Hello Reader,

Thanks for showing up — and for reading, writing, and keeping on.

Some weeks shine, your energy bright and your hopes high. Others are rough and tumble, and you escape the shaker feeling tattered and small.

Let’s meet in the middle.

Here are a few things I’ve enjoyed lately, and think you might, too:

1.
No Answers

Last night I cried myself to sleep

again; I surrendered to the impossible

helplessness of having no good answers

for the problems of the world. No, not the world—

but not even my own. I don't know what the wind

is threading through the reeds, or what the river

might be thinking about territory. Across the stump

of an old oak hewn down five years ago, a screen

mixed of holly and ivy has begun to emerge.

Nothing is intimate or everything is intimate

and we are all climbing a trellis thin as spider

silk, more opaque than ordinary light.

— Luisa A. Igloria

2.
That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour by Sunita Puri

This may be the best book of 2023!

Yes, I said the same thing earlier this year but, really, this is another best book. Because our health care system is broken and our actions toward life and death so warped, I want to give this book to everyone I know.

Published in 2019, this literary memoir explores a doctor’s practice of palliative medicine. Blending science with spirituality, Dr. Puri offers a thoughtful and compassionate perspective that helps patients and families redefine what it means to live and die in the face of serious illness.

This book stands strong among my other health-related favorites:

The People’s Hospital: Hope and Peril in American Medicine by Ricardo Nuila

Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gwande

God’s Hotel: A Doctor, A Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine by Victoria Sweet

Knocking on Heaven’s Door: The Path to a Better Way to Death by Katy Butler

My Own Country: A Doctor’s Story by Abraham Verghese

Note: Yes, I keep pushing the value of these medically-themed books — not because I am a Sad Sally or a Gruesome Gus but because I continue to feel frustrated with our traditional medical system, with public perception toward end-of-life, and because of my personal conviction that living fully means to meet the end with awareness, honesty, and grace.

3.
The Billion Dollar Code, a four-part movie series that tells the story of two young German developers — an artist and a programmer nerd — who team up to create a groundbreaking way to see the world, and later sue Google for stealing their work.

Based on true events, this good-versus-evil story is both illuminating and heartbreaking, and will likely cause you to question Google’s “don’t be evil” practices.

You might also wonder, as I do, why this spectacular 2021 movie received little to no attention or promotion.

Currently showing on Netflix.