Herbs in Hydroponics Basil, chives, cilantro, dill, mint, oregano, parsley, rosemary, thyme, and watercress are all great options. Herb production is another great way to test out your new hydroponic system, and nearly every system style is suitable for a round of herbs as you learn the ropes!
- 1 What hydroponic system is best for herbs?
- 2 What grows well in hydroponics?
- 3 What Cannot be grown in hydroponics?
- 4 What is the easiest hydroponic system to use?
- 5 What is the most efficient hydroponic system?
- 6 Why is hydroponics bad?
- 7 What are the disadvantages of hydroponics?
- 8 Can carrots grow hydroponically?
- 9 Is soil better than hydroponics?
- 10 Is PVC safe for hydroponics?
- 11 Can Rice be grown hydroponically?
- 12 Can broccoli be grown hydroponically?
- 13 Can all plants be grown hydroponically?
What hydroponic system is best for herbs?
The 8 Best Indoor Hydroponic Garden Kits For Growing Herbs And Vegetables Indoor
- AeroGarden Harvest-Black Indoor Hydroponic Garden.
- Hydroponics Growing System.
- GrowLED Plant Indoor Garden.
- Gardyn Home Indoor Smart Garden.
- AeroGarden Bounty Basic Indoor Hydroponic Herb Garden.
- The Farmstand.
What grows well in hydroponics?
Almost anything can be grown hydroponically. Leafy greens will be available for harvest in just three weeks and vegetables can be ready for picking in as early as six weeks. Plants that prefer a high nutrient level:
- Brussel Sprouts.
What Cannot be grown in hydroponics?
What Cannot Be Grown Hydroponically
- Potatoes and Sweet Potatoes.
- Vine Crops.
- Lettuce (pH 6.0 to 7.0)
- Strawberries (pH 5.5 to 6.2)
- Spinach (pH 6.0-7.5)
- Cherry Tomatoes (pH 5.5-6.5)
What is the easiest hydroponic system to use?
Deep Water Culture (DWC) is the easiest type of hydroponic system that you can build and maintain at home. In this system, the plants grow with their roots submerged directly in nutrient-rich water. For home growers, this can be achieved by growing in large opaque storage containers or buckets.
What is the most efficient hydroponic system?
Without a doubt the most cost effective hydroponic setup for commercial growers is the Botanicare Slide Bench System. It will allow you to get the highest quantity of plants possible in your expensive commercial grow room, getting you the highest ROI possible.
Why is hydroponics bad?
Hydroponics has a reputation for being sterile. This may include real consequences for farmers who use these techniques to make a living. The danger is that a failed bid for organic certification could set a dangerous precedent, leading to a large scale devaluation of the industry.
What are the disadvantages of hydroponics?
5 Disadvantages of Hydroponics
- Expensive to set up. Compared to a traditional garden, a hydroponics system is more expensive to acquire and build.
- Vulnerable to power outages.
- Requires constant monitoring and maintenance.
- Waterborne diseases.
- Problems affect plants quicker.
Can carrots grow hydroponically?
Root crops such as turnips, radishes, carrots and beets can all be grown hydroponically. While they will grow fine using various types of hydroponic methods, one of the easiest ways is an ebb and flow system that uses enough growing media to support the plants from start to finish, according to Gardening Tips.
Is soil better than hydroponics?
In general, hydroponics is often considered “better” because it uses less water. You can grow more in less space because hydroponic systems are stacked vertically. Typically, plants grow faster in hydroponics vs soil because you can control the nutrients you give the plants.
Is PVC safe for hydroponics?
When the right type of PVC is used (uPVC or Rigid PVC), it is perfectly safe for use in gardening, aquaponics, drinking water systems, or other systems where it will come into contact with food or beverages. However, it’s important to avoid over-gluing PVC connections.
Can Rice be grown hydroponically?
Seedlings are ready for transplanting in 21-30 days after sowing. The hydroponics system grows plants without soil. The temperature, light, water, and nutrition can be fully adjusted to optimum conditions making the hydroponics paddy nursery highly productive even with limited water and land area.
Can broccoli be grown hydroponically?
Broccoli is a nutritious winter vegetable and very well suited to grow in hydroponics. It can be started from seeds or plants. Media bed method is recommended because Broccoli grows into a large and heavy plant by harvest.
Can all plants be grown hydroponically?
While almost all plants can grow hydroponically, that doesn’t mean that it’s a good idea. Some crops are just not worth the time and effort they ask for to grow hydroponically. The entire point of growing hydroponically is to maximize yield in smaller space and grow faster than traditional gardening techniques.


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Christmas in Seattle and other Puget Sound cities is an especially fun time of year. The area lights up with holiday fun, light displays, Christmas trees, fun plays and musicals, and events. While the weather outside can be wet and dreary throughout November and December, one of the best ways to forget about the weather and create a cozy holiday atmosphere is to get out and enjoy the area's events. Whether you’re looking for a quaint local event or major holiday fanfare, you can find it somewhere around Seattle.
Many holiday events have been scaled back or canceled in 2020, so be sure to confirm the most up-to-date details with event organizers.
Going to stroll or drive through a Christmas lights display is a family tradition for many—and for good reason. Few activities will get you more into the spirit of the holidays than sipping some hot chocolate while surrounded by twinkling lights.
Some walk-through light displays are canceled for the 2020 holiday season, such as the Bellevue Garden d'Lights. However, many others are turned on and open to visitors. You can see WildLanterns at Woodland Park Zoo or Zoolights at Point Defiance Zoo in Tacoma. At Spanaway Park, you can drive through Fantasy Lights, one of the largest light displays in the Pacific Northwest.
If you want to drive around a neighborhood without paying admission into a park, the houses on Park Road NE—more commonly known as Candy Cane Lane—are decked out with festive decorations.
Holiday Shop at Bazaars and Craft Fairs
Holiday bazaars and craft fairs large and small take place throughout Seattle and surrounding cities. If you want to get your holiday shopping done in a less commercial atmosphere, or are just looking for a way to absorb the holiday season, these events are a lot of fun. And while it’s not tough at all to find these events at local schools, hotel ballrooms, churches, and the like, if what you seek are larger events, look no further.
Two of the biggest local craft fairs are taking place virtually in 2020. The Annual Winter Festival & Crafts Fair, hosted by the Phinney Neighborhood Association, takes place online December 4–6, 2020, so you can buy local gifts without leaving home. Another big fair that's usually at the Seattle Center is Urban Craft Uprising's Winter Show, scheduled to take place virtually from December 2–7, 2020.
Westlake Center's Tree Lighting
Downtown Seattle is just a festive place to be starting on the day after Thanksgiving. Head to Westlake Center shopping center and you’ll find special deals, entertainment, and all kinds of holiday happenings. In the later afternoon, Westlake’s Tree Lighting Ceremony kicks off. Instead of the usual festivities, the tree lighting ceremony takes place virtually at 5 p.m. on November 27, 2020, and can be watched from your computer, tablet, or smartphone wherever you are. If you want to see the lights in person, head to Westlake Center any evening until January 9, 2021.
Holiday Shopping in Pike Place Market
Pike Place Market, one of the most iconic places to visit in Seattle, gets into the spirit with live holiday music and festive decorations. Whether you're going to eat at one of the market's restaurants or you want to pick up a unique and locally-made gift, this is the place to go. If you aren't sure where to begin, the market conveniently prepares an annual guide to get you through the season.
Some of the usual holiday events, like a tree lighting ceremony and photos with Santa, aren't taking place in 2020. However, the market is lit up and open daily to shoppers.
Snowflake Lane brings holiday fanfare to the streets outside of the Bellevue Square shopping center. The biggest draw is the nightly falling snow (which is artificial, but still a delight), layered with the decorated buildings around the Square for a truly festive experience. The lights and snow take place every night from November 27 to December 24, 2020, from 5–9 p.m. each evening.
There is typically a big seasonal parade that accompanies the festival, but the parade is canceled in 2020.
The Seattle Center is lit up from November 27 to December 31, 2020, but the typical Winterfest activities are canceled or taking place virtually in 2020.
Seattle Center always has something going on throughout the year, and the holidays are no exception. Winterfest decks out Seattle Center with lights and typically also brings in special happenings. The Winterfest ice skating rink is one of these and it is the place to be for families looking for something fun to do when the weather is rainy out. Another popular Winterfest attraction is the Winter Train & Village in the Seattle Center Armory, featuring a mini-village that is detailed and filled with characters and animated scenes that the train passes through.
The Nutcracker at McCaw Hall
The live performance of the Nutcracker by the Pacific Northwest Ballet is canceled in 2020, but you can support the ballet by purchasing tickets to watch a digital version from home.
There are many holiday shows in town, but if you’re going to go to just one, go to The Nutcracker. It’s not only a holiday classic but it’s also a stellar production that serves up holiday magic in spades. The score is classic Tchaikovsky played by the Pacific Northwest Ballet (PNB) orchestra, and the scenery and costumes are breathtaking. And a visit to McCaw Hall—which houses the PNB—is always a surefire hit if you want to do something that feels a little extra fancy for the holidays, too.
Winter Beer Festival
The Winter Beer Festival is canceled in 2020.
Sometimes you just need to celebrate the holidays with some brew, and if that’s the case, then the Winter Beer Festival by the WA Brewers Guild is the festival for you. The beer fest fills Hangar 30 in Magnuson Park with more than 50 local breweries, all bringing their seasonal finest. Expect plenty of dark wintery beers, barrel-aged goodness, and other unique crafts sure to infuse something special into your holiday season.
Enchant Christmas is canceled in 2020.
The highlight of Enchant Christmas is a massive light maze, which is not only a Christmas lights display but also a completely immersive experience. There's even falling "snow" (not real snow, but just as enchanting and not as cold). There's usually also a Christmas market with more than 70 local artisan vendors.
As of December 2020, skating rinks are closed in the Seattle area until further notice.
Seattle isn't exactly a winter wonderland during November and December. The city rarely gets snow and ice, so the typical winter activities don't immediately come to mind. However, several seasonal ice skating rinks pop up around the holidays, usually beginning around Thanksgiving weekend, such as the Winterfest Rink that typically inhabits the Seattle Center.
Go to a Holiday Show
As of December 2020, all indoor events are suspended in Washington State.
Holiday shows pop up in theaters all around Seattle. The major one is, of course, the Nutcracker at the Pacific Northwest Ballet, but just about every theater usually has festive fun of some sort on stage. Watch for touring holiday favorites at large theaters like Paramount Theatre or 5th Avenue Theatre, but don’t discount smaller theaters like ACT Theatre that also bring holiday favorites to stage.
If you have young children, Seattle Children’s Theatre just about always has a seasonal performance on stage as well. As a bonus, the Seattle Children’s Theatre is located close to Seattle Center so it pairs nicely with wandering around the festive grounds that get decked out in lights and holiday fare.
Festival of Trees
In December 2020, the Festival of Trees Gala is a virtual event and the Festival of Trees Celebration is canceled.
The Festival of Trees is an umbrella event that includes a few happenings under it. The Festival of Trees Gala takes place at the Fairmont Olympic Hotel to raise funds for Seattle Children’s Hospital. The Festival of Trees Celebration is a free family-friendly event with storytellers for kids, choir performances, cookies, Santa photos, and more, all surrounded by designer-decorated Christmas trees. Up until early December, pop into the Fairmont lobby to view the beautiful trees before many of them go to their new owners for the holiday season.
The 2020 SantaCon is canceled in Seattle.
There is perhaps no finer way to celebrate the holidays than to put on a Santa suit and join a fleet of other people dressed up as Santa as they all make their way through the streets, pubs and restaurants of Seattle, otherwise known as SantaCon. While not officially a pub crawl, the local bars are involved (it's also an age 21 and over event). This event tends to bring out 2,000 or more Santas, all banding together to spread goodwill and cheer throughout the city.
Argosy's Christmas Ship Festival
All Seattle-area cruises and the Christmas Ship Festival are canceled in 2020.
Argosy Cruises takes passengers on local cruises all year round to Blake Island as well as around the Puget Sound and local lakes. During the holiday season, Argosy runs one of the coolest and most unique holiday events around. The Christmas Ship Festival takes place throughout the month of December, launching the official Christmas Ship—the Spirit of Seattle decked out bow to stern in lights—as well as follow boats that are also decorated.
The ships visit ports of call all around the Puget Sound, from Seattle to Des Moines to Gig Harbor and Tacoma. You can enjoy the festival either by booking passage on the Christmas Ship, on one of the follow boats, or by waiting on shore for the ships to show up. But not to be missed is the Parade of Boats on Lake Union where many boats parade around the lake in all their twinkly glory.
The Thanksgiving Holiday Parade in Seattle is canceled in 2020.
There’s nothing like a parade to welcome in the holidays! Sure, you can watch the big Macy’s parade in New York on TV, or you can go to downtown Seattle and enjoy one live. In the morning, the Macy's Holiday Parade fills the streets of Seattle with holiday cheer. The parade route starts in downtown Seattle, loops through downtown, and ends at Fourth and Pine streets. The parade includes floats, characters, music, and, of course, Santa, who officially takes his place at Macy’s for photos and wishlists after the parade. Afterward, the big star hung on Macy’s is lit for the first time of the season, followed by fireworks.

