Tag: PhD

Sharlotka, radish salad, and doing my best

lydiaandreyevnakrasilnikova1 Comment

This Thanksgiving we had the usual American Thanksgiving foods (turkey stuffed with apples, plum sauce because I’m allergic to cranberries, and stuffing, recently introduced by my magnificent and magnificently American boyfriend/partner Cory). We also had radish salad made from radishes I grew in our garden and sharlotka, an apple sponge cake.

Radishes

First I will tell you about the radishes. I grew them myself, planted as a bit of an afterthought in the pumpkin patch because they do well in the shade and therefore do well with pumpkins. Under my grandmother’s advisement I left the hose out in the sun for a bit and watered them with warm water. They did shockingly well; we are now enjoying my second round of picked radishes and there are still plenty left for a third. The exact seed mixes I used are here and here (referral links, so I get a small commission).

I grew regular pink radishes, purple radishes, daikon radishes, watermelon radishes, and black radishes. All the exotic radishes had less intense flavor than I was expecting: the daikon radishes were a bit like watered down regular radishes, the black radishes were a bit like turnips with a radish flavor, and the purple radishes had a bit of an onion-like flavor—nonetheless all radishes, maybe more tolerable than the usual radishes (I like the usual radishes, I just can’t eat too many at once). I dragged the radishes from Boston to a friend’s wedding in LA and then to South Carolina to my family (my bag/”personal item” was mostly radishes, my laptop, and a pair of heels). Here’s more or less what the radishes looked like, minus a few radishes because we’d already started to eat them.

My mom made some of the black and purple radishes into a gorgeous, delicious salad (left) and the daikon radishes into another gorgeous, delicious salad (right):

We all thought the salad was very special and delicious especially because the radishes were fresh and also because we could probably taste that I remembered to water them every day (amazing).

Sharlotka

My mom also made sharlotka (шарлотка), Russian/Eastern European/former Soviet Union apple sponge cake distantly descended from the English charlotte (sharlotka translates to little Charlotte). It’s a really cozy comfort food kind of cake, light and moist with a sweet crunchy crust and with apples inside baked just so they’re soft but barely still crunchy.

Here’s our family’s recipe, for my own reference and maybe for yours too—

  • apples
  • 4 eggs
  • 1/2 cup sugar
  • 1 big cup flour (“big cup” meaning 250 ml—mom says “technically a cup is 200 ml”)

Chop up unpeeled apples and put them on the bottom of your baking dish. In the mixer, add the eggs first and beat until they are white. Then add the sugar, then add the flour. Bake at 375 F for about 35 minutes, though it’s hard to tell for sure how long. You’ll know it’s done by the color of the crust. You can also touch the crust: it shouldn’t give too much.

Here’s the process:

Here’s how it turns out:

Doing my best

The radishes were particularly special to me because they were a very proud and successful accomplishment requiring months of sustained effort.

One of the lessons/epiphanies I learned (or just drilled into myself with some but not a lot of success) this year is about doing my best. My whole childhood my parents encouraged me to do my best, and especially as it applied to school whatever my grades were was fine with them as long as the grades actually reflected my best. Clearly that worked out but this year, when I was practicing for my driver’s license, aka driving, I decided that actually doing my best is not usually such a good approach.

When a person is driving, for example, they probably shouldn’t be doing their best. Ideally, a person should have such a reserve of skill and experience and muscle memory that their best is completely unnecessary, to such an extent that they could even be a bit distracted or upset and still be a decent driver. (They might even be thinking about the concept of doing their best, and they should have enough buffer to not run a red light or a stop sign. Should.)

And then I thought that probably this applies to most of the rest of the things I do. If I’m coding, for example, I can put on a movie and my code will be just as bug-free as it is usually, because I’ve been coding for 18 years and because I learned in undergrad how to add safeguards to make my code as bug-free as possible. Sometimes I work a lot harder—when I’m implementing a new algorithm or when I need to solve a particularly challenging problem or when I’m chasing one of those dumb four-hour bugs. But even then it’s something I’ve done a lot, and I’m comfortable with it.

I’ve noticed this year that ideally, if I have the necessary skills to do my work, and if I have not overextended myself, and if I am working in a healthy, sustainable way, I should not need to do my best. If I find that I am doing my best that is something to investigate. It might be that I am learning a new skill, which happens often and is not a bad thing but requires extra caution to avoid errors. It might be that I have too much on my plate, which means I need to try to find balance, and soon, and probably need to find partners to share my work with, otherwise delegate, or evaluate my priorities. Or it might mean that I am working on a short-term but very important project, in which case I just need to survive until it is over and make sure I am doing at least the minimum to maintain my health. (Our Cell paper, for example, was a time when I absolutely did my best, but it was not sustainable.) That kind of effort, at least for me, is how I’ve usually done everything but it only works in short bursts, and carefully.

