Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix Chapter 11

I wonder why Slytherin House remained at Hogwarts after Salazar Slytherin left. It would seem that someone so passionate about his views on the worthiness of students might have left and started a competitive school – and surely the students/parents who agreed with him would have followed him.

Along the same lines, it seems weird that Hogwarts would keep a house dedicated to the students whom Slytherin specifically preferred . . . without Slytherin around to nurture them. It would seem more natural to me that they would have done away with Slytherin House altogether and sorted future students into the other three houses based on their non-Slytherin attributes – and those non-Slytherin attributes would have been nurtured, probably for the good of all!

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix Chapter 10

On the topic of thestrals, this continues the theme of “mundanization” of magic found in the last book. The first books are all wide-eyed wonder at magic: carriages that pull themselves, a majestic feast that magically appears on the tables. Now we pull the curtains back and realize that those are the results of the work of creatures, not some fantastical spells.

In addition to the ethical questions this raises, it also somewhat diminishes the notion of magic as this be-all-end-all super power. While I dislike this trajectory, I think it is coherent with the darker tone of the later books and is another way of demonstrating the loss of innocence of the main characters. The HP novels are about growing up and what is growing up if not the loss of magic?

I often thought the same metaphor might apply to the elves leaving Middle Earth as well. Growing up is sad in some ways but also beautiful.

Innovating to Solve Two Crises at Once

The world is locked down. My calendar, which weeks ago was full of flights and meetings, is now back to back to back Zooms. And yet – while so much has stopped – the glaciers are still melting, the emissions are still climbing, and the climatetech startups that are our best hope of reversing both trends are burning through their last few months of runway with no clear path to relief.

I have spent my career in the cleantech trenches. I’ve led eight climatetech ventures. I’ve watched promising startups fall prey to pay-to-pitch scams, run out of cash navigating slow corporate procurement, and get squeezed out of investor attention by software companies with faster returns and simpler stories. The structural impediments to commercializing climatetech have always been severe – but what COVID-19 is doing to an already fragile innovation ecosystem is something different. It is potentially catastrophic.

That’s what drove me and my new colleague, Cyril Yee, to write the piece below. We are in a race against time on two fronts simultaneously, and the decisions governments, investors, and ecosystem builders make in the next few weeks will determine whether we lose another decade of progress – as we did after 2008 – or manage to convert this crisis into a genuine catalyst.

The piece was published today on Third Derivative and Trellis. I’m sharing it here in full.

Co-authored with Cyril Yee, Principal at RMI.

By applying lessons learned from the 2008 cleantech collapse, we can address this pandemic while also supporting innovation to tackle climate change.

COVID-19 is a cataclysm of epic scale that has disrupted life as we know it globally.

Early stage climate tech innovation is especially vulnerable to this disruption and, without swift, thoughtful action, we risk losing a decade of progress toward solutions that are critical for mitigating the most extreme effects of climate change. By applying lessons learned from the 2008 cleantech collapse, we can address this pandemic while also supporting innovation to tackle climate change.

Crisis, the Grandmother of Invention

If necessity is the mother of invention, then crisis is her grandmother. Humans have a long history of mobilizing quickly and effectively to confront great challenges in times of crisis. Nowhere is this phenomenon more evident today than in the many efforts to design simple, mass-producible ventilators for victims of the COVID-19 pandemic. These ad hoc innovation initiatives range from Tesla’s corporate skunk works use of automotive parts to Italian internet-enabled hackers’ repurposing of scuba gear to a collaboration between Italian and Canadian Nobel laureate luminaries.

And while it may seem hard to lift our gaze from the immediate health crisis, the world is undergoing a similarly high stakes economic and social cataclysm related to climate change. In the past three years alone, we have experienced the hottest temperatures on record in modern history; fought unprecedentedly destructive wildfires in Australia, Brazil, and California; weathered two thousand-year rainfall events in Texas; and mourned the death of an entire glacier due to ice melt.

Why, then, don’t we see a similar intense focus on innovation and deployment of climate solutions? Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions continue to climb and, while there has been considerable progress made on inexpensive renewable energy generation and practical electric vehicles, we still lack cost-competitive, scalable solutions to address over 50 percent of global emissions.

Certainly, it is easier to focus on a single virus than on the myriad challenges of climate change. But there are also structural issues that make innovation in the global energy system very hard.