domain: travel


text:
Thousands of supporters of Pakistan’s coalition government Monday gathered outside the country’s Supreme Court demanding the chief justice resign for releasing former prime minister and leading opposition politician Imran Khan.
Buses and vans transported people from around the country to the capital, Islamabad, where they made their way into a high-security zone, housing the top court and other key government buildings.
The rare agitation underscores tensions between incumbent Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s embattled coalition government and the country’s judiciary.
Khan was arrested by dozens of security officers last week, who forcibly removed him from court when he appeared for a hearing on corruption charges, into a police vehicle, sparking widespread violent protests from his supporters.
News reports say that over 1,000 people have been arrested nationwide, and eight have died during the protests so far, with hundreds injured.
With protests continuing, mobile internet, and access to social media, was reportedly down on Wednesday, while schools and universities in Punjab – Pakistan’s most populous state – were closed.
Hundreds were reportedly arrested there, with at least 25 police vehicles set alight, and 130 officers injured during clashes, with some official buildings looted.
The UN Secretary-General on Wednesday, called for an end to the violence that has continued across parts of Pakistan, following the arrest a day earlier of former Prime Minister, Imran Khan.
Khan pleaded not guilty to corruption charges on Wednesday, appearing before a judge at a police guest house, which also served as a courtroom, according to news reports.
His appearance there, reportedly coincided with an indictment by the High Court in Islamabad, in a separate corruption case brought by the Election Commission, involving allegations that he sold millions of dollars-worth of State gifts – charges which the former premier and cricket star has also denied.
If convicted, Mr. Khan would be reportedly disqualified from standing for office, with elections due later this year.
In a statement issued by his Spokesperson, UN chief António Guterres, took note of the ongoing protests, and called “for all parties to refrain from violence.” Guterres “calls for all parties to refrain from violence. He stresses the need to respect the right to peaceful assembly”, the short statement continued. The UN chief also urged the authorities “to respect due process and the rule of law in proceedings brought against former Prime Minister Khan.”
The dramatic arrest of the 70-year-old PTI chief came as he awaited a hearing on the more than 100 legal cases facing him since a parliamentary vote of no-confidence ousted him from office in April 2022. The allegations range from corruption and sedition to terrorism and murder.
But Supreme Court Chief Justice Umar Ata Bandial on Thursday ordered Khan’s immediate release, declaring his arrest “unlawful” and in violation of his right to seek justice.
On Friday, the federal court where Khan was taken into custody protected him from arrest until later this month. Khan accused the Pakistani military of orchestrating his arrest.
The successive judicial rulings drew a rebuke from Sharif and other leaders of his multi-party coalition, known as the Pakistan Democratic Movement, or PDM. They accused the top court of giving “undue reprieve” to Khan.
While protesters gathered outside the Supreme Court, PDM lawmakers and federal ministers in fiery televised speeches in the National Assembly — the lower house of parliament — condemned the chief justice and his rulings in favor of the opposition leader.
Defense Minister Khawaja Mohammad Asif called for legal proceedings against the alleged “misconduct” of the chief justice and several co-judges to remove them from office.
The fundamentalist Islamic party, Jamiat-e-Ulema-Islam (JUI), a coalition partner, led Monday’s pro-government rally. Its chief, Maulana Fazalur Rehman, has called on students from thousands of JUI-run countrywide madrassas, or religious seminaries, to converge on Islamabad.
“We are here to protest the Supreme Court decision that relieved a criminal. They keep ruling in favor of this one person, Imran Khan,” said Fazle Azeem, a JUI activist at the rally.
Workers of Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz or PML-N and those of other partners in the 13-member coalition also joined the rally.
“They give him a blanket immunity. We want him [the chief justice] to make decisions according to the law and the constitution. That’s what we are going to ask him to do,” said Uzma Kardar, a PML-N member.
Television footage showed protesters climbing security gates and forcing their way into the so-called high-security “red zone” without being challenged by security forces, despite a ban on such gatherings in the capital. The rally remained peaceful.
Last week, police used tear gas and baton charges and detained hundreds of Khan supporters for breaching the ban as they protested his arrest.
“Meanwhile, these goons are being facilitated by our security agencies to take over the Supreme Court and subvert the Constitution. All citizens be ready for peaceful protests as once the Constitution and SC are destroyed, it is the end of the Pakistan dream,” Khan wrote on Twitter.

domain: news


A few weeks back I was kindly invited to a Door 121 showing for new season stock. Whilst I spent the first 10 minutes being lost in the building, the rest of the hour was spent repeatedly yelling things out like 'Oh my god I looooove this' and 'look at this!' and frankly, putting Rachel Zoe (and myself) to shame.
But apart from the momentary lapse in disproving the blonde-stereotype, I was so in love with some of the brands and their colours. One brand that stood out especially was Steele. Their summer stripes and loose clothing made me nostalgic for my Italian summers. I especially liked the 'muted' mustards and oranges (not sure that's even a colour description, but it makes sense in my convoluted world where accents can be slanted and colours are personified to the extreme).
Anyway- a big thank you to Sarah from Door 121 for looking after me and inspiring my wardrobe this summer.
On other news, thought I take this chance to make a bit of an announcement- looks like I will be the official photographer and blogger for Launch Fashion Management, one of the premier fashion agencies representing labels like Unif, Stylestalker and Mooks. At least for little bit of collaborating!
I also just got a awarded the position of research assistant on a psychology experimental project, so my time is definitely fully booked these days.
Along with full time Uni, Byrd Holland Designs (new stock coming in that is to die for and 3 new up and coming Australian brands!) and of course- this fantabulous (...yes... I know it's not a word) FASHION FAZER!
Still working on the last neon outfit, thanks to all the readers on Facebook, Twitter and this blog who shared their ideas ;)


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Simplicity 4960; ©1954; Misses' and Women's One-Piece Dress in Half-Sizes: This trimly tailored dress features short cuffed sleeves set in a stylized armhole. Open neckline has curved lapels and a shaped collar. There is a front button closing and a moderately flared skirt. Collar and cuffs may be detailed with top stitching, narrow braid or ribbon. Armhole may be top stitched. Cuffs may be trimmed with two buttons.
Links to reviews/blog posts Edit
- New Vintage Studio Size 20.5, B39
[insert your username, and make sure your preferences allow for people to contact you via e-mail. Do not list your email address here!]

domain: design


text:
Moderator: Juanita Smart
Coordinator: Juanita Smart
Making career transitions in the finance field can be an exciting and rewarding experience, but it can also be a culture shock. Today more and more finance professionals are transitioning from the private sector to local government, or from a professional position to management. Local governments have many of the same financial requirements as businesses, but the political environment adds a layer of complexity that can feel uncomfortable and frustrating. This two part session will offer participants some basic fundamentals about navigating and understanding local government (including a set of “keys” managers need to have in their pockets) coupled with interactive discussions on how politics influence finance, and how finance can be effectively used to guide informed and ethical policy making. Whether you are new to local government or a career bureaucrat, these two sessions will offer practical and insightful techniques to more effectively manage a local government’s finances, while skillfully navigating the political side of government.