When I successfully studied for and got my driver’s license, I did not do my best. First, my dad taught me how to drive stick shift and then I didn’t sign up for a road test and then I went to college and then a decade went by. Then I practiced on my and my partner’s first car, a 2001 Highlander that made sounds I recorded and sent to my dad every week, with my licensed and very brave partner in the passenger seat directing me around very narrow Cambridge streets where side mirrors go to hospice. Then when the Highlander failed its inspection I scheduled lessons, more or less once a week, and I showed up. I took the commuter rail and then the orange line or the red line and I arrived at the designated place at the designated time with the designated amount of cash, somehow never late (though I did forget the cash once and a kind and very smart coworker who unlike me still carries cash lent me the money), and I drove around for 45 minutes with my brave and patient instructor who had and used an instructor brake, and I did that more or less every week. I was terrible at it, then great at it, then terrible again, then more or less okay more or less consistently. I scheduled my road test, did pretty poorly, and somehow passed. This kind of workflow is new to me. I didn’t do my best—I allocated the time, I showed up, and I did the work, a little every week, and then I looked back and I saw that the goal was achieved.

The same thing happened with the radishes. I planted them, I watered them every day, I reluctantly (with Cory’s help and insistence) culled them when I had to, and then some months later I had radishes—and then I had radishes again, and there are still more that might grow even bigger, more radishes than I know what to do with.

What happens when a person does their best

As evidence that doing your best is a bad idea, here is our gingerbread house, which we made in earnest as a family:

The Summer of Shit

Unrelatedly I am reminded all of a sudden that there was one summer recently but pre-pandemic when, no joke, a bird pooped in my eye on two separate occasions (two separate birds, presumably, but I can’t be sure). I wear glasses (all the time, or I’d walk into a pole (with my luck a pole from which a bird is just taking off)), so that means the bird would have needed to aim so precisely between my glasses and my eye, at just the right angle, just slightly closer to my eye than to my glasses. Twice.

I remember one of the incidents was under a stoplight, which is probably why I had trouble noticing them while learning to drive. Something about repressed trauma.

An Early Resolution

Since my driver’s license/radishes revelation I have been trying to apply some kind of sustainable, gradual-progress type of workflow to all my work. It is very different from how I usually or naturally work, which is in short, passionate bursts followed by long periods of burn-out. (Of course, because my work is tangential to public health and the pandemic specifically I don’t always get to work sustainably, but I am trying when I can. (Not trying my best, though—as just established that is not the goal.))

Gradual, sustainable progress requires difficult planning and facing reality, the former of which I enjoy and the latter of which I do not: breaking a goal into small steps, being realistic about how much I can get done and prioritizing my goals accordingly, and doing those steps bit by bit every day or every week, with or without passion, efficiently during the day rather than in happy bursts of hyperfocused all-nighters. I haven’t entirely gotten the hang of it, or figured out how exactly it works for me specifically: do I, for example, work on one project on Mondays and Wednesdays and a different project on Tuesdays and Thursdays? Do I let myself follow my interests, so long as I make a bit of progress on each of my active projects every week? Or do I work on each project a little every day, perhaps optimized by the type of work I do best in the morning, afternoon, or early evening? Maybe, since school worked so well for me, I should break my day into two-hour “class periods,” giving each project a class period and stopping when the time runs out?

(So far, it’s looked like working on whichever of my active projects I’m most excited about at the moment, switching when I get stuck, and getting unstuck during the semi-rest/not thinking about it of working on the other project, like epiphanies showing up in the shower but instead more like epiphanies showing up while I’m working on something that is at the moment more fun.)

Figuring out a productive, happy, sustainable workflow is one of my goals for the remainder of the year and for the year to come—or in other words, to do the work I care about in a productive, happy, sustainable way and learn how to do that as I go.

Reaching

This is my favorite sculpture in our favorite sculpture garden, Brookgreen Gardens. She’s reaching for something in the water—reaching quickly, judging by her hair. She’s definitely not going to get whatever she is reaching for, because she is a statue, and every time I see her she is still reaching. I like the motion captured in her body and her hair and I like that the water is also a part of the sculpture, and that the reflection of her hand is also part of the sculpture.

The Fates

This is my grandmother’s favorite sculpture in our favorite sculpture garden, Brookgreen Gardens. The three fates: one spinning the thread of life, one directing it, and one cutting it.

