that our guest lists are more or less kind of cool modernists, except for yours, Elaine, where you have the realists coming in as like the agitators. And I just, I was thinking of other realists that we might want to toss in to be the, you know, the crowd, the out crowd at the party. The other thing is Toni Morrison was at Princeton when I was at Princeton was a colleague of mine at Princeton. She is a great party giver, I have to say. She would be the life of the party. And she was one of these people, you know, who brought out the party person and everybody else. And while she was at Princeton, she instituted, I think after she won the Nobel Prize and Princeton, you know, wanted to honor in various ways. And what she asked for was to start something that was called the Princeton Atelier in which two artists from very different fields were brought together to collaborate. And that went on for a number of years, very interesting pairings that she had together. So I think the first one she actually was herself, somebody picked her and she had her poems set to music and performed by Andre Previn. Try to imagine this. So it was, it was an interesting thing. And she would be, she'd be great. I think she would be a wonderful presence at anybody's party. Yeah, there are, there are photos of Toni Morrison at parties, I think. And she's having a really good time. So she seems to somebody who would probably be the life of the party, I reckon. It's a wonderful, wonderful choice.  I mean, this is a polymath whose wit and flamboyance would be a massive, massive draw. So talk us through Noel as your second choice.  I put him in because he was at the center of a sort of very different, I don't know, gay culture. Again, I thought he was a kind of, I don't know, the entertainment world, something that Wolf doesn't engage with. One of her, one of her blind spots, so to speak, you don't get that sense of her being there. And I was also, I kind of link him with Rebecca West, very different kind of personality, but also as somebody kind of with some of, with a lot of things in common with Wolf, but also kind of an outrageous person, Rebecca West. And as with Winterford Holtry, Wolf was not at all impressed by Rebecca West and wrote an incredibly nasty thing about her too. She said about, about Rebecca West as tenacious, as a terrier with flashing eyes, very shabby, dirty nails, and it goes on. I mean, Wolf, in a way, you think you don't really want to be around that much if you get into the letters. But I think that Rebecca West could have stood up for herself. That's the thing. You don't have to be protective of Rebecca West. And by the time Wolf was writing, way before Wolf was writing Mrs. Dalloway, Rebecca West had published one of the first novels about the war in 1918 and was sort of a bit ahead of the game. So she too had written about the effect of war and shell shock on male identity. There are so many, so many potential pairings, right? So many conversations you can imagine that Wolf might not have sought out. Yeah. Do you think, Elaine, just do you think that there was perhaps a competitive element there with Wolf and people she was mean towards other women that she was mean towards? Because, you know, I'm imagining at that time that there probably weren't many women writers being published. And you would, you would hope that there would be some sort of shared affinity there, some sort of sense of community. So I wondered if it was a way of her kind of keeping people who may be a threat in their place, because we know that she has this side to her where she can be gracious, but also quite vicious. Well, it is really interesting. Of course, Vita Sackville West, you know, the great example who obviously would have been at any party. And, you know, if there were such a thing, she would have been there. But there's a fairly small list of people who were accepted into the canon of women writers. And I'm sure they're competitive. I don't know if Wolf thought of it as being competitive. They thought of it as being competitive for sure. Yeah, well, she thought of it. I mean, you could you could put together a great guest list based on just people she said nasty things about in her overflow. I'm thinking like if you really wanted to wrinkle her Catherine Mansfield, with the feel quite competitive, Elizabeth Bowman, there's a great line that she has about Mary Butz, who comes to visit her and she says Mary Butz has left but the stench of her remains. She had written an instant book about the Greeks and the Downs. And so I was just thinking how wonderful it would be for this entire guest list to just be people who would really piss her off. Yeah, yeah. It might be nice to have half the guest list. I think she would need some mediating perhaps some reasonable folk amongst the instigators. But certainly it's fascinating to hear about Mansfield as well.  I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about that. Well, and she, am I remembering correctly, didn't Mansfield die right as she was writing Mrs. Dalloway? I don't know. I have this annotated version of Dalloway and I'm looking up and taking it. Yes, no, that was an extremely difficult relationship. And that was one that I think was more overtly marked by competition, because she felt that Mansfield got better reviews and that her stories were more widely read. And she felt quite bad about that. And in fact, I think was composing the final chapters or the final interludes of Mrs. Dalloway after Mansfield died. And that seems to me, in addition to Kitty, Max, the inspiration for Clarissa Dalloway, one of the ghosts that's clearly haunting the novel. And that seems to be overhanging the wake or the party at the end of it. But I think that I, yeah, I don't know. I'm coming over more to