domain: finance


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U.S. safety officials have upgraded an investigation into an estimated 250,000 Mercedes-Benz E-Class sedans for a possible leak from the fuel tank. NHTSA upgraded its probe of model-year 2003 to 2008 E-Class cars to an engineering analysis, from a preliminary evaluation, based on 533 complaints received by regulators and Daimler AG’s Mercedes. An engineering analysis is a step in a process that could lead to a recall if regulators determine that a safety issue needs to be addressed by a manufacturer.
The initial probe was opened in January 2012 after NHTSA received 20 consumer complaints from owners of E55 AMG cars about alleged fuel leaks or the presence of a strong gasoline odor both inside and outside the vehicle, particularly after refueling. To date NHTSA and Mercedes have received 370 and 163 complaints related to the issue, respectively. After the initial probe was opened, NHTSA said complaints were also received about other E-Class models, such as E320, E350, E500, E550 and E63 cars. The agency then decided to upgrade the investigation to further study the issue.
Source: Claims Journal
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You will need
- - intesti-bacteriophage liquid;
- pills ampicillin;
- - drugs from the group of antifungals;
- - probiotiki.
To cure enterococci by using bacteriophage. It infects bacteria and causes their death. The bacteriophage used in the treatment entrococci infections, called "Intesti-bacteriophage liquid. Take it an hour before meals 1-2 teaspoon 4 times a day. A bacteriophage can treat children of any age. To three years of age give half a teaspoon, and a newborn the same amount of dilute a teaspoon of boiled water. The reception frequency bacteriophage for children same as for adults. The course lasts 5-6 days. If healing does not come, but there is a positive trend, bacteriophage take another 2-3 days.
Enterococci also can be cured with antibiotics. Take the pill ampicillin, one (250 mg) 4 times a day for half an hour before eating, squeezed small amounts of water. Children with body weight under 20 kg the drug is prescribed rate of 12,5-25 mg per kilogram of weight. If the child's weight more than 20 kg, assigned 50-100 mg/kg. this dose divided into 4 doses and give the child every 6 hours. The duration of treatment depends on the severity of the disease, it can range from 5 days to several weeks.
If treatment with ampicillin proved ineffective, consult your doctor. He will prescribe you a stronger medication that will be administered intramuscularly or intravenously.
During antibiotic treatment take antifungal drugs. Antibiotics work on all bacteria in the body, including those that protect him from infection fungal infections. Therefore, for maintenance, take any drug from the group of antifungals: fluconazole, Itraconazole, ketoconazole, terbinafine or natamycin.
After a course of antibiotics to restore normal gut flora. Take probiotics: triact, Bifidumbacterin, Linex, Bifiform. Treatment should last at least 2 weeks.

domain: biology


text:
Higher consumption of dietary trans fatty acids (dTFA), commonly used in processed foods to improve taste, texture and durability, has been linked to worsened memory function in men 45 years old and younger, according to a University of California, San Diego School of Medicine study published online on June 17 in PLOS ONE. …Read the full story from the UC San Diego Newsroom
A lack of O2 in fat cells triggers inflammation and insulin resistance in obesity:
Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have, for the first time, described the sequence of early cellular responses to a high-fat diet, one that can result in obesity-induced insulin resistance and diabetes. The findings, published in the June 5 issue of Cell, also suggest potential molecular targets for preventing or reversing the process.
“We’ve described the etiology of obesity-related diabetes. We’ve pinpointed the steps, the way the whole thing happens,” said Jerrold M. Olefsky, MD (left), associate dean for Scientific Affairs and Distinguished Professor of Medicine at UC San Diego. “The research is in mice, but the evidence suggests that the processes are comparable in humans and these findings are important to not just understanding how diabetes begins, but how better to treat and prevent it … Read the full story from the UC San Diego Newsroom
News Feature from the UC San Diego Health System Newsroom
by Scott LaFee
Diabetes is a monumental public health issue, not just because millions of Americans have been diagnosed with the metabolic disease, but also for the many more millions who either remain undiagnosed or have signs suggesting they will likely become diabetic. .. Read the full news feature from the UC San Diego Health System newsroom
In “The Fat You Can’t See,” Loomba describes the rising incidence of fatty liver disease and points to society’s general increase in dietary sugar intake as a major cause. He emphasizes the importance of identifying individuals who are at highest risk for developing the disease and he predicts there will be a dramatic increase in our understanding of the disease in the next five years.
Rohit Loomba, MD, MHSc, is assistant professor of clinical medicine in the Division of Gastroenterology. He also holds an appointment in the Division of Epidemiology in the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine.
Loomba conducts his clinical practice in UC San Diego Health System’s liver disease clinics. In his research laboratory, he conducts a variety of studies of nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), including a number of clinical trials.
With a four-year mentored patient-oriented research career development grant from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK), Loomba is investigating the genetic epidemiology of NAFLD in a twin-pair study. In that work, his mentors are UCSD researchers Daniel T. O’Connor, MD, professor of medicine and pharmacology; Elizabeth Barrett-Connor, MD, distinguished professor and chief of the Division of Epidemiology in the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine; and David Brenner, MD, Vice Chancellor for Health Sciences and Dean of the School of Medicine.
Loomba serves as the UCSD site principal investigator for the Nonalcoholic Steatohepatitis Clinical Research Network (NASH-CRN) studies in adult patients with NAFLD. NASH-CRN, an NIDDK-sponsored research consortium funded via a UO1 research program-cooperative agreement mechanism, aims to improve understanding of the natural history, pathophysiology and management of NAFLD.
In addition, he is the founding director and principal investigator of the San Diego Integrated NAFLD Research Consortium (SINC), which includes four centers: UCSD, Kaiser Permanente Health System, Sharp Health System, and Balboa Naval Medical Center. SINC is a collaborative network that allows community-based patients to participate in NAFLD studies conducted at UCSD.
Loomba has established a major NAFLD research program at UCSD with recently published investigator-initiated treatment studies in NASH (Le et al., Hepatology September 2012) and several in progress.
In various NAFLD translational research studies currently ongoing at UCSD, Loomba collaborates with Drs. Jerrold Olefsky, David Brenner, Claude Sirlin, Bernd Schnabl, Lars Eckmann, Edward Dennis, Ariel Feldstein and Ekihiro Seki.
He also directs the UCSD fellowship training program in liver epidemiology and patient-oriented outcomes research.
Atherosclerosis – the hardening of arteries that is a primary cause of cardiovascular disease and death – has long been presumed to be the fateful consequence of complicated interactions between overabundant cholesterol and resulting inflammation in the heart and blood vessels. … Read the full story from the UCSD Newsroom
The other Department of Medicine coauthors on the study report are Andrew C. Li, MD, PhD, assistant professor of medicine in the Division of Endocrinology and Metabolism; Sotirios Tsimikas, MD, FACC, professor of clinical medicine in the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine; and Oswald Quehenberger, PhD, professor of medicine in the Division of Endocrinology and Metabolism.
Read the report of the study in Cell (full text UCSD only)
Citation of study report: Spann NJ, Garmire LX, McDonald JG, Myers DS, Milne SB, Shibata N, Reichart D, Fox JN, Shaked I, Heudobler D, Raetz CRH, Wang EW, Kelly SL, Sullards MC, Murphy RC, Merrill AH Jr, Brown HA, Dennis EA, Li AC, Ley K, Tsimikas S, Fahy E, Subramaniam S, Quehenberger O, Russell DW, Glass CK. Regulated accumulation of desmosterol integrates macrophage lipid metabolism and inflammatory responses. Cell 151(1):138-152, 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2012.06.054
Katharine Hepburn famously said of her slim physique: “What you see before you is the result of a lifetime of chocolate.” New evidence suggests she may have been right.
Beatrice Golomb, MD, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Diego, and colleagues present new findings that may overturn the major objection to regular chocolate consumption: that it makes people fat … Read the full story from the UCSD Newsroom
Dr. Golomb is professor of medicine in the Division of General Internal Medicine at UCSD and a primary care physician at the Veterans Administration San Diego Healthcare System.
- Citation for the study report: Golomb BA, Koperski S, White HL. Association between more frequent chocolate consumption and lower body mass index. Arch Intern Med. 2012 Mar 26;172(6):519-21. doi: 10.1001/archinternmed.2011.2100.
- Related studies by Dr. Golomb:
- Dr. Golomb’s clinical profile
Might the “Twinkie defense” have a scientific foundation after all? Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have shown – by each of a range of measures, in men and women of all ages, in Caucasians and minorities – that consumption of dietary trans fatty acids (dTFAs) is associated with irritability and aggression…. Read the full story from the UCSD Newsroom
News Feature from the UC San Diego Health System Newsroom
Matters of the Heart: A Q&A with Ehtisham Mahmud
A profile of Dr. Ehtisham Mahmud
Professor and Chief of Cardiovascular Medicine
Co-director of UC San Diego Sulpizio Cardiovascular Center
Director, Interventional Cardiology and Cardiac Catheterization Laboratory
by Scott LaFee
Every 34 seconds, on average, an American has a heart attack. Every minute, someone in the United States dies from a heart disease-related event. Both men and women are afflicted equally, if differently. More than one-quarter of the annual deaths in this country are due to cardiovascular disease in its myriad manifestations. It claims more lives each year than cancer, chronic lower respiratory diseases and accidents combined.”… Read the full profile from the UC San Diego Health System newsroom
A study using genetically modified zebrafish to visualize early events involved in development of human atherosclerosis describes an efficient model – one that the researchers say offers many applications for testing the potential effectiveness of new antioxidant and dietary therapies. …Read the full story from the UCSD Newsroom
Leader of the research team is Yury Miller, MD, PhD, associate professor of medicine in the Division of Endocrinology and Metabolism. His Department of Medicine coauthors include Joseph L. Witztum, MD, professor in the same division; and Sotirios “Sam” Tsimikas, MD, FACC, professor in the Division of Cardiology. | Read the article online in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.
Dr. Barbara A. Parker is an investigator in the new clinical trial described in “UC San Diego Researcher Awarded $5.3 Million for Breast Cancer Survivorship Study” from the UCSD Newsroom.