Lights

Brookgreen Gardens is a magical place to spend Thanksgiving, because it is when they are in the midst of decorating for Christmas and you get to see their progress from day to day. They put up every conceivable kind of light in every color, including lights in glass bubbles floating in fountains. It’s an enormous, unimaginable effort by many volunteers. My favorites are these string lights hanging from a small forest of oaks and a few other trees at the edges:

Butterflies

I was talking with a volunteer who told me that the paths in the gardens were originally shaped like a butterfly, proboscis and antennae and all, and butterflies are special in the gardens. Then he pointed out to me that the ceiling was covered in butterflies glowing gold in the lights. He had put them all up the previous day. Apparently there were monarchs before but they switched them out. My photos absolutely do not capture the overwhelmingness of the quantity of butterflies, but this is what they look like:

New Fruits

We didn’t get to spend Rosh Hashanah together so we marked one of our family traditions for the new year (which we do sometimes on Rosh Hashanah, sometimes on the calendar new year, and sometimes both) both late and early over Thanksgiving: trying some new fruit.

This year’s new fruit was a kiwano melon. We spent a few days admiring its exterior (we didn’t google it so as not to spoil the surprise). We were very surprised when we cut it open that it was bright green. It was like a sweet-sour cucumber:

I dragged it along with a bunch of mangos, avocados, a papaya, dragon fruit, and four varieties of persimmon in a trash bag together with my radishes as a carry-on when I realized in LA that I had a carry-on for my flight to South Carolina, that I wanted to use that free space for fruit, and California had more exciting fruit than the non-Florida East Coast.

Here is a kiwano melon and a dragon fruit:

Ocean

And here is the ocean on the beach, and a bird flying over the ocean on the beach.

Gratitude

This Thanksgiving I am thankful for:

  • sharlotka
  • an excellent crop of radishes
  • a garden for my radishes, and for our other crops, and all the crops that grew
  • my mom, who made the radish salads and the sharlotka
  • my grandmother, who taught my mom how to make sharlotka
  • my dad and my brother, who in addition to being wonderful also give the sharlotka and the radishes and the radish salad their whole purpose (my dad loves radishes, and my brother loves food)
  • my family abroad
  • my partner Cory
  • our housemate
  • Cory’s family
  • all our friends
  • and our health and survival
  • the covid vaccines
  • modern medicine—oh, especially modern medicine
  • that I get to do work I’m passionate about, and that I get to choose what I work on, and that I get to chase ideas down rabbit holes, and that, though I would of course prefer it be more money, I get paid money to fuck around and find out, irrespective of whether or not I actually end up finding out anything of value
  • my dissertation committee
  • my mentors and coworkers
  • the people who made my career and my life possible, at various stages
  • my growing ability to apply sustained, sustainable effort towards a goal and achieve it
  • and my progress in no longer doing my best, when possible
  • our Cell paper (omg!)
  • my driver’s license (yay!)
  • new fruits and new experiences
  • no bird poop in my eye yet this year

Happy Thanksgiving!

“Fun, exciting, and interesting along the way”—Lab Alumni PIs Academic Career Panel

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About a week ago we the grad students in our lab virtually hosted a panel* of a few* of the lab alumni who after their postdocs with us are now professors. I get a lot of messaging (from the University, surprisingly, and from student groups and of course from twitter) against academia and toward industry—about the transition from academia to industry, about destigmatizing “leaving” academia, about the flaws in the academic system, about low pay in academia, about how miserable everyone is, etc.—, I think to try to balance the pressure to follow an academic career path after a PhD but somehow at least the pieces that reach me have tipped in the other direction, to the extent that I don’t think I receive much pro-academia or even happy-academia messaging at all. I really enjoyed this panel. Everyone seemed happy. After the conversations I’m used to it was like stepping out of a loud smoke-filled bar into an open hillside with cows grazing. I want to share it with you, in case you see a potential future for yourself in academia, like I do, because I was reassured to know that that hopeful future can stay hopeful and light and that there are people in my field who love their jobs.

We asked about what we can do in grad school to be better prepared for a career in academia. Along the same lines, we also asked what the most important and underrated skill to focus on building in a postdoc is:

  • You learn A LOT as a grad student.
  • The fellowships you apply for are great practice in writing proposals. You get better at it; you learn how to use feedback.
  • Learn all of the stuff that happens behind the scenes—what gets funded, what doesn’t. Learn how money is spent.
  • Network and find connections.
  • Write papers well.
  • Learn the nitty-gritty of your science, but also the big picture of your science.
  • As a PI, managing people is new—being a cheerleader for the team is critical, and it’s something you can work on in a postdoc.

On applying to postdocs and finding a good lab for your postdoc:

  • When looking for a postdoc, look for the specific things YOU need to grow in.
  • Meet with people at conferences.
  • Meet others in the lab to get the vibe of the lab you’re interested in.
  • Tell people DIRECTLY and candidly that you are applying for postdocs. BE DIRECT.
  • Your postdoc is your last opportunity to do something totally different from what you’ve been doing.
  • Getting a postdoc is all about personal connections, or it can be.
  • For your postdoc, find a lab that gives autonomy—enough autonomy to learn how to run a research project, with training wheels. You don’t want a lab where postdocs are treated like “super grad students.”
  • A larger lab can be more autonomous. On the other hand, there can be less opportunity for direct mentorship from the PI in a large lab.
  • Get a fellowship; then you can go wherever you want.