Elaine's point of view that you want to invite people who either wouldn't have wanted to be there or wouldn't have been wanted. And that that is in many ways the key to a party that people will then talk about. Because people want drama. You don't want some quiet tea party. You want things thrown. You want fights. Absolutely. Yeah, you want tension. You want tension. You want gossip and you want entertainment, I think you want a mixture of all of those things. As well as our wonderful guests, I was thinking about menu as well, potentially. I personally would love some sort of seafood, strange seafood delicacy on the menu, because I think that might be a good topic of conversation. So I was wondering, you know, if we could imagine what the menu would look like, what one thing would each of you want to see on the menu? I'm going to come to you first, Merve. Oh, gosh. I was just thinking about what actually is on the menu or what we're told is on the menu. And the thing that I keep coming back to is the Tokai, the Hungarian Tokai, the wine that we're told that Richard goes and fetches from the wine seller as an emblem of the of his imperial connections. But then I thought maybe I would just read from the end from the beginning of the party scene, I about the Prime Minister coming, and then it made no difference that this hour of the night to Mrs Walker among the plates, saucepans, colanders, frying pans, chicken and aspic, ice cream freezers, paired crusts of bread, lemons, soup terrenes, and pudding basins, which however hard they washed up in the scullery, seemed to be all on top of her on the kitchen table on chairs, while the fire blared and roared, the electric lights glared and still supper had to be laid. And I think that reading that, you know, you're not actually getting the you're not getting the food itself, right? You're getting the aftermath of the food, the waste of the food that's piling up in the in the kitchen, which makes me think that they both would have eaten too much, it would have been this massively decadent meal, and also like supermodels at a party today, they wouldn't have eaten anything at all. And so the menu is for me both both entirely excessive too much and completely non present at the same at the same time, which which I've always found quite interesting that I can't picture the food. Well, I love the idea of a decadent menu. So I'm going to let that thrive in my imagination. Elaine, you were going to add something. I have a lot of trouble visualizing the party because it sounds you know the scene with the cook, which Mervage has read, it sounds like it's a sit down dinner. But it's described as a stand up like a cocktail party. And I'm trying to imagine them balancing this stuff. And, you know, is how hard it is at a real party to try to do that and juggle it. But the only dish that I can imagine having this because what I would like to have at a party in London in June is my favorite thing to eat in London in June. And I thought it fits with Mrs. Dalloway is eaten mess. There's a lot of, you know, discussion of eating various points. And Sally Seton has these five great sons. And I think some of them, maybe all of them are really eaten. So I thought it would be appropriate. And it's the right season. So eaten mess all over the place. That's a lovely suggestion, Elaine. Classic English bear. Thank you for that. Carl Bay, anything you would add to the menu? Well, I was just thinking, what's funny in terms of eating mess is obviously this whole conversation about a party with the Prime Minister is that at the moment there's this whole discussion in the UK of a party in front of us. So which I would have sort of followed through, I would imagine there's a lot of drink there as as Mervie says, but not so much in terms of what's actually on the plates, but the plates themselves, I just keep thinking about the Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant's dinner plate collection. And just whether whether or not the differences we'll see between Mrs. Dalloway's party and Wolf's party are actually kind of like interior stylistic. And it's kind of very important for them to not have these kind of like overly overly ornate plates. But actually, yeah, there's an artistry. And essentially, it's a cool party, which brings me back to Tilda Swinton, I think there is, as you were saying before, there is a very, there's a stylistic sense of what has to be what has to be going on here, which seemingly, Wolf was was, you know, distracted by concerns with, but that's what her, you know, that's what her, her scene, that's what I have seen was these were people who wanted to be, you know, they wanted to be seen as as the cool, you know, the cool ones. This is, this is, this is what's, this is what's quite important to them. Which I think, yeah, just it throws up very, very clear distinctions between at least how I view Mrs. Dalloway's party. And I think potentially, is Wolf's party going to be kind of a younger crown? We, we like to be fair and intergenerational. I mean, I imagine it'd be quite a cool party and one that everybody would want an invite to. So, I mean, you could potentially have quite a young crowd, but in terms of who she moved around with, perhaps slightly older as well, I think it'd be nice to have a good, a good mixture of both. But already it's like a scintillating, scintillating party and guest list. Lastly, I want to just talk briefly about Virginia Wolf's influence. She's a writer who continues to loom largely in our imaginations and, you know, continues to inspire future generations. So I wondered if each of you could just touch on how she's inspired your work and your creativity. I'm going to come to Carbet first this time. Yeah, I mean, my work with Wolf originally started about