domain: medical


text:
By G. Douglas Atkins
. . . the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Crack-Up”
It began to seem that one would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition. The ﬁrst idea was acceptance, the accept- ance, totally without rancor, of life as it is, and men as they are: in the light of this idea, it goes without saying that injustice is a commonplace. But this did not mean that one could be complacent, for the second idea was of equal power: that one must never, in one’s own life, accept these injustices as commonplace but must ﬁght them with all one’s strength.
—James Baldwin, “Notes of a Native Son”
An Essay on the Essay
Embracing tension, the essay lies between literature and philosophy, experience and meaning, fiction and fact, tradition and the individual, timelessness and time, a via media creature (which does not, contrary to appearance, equate with “middle ground” or the moderate). The tension everywhere present in the essay, rooted in the here-and-now through which it works towards timelessness, which it comes to realize as inhering—incarnate—in the here-and-now, is crucial to an individual essay’s success. Take the essays collected in Scott Russell Sanders’s admirable The Force of Spirit. Typically engaging, these essays reflect Sanders’s trademark sympathy, the capaciousness of his imagination, and the genial warmth and generous magnetism that attract more and more readers. Once, I find, you go beyond the initial reading and the necessary sympathy with which that must be conducted, and you begin to allow for critical judgment to emerge, you find something missing. It is absent from the Introduction on. Matters are too easy, Sanders bent on peace and peaceableness, a kind man who has trouble dealing with trouble, a point he underscored in an earlier and much-anthologized essay about his alcoholic late father “Under the Influence.” Here, introducing The Force of Spirit, he avers that the assembled essays “grew from seeds of bewilderment and wonder,” but we are allowed to see very little of either. Sanders briefly mentions climacteric events in his life that shaped his thinking and feeling and that led directly to this writing, including his son’s and daughter’s growing- up, his father-in-law’s series of strokes, his own mother’s death. But we get none of these events represented, only reported on and thus dealt with at best as cause. Sanders goes on to record some of the searching questions with which he was “struggling,” but those questions do not figure in the foreground of the essays that follow. He emphasizes the “bind]ing] back together” that the word “religion” itself connotes, and then describes “the rhythm of my days—a scattering and gathering, scattering and gathering.”
A brief look at Thoreau will clarify matters as well as allow implications to emerge. Often regarded as the quintessential American essayist, in any case, a writer more often mentioned (and revered) than actually read, the author of Walden, itself a collection of essays, famously declared in its second paragraph: “In most books, the I, or first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism, is the main difference. We commonly do not remember,” he proceeds, beginning to lecture us, “that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking. I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.” Of course, we actually get very little autobiography in Walden, but the voice we hear—lecturing, even hectoring—reflects, I am emboldened to say, Transcendentalism at its worst and most unattractive, its most ungenerous and unsympathetic. Thoreau shows hardly any compassion for us ordinary mortals, whom he literally and metaphorically rises above. He may not be a Puritan, but he quests for purity, thus his forsaking for two years “the mass of men who lead lives of quiet desperation” in order to live alone, and apart, at Walden Pond. The problem is, he has so much wrong, exactly backwards in fact. Thus he writes, in a passage that many now carry in their heads and not a few have plastered above their beds: “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.” This, in the Conclusion, effectively undercuts and vitiates, rather than merely deconstructs, his earlier question “Why has man rooted himself thus firmly in the earth, but that he may rise in the same proportion to the heavens above?” For all his notice and mention of the particulars of such nature as he observes, still within easy walking-distance of town, drunk on an imagined sense of wildness, Thoreau seeks to rise above the world, a flyer and escapist like Joyce’s anti-hero Stephen Dedalus; Thoreau too would “forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race” (italics added, from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man). Both are Moderns, both spiders, creating solely out of themselves (to borrow Swift’s distinction, in The Battle of the Books, between Ancients and Moderns).
The well-known essay “Walking” confirms what Walden sometimes blankets. Thoreau represents himself as a “saunterer,” zealously deriving the term from “’a Sainte-Terrer,’ a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander” and espousing a commitment, not just as earlier to “Higher Principles” (italics again added), but also to universalism and a home elsewhere: “sans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere.” Nothing could be more unessayistic than this flouting of particulars and, particularly, the notion of place in which we are all, as human beings, rooted, willy-nilly.
Thoreau, though, privileges spirit, even as he admitted very earlier in Walden, without lamenting or seeking to correct it, “the narrowness of my experience.” He would not, he says in “Walking,” have us “confine[d] . . . to the public road” (Thoreau’s emphasis). His is a private, inner world, whose home is only in the higher reaches. Having quoted Sir William Habington’s account of “home- cosmography,” at the beginning of the final essay in Walden (that term apt for the essay as form), Thoreau, who made a modest living by surveying, writes in “Walking”: “We would fain take that walk, never yet taken by us through the actual world, which is perfectly symbolical of the path which we love to travel in the interior and ideal world” (italics added). It is no news at all when he adds, a bit later in this essay spoken in favor of “wildness,” “I confess that I am partial to these wild fancies, which transcend the order of time and development.” The terms are fraught with unintended revelation: “partial,” “fancies,” “transcend,” all pointing to failure to abide tension and remain in the metaxy. After deploring the fact, shared with Stephen Dedalus, that we “no longer soar,” Thoreau laments that “We hug the earth—how rarely we mount! Methinks we might elevate ourselves a bit more.” That he accomplishes—if above only his readers, looking down upon us and judging us. Thoreau evidently does not understand this world’s importance—nor that the Platonic pull is a temptation to be resisted. He cannot see that time is a ceaseless, unending purification.Henry David Thoreau already knows—knows far more, or so he assumes, than us readers, whom it is his duty to educate and enlighten. He lacks both humility as well as openness, themselves characteristic of and essential to the essay from Montaigne to E.B. White, Scott Sanders, Sam Pickering, and some others. White’s well-known panegyric on Thoreau, published on the centenary of Walden’s appearance in 1854, “A Slight Sound at Evening,” is not unmitigated praise. White, who clearly admires this “hair-shirt of a man,” just as clearly recognizes his penchant for purity, his decision to go to the Pond as a “retreat,” the fact that Thoreau was torn by, and unable to join successfully, “two powerful and opposing drives—the desire to enjoy the world (and not be derailed by a mosquito wing) and the urge to set the world straight.” White, differently, opts to enjoy the world—and in the process manages to go some distance toward setting the world straight. He does so, unlike Thoreau, by a path indirect, one never bent on purity (see “Coon Tree,” a paean to im-purity and a rebuke of forms of “sanitation”), one that never transcends the world and the joys it furnishes. And all the while, White remains humble, indeed as self-effacing as Thoreau is overbearing and not infrequently mean. If White knows a lot—and he does—he never parades either knowledge or wisdom.
White is rooted, as his essay “What Do Our Hearts Treasure?” alone substantiates. Here he realizes just how much place matters, uprooted for Christmas in Florida at the time of the Vietnam war and amidst the pink stuccoes, the lawn flamingoes, and the artificial poinsettias, along with the pot-bellied Santas sweating in their incarnadine suits. He and his wife miss Maine and the smell and presence of fir and family. It is she, Katherine, gardener-essayist, who teaches him, not via a Thoreavian lecture, but her tears that “something far deeper than Southeast Asia was at work,” upsetting her. Even though “the crying spells ceased,” “it was plain [not “certain”] that was something the matter; it wasn’t Vietnam, it wasn’t the reverse-cycle system. It was some kind of unreality that pervaded our lives.” Reality returns only when a package arrives from Maine, bearing “the look and carr[ying] the smell of authenticity.” The something-deeper has to do indeed with family and the familiar and love and particulars, which White everywhere shows as mattering, indeed as rooting us, in the way politics, for instance, can never do.
E.B. White, I venture to say, relishes the letter, a plain-spoken man, given to common sense and wary of all sorts of systematizing, not least those many versions of Transcendentalism. He is not a particularly religious person, not even much spiritual, but he is no mere materialist either. In fact, he is not “mere” anything at all. Other essayists are more so, although few of them strive with Thoreauvian intensity and determination for a “haven” (White’s word) in a realm above the earth. If Scott Russell Sanders veers toward Thoreau’s idealism, others like Annie Dillard, Wendell Berry, and Peter Matthiessen manage to steer clear of Transcendentalism (see, for example, her “God in the Doorway,” which I consider in Reading Essays).
The tension lacking in Thoreau appears in White as a commitment to the physical and material world that does not obviate or forgo the possibility of meaning. It is not merely physical, although it is stubbornly and ineluctably that; the spiritual, or at least meaning, exists, but it does not reside outside or beyond this that we know in our blood and along our bones. As T.S. Eliot wrote in “The Metaphysical Poets,” it is not enough to look into, thence to know, the human heart, for “that is not looking deep enough; Racine and Donne looked into a good deal more than the heart. One must look into the cerebral cortex, the nervous system, and the digestive tracts”—this from the most cerebral of poets!
Life is too short and precious for following the will-of-the- wisps “forged” by the mind or for spending too much time in cold corridors and the self-reflecting mirrors of that most untrustworthy and unreliable instrument, where only idea(l)s abound, graceless.
For all the time he spent outside, surveying, measuring, and observing—Gulliver confined—Thoreau preferred the vast inner world. Having just abjured his readers to spend four hours a day walking, he writes: “I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit.” There he dwells, among the “higher principles,” his coldness reflecting the greater hell awaiting him, already separated and apart, from the warmth of necessary touch.
It would be a mistake, and a serious one, to conclude that tension thus marks Thoreau’s thinking and writing. Oppositions certainly exist, as we are seeing: outside/inside, particular/general, body/soul, to name only three. Rather than tension, reflected here is what Pierre Bourdieu lamented: pairs of oppositions, “conceived as insurmountable antinomies, absolute alternatives, in terms of all or nothing,” which thus “structure thought . . . [and] also imprison it in a series of false dilemmas.” Eliot for one spent his life writing against such confinement, purity, and part-iality, opposing “the thoroughgoing,” aware, with Antoine Compagnon, that “the truth always lies somewhere in between.”
Although Thoreau beseeches us to attend to the large and monumental things, and many, in like manner, would have you “not sweat the small stuff,” E.B. White knows that that is where you begin. It is, after all, what caused beloved Katherine’s crying spells that dreadful Christmas spent in Florida. It is, in fact, the starting- point for the essay, as the early writer in the form Abraham Cowley would teach us. Writing in 1668, Cowley affirms in his ironically titled “Of Greatness” that smallness is what counts, is in fact what he prefers in various aspects of his life: after quoting Horace to the effect that “’The gods have done well in making me a humble and small-spirited fellow,” Cowley proceeds, in the manner familiar in essayists, embracing the beautiful rather than the (Romantic) sublime:
I confess I love littleness almost in all things. A little convenient estate, a little cheerful house, a little
company, and a very little feast; and, if I were to fall in love again (which is a very great passion, and therefore, I hope, I have done with it), it would be, I think, with prettiness, rather than with majestical beauty.
White follows suit, like G.K. Chesterton (e.g., in “A Piece of Chalk”) and Hilaire Belloc (e.g., in “The Mowing of a Field”), beginning, perhaps paradigmatically in “Death of a Pig,” with the small, the common-place, and the ordinary (see Patrick Madden’s fine recent book Quotidiana), thence moving outward to the large implications incarnate in them.
Embodiment represents the essay’s manner. A person embodies the particular essay’s values; often this is the voice we hear speaking to us—rejecting that voice, say Thoreau’s—we reject the essay and its values. Zora Neale Hurston springs to mind in “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” along with Belloc in the aforementioned “The Mowing of a Field.” In these, particularly striking instances perhaps but still characteristic of the essay as form, ideas function not apart from persons but, rather, as reflected by and in them; ideas reach their fulfillment in persons. Accordingly, Hurston shows not bitterness towards Whites but anger contained and difference in action; Belloc himself incarnates the respect, patience, and craft that his essay is all about. E.B. White does the same supremely well in “Death of a Pig.” Whether he was the first to do so matters little here, but Alexander Pope shows the way in his poem-as-essay, criticism- as-poem-as-essay, An Essay on Criticism, in which he emerges as the ideal critic. The terms of praise apply almost equally to the essayist as to the critic. Part-iality ruins the former perhaps as much as the latter, leading, if not always to “the thoroughgoing,” the “earnest,” and even purity, to the neglect of both other parts and the whole, precisely what Pope’s poem demonstrates (a point I argued long ago in an article on its structure). In another essay in verse, An Essay on Man, Pope proclaims himself “Slave to no Sect,” a point he takes great pains to represent throughout the Imitations of Horace.
Pope’s verses in An Essay on Criticism are made of the tension that he elsewhere endorses and embraces: e.g., “The lights and shades” of the mind instance “well accorded strife,” which “Gives all the strength and colour of our life” and “ . . . jarring int’rests of themselves create/ Th’according music of a well-mix’d State.” He successfully, sometimes melodramatically, associates what too readily and too often get separated and divided. He not only “avoids” easy, misleading, structuring, and imprisoning oppositions, but his verse itself embodies the notion that “the truth always lies somewhere in between.”
