Miznon (New York City, 435 W. 15th Street)

We are pleased to report to our growing New York readership, not to mention the enormous number of loyal readers who visit New York, that we have found the very best pita and hummus in the world, and chef and owner are Israeli. You can get all kinds of sandwiches wrapped in pita, but the pita cheeseburger should not be missed: the grass-fed sheet-like patty is griddled briefly and then wrapped around cheddar and griddled some more, until the meat is medium-rare and the edges of the cheese have gone lacy and crunchy, and then it's smothered in sour cream, pickles, and tomato, turning New York's best pita into one of New York's best burgers. Our only complaint is that chef does not sell the pita separately or allow left-overs to be taken out, because chef knows people will re-heat it and "mess it up." 

Link to Miznon''s Website

PS: It has just been brought to our attention that the April 30 edition of the New Yorker not only agrees with our assessment of Miznon, it does so in eerily similar, and often more eerily identical, language. 

Phoenix Water Quality

We are pleased to report that, having listened to recommendations from our Hydrogen-to-Oxygen team (H20), in 2017, Phoenix’s tap water met or surpassed all Environmental Protection Agency and state drinking water quality regulations. The full report (about 4 pages) can be found in the link below. 

Link to Phoenix Water Quality Report

Belly vs. Nova Lox

It recently has come to the (shocking) attention of our Department of Esoteric Lox Information (DELI) that many of our loyal readers and others do not know the difference between belly and nova lox. While we have neither the time nor the energy to explain all the different lox cuts, the choice between belly and nova is presented not just by East Coast deli servers but even deli servers in the desert. Belly and nova are sliced from two different parts of the fish, but that's not the key. The key is that belly lox is much much saltier than nova. Our DELI has a strong suggestion: Unless you like very salty stuff and stuff that tastes very salty, go with the nova.

Raising Children in a Robot World

[Courtesy of the WSJ]

The problem is, we don’t know for certain which particular jobs will be automated years from now, because AI is constantly developing in surprising ways. So while it’s helpful to get a broad sense of which kinds of jobs or skills are most likely to be taken over by robots, all of that is only so useful.

So how do you raise robot-proof children? Helping them develop a broad set of particular skills is the best way to improve their odds of being gainfully and happily employed. Here is a list of things you can do, whatever career path they go down.

Teach them to code: Yes, robots will eventually do most of the actual coding, so this isn’t about coding jobs. The point of learning to code is that there’s no better way to anticipate where automation is heading than to understand what kinds of problems code is or isn’t good at solving. Coding knowledge will also help future workers survive or excel in fields that become increasingly automated. For example, lawyers may do less contract-review work, but more work establishing the rules for contract-reading bots.

Even if your children won’t take a programming class per se, you can still teach them the principles of coding logic with a mobile game like LightBot, toys like Wonder Workshop’s programmable Dash robot, or our new family favorite, the card game Potato Pirates. Yes, these can get expensive—but not compared with feeding your unemployable child for the next 30 years.

Include arts education: We already know arts education is good for the soul and creative thinking. But now it’s essential to foster that kind of creativity as a competitive advantage. That’s because, in general, jobs that involve creativity are less likely to be automated than routine or predictable activities, or those that involve processing large amounts of information.

Include some after-school art classes in your children’s education (whether that means painting, music or theater) alongside sports or academic enrichment, and look for teachers who focus on creative thinking as much as technical skill. You may need to get creative yourself to find the activity that’s a fit for your child. My eldest loved every kind of arts class, but my youngest was only interested in tech-related activities, so we found a digital art class that suited him better than sculpture and painting.

Nurture emotional intelligence: Even the most breathless forecasts still put the arrival of emotional robots very far in the future. While some chatbots and robots are learning to recognize emotional cues and respond with simulated emotional affect, there are many career paths—like teaching or nursing—that require a level of emotional connection far beyond what any AI will be able to provide. And in any field, nothing will give your child an edge over the machines like a strong empathetic orientation and great interpersonal skills.