  • Early stage innovations face long paths to market that require more capital than software, apps, and other investments that offer early stage investors tantalizingly rapid returns.
  • These long paths to market are made slower and bumpier by the necessity of different sources and classes of capital as innovations graduate from labs to startups to pilot demonstrations to scale deployments – facing a “valley of death” at each stage.
  • Exits for climate tech startups are challenging as the ultimate customers, partners, and acquirers for these early stage innovations are often large global companies with slow, complex, risk-averse technology adoption processes that can be prohibitively difficult for outsiders to navigate. Even worse, some of the major incumbents often see new technologies and startups as competitors that threaten their existing business.
  • Some energy markets are highly regulated and complex. Insight into the impact of regulation/policy – and the ability to shape policy – to facilitate energy system transformation is generally beyond the capabilities of early stage innovators.
  • The major constituents along the path to commercialization of early stage energy innovation – investors, project financiers, corporations, customers, and policymakers – don’t collaborate well.

In short, climate tech lacks a smooth and integrated development, funding, and scaling pipeline. The performance of this system is telling. Relative to a healthy innovation ecosystem like medtech, climate tech produces approximately one-tenth of the number of startups for an equivalently sized market.

And at a moment of urgent global need for energy innovation, we see that funding for the earliest stage climate innovation (including series A and before) was still at half of 2008 levels a full decade later in 2018.

Climate Tech Double Jeopardy

In addition to the structural challenges confronting climate innovators, we now have the added complication of the COVID-19 pandemic. There are numerous reports on how the current economic downturn disproportionately impacts startups. Ironically, these are organizations that are uniquely agile and should be able to thrive at moments of high risk and uncertainty. But the COVID-19 environment makes them especially vulnerable to failure.

So, while many startups are accustomed to having limited cash reserves, their inability to access their labs, manufacturing, or customers represents immediate and existential threats. Unlike many conventional businesses, startups do not have access to debt markets or lines of credit to help them weather the storm.

Indeed, New Energy Nexus’s March survey of California-based climate tech startups showed that 65 percent had less than four months of cash-on-hand and 90 percent did not expect to survive the current crisis without aid.

It would be devastating if the majority of climate tech startups that are in the process of bringing critical climate change solutions to market failed due to this crisis. It takes years for new technologies to be developed, demonstrated in the field, and deployed at scale; we cannot afford the loss of an entire generation of climate tech startups and the associated delay in technology commercialization.

Hard Won Insights from CleanTech’s 2008 Demise

This is not the first time that climate tech solutions have faced near-total annihilation. During the 2008 global economic crisis, sources of capital dried up, customer purchasing power declined, and many startups failed.

These failures generated poor investor returns, which further reduced investment and contributed to a “death spiral” that made “CleanTech” a toxic investment category for more than a decade. We lost an entire generation of climate tech innovations and the sector still hasn’t completely recovered.

Even during such dark times, there were some success stories that emerged. Tesla, for example, survived the downturn and is now the second-most valuable automotive manufacturer in the world. The Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), launched in 2009, has generated 800 projects which have collectively attracted $2.6 billion of private investment.

Here are a few important lessons we can take from the 2008 CleanTech demise:

  • Climate tech startups are vulnerable to a “death spiral” in times of crisis. Any intervention to help them survive would cost much less than the decade of lost progress in an entire sector.
  • Crisis is an opportune time for investment while valuations, labor, and material costs are low. For example, Tesla acquired its Fremont facility and significant quantities of manufacturing equipment at deep discounts in 2010 (including a $50 million Schuler press for $6 million).
  • Governments have a role to play. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009 was partially responsible for the last decade’s progress on renewables and electric cars. The ARRA’s tens of billions of dollars of tax credits, grants, and loan guarantees supported the demand for and helped scale manufacturing of critical technologies like wind and solar, continuing to drive down costs. The Department of Energy’s Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing loan of $465 million was also an important contributor to Tesla’s early progress.
  • Support a trend; don’t favor a technology. Government isn’t good at picking winners in the private sector. Very public failures of government-backed ventures such as KiOR, INEOS Bio, and Solyndra created bad will in the political sphere and undermined confidence in the sector.

By learning from this history, and taking into account the special needs of climate tech entrepreneurs, it should be possible to convert a moment of existential crisis and the potential for another lost decade of innovation into a crucible of opportunity and solutions.

Innovation in the Time of COVID-19

Turning crisis into catalysis requires quick action, and we only have a few months to get it right. These government actions could prevent us from losing another decade of innovation.