The tension that Pope generally calls “difference,” when carefully considered, leads to the recognition expressed clearly in An Essay on Man: he who thinks rightly “takes no private road,/ But looks thro’ Nature, up to Nature’s God.” It is not one or theother, contrary to Thoreau: either Nature or God. Nor is it enough to say that it is both. What Pope recognizes is the way in which you proceed in, through, and by means of Nature “up to Nature’s God.”
An Essay on Criticism
Writing of Geoffrey Hartman in The Reach of Criticism: Method and Perception in Literary Theory, his colleague at Yale Paul H. Fry calls “the roundabout course of his allusiveness . . . the course of interpretive discovery.” Having described his own preference for “a personable but philologically keen, densely allusive criticism that takes more and more diverse cues from its text than is customary,” Fry calls on to say that Hartman’s criticism, which “exemplifies . . . the staging of distraction,” “is the most realistic record we have of what literate reading is like.” Having studied, admired, and written about Hartman’s criticism, and having studied, admired, and written about the essay for much longer, I am inclined to think that the precise, apt, and elegant terms “the course of interpretive discovery” apply to all critical writing—or, rather, I wish to argue, Fry’s words define an essayistic criticism long established and now needed perhaps more than ever before. In fact, “the course of interpretive discovery” beautifully and effectively describes both the mode of criticism and that of the essay and so point to the inescapable, ineluctable, and welcome relation of the essay and criticism.
It is, of course, true that the essay is historically and traditionally the form that criticism has taken. Think of Dryden’s Essay of Dramatick Poesie, Pope’s An Essay on Criticism (which alerts us that essays need not be written in prose), the work of the English Romantics, that of such Victorians as Arnold, then Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, and on to Edmund Wilson and Allen Tate, and, most recently, William H. Gass, Hugh Kenner, James Wood, and a number of mainly British critics. The numbers have dwindled since the founding of university presses and of the Modern Language Association in the late nineteenth century. In the academization of literary studies, the professional and “definite” article has replaced the essay as the manner and form of critical writing. A few years ago, the essayist and then-editor of The American Scholar, Joseph Epstein, observed, lamenting, that the last place you would be likely to find an essay is in the pages of the PMLA.
Things have changed a bit, with the “return of/to the essay,” its blinkered and belated recognition as “the fourth genre,” and the attraction has been enjoying of writers and readers like. The academy still, however, reveres the article, regards the essay with suspicion, and recommends—or requires, really—that the young and fledgling pledge themselves to the practice and inculcation of merely logical form, thesis statements, the “marshalling” of evidence, the avoidance at nearly all costs of the first-person and any autobiographical reference, all the while proceeding without regard to elegance of expression, grace, or art.
Earlier, in describing the essay as form, I have drawn attention to its “in-betweenness,” reflected, inter alia, in an abiding tension present from Montaigne’s so-called founding of the form at the end of the sixteenth century in France: between one thing and another, “hanging somewhere on a line between two sturdy poles, what I think and what I am” (Edward Hoagland), the essay is “almost literature” and “almost philosophy,” averred Eduardo Nicol: it walks a tightrope between fact and fiction, experience and meaning, process and product. It also always insists on embodied truth.
Neither quite one thing nor absolutely another, the essay bears traces of both one thing and another (to borrow terms from Derrida and deconstruction). Bred by reading and mentored by writing, the essay may best be viewed as a site rather than a thing, or genre: a place where apparent opposites meet and may cross. Is it literature, or journalism? An example and an instance of creative writing or of (what is called) composition, perhaps advanced composition? As a student and a professor of the essay, I was—I am now retired––afforded a place in our creative-writing program, in which I rested—if at all—rather uncomfortably (I was a site—and no doubt a sight). I taught reading the essay and writing the essay, doing the one by also doing the other, refusing to separate writing and reading. Therein, taught by the form, may lie great promise for some sanity in literary studies, too long given to either/or choices and neat and uncomplicated pigeonholing.
To return, briefly, to the essay as in-between site: When Eduardo Nicol points to the form as being “almost literature” and almost philosophy,” he signals more than one crucial distinction, perhaps inadvertently. We may read his description as a variation on and indeed difference from, say, a Derridean sense of “both/and” (itself in apparent opposition to our familiar tendency to think, in the West, of more or less simple and relatively uncomplicated either/or choices). Key, I would suggest, is this: Borrowing a term from T.S. Eliot, which I have already used, I would say that the essay avoids the “thorough-going,” hence its historical skepticism, hence too its essential critical spirit. In its manner, in fact, the essay appears open, inviting, welcoming, even irenic, but it is a mistake to assume therefore that the essay lacks backbone, strong, courage, conviction, or determination. Truth to tell, the essay insists on its non-insistent manner. With essays, paradox abounds.
The temptation appears to be to kill off the essay, and not merely ignore or dismiss it. I do not mean to overdramatize here, but it is surely the case that the academy sacrificed the essay in its grand march towards professionalization and specialization: the essayist, said Virginia Woolf, is mainly “an amateur who has a done a little reading up,” and he or she has always cared about form as well as content, attentive to how he wrote while recognizing that the (Gnostic) desire for what cannot be separated from how. Get rid of concern with dress, expression, and form, and you can concentrate, unimpeded, on “content,” which is, after all, the point—it is always about the point (and the part), abstracted from the whole.
An amateur, the essayist is also a layperson as well as “a common reader,” with little use for the narrow or the recondite, the arcane or specialized knowledge. He or she is a Lord Munodi in a world given by his contemporaries to whoring after speculation, technical knowledge, and the theoretical: “every thing about him” may not be, as in Swift’s mouthpiece’s demesne, “magnificent, regular, and polite,” but he knows better than the erstwhile “Projector” Lemuel Gulliver, fatally attracted to Laputa, “the floating island,” as “the most delicious spot of ground in the world.” Swift is the virtual essayist, standing behind Gulliver and letting him expose himself—as when he praises the hair-brained “scheme for entirely abolishing all words whatsoever . . . as a great advantage in point of health as well as brevity.” This invention, this “project,” might have succeeded absent essayistic understanding: if, that is, “the women in conjunction with the vulgar and illiterate had not threatened to raise a rebellion, unless they might be allowed the liberty to speak with their tongues, after the manner of their forefathers; such irreconcilable enemies to science are the common people.”
Laputan culture silences, sacrifices, and “scapegoats” the women as it does the admirable Lord Munodi. We all, though, or so it seems, have trouble with those who refuse to simplify and reduce, who insist on the necessity of tension, as did T.S. Eliot, who believed that “man lives in a world where tension rather than unity gives significance to his life”: “our temporal and spiritual life should be harmonized: the temporal and spiritual would never be identified. . . There would always be a tension.” Moreover, writes Eliot, we seem instinctively almost “to yearn for a ‘totalitarianism’ in which man would abandon the very agonies that ma[k]e him fully human”:
Totalitarianism appeals to the desire to return to the womb.
The contrast between religion and culture imposes a
strain: we escape from this strain by attempting to revert to an identity of religion and culture which prevailed at a more primitive stage; as when we indulge in alcohol as
an anodyne, we consciously seek unconsciousness”
Unconsciousness is precisely, I am suggesting, what we do not wish to awake from, or be awakened from, as by essayists who exist in and embrace the tension that threatens our slumber and our (false) sense that security is possible. As long as clear differences and distinctions exist, as long, in fact, as we feel confident in the presence and prestige of either/or choices, we can drift, with reminders or hints of both/and the arch-enemy, the snake in the garden of our content.
Professionalization, such as that ushered in by the MLA and the ascendancy of universities especially as weaned on the Germanic models, necessarily entails the drawing of distinctions, the making of difference, and the creation of sectarianism. With definition, or the quest of it, follows the article (and the monograph, that is, the article writ large). The professional knows, or at least claims and pretends to, however narrow his or her scope and range; indeed, the restriction, and the definition, precisely allows him to know. Pope saw this world aborning, at the mid-point of the eighteenth century, his forecast as compelling and accurate as his exposure, his insight rather like his friend Swift’s a few years earlier—the speaker is the renowned Westminster Headmaster Dr. Richard Busby:
“Since Man from beast by Words is known, Words are Man’s province, Words we teach alone. When Reason doubtful, like the Samian letter, Points him two ways, the narrower is the better.
Plac’d at the door of Learning, youth to guide, We never suffer it to stand too wide.
To ask, to guess, to know, as they commence, As fancy opens the quick springs of Sense, We ply the Memory, we load the brain,
Bind rebel Wit, and double chain on chain, Confine the thought, to exercise the breath; And keep them in the pale of Words till death. Whate’er the talents, or howe’er design’d,
We hang one jingling padlock on the mind. . . (Dunciad 4.149-62)
The learned Dr. Richard Bentley chimes in, echoing Busby and honoring the Goddess Dulness:
The critic Eye, that microscope of Wit, Sees hairs and pores, examines bit by bit: How parts relate to parts, or they to whole, The body’s harmony, the beaming soul,
Are things which Kuster, Burman, Wasse shall see, When Man’s whole frame is obvious to a Flea. (233-38)
Eventually Dulness herself caps the presentations, summarizing her essential direction and determined goals:
“O! would the Sons of Men once think their Eyes And Reason giv’n them but to study Flies!
See Nature in some partial narrow shape, And let the Author of the Whole escape: Learn but to trifle; or, who most observe,
To wonder at their Maker, not to serve.” (453-58)
If the ascendancy of professionalization, specialization, and academization very nearly rang the death knell on the essay, now, I suspect, at least some modern and postmodern versions, modifications, and adaptations of this venerable form are designed to quell its implicit message. Human being cannot stand too much truth, sayeth Eliot, and I contend that, when it began to appear that the essay was not dead, had not been killed off, but, on the contrary, was beginning a renaissance, anxious souls, unable to abide life lived in tension and frightened by both/and thinking, decided to parry the essay’s essential thrust by turning the form into something different, something rarely recognizable by familiar standards but nevertheless called by the familiar term.
The tension that marks, and indeed characterizes, the essay as form creates further, significant effects. Consider beyond what I said earlier: The essay repudiates, indeed gives the lie to, the notion not so long ago bruited about of “the death of the author.” As a matter of fact, with essays there is no need to adduce an implied or implicit author or even, usually, a narrator, for the speaking voice we hear and respond to is the author. The essay simply will not tolerate a “disconnect” between the real, historical, biographical person writing and the voice we hear, although that voice is certained shaped, made for the occasion, a point well established in White’s essays and affirmed in recent work by Carl Klaus.
Essays assume a real, live reader—a person every bit as real and live as the essayist. The reader may be “gentle,” but he or she may not purely imagined, fictive, or implied—no more a creation of the writer than the speaker is a creation of the reader. In that sense, a directness obtains, the reader present. Indeed, in essays the (Derridean sense of a) desire for presence is actively present and effective: Readers want closeness, and writers of essays accommodate. And yet—the essay is, as I argue in Tracing the Essay, very much an indirect form. “By indirections find directions out,” Polonius urged in Hamlet, and essayists largely, perhaps characteristically, subscribe to the old fool’s directions. The form’s notorious irony, first attributed to it by the theorist Georg Lukacs in 1910, constitutes a telling case in point: It pretends to be about the small and insignificant, perhaps the shallow—a “second-class citizen,” said E.B. White with magisterial irony—all the while really having to do with “the Ultimate.” It reaches the large, the general, the universal, that is to say, via its vaunted attention to and emphasis of the small, the concrete, and the particular. The extra-ordinary appears—pace Cynthia Ozick, writing otherwise brilliantly in “The Riddle of the Ordinary”—precisely inside and within the ordinary. As a result, indirectness exists alongside—although not always in peaceful coexistence with—a desire for presence and the directness that is its confrere.
What I have been at pains to describe, and account for, may be suggested by the term independent spirit. It is so important that the distinguished publishing house Farrar, Straus and Giroux chose those words as the title for the Irish writer Hubert Butler’s posthumous collection of essays (see, for example, “The Writer as Independent Spirit,” written in 1966, following his participation in the International PEN Club Congress). Butler is noteworthy, although little known in this country. Fiercely anti-sectarian, Butler was attracted, to “Mitteleuropa,” as Joseph Brodsky wrote in a tribute:
A man of immense learning, he was interested in this borderline zone, with its fusion of Latin and Slavic cultures, presumably because he sensed in their interplay the future of European civilization. Born where he was, he couldn’t help being concerned with the fate of Christendom, whose natural son he was.
What Butler everywhere opposed was dishonesty: in Brodsky’s words “he was a dishonesty hunter.” Butler was possessed, indeed, of the essential qualities of the essayist, apparent in Hugh Bredin’s remarks in Fortnight and blurbed on the jacket of Independent Spirit:
He has all the essayist’s gifts: a clear, strong prose, a fascination with everyday affairs and their significance sub specie aeternatis, a readiness to generalize, the ability to digress without wandering from the point, to inform without pedantry and enlighten without condescension, to give pleasure simply