A book titled “The Whole-Brain Child” by Daniel J. Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson helped me learn some conversational strategies for prompting emotional self-reflection in my children. Or look for a program like Roots of Empathy, which brings babies into classrooms to teach empathy to elementary-school children.

Rethink the rules: Both the traditional school system and a lot of parenting advice frame child discipline in terms of compliance and rule-following. But rule-following is exactly where robots excel, and where even the most disciplined worker is likely to fall short in comparison. So encourage your children to question rules and think independently—because that fosters the kind of thinking that robots can’t master. Yes, it makes parenting a bit harder in the short term. I regret all the rule-questioning whenever I’m just trying to get my youngest to sleep. But I’m banking on it paying off in a couple of decades.

Insist on self learning: Make sure your children teach themselves at least one significant skill or subject—like a language, a tech skill or an academic subject—to a level of excellence equivalent to at least a year-long course. It’s crucial that your children learn how to learn, not just in the classroom but also on a do-it-yourself basis, because they’ll need to continuously reskill to keep up with rapid technological change.

My children have enjoyed learning digital illustration from tutorials on TutsPlus.com, math via KhanAcademy.org and beginning animation at JAM.com.

Skip entry-level service jobs in favor of entrepreneurship: Many children need part-time or summer jobs to pay for college, contribute to their family’s financial well-being or get a little pocket money. But if you’re insisting that your child take a first job at a store selling, say, coffee or clothes, because you think it will help them build useful work experience—well, think again. Frontline service and retail jobs are widely predicted to disappear, so the experience children gain in these jobs will be far less useful than the experience of starting their own business, since many of them will need to create their own jobs as small-business owners, consultants or freelancers.

Help your children develop an entrepreneurial mind-set and skill set by encouraging them to run their own businesses, even if they are small or time-limited: They could create their own online storefront, selling their own creations or reselling pre-existing products, or run an offline business like dog walking or babysitting. One of my children set up an Etsy store at age 8, with some parental help, and six years later still draws on that experience in a new online business doing art and illustration work by commission.

Talk about the bigger picture: While you’re busy robot-proofing your children, take the time to engage them in the bigger questions that a robotic future will bring, and how they can prepare for a world in which they are likely to be working side-by-side with robots and artificial intelligences.

Movies like “WALL-E,” “Big Hero 6” and “Bicentennial Man” for younger children or “The Matrix,” “Her” and “Robot & Frank” for much older children can give you a starting place for conversations about what kinds of things robots are really good at, and what is uniquely human. The more your children learn to reflect critically on the role of automation in our society and our economy, the more they will be prepared to shape that future.

Cellphone Battery Triage Step One

If you're cellphone battery seems to go on a downward slope of its daily life, ask yourself when the last time was that you shut down or at least re-started your phone. Many of our loyal readers do not turn off their phones, but instead, just plug them in at night to recharge. Before cursing the shortening of your battery life or thinking about having the battery replaced, just re-start the phone or, even better, shut it down while it charges over night. You just might be amazed at how that will extend the time the battery will last the next day, and for many days thereafter.

HR McMaster and Trump (New Yorker Piece: McMaster and Commander)

This week's (April 30) New Yorker has a detailed look at HR McMaster, focusing mostly on his tenure as National Security Advisor. It reinforces the fears one might have about the competency of our CIC upon reading Michael Wolf's Fire and Fury. The full article can be read from the link below. One paragraph provides an insightful synopsis:

"McMaster gave Trump “the benefit of the doubt,” assuming that he could understand complicated issues. Every day, McMaster subjected Trump to detailed briefings. According to Pollack, the President just sat there. “He would look like he was interested,” KenPollack said. “He was probably trying to imagine how many times H.R. has to shave his head every day, while H.R. is going on and on about the complexities of Russia policy.” Only later, Pollack said, did McMaster realize that “the guy wasn’t absorbing a fucking thing he said!”"