1. Provide equal and streamlined access to sustaining funds for startups.

Accessing government funding is especially complicated for startups. Early stage startups may be pre-revenue and lack either tax or credit history, disqualifying or making it more difficult to work with funders. Later stage ones that have received venture capital or private equity money are ineligible for Small Business Administration loans. Few startups of any maturity have the capacity to navigate complex channels. Streamlining the process is essential and the two most important governmental small business relief programs – the Economic Impact Disaster Loan Program and the Paycheck Protection Program – must lift restrictions against venture-backed startups. Although there may be investors who benefit from government support, we shouldn’t gamble the success of the strongest solutions at a time when private capital is increasingly difficult to free-up. Equal treatment is fair and could allow the US to regain ground in climate tech lost since the last downturn.

2. Make special efforts to preserve the most vulnerable early-stage companies.

The earliest-stage climate tech startups are the most at risk during this crisis. These companies have often emerged from the research valley of death and face concept commercialization as their next big hurdle. Because these startups require quick action (which is incompatible with careful due-diligence) and because government is bad at picking winners, government should focus its intervention on expanding the resources of and fast tracking applications to established and successful grantmaking agencies such as ARPA-E, the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, and the National Science Foundation. Using standard screening filters within prioritized solution areas can expedite selection and support, giving the startups the greatest chance of survival.

3. Provide incentives for active investors to spur available fund deployment.

As we saw in the aftermath of the last financial crisis, there is both great opportunity (e.g., Tesla) and great peril (e.g., Solyndra) that comes with investing during a discontinuity. But we can’t afford to have capital sidelined or hesitant when it is urgently needed to create new jobs and advance critical climate solutions. Promoting additional and diverse investment by offering supportive funds and policies that shift risk profiles (e.g., matching government funding, deferred tax payments) can greatly shift investment criteria to favor faster deployment of available funds.

4. Legislate and regulate to provide clear market signals that offer some degree of economic certainty.

Understanding startup economics is challenging during the best of times given customer, competitor, team, and other dynamics. Even so, energy markets can be especially opaque for investors. Providing clear updates on levels and duration of government support at the federal, state, and municipal levels can offer a bit more certainty about important business model drivers that impact growth and investability. Using the current moment to clarify feed-in-tariffs, standards, tax credits, and other market drivers is a powerful tool to de-risk investments and stimulate focal points for innovation.

5. Build integrated ecosystems.

The first four recommendations will help ensure that startups survive the COVID-19 crisis. To increase the efficacy of our fight against the climate crisis, though, we must dramatically change the entire system of innovation. We need to build out entire ecosystems of startups, investors, large corporations, and other market participants such that they collaborate efficiently and march together in lock step toward common climate and financial goals. Only then will we be able to scale solutions rapidly enough to meet the climate crisis, and generate the jobs to help solve the economic fallout from COVID-19.

Humanity is in a race to prevent the most extreme effects of climate change and, even before the COVID-19 crisis, our early stage innovation efforts weren’t moving quickly enough.

The crisis illuminates just how fragile our climate tech innovation funnel is, and that we cannot afford to lose an entire generation of startups during this critical decade. We must first and foremost support existing startups during these challenging times. However, we must also change our approach to bringing new technologies to market.

Now is the time to bring together startups, investors, large corporations, and researchers in tight collaboration to streamline climate tech innovation and deployment. By combining a systems approach, lessons learned from the past, and the present zeal for innovation in the face of the COVID-19, we just might be able to address two crises at once.

Cyril Yee is a Principal at RMI. Bryan Guido Hassin is a climatetech entrepreneur and writer. He blogs at greenknig.ht.

If you agree that this moment calls for urgent, coordinated action, please share this piece widely. Governments and investors need to hear from the climatetech community right now – not in six months, when it will be too late for most of these startups. The climate isn’t waiting, and neither can we.

