Fatherhood

There are no shortcuts in grief. After a loss, every day hurt. Then each month. And then every special days of the year. 

The opposite is true of bringing up a child. Every day comes with surprise. Then every week ends with a Sunday when the parents find something new. And it is really, really, really funny. When I read the book of parenthood by Fredrik Backman, I can't stop laughing.

If you've read his novel Beartown, you might have remembered the dark theme of a hockey team in a small town. The book, Things My Son Needs to Know about the World, is very different. Whereas Beartown is heartbroken and agonizing, the dad-and-son memoir is stinky yet harmless. His own story of fatherhood is an absolutely hilarious one.

Backman's uncensored love letter to his son tells the honest jokes of being a dad. One letter about his secret wish for his boy to play football sums up the parenting experience pretty well. "I'm not saying you have to play football. Of course, you don't. I'm not going to be one of those dads who puts pressure on you and stands on the sidelines screaming and shouting."

Is that all? Pretty cool, huh? I know. 

"Fine. You might end up hating football. I'm afraid of what people will say if you don't play football. Afraid of the shame. The nicknames. The being left out. Afraid that they'll ... you know."

Butter

Not many writers are chefs. 

Charles Dickens had gone into such details of Christmas dinner. Amy Tan previously told a story of cooking crabs in The Joy Luck Club. Nigella Lawson's book How to Eat does not have a single photograph of food, and yet presents us with the best recipe of mayonnaise.

Asako Yuzuki's novel, Butter, turns out to be the best reading experience of mine recently. The secrets of butter and gourmet cooking could have been a reason for getting the 2025 British Book Awards. It's more than that. In the end, we don't just learn why butter is much better than margarine. Part psychological thriller, part fiction, part story of a real case of serial killer, this book relays a tasty lesson of fatphobia in Japanese culture. 

Superior-quality butter should be eaten when it's still cold and hard, as I learn from the storyteller, to truly luxuriate in its texture and aroma. I can't tell if this is really the case. I simply know that I need to finish the 452-page book within 2 weeks, because this bestseller has already been reserved by many public library users.   

Owl

I learned about Pablo Picasso's weird friendship with an owl in one of the first major exhibition of his in Hong Kong. In 1946, Picasso adopted a little injured animal, bandaged up its broken claw, and kept the owl until it healed, then decided to take the owl with him back to Paris. 

The famous self portrait of Picasso as an owl, his ceramics, etchings and drawings of owls, seem to depict the artist's personal relationship with owls. When it comes to the world's foremost experts on owls, Picasso pales in comparison to Jennifer Ackerman. 

Jennifer Ackerman is the author of What an Owl Knows. She tells us the birdcalls of owls, the huge number of hair cells inside owls' cochlea, the roosting sites of owls. And, believe me, she knows about owls more than any one of us. It's not just Jennifer Ackerman's knowledge on the animal that is impressive. It's her writing that is vibrant, authentic and absorbing. In the way Jennifer Ackerman describes owls' sound, a hoot is not just a hoot. Owls don't just hoot. Or so I was told. They shriek, yap, chitter, squeal, squawk, warble, and wail. Some chirrup like a cricket. Some chuckle with maniacal laughter. Some utters a strange sliding whistle, like a dropping bomb.  

Oh-oh. Owl. Owl.

Laughter

"The secret to happiness is either to have had a happy childhood or a poor memory." So says the psychiatrist Benji Waterhouse, whose mother was surprised to hear his speaking about childhood to his therapist. Can a mother remember her son's childhood? That's where things often get murky.

Here's why laughter matters: If you're wondering the way to fend off sickness or stress, go and read Benji Waterhouse's book. He wrote the comic medical memoir as a NHS doctor, You Don't Have to Be Mad to Work Here.

Hardly a day goes by without frustration under the overstretched NHS, as we can imagine. One fine day, Benji came across Gladys, a new patient admitted for Cotard's syndrome, a rare delusional disorder in which patients believe they're dead, have lost their internal organs, or are roting. 

"So you taught biology, the study of living things?" 

Gladys nodded.

"But if you're dead, how do you explain talking to me now?" Benji confronted Gladys.

Gladys pondered for a moment. "You must be dead too."

"What a way to find out," Benji was amused. "Also, it certainly won't reflect well on me, if in the afterlife I am still working in the NHS."

I nearly laughed my head off.

Maame

Every death is a tragedy, whether in Ghana, Punjab, or Gaza. You get hurt over the loss. I do, too. Everybody does. We all have suffered the tragedy with the death of a loved family member or close friend. But Jessica George's novel is one of the most heartbreaking stories, in which a London-born Ghanaian daughter lost her father with Parkinson's disease. 

Maddie Wright, with a nickname Maame meaing "woman" in Twi dialect, has been the main caregiver of her dad. She can't rely on her brother to pay the council tax and bills. She can't even ask her mum to help the funeral expense after her dad's death. 

The overwhelmed daughter faces the challenge by herself. When things go wrong, she would try Google searches. The questions she typed in the browser, and the list of Google-provided responses, tell a good story.