Link to New Yorker Article: McMaster and Commander

Educated: A Memoir (Tara Westover, 2018)

[Prefatory Note re Possible Bias: I confess that the eerie similarities between the life of the book's author and my own might account for how favorable this review is]

Educated is the autobiography of a women who grew up in survivalist Mormon family that shunned the civilized and modern world in their shanty-like life in most rural Idaho. She was not permitted and did not go to school until she was 18, and ultimately ended up with a PhD from Cambridge (not some school in Cambridge like Harvard but Cambridge University in England), and wrote this book. It should give great comfort to any parents worried about whether their child is learning enough in school. It is beautifully written even though it does not move at the fastest pace and does not leave out any detail or memory. Put another way, at least the first 100 pages could have been done as a spell-binding 5-8 page essay in the New Yorker. In all events, it's a captivating read. 

Link to Educated on Amazon

Free MacBook Battery Replacement

If you have a 13" MacBook, you might need a battery replacement. The good news is that it's free. The below article explains all.

Link to cnet Article

8K Televisions

Great News: 8K televisions are coming! Alas, not such great news for the present or near-term future given the cost and lack of programming. But the future: Katy bar the door. As the below article explains, at some point we will be able to throw off the shackles of 75" TVs and start enjoying TVs that truly will bring the movie-theater experience to our homes. 

Link to Explanatory Article

New Gmail

As you likely know, Gmail has done a radical change to its interface and function, which likely will be foisted on you at some point in the near future. In reality, putting aside the enhanced functions, the look-and-feel is not as dramatically different as some of the commentators have said they are. In any event, if you want to try it now, just click on gear icon in the upper right of the Gmail home page and choose Try New Gmail. If you don't like it, click on the gear icon again and choose to revert back to the old Gmail. 

Estimating Speech Time

If you have to give a talk at some point, often you will type it out. Should you want to get an estimate as to how long your speech will run, if you prepare the speech in Google Docs, there is an estimate converter. If you prepare the speech in Word, the Google can point you to many estimators.

Link to Google Docs

Link to Word to Speech Estimator

Blood Pressure Monitor Caution

[Prefatory Note: If you're not a complete idiot, you do not need to read this. But if you or a loved one has high blood pressure (BP) and is on BP medication and monitors his or her BP with a monitor at home, and are prone to supreme idiocy, you might read this]

Assumed Facts: Since going on BP meds, your've been monitoring your BP (e.g., doing a reading every week) and for months even more than a year, your readings have been fine. Then, one day, you register a quite low reading, which you figure is great. That reading repeats over the next two weeks, and you're all smiles thinking you might be able to get off your meds. You have no headaches or other symptoms. Something tells you, however, that your levels are too low, and so you alert your doctor. He starts weaning you off your meds, which delights you. You become a bit perplexed, however, that the low readings persist, and you alert your doctor. He orders you off your meds and schedules you to come in to the office the next morning, and to go immediately to a fire station to have them take your readings, which you do schlepping your monitor with you. 

Ensuing Evetns: At the fire station, your readings by the fireman show high BP. You take a reading with your monitor and register the same low BP. You go to the pharmacy, buy a new monitor, go home, and your readings match those from the firehouse.

What to Do Next: You write a heart-felt email to your doctor apologizing for being one of the great idiots of the Western world. He puts you back on your meds and within a few days, your readings return to their normalized levels.

Lesson: Even if you take enormous pride in yourself because of your Monk-like intuitive powers, you are still capable of being a complete moron. Act accordingly.

How Aging Parents Can Get Helicopter Kids to Back Off

[Courtesy of the WSJ: This is a terrific piece, with a summary of excellent tips at the end]

There’s a fine line between being an appropriately concerned adult child and an overly worried, helicopter one, says Dr. Coleman, a psychologist who specializes in family dynamics. If a parent is in an accident, it might be time to talk about driving, as he did after his father sideswiped three cars. But if Mom doesn’t want to wear a hearing aid, it might be wise not to nag. Maybe she doesn’t want to listen to anyone at the moment.

When Cathy Walbert, a mother of five, picked up a baby at a family gathering last year, her daughter rushed to her side, worried she might drop her. Another daughter hovers when Mrs. Walbert—who says she probably is more candid than she was years ago—starts talking to someone. Her son tells her to be careful on the steps.

“I think, ‘What’s wrong with you people?’ I’m an adult,” says Mrs. Walbert, of Pittsburgh who says she is older than 75.