Follow-Up on Facebook

To follow up on my recent post about considering leaving Facebook, I have decided not to leave but to change/refine my rules of engagement. Broadly this means only visiting facebook intentionally for a limited scope of reasons. Specifically, for each of the use cases I laid out in the previous post, this is my current approach:

  1. Social Graph / Rolodex / Discovering Whom I Know in Various Places / Discovering Social Worlds Colliding: I’m continuing to use Facebook for this purpose, as well as LinkedIn.
  2. Sharing Updates and Pictures: I very occasionally share significant personal updates on facebook. Mostly I post small stuff on Twitter, more substantive updates here on this blog, and professional updates on LinkedIn. I keep pictures in Google Photos and post periodic links to those pictures in Facebook. I share pictures of my child – which are in much greater demand than pictures of me – through links in a monthly email update to family and friends who have opted in.
  3. Seeing Updates and Pictures: I keep up with content from others on a one-to-one basis via text and Signal. This means I miss out on some important updates, but it also means that my interactions with others are generally more personal.
  4. Groups: I left most of my Facebook groups and remained in the ~5 I was using the most. Most of my small group communication is now done on Signal, with some on Discord.
  5. Supporting and Honoring Others: I’m continuing to use Facebook for this purpose.
  6. Asking Advice: I’m continuing to use Facebook for this purpose, as well as Signal and Twitter.
  7. Birthdays: I’m continuing to use Facebook for this purpose, as well as LinkedIn.
  8. Fundraiser: I’m continuing to use Facebook for this purpose.

My new normal is spending about 10 targeted minutes a day on Facebook and posting most of my content on other platforms. If you would like to engage more substantively with me, please join me on Signal! It’s an excellent messaging app run by a transparent nonprofit.

Thank you to everyone who provided thoughtful feedback/advice, including the following (in no particular order) suggestions:

  • Trustroots (a Facebook competitor)
  • Telegram for chat, groups, and media sharing among friends (a Signal competitor)
  • When using Facebook, let your notifications be your feed rather than browsing through the overwhelming amount of info in your actual feed.
  • Shut down your account and start a new, bare bones account so that Zuck won’t have your info.
  • Change Facebook settings so that you don’t see targeted ads.
  • Use Facebook on desktop only to eliminate the temptation to browse it mindlessly on your phone.
  • Cull your friends list to increase Signal-to-Noise Ratio.
  • Mixing social engagement with news is overwhelming so eliminate news from your facebook feed.
  • More people should have blogs so that we can use Feedly (or similar) as our feed.

RIP Max the Golden Retriever

Tonight we lost Max, our English Cream Golden Retriever of nine and a half years.

We adopted Max in 2010. Back then he was an energetic three year old with a penchant for counter cruising and eating things he wasn’t supposed to. He had more than a little separation anxiety from having been abandoned by previous owners, which we never understood; he was the sweetest boy we had ever known! By 2020 he had slowed down considerably and his hips weren’t quite as limber but he was still just as sweet and just as devoted to his pack.

Max joined our pack in Houston and moved with us to Chapel Hill, where he had a chance to chase deer and play in the snow. He also spent a lot of time being a free-running country dog in Hot Springs, a turkey-hunting mountain dog in Asheville, and a sandy beach dog in the Outer Banks. He was with us through some of the most significant moments of our lives: marriage, a Ph.D., business failure, business success, pregnancy loss, and the birth of our child. He took it all in stride and was a source of comfort throughout.

Max seemed to be missing the “retriever” gene as he had little interest in balls, sticks, and the like – and even less interest in bringing anything he did fetch back to us. He was very vocal and had a very particular “arooo” bay.

He loved being a sun dog, lying out on our deck, squinting and panting until he had to come in to cool off. He loved barking at anyone and anything outside our front door, but wagging his tail and licking anyone who actually came inside. His eternal optimism that he might be the recipient of our food earned him the label Max The Ever Hopeful. His penchant for getting into light trouble earned him the label Max The Mischievous!

His last month with us was one of the best of his life. Katie and I were working from home, so he got much more attention – and many more plates to lick – than he was accustomed to. His last day was idyllic and included steak gristle off our plates after dinner. While I was putting our child down to sleep, Max collapsed on the floor and couldn’t get back up. Katie was with him as he panted for a few minutes and then just stopped breathing. His belly was full and his pack was with him.

Now we are coping with a house (and home office for who knows how long) that feels emptier. There is no wagging tail when we open the front door. There is no furry chin on one of our knees, waiting for a scratch. There is no furry barrel chest to pat. When I walk by the dog bed to give a final goodnight pet on my way to bed, it is empty. We keep putting our plates down on the kitchen floor out of habit but there is no one to clean them off. Even our toddler has noticed. “Dog gone?” “Max gone!”

While it’s true that Max is gone from our physical world, his mark on our pack will last forever. He was our first baby. He had a good, long life and was cared for immeasurably. He was – and always will be – a good boy.