by sharing his thoughts.
And, I would add, to remain—in Pope’s words—“Slave to no sect,” where the emphasis falls here, first, on “Slave” and then on “sect.”
To refer to an undeniable “independent spirit” may not take us far enough in our attempt to describe the essay and account for its peculiar qualities and effects. We need to add—or, perhaps, to substitute—critical–ness ( I try to avoid the term “spirit,” which, I find, threatens to countermand the essay’s fundamental––and anti- Gnostic––rootedness). For, in truth, the essay is inherently critical, a point already implicit in my foregoing words. Whether we think of Hilaire Belloc, James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, or Richard Rodriquez, to take but a few familiar names, to which we might here add Dryden and Pope and Johnson, the essayist’s voice exists in uneasy relation—and tension—with the world that he or she observes so closely and on which he trains his intense scrutiny.
In some ways, of course, conservative, the essayist rarely if ever appears self-satisfied—that is a characteristic of Swift’s satirized speaker in A Tale of a Tub, a complex and technically sophisticated text that shows awareness of essays’ capacity for writing “upon Nothing.” Perhaps “preservative” functions better, more accurately, than “conservative,” for the essayist cannot bring herself to support the present or the established power or authority in any “thorough-going” fashion—here the notoriously anticlerical Restoration poet, dramatist, and critic John Dryden’s great verse- essay Religio Laici or A Laymans Faith is a telling and important case in point: a defence of the Established Church, and (therefore) the King, that nevertheless redefines the via media as a site between acceptance and assertion, tradition and the individual, clergy and laity. Essentially, the essay deconstructs the (easy, latitudinarian, and Romantic) notion of familiar opposition between writer and society, culture, or world. It does not quite accept nor merely set itself in crude, rude, and uncomplicated difference, and therefore opposition. Rather, it establishes a relation, and relation ineluctably and invariably involves a certain tension: neither clear identity nor absolute difference either. Perhaps better: almost acceptance, but not quite, and at the same time almost opposition—thus difference, and thus a position that I would submit is essentially critical.
Like the essay, critical commentary follows “the course of interpretive discovery”—at least, when it is understood, properly, as critical inquiry. The essay is as much about the way—the course—of the writer’s thinking as it is with any conclusion reached; in similar fashion, criticism may be about the way—that is, both the course and the manner—of reading rather than any conclusion attained. Commentary wedded to and dependent upon theory runs the risk, certainly, proceeding in a priori fashion, of vitiating the essentially critical nature of criticism: It knows, already, before and apart from reading, from encountering the text at that site we call reading. The essay’s “opposite,” as William H. Gass affirms, “the definite article,” does not allow for discovery, closed as it is to serendipity and bent upon convincing its readers of its conclusion, already known, announced, developed, and then merely repeated at the end.
An inherent narrative thus attaches to the critical enterprise: the story of reading. Like the essay, moreover, reading very rarely follows a strictly linear path; that path is, instead, mazy, meandering, liable to starts, stops, misdirection, indirection, fraught with interruptions, dangers, temptations, and subject always to the reader’s own willfulness. Something as little as a gnat’s wing may throw everything off; a slight misstep may doom the entire enterprise—and produce a reading wildly aberrant. Reading deserves all the respect of a solemn ritual and should be entered upon, if not with solemnity, at least with the kind of observance, preparation, and self-control exacted by authority of other acts of communion, for reading is communion.
Poet, novelist, and critic Allen Tate helpfully called criticism “the passionate discourse of an amateur” (he was evidently recalling
R.P. Blackmur’s definition as “the formal discourse of an amateur”). The mention of “amateur” bears no more surprise than the term “passionate”; both terms call attention to crucial qualities of the critical enterprise that we tend to forget—or ignore. In a sense, “passionate” is redundant, for an amateur, unlike the professional wedded to the dispassionate and merely logical article (or monograph), is passionate. The (amateur) critic cares—is, indeed, by a definition one who loves.
As Tate says, in the foreword to his friend Andrew Lytle’s essay collection The Hero with the Private Parts, the discourse he, and Blackmur, have in mind is “a kind . . . which even the exclusively critical writer can never make into an exact science. By ‘amateur,’” he supposes, Blackmur surely meant the man or woman “devoted to the object of his attention—literature, in this case—the man whose developing awareness and possession of the imaginative object becomes in the end self-knowledge.” The point also applies, of course, to the essayist—and note, here, Tate’s word “developing.” No better illustration of such criticism exists than Dryden’s Essay of Dramatick Poesie, an imaginative representation of literature’s importance that makes of commentary nothing short of creation.
Dryden’s brilliant essay sets the stage—as well as standard— for all subsequent criticism written in English in another way, as well. Designed as conversation among four well-informed gentlemen and framed by the specific setting within earshot of the war with the Dutch, who are sailing up the Thames as the fictive figures leisurely sail not far away, passionately discussing a set of concerns having to do with the drama, the Essay of Dramatick Poesie establishes, by implied comparison, the importance of the critical enterprise. Comparison, indeed, constitutes the mode of discourse: Not only do the four speakers—Neander, Crites, Eugenius, and Lisideius––engage in comparison of, for instance, ancients and moderns and the French and the English, but their commentary that thus takes the form of comparison of the drama both parallels and draws attention to the four embodied representatives whose positions the reader compares in turn. When T.S. Eliot defined the tools of criticism as comparison and analysis (in “Tradition and the Individual Talent”), he affirmed what he had learned from the first major critic to write in English, his mentor, on whom he so often wrote.
Eliot, in fact, makes many, if not most, of his essays out of comparison, for instance, the famous discussion of the “dissociation of sensibility” via juxtaposition of Donne with Tennyson in “The Metaphysical Poets.” In the equally important though less familiar essay on Lancelot Andrewes, Eliot makes his most effective, and dramatic, points by way of comparison of Andrewes and the same John Donne. In like manner, Eliot offers crucial readings of Montaigne through comparison with Blaise Pascal.
Four Quartets, Eliot’s greatest poem, works by means of the implicit invitation to the reader to compare resonant passages and both similar and seemingly contradictory positions. We may, then, speak justifiably and with confidence of the comparative basis of criticism.
Such comparison, I argue, requires lateral reading—a far cry from the allegedly “in depth” reading taught in the schools and smacking of the symbol-mongering that so often turns students off to the pleasures of poetry, especially. In order to make sense of a work like Four Quartets, you have to read laterally, listening for echoes, attentive to resonance and thus both similarity and difference, which leads us, willy-nilly, into comparing. Essays, in particular, open themselves up to lateral reading, perhaps even require it—they rarely seem to repay “deep reading,” being texts whose meanings lie not before the surface but on it. Lateral reading, whatever the text or genre, contrasts with the mining of texts for meaning and then its excavation. Reading laterally, you may well find yourself reading like a writer, mirroring the primary author’s essential strategies and procedures, locating his or her interests, and perhaps stumbling upon his intentions and her text’s apparent meanings.
Teaching Joyce’s great novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to Honors freshmen in a class just before I retired, I felt with both great intensity and powerful force the validity of lateral reading. It came as, throwing out my careful outline of the day’s lecture-discussion, I began with what I called a rather innocent- looking passage in the second chapter:
[Stephen] returned to Mercedes [in The Count of Monte Cristo] and, as he brooded upon her image, a strange unrest crept into his blood. Sometimes a fever gathered within him and led him to rove alone in the evening along
the quiet avenue. The peace of the gardens and the kindly lights in the windows poured a tender influence into his restless heart. The noise of children at play annoyed him and their silly voices made even feel, even more keenly than he had felt at Clongowes, that he was different from others. He did not want to play. He wanted to meet in the real world the unsubstantial image which his soul so constantly beheld. He did not know where to seek it or how: but a premonition which led him on told him that this image would, without any overt act of his, encounter him. They would meet quietly as if they had known each other and had made their tryst, perhaps at one of the gates or
in some more secret place. They would be alone, surrounded by darkness and silence: and in that moment of supreme tenderness he would be transfigured. He would fade into something impalpable under her eyes and then in a moment, he would be transfigured. Weakness and timidity and inexperience would fall from him in that magic moment.
The passage invites the reader to linger over its words (including “brooded,” “image,” “different,” “unsubstantial,” “darkness,” “transfigured,” “impalpable,” and “inexperience,” which are charged with meaning, rather like poetry, to invoke Ezra Pound’s well-known definition. Of course, you feel the charge when you know the rest of the novel, particularly when, moving laterally, instead of vertically, you compare such words to Stephen-no-longer-hero and you relate the quoted sentences to the upcoming non-encounter with the girl on the tram, his abject passivity (as when meeting the prostitute), the later (and parallel) so-called epiphantic beach scene, Stephen’s understanding of himself as “priest of eternal imagination,” and the penultimate diary entry at novel’s end when, in Luciferian perversion and pride worthy of Gulliver, Stephen arrogantly and blindly declares his desire cum expectation “to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race”).
Lateral reading, as I describe it, enacts “the course of interpretive discovery.” It results, like Geoffrey Hartman’s criticism, in brooding, deep and intense, and that brooding is at once abetted by and productive of the discovery of echoes and resonances, the critical ear very much engaged and active. Hartman’s “densely allusive criticism,” said Paul Fry, “takes more and more diverse cues from its text than is customary,” and so does lateral reading.
The article does not lend itself readily to comparison, or lateral reading. Its own manner a priori—from a declared thesis through logical evidence to a definite conclusion known from the beginning—the article, the essay’s “opposite,” avers William H. Gass, is assertive; if it has any doubts, it hides them, no skepticism permitted or acknowledgment of self-doubt. “Discourse” seems, indeed, the right word to describe its mode of being.
The essay, on the other hand, is conversational in manner, if not always in fact. Generosity lies at the heart of writing so understood. “Concorde” names the issue precisely: “concordia discors,” Pope had called it two centuries before. He comes as close as anyone I know to defining the ideal critic, the ideal critical essayist, when he describes that worthy endeavor as “Gen’rous Converse,” this in An Essay on Criticism. “Converse” seems to me a better term than “discourse,” for the latter lacks the former’s acknowledgment of necessary dialogue. Pope recognizes and enacts the equally necessary tentativeness, while concentrating on—and embodying via his brilliant couplets—“two and two,” differences and even oppositions, assisting each other, dancing together: “Which betokenth concorde.” Here is Pope: But where’s the Man, who Counsel can bestow, Still pleas’d to teach, and yet not proud to know? Unbiass’d, or by Favour or by Spite;
Not dully prepossest, nor blindly right;
Tho’ Learn’d, well-bred; and tho’ well-bred, sincere; Modestly bold, and Humanly severe?
Who to a Friend his Faults can freely show, And gladly praise the Merit of a Foe?
Blest with a Taste exact, yet unconfin’d;
A Knowledge both of Books and Humankind; Gen’rous Converse; a Soul exempt from Pride; And Love to Praise, with Reason on his Side?
Pope himself does it all, or very nearly everything: an essay on criticism performed in verse, bringing together wit and judgment, depicted (as if in anticipation of Eliot), as “meant each other’s Aid, like Man and Wife” (83), criticism done up as essay, an essay that is criticism, criticism become literature (or almost?), literature that is both critical and about criticism. It is time that we not merely acknowledged Pope’s insight but returned to such understanding of criticism and the essay as he offers, and his predecessor John Dryden as well. Criticism seems, always, to do with the relation of the individual and tradition. Said Eliot, writing about the poet, for whom I would invite you to substitute the critical essayist in the following passage: “In a peculiar sense,” he or she will be aware . . . that he must inevitably be judged by the standards of the past. I say judged, not amputated, by them; not judged to be as good as, or worse or better than, the dead. . . . It is a judgment, a comparison, in which two things are measured by each other. To conform merely would be for the new work not really to conform at all; it would not be new, and would therefore not be a work of art. And we not quite say that the new is more valuable because it fits in; but its fitting in is a test of its value—a test, it is true, which can only be slowly and cautiously applied, for we are none of us infallible judges of conformity. We say: it appears to conform, and is perhaps individual, and may conform; but we are hardly likely to find that it is one and not the other.
We are thus invited, and indeed we are enabled, to compare—not least, criticism and the essay.
Douglas Atkins is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Kansas, from which he retired in 2013 after 44 years of teaching, 18 of them as also Coordinator of Graduate Studies. He is the author of 24 books (so far), on a wide variety of literary, critical, and theoretical subjects, and co-editor of three others. Among his books are several on the essay, including Estranging the Familiar: Toward a Rivitalized Critical Writing (a Choice Outstanding Academic Book of the Year), Tracing the Essay: From Experience to Truth, Reading Essays: An Invitation, On the Familiar Essay: Challenging Academic Orthodoxies, T.S. Eliot and the Essay: From “The Sacred Wood” to “Four Quartets,” and E.B. White: The Essayist as First-Class Writer. Among his many awards are three for outstanding teaching and the Kenyon Review Prize for Excellence in Nonfiction Prose. Post-retirement, he continues to write on T.S. Eliot in particular and literature and religion in general. He is in the process of moving from Lawrence, Kansas, “back home” to Greenville, South Carolina.