“You start treating them like a child, saying ‘Don’t do this’ or ‘Don’t do that,’ ” says her daughter, Lisa Spor. Her mother, she says, usually responds “What do you mean, ‘Don’t do that?’ ”

A big question adult children need to ask is whether they are intervening for their parents’ well-being or to alleviate their own worries, says William Doherty, a family therapist and professor of Family Social Science at the University of Minnesota. “If your 80-year-father is still driving, you worry,” even if he is capable of driving, he says. “If he’s not driving, you don’t worry, but your father has had a big loss.”

During her career as a clinical psychologist, Laura Carstensen, who is also founding director of Stanford University’s Center on Longevity, heard from both sides. Parents wanted advice on how to get their kids off their back. Adult children wanted advice on how to persuade their parents to give up their family home.

In general, her advice is that unless a parent is cognitively impaired and not aware of the level of his or her impairment, children need to respect the parent’s decision.

“These are difficult situations,” she says. “I know that first-hand.”

In 2015, Dr. Carstensen tried to talk her father, then 95, into leaving New York and moving to the California home she shares with her husband. Her father, a scientist, was still writing and publishing papers. But he was having trouble with balance and lived in a two-story house where he had to go down to the basement to do his laundry.

“Was I worried? Yes, I was worried,” she says. He was hard of hearing, so phone calls were difficult. A few times when she couldn’t reach him, she worried that something had happened, only to learn he had simply gone to the drugstore.

Her father did agree to have activity sensors installed in certain places in the house—his chair by the computer, the refrigerator, the cutlery drawer. Every morning, Dr. Carstensen would check the sensors and if they indicated activity, she knew not to worry.

“He really wanted to live in his own home,” she says. She talked to him about her concerns that he would fall. He told her that falling down in his own home was as “good a way to go as he could imagine.” Her father did eventually die, at 96, after a fall at home.

Grace Whiting, chief executive of the National Alliance for Caregiving, says monitoring devices can turn into a proxy helicopter. They can be extremely useful, especially in the case of an emergency, she says, as long as they don’t compromise the dignity of an older adult. “Do kids need to monitor every time a parent crosses the room or goes to the bathroom?” she asks. “You have to give them space to live their own life.”

Even small, well-intentioned acts can send the wrong message to parents, says Ellen Langer, a Harvard psychologist and author. If a parent fumbles with the key when trying to unlock a door, kids should be patient and wait, rather than grabbing the key and taking over. While you may be trying to be helpful, the message, deliberate or not, is that you are competent, and the parent isn’t, she says.

When Rip Kempthorne’s parents were having trouble covering the mortgage on their farm in Kansas, he suggested they relocate to Olympia, Wash., and move in with his young family. They did. Charley, 80, and June, 71, have a basement apartment to themselves. Their 5-year-old granddaughter runs in and out.

“There was no pressure,” says Charley Kempthorne. He and his wife expect the time will come when they can’t make decisions on their own and are grateful to be with family before that time comes. For the moment, the younger Kempthornes don’t have to hover over Charley and June because they watch out for each other.

June tells Charley to put in his hearing aid. He tells her not to leap out of the car. After several falls, she has given up sandals for sturdier shoes. “They won’t let me carry groceries,” says June, but that is probably a good thing. “I tend to carry too much and fall over.”

David Solie, an expert in geriatric psychology, says he was overly anxious when caring for his mother, Carol. As her health deteriorated, he was urged by a cousin, who lived closer to her, to move her into assisted living, which she strongly opposed. At one point, he went to the family attorney asking what he could do. The attorney told him his mother moved slowly and couldn’t open a jar of food, but was coherent and articulate. He advised Mr. Solie to wait, which he ultimately did. His mother remained at home until she had a massive stroke.

In retrospect, Mr. Solie says he wishes he had relaxed more and not been so consumed by getting her to give up her home.

Mr. Solie cautions other adult children against trying to make sure everything is perfect, with every pill taken and every appointment kept. “Don’t point out everything that they forgot or that they aren’t as clean as they should be,” he says. “Cut them some slack.” And if they want to date—something that many adult children oppose for fear of their parents being hurt or losing part of their inheritance—don’t stand in the way. “Allow them to be happy.”