Leaving Facebook

I’m considering deleting my Facebook account and am seeking advice on a tech stack to replace its various functions in my life.

Facebook provides a valuable service, but unfortunately its business model is not aligned with the value it provides. It makes decision after decision that I disagree with ethically and it has been weaponized as a source of disinformation and propaganda.

I would gladly pay a subscription fee for the valuable service Facebook provides me and maintain my privacy, but that isn’t an option. Instead, by using Facebook, I support an arms dealer that sells my data to organizations who use that info to manipulate me.

For years I have not uploaded photos to facebook and I have never installed the app on my phone. I don’t want Zuck having access to my phone, especially not now that I have so many pictures of our child – whose likeness we are intentionally keeping nonpublic for the time being – on it.

I recently deleted Whatsapp – owned by Facebook – so I have some experience already with sacrificing connectivity to friends for privacy. Still, that’s a tradeoff I would rather make thoughtfully than rashly, so below I attempt to enumerate each of the ways that I use Facebook. I’m still very early in this process and would appreciate advice/suggestions on how to fulfill each function without Facebook.

  1. Social Graph: Facebook is my “rolodex” of personal connections, ranging from close family to long lost friends from elementary school. I don’t communicate regularly with the vast majority of my Facebook friends, but it is nice to know that they are available and organized if I need to reach them.
  2. Sharing Updates And Pictures: I post much less to Facebook than I used to, but it remains a good platform for sharing information about what I’ve been up to, what I’m thinking about, movie reviews, etc., and fostering discussions about it. This technically includes political posts, but Facebook has turned out to be a pretty poor medium for such discussions.
  3. Seeing Updates And Pictures: it’s nice to stay abreast of what my friends are up to: parenting adventures, travel, culinary exploration, sports, etc.
  4. Groups: I’m part of several sports, parenting, alumni, and gaming Facebook groups that are very beneficial. I access a great deal of advice, learn about events, and communicate with specific subsets of my friends through these groups.
  5. Supporting and Honoring Others: I use my Facebook profile and cover photos to honor loved ones (birthdays, deathdays, anniversaries) and support people and causes I believe in.
  6. Asking Advice: Facebook can crowdsource advice from a curated set of friends.
  7. Discovering Whom I Know In Various Places: when traveling I use Facebook to reach out to friends who live at the destination, often catching up with people I haven’t seen in years.
  8. Worlds Colliding: it’s fun to see (and, sometimes, create) connections between friends from different eras of my life.
  9. Birthdays: I no longer log into Facebook every day but, when I do, I wish happy birthday to my friends who are celebrating.
  10. Fundraiser: When my own birthday rolls around, my friends use Facebook to donate to my favorite charity.
What stack of technologies would most efficiently substitute for these use cases? Which aspects are unsubstitutable? What are the tradeoffs I will need to make by switching to other products?

Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker Review

Tonight we attended the first showing of Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise Of Skywalker and boy do I have some thoughts. My TL;DR non-spoiler review is that the film isn’t terrible, but it’s very disappointing. It was mostly an OK film, but then a couple of key decisions ruined it for me. In hindsight, they should have stopped after Episode VIII.

Now for my full review. WARNING: THERE BE SPOILERS BELOW!

THE GOOD

  • This film looks beautiful! Many of the set pieces are spectacular and everything down to the details of individual ships is really well-crafted.
  • The score is, of course, outstanding. John Williams really showed up for the final film in the saga.
  • Adam Driver and Daisy Ridley once again acted their faces off. Well done, everyone, but especially them.
  • They did a decent job weaving Leia into the narrative. It was always going to be a tall order to include Leia’s character after Carrie Fisher died – and you can definitely tell that something is “off” in most of the Leia scenes – but I thought they did about as well as one could.
  • Several of the plot points have major potential. Leia’s death, all of the ships showing up to save the Resistance, and Rey’s adoption of the Skywalker name could be very effective if well executed.