sort of, I don't know, like 12 years ago now. I was quite a lot younger. And I didn't think that I would come back to it. But in the last couple of years, I've kind of come back to it in quite a big way. She kind of looms ever present. But as I say, I think it's something that I'm so inspired by and interested in is actually this question of influence and how she influences generations afterwards. And not necessarily, I mean, we're actually not even necessarily just in just in literature. There was something I wanted to bring up at the party. I don't know who who would maybe raise this potentially. It could be Till the Swinton again might be, might be a good suggestion point. But I, in terms of the connections between Carmichael and Wolf, I discovered that if anyone can picture the character Susie Carmichael in the Rugrats, she's actually, it turns out named after Stokely Carmichael, and another Nickelodeon cartoon Doug, if anyone ever remembers Doug, and Doug's older sister, Judy is actually named after Judith Shakespeare. So, you know, there was a sense that there were so many different ways that we can like take these threads through through time and it doesn't have to be sort of uniquely connected to the, to the, you know, a modernist writer doesn't have to inspire a modernist writer. And so certainly from my point of view, it's this idea that the differences between me and Virginia Woolf, the fact that she can inspire me despite those, I think is is is very important to me. And that's something that I'm just very interested in seeing how that connects to other people and their work and the way she she is a presence there. Wonderful.  Well, I first read Wolf when I was an undergraduate in a course taught by a particularly conservative and unimaginative professor. And we read Mrs. Dalloway and she said that it was about learning to be a healthier husband, which I think is not an interpretation that any of us would apply now. But one of the things that was always important to me was the sense of how Anglo American in a sense Wolf was. And this is Dalloway certainly, because of course, there are manuscripts both in the United States and in the UK. And research that I did, I've done research and looked at the manuscripts in the Bird Collection of the New York Public Library, which was when I when I first looked at was really a shrine. Everybody, you know, all the feminist scholars wanted to read Wolf. And all of us went in there in this hushed, sanctuary, being very careful not to touch anything. Because if we did, you know, the very stern head of the Bird Collection would come in and yell at us and scold us. And then reading the manuscripts in the British Library, which are magnificent and bowed and you can turn off the pages, very luxurious. And the manuscript of Mrs. Dalloway, there were two different editions, the American and the British. So I have a kind of identification with that as an American who also feels very angle a lot of the time. Hopefully, Mervay, I'm going to come to you. Yeah, maybe I'll actually flip what Elaine said, which is as an American who lives in the UK and who finds a great deal of it baffling, very, very strange. The process of annotating Mrs. Dalloway was actually extremely educational for me. It was an incredible education and understanding things about the history of the UK, but also the particular role that the institution where I work, Oxford has played in the imagination of many people in the UK and the role that it played in Wolf's imagination. And it helped me understand both what I find puzzling or inscrutable and what I feel a kind of deep antipathy to, which are these continuing legacies of its role in propping up colonial administration. And I continue to find Mrs. Dalloway extraordinary for the way that imperialism is written into the details of that novel, that part of what I learned annotating it was that every statue that you see, that you read the name of as Peter Walsh is walking down the street, or every person who is named at the party has some kind of a pernicious tie to the state and its projects of colonialism and genocide in many cases. And so I think, again, just to play off of what Elaine was saying, and that kind of fascinatingly horrible interpretation of Mrs. Dalloway as being a novel about being your husband's helpmate, I think one of Wolf's legacies that we can recover is her extraordinary political imagination and her capacity for political satire and particularly satire and critique of the colonial project, traces of which are still here, are still present today, whether that's in the form of statues or institutions of higher education. Is that too, is that too polemical? Did I end up? No, no, it's, it's wonderful, though. Elaine, were you going to respond? Was anyone going to respond or? I was just sort of thinking, you know, that one of the things that I really love reading Marabay's annotating Mrs. Dalloway, which is so thorough and I mean, but there are things that that you pick up that I would have passed over because I thought, well, everybody knows this, you don't have to annotate it, but you have to annotate everything. And there's an entry for the Bodleian Library very early on. And I can't remember that that was in Mrs. Dalloway, but it is. It's just mentioned in passing. And when you talk about it, he said the second largest library and all kinds of information about it. So I do think that, you know, there's a way that you can unpack or locate, you can you can be attentive to so many of these references, which could simply be like the air, maybe to a native. Fascinating stuff. Just to add to that, I was, I think what's really interesting about this this party setup in terms of what you said, Marabay, is that kind of as Wolf Scholars, you have this