Books, books [books]

I just finished reading Who is Vera Kelly?, by Rosalie Knecht, mainly because I recently went on an ebook-buying spree and it was one of the titles on my list of potential books to read. It's basically historical spy fiction, well-written, and fun. Yay!

Most likely up next I'll read A Half-Built Garden, as recommended by my sister and brother-in-law (also bought during that buying spree).

Today I learned about a nonfiction book called The Sunflower, by Simon Visenthal, by way of this post about how to respond to ex-MAGA folks (I prefer the post version rather than the video, personally, because I can read far faster than I can video, even with a video running at 2x speed). I've done other reading in the past about forgiveness/forgiving, so it may be interesting to see where this book fits in. Or who knows, I might throw it down in a fit. (I doubt it!).

In the meantime, in the name of manuscript-writing I have been reading a lot of molecularly-heavy articles about circadian and metabolic physiology. The best of that set has helped me feel much more confident about getting this circadian manuscript moved along. I've only dozed off a half-dozen times while trying to work through the reading.

And so, back to work.

News to pay attention to [news]

I don't know how much of this has been winding up in the national news, but there are a lot of things happening these days in the prison system in New York that I feel like people SHOULD pay at least some attention to.

Today there's an article in the local paper about how prison staffing levels are in even worse crisis now than before an unsanctioned three-week strike that took place this past February. My understanding from the article is that a major reason the strike happened is because of prison guard concerns over implementation of a law called the "Humane Alternatives for Long-Term Solitary Confinement Act." Anyway, because of this staffing crisis, National Guard troops are still being deployed across state prisons. It has sounded like a super terrible situation for both prisoners and the people somehow still hanging on as prison guards.

There was also a case in the past year where New York prison guards beat and killed a prisoner (caught on camera), but of course it isn't as though any of us knows the full story in that situation (i.e. prisoner's own history of violence, or lack thereof).

Locally, there is apparently anecdotal evidence of an uptick in youth crime in this region, and it's interesting to note that part of the reason the evidence is anecdotal is because of the state's 2019 Raise the Age Law, which changed the age of criminal responsibility from 16 to 18. This means that kids under age 18 are less likely to be arrested for criminal activity, which means less formal information about criminal activity can be gathered. Not that I expect that anecdotal information can be trusted, mind you.

I'm reminded of one of the days when I was bike commuting home from work last year, stopped at a traffic light waiting for it to change. A trio of young kids that had a pair of boxing gloves in their possession came up to me, and one of them punched me with a gloved hand (not hard; he appeared to be just testing the waters). I did my best to not give the kid the benefit of a reaction (I mean, WTF kid??); the light changed and I moved on.

Still - when I recently looked up actual crime data for Albany, it's still disproportionately high here and people don't seem to know how to figure out how to do anything about that. (slash, politicians are politicians here).