THE BAD

  • Unfortunately those plot points are not well executed; they wind up half baked. The ships showing up just in the nick of time, for example, could have been tremendously emotionally powerful in the same way that British private citizens mobilizing ships to evacuate troops from Dunkirk during World War II was very moving. Instead, however, the arrival of the new ships is cheaply glossed over and then quickly abandoned to bounce around to other action sequences.
  • The arrival of these allies combined with a one-on-one fight with a superpowered villain that requires the hero’s mortal sacrifice feels very Avengers: End Game. It even has the same villain-says-taunt-then-hero-responds-with-slightly-tweaked-version-of-same-taunt-as-retort climax. Yawn.
  • The pacing was very uneven. It starts off cramming lots of plot and exposition down the viewer’s throat, jumping from one thing to another to another without giving much time for anything to land. Then it slows way down, then speeds back up. It has the feel of something that was made by committee. They had way too much footage, so had to chop out a bunch of stuff in order to reduce the runtime. As such, it just feels like several setpieces strung together by a [very thin] narrative thread.
  • The exposition necessary to connect this jumble of setpieces together is very clunky and, at times, so eye-rolling as to pull me out of the movie. Maz stating to the audience that Leia knows what she has to do and is about to give up her life to reach out to Ben is just . . . the worst. Come on, JJ, show don’t tell!
  • The multiple writers and directors attached to this project have resulted in the film being something of a Frankenstein’s monster. JJ’s first Star Wars film, Episode VII, felt much more confidently directed. He had a much more coherent vision, tone, and style in that film than he did in this mish-mash.
  • In fact, the made-by-committee feel is a problem at an even higher level. For a film that is supposed to be the culmination of a trilogy – and even of a nine-film series – this feels much more haphazard. It feels like this film was thrown together trying to wrap up story lines rather than being the end result of a flowing, well-thought-out road map.
  • The action was underwhelming. It seemed to be more interested in style than substance. Good action tells a story through fight (or flight) choreography, but this seemed more interested in lots of jump cuts and strobe lights. That’s disappointing from a series that has generally done very well in this regard.
  • Many of the plot points come from the prequel films or the Star Wars Legends (née Expanded Universe) books. With some few exceptions, these are not the strongest sources for material, often bordering on fanfiction quality. As an example, I don’t really care about the concept of the Sith. It wasn’t in the original trilogy and didn’t make Star Wars the icon it became. That said, exploring the more mystical aspect of the Sith could have been interesting – and this film flirted with it via Palpatine’s acolytes and ritual, but didn’t really deliver.
  • Most of the plot twists were super obvious from a mile out.
  • I didn’t really buy Kylo’s turn back to the light side of the Force; he just kind of flipped a switch. Similarly Rey struggles in the beginning with connecting to her jedi predecessors, but then magically achieves this feat during the climax – not because she underwent a journey and transformed, but just because . . . plot. In both cases these scenes are very well-acted; it’s the script that doesn’t earn the transformation.
  • Hayden Christensen gets a brief voice over toward the end of the film. Boo!
  • Frankly, large swaths of the film are pretty boring and I find my mind wandering.
  • So much unnecessary fan service / easter eggs. Please just tell me an interesting story with compelling characters and stop winking at me!

THE UGLY

  • Bringing Palpatine back was a mistake. He had a good death and we all moved on from him decades ago. He just makes the entire movie feel less serious, almost comical. I would generally prefer not to bring villains back as it reduces the stakes and shrinks the universe. An unhinged Kylo without any father figure to check him would have been a great villain. That said, if you absolutely have to bring back some villain, why not one who had a dissatisfactory death and about whom people would like to learn more? Snoke coming back would make just as much sense as Palpatine and would feel much less goofy. 
  • Retconning Rey to be Palpatine’s granddaughter was really dumb. I loved that Rey was nobody and I think that really is appropriate for the Star Wars mythology: anyone can be a hero, not just purebloods of the Force aristocracy. The reveal was just so ham-fisted, too, like something on cheap daytime trash TV: “We’ll reveal who the father is after this commercial break!” I literally facepalmed in the theater.
  • I facepalmed, too, when Rey and Kylo kissed right before he died. Rey was built up during the previous two films to be such a strong female character and I loved that she didn’t have to have a love interest for validation. I understand the “I would love Ben” arc they were going for here, but I just didn’t buy it given their infrequent and usually contentious interactions. I thought it cheapened Rey’s arc and I thought Rogue One handled this much better by just having their leads hug at the end.
  • Maybe the worst part of the previous two points is that I suspect they are the result of caving to fan whining. Some fans vocally wanted Rey’s parents to be a thing. Some fans vocally wanted to ship Reylo. In a film that was already brimming with fan service, it was very disappointing to see huge plot/character points be determined by an angry mob. The good news is that fan edits will only need to cut ~10 seconds of total screen time to negate both of those points!
UPDATE: I have seen it a second time and was a little more positive. Unless my opinion changes a great deal, though, I think I am as done with this episode as I am with the prequels. From now on, Star Wars will be Episodes IV – VIII, essentially the story of Luke Skywalker, with some other amazing characters thrown in. And frankly, that’s more than enough.