interesting, this dual recognition of Wolf as a person and then as her writer in terms of her work. And yeah, I find it so funny and kind of fun that we're so much of what we've been talking about is how she would respond to people and the kind of like strange ways, you know, people who you would think of as like, yeah, contemporaries that she, I don't know, on the face of it, you know, she's referencing the work, she's positive about the work, but she's very scathing about them as people. Which, yeah, I've always found like quite something that really draws me to her as a writer, that there is that like, that strange tension there. But it's when it's when you actually really, which as I did with the poem, as you see, is you really, really get into the text and you, you kind of kind of appreciate her as a writer. And as I think her in a way, that means you often will then have to leave behind all the, you know, the kind of things about her that may be interest us more as, as like, you know, particular Wolf scholars or people into, into her in that way. And yeah, and I just, yeah, I just totally agree with what you were saying about the, the, the interest in where the colonialism features in Mrs. Dalloway and the way you can read that in the text. Thank you all for your wonderful contributions. Unfortunately, we've run out of time. I mean, I could mine your brains endlessly about this intriguing prospect of a dinner party with Virginia Woolf. It's absolutely amazing. Thank you, everyone. It's been a joy to talk to you and hear your insights about this potential dinner party. Dalloway Day is a fantastic day that we love to celebrate at the RSL. Please join us again next year, where we will be doing the same thing, reimagining how we celebrate Virginia Woolf in interesting and fascinating ways, a writer that continues to be at the forefront of the site, guys. Thank you so much for joining us and see you next year. Thank you. Thanks, guys. Bye.


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Hey Psych2Goers, welcome back to our channel. So you want to improve your intelligence, huh? There are many ways that this can be done. Education is key. It's never too late to learn something new and become a bit smarter than you were yesterday. Here are a few little habits you can pick up that can also boost your intelligence. 1. Play word games in puzzles. Have you heard of any brain games out there that may just improve your IQ? Well, some common games such as Scrabble or Crosswords can help as well. Memory games such as jigsaw puzzles, crosswords, Sudoku, and card games can improve memory and language and reasoning skills. So much so that there are several research studies that use memory games in order to see how much spatial memory connects to language and our understanding of objectives. Sudoku has even been said to lower the risk of Alzheimer's disease, according to the American Alzheimer's Association. Games like Scrabble and Pictionary can affect our executive control, while mazes and unfolded prisms help in our visuospatial reasoning. Improving visuospatial reasoning can even lead to a higher IQ according to a 2017 research study. So while you've never won a game of Sudoku, it's best for your brain to keep up those puzzles and word games. Sudoku, anyone? 2. Read the uncomfortable. We can be experts on things that we love, which is good. But who wouldn't want to have a greater knowledge of broad subjects, too? Our mind is comfortable reading subjects that we already know a thing or two about. So if you're used to only reading modern fantasy books, pick up an autobiography or a literary classic, or perhaps you're a light reader, delve into that history book that's been collecting dust for the past couple of years. If we expand our knowledge and get outside of our comfort zones, our brains will thank us for it in the long run. 3. Write down your existential questions and thoughts. So you have all these exciting ideas and existential questions, but there's no one around at the moment. Instead of letting these thoughts pass, write them down and exercise your mind. It will not only improve your communication skills, mostly written communication skills, but it will also give you a chance to expand on these deeper ideas, a much-needed brain exercise. 4. Learn a musical instrument and take time for your passions.  If you have a creative passion you've been neglecting for a while, now's the time to bring it back. Many find their passion in playing a musical instrument. Have you considered learning the violin or the piano or the oboe? One 2016 study found that musicians have a greater working memory than those who don't play a musical instrument. Improving our memory is a great way to boost our intelligence, so it's not a bad idea to pick up a habit of practicing that guitar. With enough practice, you may just finally win a match. Game on. 5. Exercise A good diet and plenty of exercise will not only benefit our physical health, but our mental health as well. We'll not only have better blood flow to our brain with exercise, but will gain a boost of proteins that can help grow our neural connections and our brain. So I guess it's time to roll out that yoga mat. 6. Learn a new skill or hobby It's time to stimulate your mind. How? Getting creative. You know, that new hobby you've been meaning to try out or that skill you've been wanting to learn? Well, now is the time. It's never too late to broaden your knowledge or refine a skill.  So, which of these habits will you implement? Share with us in the comment section down below. If you enjoyed this video, don't forget to click the like button and share it with a friend. Subscribe to Psych2Go and hit the notification bell icon for more content like this. And as always, thanks so much for watching.