How to avoid becoming a helicopter child:

• Unless your father or mother has dementia, don’t make decisions for him or her. Discuss matters and remember he or she has a right to take informed risks.

• If you and your parents don’t agree on their level of competence, consult a professional together.

• Don’t go through your parents’ mail or screen their calls unless asked.

• Pick your battles. If a parent is getting lost or has stopped bathing, talk about what help he or she might need to remain independent. If his or her clothes don’t match, get over it.

• If a parent has cataracts in both eyes and continues to drive at night, ask the primary-care physician to intervene.

• If your parents forget to turn off the stove, don’t jump to the conclusion they can’t stay in their home. Look into devices that turn stoves off automatically.

• Use classic ‘I’ language, such as: ‘I am concerned about you living in a two-story house after your heart attack.’ Avoid: ‘You can’t live here anymore.’

The Post (Available to Rent on Amazon)

The story is so compelling that it overwhelms the serious shortcomings in the production. It is not up to Steven Spielberg's expected quality. The acting is stilted in many ways. But more than that, the story is told in what you'd expect in a 1930s movie where the characters are under-developed (McNamara as a wimp, oh please) or over-played, without the subtlety or nuance one might expect  and certainly hope for in a first-rate production. Also, it would have been easy to cut a half hour without losing anything except extraneous stuff. The casting is made for the television-binging afficionado, in that the lead spy from the Americans playing Daniel Ellsberg, Saul from Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul for the hot-head reporter, along with others from the West Wing, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Glow, Fargo, Gone Girl, The Good Wife, Mozart in the Jungle--and more but you get the idea. All that said, it's well to remember the day the U.S. Supreme Court stood up for the First Amendment, which it might have to once again, with the outcome this next time well in doubt. It also is nice to see some courage by people at risk, which there is a grave shortage of these days. 

IMDb Link to The Post

Second Plea to Get the New Shingles Shot

As my loyal readers know, I do not like repetition and especially do not like saying things twice. So, with apologies, this is my second plead to get the new shingles vaccine. The link below to a recent NYT article explains why. It also explains the post-vaccine effects you likely will experience for a couple of days. After getting the shot, be sure to flail your arm around with some frequency which won't do anything for the other symptoms but may reduce or eliminate the feeling of having been socked in the arm with a sledge hammer. Here is a short summary from that article:

"Lest you have doubts about the value of this vaccine, consider the effects of shingles. It is a painful infection of a single sensory nerve on one side of the body that can occur almost anywhere but most commonly involves the torso or face. Initial symptoms of tingling or burning pain within days develop into a red bumpy rash and very painful blisters. The blisters heal in a week or two to form crusty scabs that eventually fall off. But for about 15 percent of people, shingles does not end there. Instead, it leaves them with deep, searing nerve pain — a condition called postherpetic neuralgia, or PHN — that can last for months or years and has no treatment or cure. More than half the cases of PHN affect people over 60. Other possible complications of shingles include pneumonia, hearing problems, blindness and encephalitis. That’s not all. Although most people get shingles only once, it can happen again, especially if you have a weakened immune system, which most everyone does with advancing age.

"Here’s how the new vaccine (Shingrix) compares to its predecessor (Zostavax), which over all reduces the risk of shingles by 51 percent and of PHN by 67 percent. According to the C.D.C., Shingrix can protect 97 percent of people in their 50s and 60s and 91 percent of those in their 70s and 80s. It also reduces the risk of PHN by 86 percent, and it appears to be longer lasting than Zostavax, which starts to lose its protection after three years. What makes Shingrix so much better is the inclusion of a substance called an adjuvant that boosts the body’s immune response to the vaccine. Another difference is that Zostavax contains a live, weakened virus, making it unsuitable for people with poor immunity, whereas Shingrix contains a nonliving virus particle and may eventually be approved for those with compromised immunity, who are especially susceptible to a severe case of shingles."

Link to Full NYT Article