So Proud of Katie!

Tuesday I had the enormous privilege of attending Katie’s public Ph.D. dissertation defense. What an incredible moment it was as my wife stood before her colleagues and presented her research findings, the culmination of her last six years of work and the reason for our cross-country move to North Carolina!

To be clear, Katie’s dissertation research was fraught with challenges. Her initial target group became reluctant to participate after the 2016 election. She had to change her research subjects on the fly, but ultimately managed to recruit dozens of participants and maintained 90% of them over the full year of her longitudinal study. Some of the data she collected posed great difficulty in analysis such that Katie unexpectedly had to develop new methods to process them.

In addition to these direct challenges, we also had significant indirect challenges in our personal life. We experienced four pregnancy losses during this time period and, as much as these heartbreaking events affected us both emotionally, Katie bore the brunt of their effects physically. She lost months of time recovering from these losses – not to mention dealing with the challenges (nausea, etc.) of being pregnant in the first place!

Then, when we finally had a healthy pregnancy and a healthy baby, those were certainly joyous times – but just as certainly not times that lent themselves very well to deep time and focus on research! Not long after our baby was born, Katie interviewed, was hired, and began a job at Duke University, where she has been thriving for the last year while writing her dissertation in parallel. Oh and, by the way, Katie has been an amazing partner to me / mother to our child the entire time!

It has not been a straightforward or easy road for Katie but, despite that, she persevered and accomplished her goal. There are still some revisions to be completed, but the major hurdle of defending her thesis against leaders in her field has been passed with flying colors. Her strength, resilience, and competence is inspiring – not only to me, but it certainly will be to our toddler as well.

I have been in awe of / inspired by / in love with smart women since literally the day I was born. Some, like my mom, had no choice but to be stuck with me. Katie, however, actually chose to spend the rest of her life with me and to build a family together. I’m not sure I deserve it, but I’m grateful for it every day. And, on days like this, I’m just so damn proud of who she is and what she has accomplished.

Congratulations to the soon-to-be Dr. Katie!

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: Chapter 4

Can we talk about how OP Hermione is? She’s the smartest (IQ) of the Power Trio by far and then this scene (when Harry arrives at 12 Grimmauld Place and Hermione anticipates how he must be feeling / how to talk him down from his lashing out) demonstrates how she has the highest EQ as well.

They always say that she’s the cleverest witch of her age – but, if you are a genius at #allthethoughts and #allthefeels, I say you are the most powerful witch or wizard period. Not that I’m complaining; this Ravenclaw adores Hermione!

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: Chapter 2

As we are winding down for bed each night, we read a little bit with our toddler. Currently we are making our way through the Harry Potter series and just finished book 4 / started book 5. Book 5, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, is where my online Harry Potter book club began, which means I have had the chance to engage in thoughtful discussion with other Potterheads about it.

As my family progresses through this and subsequent Harry Potter books, I will post some thoughts from my book club discussions here, starting with the chapter we just finished at home: Chapter 2. Caution: there be SPOILERS below:

  • It has always fascinated me how/why Mafalda Hopkirk sends Harry a letter so promptly after he casts his patronus. Is she the only person who would send such letters? In which case, is she on duty 24/7/365 to do so? Or was she just the person on call / on shift at the time? As well as magic works, this should actually be a very automated task, but the fact that Harry receives another letter from her shortly thereafter in response to Dumbledore’s arguments seems to contradict that possibility.
  • Or, if the dementor attack was a concerted attempt by the Ministry to silence Harry, was there an entire team of ministry officials coordinating it, including Hopkirk standing by to send the letter as a plan B in case Harry successfully warded off the dementors instead of having his soul sucked out by them?
  • We actually DO get an answer to this question in Chapter 32 of OotP:

“He never knew I ordered dementors after Potter last summer, but he was delighted to be given the chance to expel him, all the same…” – Dolores J. Umbridge

  • It sounds like Umbridge was operating on her own, not coordinating a Ministry-wide conspiracy to murder Harry, in which case I am still left with my original questions about the inner workings of the Improper Use of Magic Office.