Hi friends welcome back to my channel and a very special welcome if you're new here. My name is Jen. I'm a certified weight loss and nutrition coach and I'm on WW personal points. Happy Friday. It is Friday. It is the weekend and I couldn't be happier. Even though I'm just as busy on the weekend is the week day. It's always such a good feeling when the weekend rolls around. Today we're going to be talking all about my week setting some goals for next week. I have a very very exciting announcement for you. We're going to discuss the WW workshop topic and of course this week's weigh-in. So if you're excited give this video a huge thumbs up. Make sure you're subscribed and of course your bell notification is turned on so you never miss a single weigh-in or a single video. I do upload five days a week. Check out that description box down below for nutrition coaching. I offer personalized to you macros and calories. Highly recommend as well as one-on-one coaching if you would like to talk with me one-on-one. Links discounts to my favorite things and come on over join us on Facebook. We would love to have you join that community as well. So let's go ahead and dive into how my week was. Let's set some goals. Talk about the WW workshop topic. Have an exciting announcement and of course this week's weigh-in. I hope you had an amazing week. I shared this last Sunday a huge huge life update. If you haven't seen that video I'll make sure that I link it down in the description box for you. Get caught up with me. I'll let you know what's happening in my life, what's happening on my channel. Lots and lots of changes. So with that I've been very busy as you can imagine. I have been packing and making tons and tons of phone calls trying to get everything lined up. It's a lot of work to sell a house, buy another house and move out of state all at the same time. I'm so grateful that Troy is here to help me because I don't know if I would be able to handle all of this on my own. So that's truly been a blessing having him home from work. Not only just to help watch the dogs, help run errands. We've taken several loads to Goodwill. We have sold a plethora of things on Facebook Marketplace and he has just been such a big help which has really taken a lot of the burden off of me. Several good things have happened but one thing that I'm really proud of this last week is that I was able to get my exercise in. I was able to go to Jazzercise. I went and walked on the treadmill on Monday at my local gym. That was actually really nice and something I looked forward to as weird as that sounds. That half of an hour walk really helps set my day up on the right foot and helps set me up for success. My food throughout the week has been fantastic. In fact right now I am drinking my coffee with a protein shake to get in about 30 grams of protein this morning and just overall I feel like I had a great week. I also shared with you in last week's weigh-in video that I have lost 89.3 pounds which means that I am 0.7 point measly 7 away from hitting a 90 pounds loss which is a huge milestone for me and one of the things that I'm doing for myself in honor of that is a closet cleanout. I have been struggling with my clothes. Most of my clothes don't fit. Some of them still fit okay but most of them are excessively large on me and I'm just not reaching for them so I'm so excited to be able to do a closet cleanout at 90 pounds down. I'm planning on giving all of my clothes to my girlfriend. She'll route through those, decide what she wants and then whatever she doesn't choose to keep or doesn't fit her she'll go ahead and take to our local shelter or to Goodwill. So this is something I'm really excited about. So we need to find out whether or not I lost 0.7 this week and hit that 90 pounds down but before we do let's go ahead and talk a little bit about this week's WW workshop topic. It's another really good one and this is to how to stop self-sabotaging yourself. Let's cut right to the chase. Sometimes things don't go the way that we want them to go whether it's in our personal life with our kids with our family and especially with our weight loss but there are ways to make changes and kind of course correct so that we can stop self-sabotaging ourselves when things don't go our way. There are some things that we can try that will help us stop self-sabotaging. I'm going to go ahead and pop the picture here on the screen from the WW workshop topic because I think it's a really good visual tool for us to really understand the steps that we can take to stop this behavior. So number one, imagine there's a recording of that situation you were in and that you didn't love. Rewind it in your mind. Make note of what you're doing, what's going on around you and even what you're thinking. This is a good starting point to really rewind and reflect on what happened that made you self-sabotage. We can't make changes if we don't recognize what changes need to be made. Number two is to spot any moments that might have contributed to your challenge. The ones where you wish you could stop the tape and change what you did or how you acted. This is really important. Maybe the self-sabotage that you did is eating a whole entire package of cookies. What could you have done to prevent that from happening?  