Is Parkinson's disease genetic?

How to be happy? How to get flatmates to like you?

How do you write a eulogy for your dad?

Symptoms of depression?

When do you start feeling better after losing a loved one?

Stages of grief?

Did I skip bargaining and is it too late to start?

FOPO

Social psychologists like to describe our brain comparison machines as a "sociometer". That's a gauge hidden inside our brain, running from 0 to 100 to denote where we stand in the local prestige rankings, moment by moment. 

Think about the electricity bill you receive once every month, after which you will know your electricity consumption. If you're meticulous, you can view your meter in real time. Most of us won't bother to do that. Now we do. We check the sociometer, swiping through bottomless feeds. Post a picture with beauty filter on Instagram or Snapchat, and see if this dials up your sociometer score, as reflected by the number of followers, likes, shares, or comments. That is the way to move the needle in most adolescents' sociometer. 

I read about the mechanics of this maladaptive sociometer in the book The First Rule of Mastery. That's about the three phases of a FOPO loop. FOPO means our "fear of people's opinions". The circular cycle begins with an anticipation phase: think about browsing through our closet before a social gathering. Or else, photoshopping or airbrushing the photos to boost our Instagram beauty. Next, during the checking phase, we relentlessly scan for external cues of acceptance or rejection. The third phase is responding phase. That's how we react after we take in the perceived cues. "Am I good?" "Do my sociometer plunge?" The FOPO cycle goes on and on. 

We can't get out of the cycle until we recognise that we are worthy exactly as our intrinsic virtue.We are not our grade. We are not our job, our age, our marathon time, our place on the organisation chart. Our value stems from our being, not our doing.

Technology

Randomised controlled trials are the gold standard of scientific proof. 

Much of what we now believe is the result of experiments in which people are randomly assigned, like lottery, to receive a treatment and other people are randomly allocated to be in the control group. Researchers then look at the outcomes of intervention. Unlike the observational studies, this tool can get rid of selection bias, when groups being studied are already significantly different after they are "selected" to receive treatment.

Observational studies often fall prey to "reverse causality", in which the outcome drives the "exposure", rather than the other way around. When we observe that people with obesity survive better, it doesn't mean obesity causes longevity. One explanation for the observation or correlation is that people with deteriorating health, such as advanced cancer, often lose weight. When we aren't careful, as it turns out, we could have assumed obesity is the cause of living longer.

All of which is to say that we should put more emphasis on randomised controlled trials. 

This much we know. Yet when it comes to social science, randomisation is not often practical. The idea that social media have detrimental effect on adolescents have been around long enough to become cause of concerns. Jonathan Haidt, the American social psychologist who wrote The Anxious Generation, found 20 randomised controlled trials on social media, most of them randomly assigning students to limit the use of social media platforms (or not reduce the use in the control group). More than two-thirds of these experiments found evidence of harm.

Quasi-experiment study design to measure the effect at community level, on the other hand, is more practical (or realistic) than randomly assigning all students in 20 middle schools to put their phones in a phone locker for a year. One good example of such studies takes advantage of the rollout of high-speed internet. In a "natural experiment" in Spain, researchers made note of the fibre-optic cables and high-speed internet, which came to different regions at different times. Drawing on data that are proxy of internet penetration in Spanish households, the study examined the group-level effects rather than the individual-level effects. As it turns out, there was a significant effect of access to high-speed internet on hospital discharge diagnoses of behavioural and mental health cases among adolescents.

This natural experiment study spoke volumes to the potential epidemic of teen mental illness after the arrival of world-changing smartphone technology. 

Upgrade

Getting our DNA upgraded would be really exciting. We get excited just writing the phrase "upgraded." 

To finally get a genetic upgrade that ramps up our performance would be a huge milestone for humanity. After reading Thomas Cech's book about RNA and CRISPR, I picked up a sci-fi novel Upgrade. 

I am not sure if genetic upgrade is a real thing or fiction fantasy. The story of Logan Ramsay in Upgrade lets us get a better picture. Logan literally got a mind-blowing transformation in his genome. All of a sudden, Logan read faster and finished all twelve books that had been languishing on his nightstand, including that of Kazuo Ishiguro. He could even read a book with his eyes while simultaneously listening to an audiobook. He easily made a fortune at casino by recalling the seven poker strategy books he'd speed-read at the library. His energy was bottomless. He slept four hours and woke as fresh as a daisy. 

If you aren't excited about the quantum leap in the genetic makeup, there's indeed a grain of truth in that argument. Imagine Logan Ramsay getting trouble with people interaction. After all, if Logan has  supernatural neurons, then he should be able to predict what someone is going to say long before another human being manages to say it. And if Logan has upgraded intelligence, then he will find speaking with a bright adult somewhat like holding a conversation with a ten-year-old. When Logan revisited a pristine stream in a primeval forest, he could no longer feel the tranquility of the sublime spot. 

Everyone who has read the fairy tale of The Little Mermaid knows how an upgrade could be suffering in disguise. I felt a twinge of loss for Logan, like what we do for the poor mermaid.