domain: literature


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Iovance Biotherapeutics has developed first-of-its-kind AMTAGVI™ (lifileucel) cell therapy for a solid tumour cancer and first treatment option for advanced melanoma.
AMTAGVI stands as the first-ever individualised T cell therapy approved by the FDA for solid tumour cancer. Its innovative mechanism revolves around deploying patient-specific TIL cells, which are T cells created by the immune system to seek out, attack, and eliminate cancer cells. When cancer arises, the body's natural TIL cells lose their ability to combat cancer effectively.
Specifically indicated for adult patients with unresectable or metastatic melanoma who have previously undergone treatment with a PD-1 blocking antibody, and if applicable, a BRAF inhibitor with or without a MEK inhibitor, AMTAGVI is derived from the patient's own tumour. Through a proprietary process, billions of the patient's T cells are extracted, expanded, and reintroduced into the body to combat cancer.
AMTAGVI offers new hope for patients. With approximately 8,000 deaths from melanoma occurring in the U.S. each year and limited FDA-approved options for those with advanced melanoma, the approval of AMTAGVI signifies a significant advancement in addressing the needs of this patient population.
The approval of AMTAGVI represents a beacon of hope for individuals with advanced melanoma, providing a potential paradigm shift in their treatment journey. This pioneering cell therapy offers promise in transforming care for patients who urgently require alternative therapeutic options.