Again, it's really important to reflect and know what needs to be changed to stop self sabotaging. Number three is pick just one thing to tweak and rerecord. What did you shift? So let's go back to our cookie situation. Maybe we decide that it's just not wise for us to bring a whole entire package of cookies into our house. But we don't want to eliminate cookies altogether. So maybe we buy a single cookie from our local bakery. That way, once it's gone, it's gone and we have a single serving, not an entire package. And number four is to press play on your new video. Did your outcome ultimately change pinpoint what led to your success so that you can repeat it? This is really important. What works for you and what doesn't? Now the things that work for you, put those on repeat. Keep doing those over and over again. Maybe the single cookie from the bakery really helped you not overeat and not over consume points or calories with the entire package. All of these little changes and really reflecting on what didn't work and what works can play a huge part in stopping the self sabotage. Have you ever blamed yourself for not feeling motivated enough? I know that I have. And in fact, this is a question I get asked all the time, whether it's from a coaching client or from YouTube is how do I stay motivated? How do I keep going when we self sabotage when we screw up so to speak, we can get really mad, annoyed at ourselves and feel really, really disappointed in ourselves. This is a form of self sabotage. When we're talking negatively to ourselves or focusing on negative things, it can really lead us down a destructive path. Try showing yourself some kindness, giving yourself some grace. We're not perfect. We're human beings. We're not perfect in life. We're not perfect in our with our kids with our marriage, and we're definitely not perfect with our weight loss journey. So allow yourself a little bit of grace and instead of getting mad at yourself, course correct and do it different next time. Make small changes to stay motivated, build up momentum and keep going in the right direction. I really, really like this topic. I think every single one of us, let me know if you are one of the rare ones that don't self sabotage ourselves at times. And this doesn't even have to be with weight loss. This can be in life in general, we can self sabotage ourselves in our marriage in our career and especially when it comes to losing weight and living a healthy lifestyle. So I'm glad WW is focusing on these topics and giving us the tools that we need to stop the destructive behavior. I really think this month's topics have been really, really good. This one included. So now what you've all been waiting for, did I hit 90 pounds loss? And do I have a closet clean out video coming your way soon? The short answer to this is yes, I did. When I stepped on the scale today, I am down 1.2 pounds, which means that I have lost 90.5 pounds total. So that means that I am over 90 pounds loss, which is so incredibly exciting. And I cannot wait cannot wait to clean out my closet. I have a feeling I'll be getting rid of a lot of my clothes, I would say at least half of them. And then with moving out of state on top of that, this is the perfect time to really deep dive in my closet, get rid of clothes that don't fit me because I'm never going to be wearing those clothes again ever. Also get rid of shoes, winter clothes, things I won't need in sunny Arizona. This is just the perfect, perfect time for that. So definitely stay tuned for that closet clean out video coming your way here in the next couple of weeks, which is super exciting. So now I want to hear from you guys. Let me know how your week was. Did you gain? Did you lose? What do you think of this week's topic? And do you think that you self sabotage yourself a lot? I know that I can suffer from this. Definitely let me know down in the comments and let me know if you're excited for this closet clean out video. I know that I am. I hope you have an amazing Friday and amazing weekend. And don't forget to give this video a big huge thumbs up. Make sure you're subscribed and your bell is turned on so you never miss any future videos. I do upload five days a week. Stay tuned for tomorrow's grocery haul. It is going to be a little bit different. We're shopping my pantry, my fridge, my freezer, and we're building recipes around what we have on hand, which is a good way to save money and stay within our grocery budget. Don't forget to check out the description box again for nutrition coaching. I'd love to help you reach your goals as well as links and discounts to my favorite things. And lastly, we'd love to have you over in our Facebook group. Thank you so much for watching friends and I'll see you in tomorrow's video. Bye.