This past Monday, I had the honor of attending my sister’s Ph.D thesis defense. She’s been on this path since she was in college, but this hour-long talk was the culmination of six years of serious work. We’re talking late nights and weekends in the lab, lots of experimental failures, and plenty of going back to the drawing board. While I’ve followed her throughout this journey, most of our conversations centered around particular events during a given experiment. Monday was the first time that I heard the narrative behind her research and understood how it all fits together.

One of my favorite books of all time is Love in the Time of Cholera. It was my uncle’s favorite, and my dad gave me an inscribed copy as a gift. Over the years, I’ve left a lot of books behind, and I rarely reread a book, but that novel is a rare gem. So happy to see UT archivists putting in the work to make his writing public. 27,000 pages is no joke!

This piece circulated on the North Brooklyn Runners Google group this weekend and I cannot get enough of it.