text:
Sustainable Hydrogen Transport
HSL Technologies is a French company aiming to revolutionise the hydrogen delivery market with a unique liquid carrier solution. It offers industrial players in the energy sector an emission-free and easy-to-deploy patented solution to transport and deliver substantial quantities of hydrogen. As the hydrogen value chain is still in deployment, HSL Technologies has observed the urge to connect offer and demand. More precisely, HSL Technologies has identified three applications that may benefit from this: overseas hydrogen transportation, strategic storage, and on-board maritime mobility. After the successful launch of its demonstrator in 2022, today the company is successfully deploying its pilots all around Europe.
HOW THE INNOVATION WAS INVENTED
The company was founded in 2015 thanks to a ground-breaking innovation at the Aix-Marseille University: the two co-founders of HSL Technologies, Pierre-Emmanuel Casanova and Vincent Lôme, got to know this amazing molecule that could spontaneously release hydrogen. Then, they decided to give it a commercial chance as hydrogen was about to become the game changer for planet decarbonization. HSL Technologies was founded with the mission of bringing a novel non-organic liquid carrier of hydrogen to the market.
Unlike other hydrogen distribution methods, HSL Technologies’ solutions are the only ones to be safe and stable at ambient temperature (unlike cryogenic hydrogen), at ambient pressure (unlike compressed gas), non-toxic and earth-friendly (unlike ammonia). Plus, no energy is needed for releasing the hydrogen from the carrier. The “charging” and “release” of hydrogen invented by HSL Technologies are the only ones in the world to transport and store hydrogen via a liquid carrier with a non-organic basis.

domain: chemistry


text:
Armazenar dados online dating
And indeed, the Plenty of Fish data showed that more than one in three men say they would be psyched if their date asked them to grab a pumpkin spice latte. Thoughtful ( 28%) This research all comes at a time when more men and women are looking for love online.
Pumpkin spice and guacamole aren’t the only phrases that can get you a date. Fully 15% of American adults say they have used at least one online dating sites and/or mobile dating apps.
Niche sites cater to people with special interests, such as sports fans, racing and automotive fans, medical or other professionals, people with political or religious preferences (e.g., Hindu, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, etc.), people with medical conditions (e.g., HIV , obese), or those living in rural farm communities.
In 2008, a variation of the online dating model emerged in the form of introduction sites, where members have to search and contact other members, who introduce them to other members whom they deem compatible.
It is possible that the mode of online dating resonates with some participants' conceptual orientation towards the process of finding a romantic partner.
The 2016 Pew Research Center's survey reveals that the usage of online dating sites by American adults increased from 9% in 2013, to 12% in 2015.
Further, during this period, the usage among 18- to 24-year-olds tripled, while that among 55- to 65-year-olds doubled.
Some sites are completely free and depend on advertising for revenue.
Others utilize the freemium revenue model, offering free registration and use, with optional, paid, premium services.

domain: sociology


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In a highly volatile morning, markets reacted to an upside surprise in both PPI and CPI inflation data. Annualized inflation remains at 8.2% in the US and the S&P 500 gapped lower at the open. Despite a magnificent rally back into positive territory by midday, the trend remains a “NoGo.”
In this week’s edition of the GoNoGo Charts show, Alex and Tyler review SPY in weekly, faily and 3-minute time horizons to unpack how trend conditions are reflected on multiple perspectives. Reviewing the sharp selloff in the US Dollar index today, $UUP remains in an upward “Go” trend. Similarly, in $TNX, US treasury yields continue to climb higher. Alex and Tyler review $DBA, a diversified agricultural commodities ETF, along multiple timeframes as well to better understand what could be a larger secular move in the commodities market.
This video was originally recorded on October 13, 2022. Click this link to watch on YouTube. You can also view new episodes – and be notified as soon as they’re published – using the StockCharts on demand website, StockChartsTV.com, or its corresponding apps on Roku, Fire TV, Chromecast, iOS, Android and more!
Tune in to the Wealth365 Summit tomorrow, Friday October 14, at 2pm for an educational presentation from Alex and Tyler on how to “Clean Up Your Charts!”


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If you log in, you can comment on buildings, submit new photos or update photos that you've already submitted.
Description: 90-104, Eaton Place Sw1
Date Listed: 14 January 1970
English Heritage Building ID: 209571
OS Grid Reference: TQ2819279013
OS Grid Coordinates: 528192, 179013
Latitude/Longitude: 51.4955, -0.1547
TQ 2879 SW CITY OF WESTMINSTER EATON PLACE, SW1
97/47 (south side)
14.1.70 Nos 90 to 104 (even)
Terrace of houses (incomplete). Early to mid C19. Stucco. Leaded mansards. 3
storeys, attic, attic mansard and basement. Each 3 windows wide. Channelling to
ground floor (except 98). Projecting fluted Doric porches. (Ground floor
remodelled to No 94). Square headed windows, architraved; cornices to first
floor. Sashes; some glazing bars; some plate glass. Balustraded balcony to
first floor. Nos 90 to 92 and 100 to 104 set forward slightly. Dentil cornice
above second floor. Balustraded parapet. Subsidiary cornice above third
floor. Cast iron area railings. Part of unified design with No 84, the
intervening houses having been rebuilt.
Listing NGR: TQ2819279013
This text is a legacy record and has not been updated since the building was originally listed. Details of the building may have changed in the intervening time. You should not rely on this listing as an accurate description of the building.
Source: English Heritage
Listed building text is © Crown Copyright. Reproduced under licence.

domain: history


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It’s not everyday that advertisers aren’t chomping at the bit to hand YouTube their ad dollars—but that’s precisely what’s happening as Home Goods advertisers opt for retail media in lieu of the video giant.
In Q1 2022, Home Goods advertisers spent $187mm on ads on retail sites like Amazon, Walmart, Target, Kroger and The Home Depot.
Meanwhile, they spent just $77mm on YouTube ads.
What does their penchant for retail media tell us about their overall digital advertising strategies? Do these advertisers see a future with YouTube—and can we predict anything about their strategies moving forward?
We dove into our data to find out.
Retail Media Has Found a Home
The mainstay tactics in most advertising strategies, like YouTube and Google, have firmly entrenched themselves into the digital advertising world thanks to their longevity and a laundry list of success stories that give advertisers the confidence they need to invest.
Retail media is ignoring that story arc.
Despite being relatively new in the grand scheme of things, retail sites have already found a home in the hearts of Home Goods advertisers, especially those promoting Laundry and Cleaning products, Mattresses, Dish Detergent and Furniture. (These top five product categories accounted for 48% of Q1’s ad spend from Home Goods advertisers.)
Since May 2021, Home Goods advertisers have invested more than $622mm in ads on major retail sites.
Unsurprisingly, much of this spending—nearly $210mm of it—came in Q4 as advertisers increased their buys leading up to the holidays. After December, which topped out at $76mm, spending on retail sites decreased following the holiday surge.
Now, with Q1 in the books, it’s clear that Home Goods advertisers are returning—February and March numbers have already neared pre-holiday levels. And over half of that is going to good ol’ Amazon; almost 1.5k companies spent more than $187mm to promote more than 2k brands, and 55 percent of that went to the e-commerce giant. (Which makes sense, given Amazon’s maturity in retail media.)
Still, Walmart got 17%, while Target, Kroger and The Home Depot got 7%, 6% and 3%, respectively.
There’s no denying Amazon’s dominance in retail media—but as other retailers enhance their data and capabilities, expect more ad dollars to go their way.
Although new retailers are entering the media game—Ulta Beauty recently introduced a revamped media network—much of the pressure on Amazon will come from Walmart.
Earlier this year, Walmart announced upcoming improvements to its media network, Walmart Connect, including ad formats that’ll help brands reach consumers when they’re watching CTV.
Facebook Meets its Match in Native Ads
YouTube isn’t the only advertising giant feeling the wrath of retail media—Facebook’s starting to feel it, too.
Case and point: When we looked at our data, including data from retail sites, we saw that Home Goods advertisers spent 40% of their dollars on Native advertising in Q1 2022 while spending 29% on Facebook.
If we remove retail media from the data set, Native advertising drops to just 3% while Facebook jumps to 48%.
The sharp decline in Facebook spending when retail media enters the fray is a talking point in and of itself. The fact that these advertisers are moving away from such a tried-and-true channel in favor of something relatively new is intriguing.
The real talking point, however, is the question: why the love for Native Ads?
Well, for one, the future of digital advertising will be all about creating the best and most seamless experience for consumers. Gone are the days when advertisers can just pop some ads online and expect their target audience to take them in stride.
GDPR and CCPA are proof of this.
All advertisers, including those in the Home Goods industry, know this.
Native ads deliver on this necessity.
Combine the inherent makeup of Native ads with the high-intent data from these retailers and Home Goods advertisers have everything they need to deliver incredibly timely and relevant ads to consumers—a strategy that is sure to attract even more ad dollars from industry advertisers moving forward.
YouTube Gets the Hand-me-down Ad Dollars (for Now)
It’s not often that we can say YouTube is getting the short end of the stick.
But when it comes to attracting the ad dollars of Home Goods advertisers, that’s exactly what it got so far in 2021.
During Q1 2022, ad spending on YouTube was over $4.4b, but Home Goods advertisers accounted for just 2% of that ($77mm).
While that’s a low amount compared to what Home Goods advertisers are spending elsewhere, especially on retail media, it appears that YouTube is growing on some of these advertisers.
In Q1 2022, we saw a 68% YoY increase from the first quarter of 2021 as YouTube’s top-spending categories increased their ad buys.
Spending from Home Improvement brands was up by nearly 400%, with top names such as Carsen Clamp (same brand name), Chervon (Ego Power+ and SKIL) and Product Bliss (Riggable) increasing their spending.
Meanwhile, Household Maintenance increased by 77% in Q1 YoY thanks to significant investments from P&G (Febreze, Gain, Microban 24, etc.), Reckitt Group ( Air Wick, Lysol, Resolve, etc.) and The Clorox Company (Clorox and Pine-Sol).
In addition to the increase in spending, the number of new advertisers on YouTube reveals their growing fondness of the platform.
In Q1, nearly $18mm (23%) of total spending on YouTube came from brands that didn’t do so in 2021.
It’s Retail Media’s Game to Lose
If the recent spending habits of Home Goods advertisers tell us anything about what their future strategies will look like, it’s that retail media will be at the heart of them—and that makes sense.
Even in its relatively nascent status, retail media’s already a powerhouse, offering an unrivaled chance to reach consumers who’ve shown true purchase intent in a way that doesn’t get them calling for more privacy regulations.
That said, the recent increase in YouTube ad buys goes to show that the video giant isn’t going to sit idly by while retailers gain even more steam.
Will YouTube continue to close the gap? Undoubtedly. Video’s too ingrained in society for them to ignore it.
But we’re still in the early stages of retail media’s evolution—and it’ll only get stronger.
As it does, expect even more ad dollars to go its way.
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