On applying for professorship jobs:

  • The job committee wants to know what you’re doing that will make science better for their university in the future.
  • The job committee also wants to know you can bring in grants.
  • Talk with faculty in the department you’re applying to.
  • Your applications are a crapshoot—the commitee uses imperfect heuristics to get the job done. There’s a lot behind the scenes you can’t see from the job posting.
  • Don’t make enemies—a single advocate can push your application forward, while a single nemesis can sink you.
  • Apply to a lot of positions.
  • You have an edge if you have interesting science, connections, and a well-written proposal.
  • Pay attention to teaching requirements—at a non-R1 university, you will actually be teaching, whereas in other universities you might have very few teaching responsibilities. Our panelists had a wide range of teaching requirements, from a lot to almost none.
  • Look for the kind of position YOU WANT.

On moving (or not moving) for jobs in academia:

  • There is a bias against people who don’t want to move or are attached to a particular area.
  • On the other hand, passion to be in a certain location can also be an advantage, and a big one, because it also shows you are more likely to take the position. If you’re targeted in your search, your commitment comes through.
  • Interviewers might legally not be allowed to ask about your partner or your personal life, depending on the state. Tell them up front about your partner, their job needs, and any other parts of your personal life that affect your job search and your interest in and needs within this particular job.

On the job of being a PI:

  • You learn quickly as a PI that even though you’re the same person you always were, everything you say carries more weight than it did before you got the Professor title.
  • Think about and try to learn whether or not you will actually like the job of being a PI. The actual job involves a lot of management and a lot of writing.
  • Once you become a professor, there is no one you report to regarding what you are doing as long as you can get money.
  • There is room to make the job what you want it to be, but even small labs come with a lot of work; making even a small team run is really hard.

One of us asked when our panelists found “their thing”:

  • One of our panelists got hooked in undergrad (“some fire was lit inside of me in one class”), which as a person who also occasionally teaches made me very happy to hear.
  • In science, some things you find interesting, while some things FASCINATE you.
  • Going down rabbit holes* is a good fit for academia.
  • You have to be creative and excited about your ideas.
  • You should try to find an intersection between what people will give you money to study and what you are naturally interested in (—and that intersection might also be a role in industry).

On doing science:

  • Just do the science you really want to do; don’t think just about tenure.
  • Have a proven track record of fantastic research.
  • Look for opportunities as you encounter them.
  • Have a five-year goal that you slowly move towards, but keep all doors open. If getting to your five-year goal will be miserable or you’ll hate the process, that’s a red flag and a sign that your five-year goal should change. Your five-year goal needs to be fun, exciting, and interesting along the way.

General advice:

  • When you need to get in touch with a professor, email them multiple times—again if they don’t respond.
  • At every point in your academic career, your life keeps going. Don’t put it on hold—live your life.
  • “I liked what I was doing.”—enjoy it. Don’t torture yourself. Your job should be a job you love.

* (I organized this panel, which was one of those things I was very very excited for then forgot I did until I appeared at the meeting thankfully on time and was surprised and delighted to discover that that thing I wanted to happen was, indeed, happening, and happening now, and I was doing it, and doing it now—and then it went great and it was really lovely.)

* (We have TONS of lab alumni who are now professors with labs of their own, but I like a panel of three people; any more than three feels like we wouldn’t really get to know anyone.)

* (I very much like to go down rabbit holes.)

Spooky Lab Halloween Decorations

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Our labmates Cindy and Jess decorated the lab for Halloween! The decorations have been spookening my life all October.

The spiderwebs are my favorite by far. They extend into my own office window.

And of course candy.

My desk is also decorated, but I keep these decorations up year-round. The scraggly tree is winter and autumn. Pumpkins are autumn, and everything green including pumpkins is winter, springtime, and summer.

The framed prints from the MFA are my museum exhibit, but I haven’t had a chance to put them up since we moved offices.

And here is me in a cow onesie. (The earrings are by Night Owl Jewelry, purchased at the Girl Gang Craft Fair in Salem.)

Happy Halloween!

Songs to Save Me From Vecna: accidentally a story of how friends shared music during my parents’ adolescence in the Soviet Union and my 90s/2000s/2010s childhood as a 1.5th generation immigrant

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For your future reference. Just in case.

This blog post is not about Stranger Things. These are a list of songs that would save me from Vecna, the robotics company in Waltham that has repeatedly appeared to me ever since I started college, as if an apparition, coincidentally at the time and place of career fairs.

Bourrée in E minor by Johann Sebastian Bach

This is a song that my mom plays on acoustic guitar, and has played on acoustic guitar since I was small. I associate it with memories of her playing it, at each stage of my life and in each apartment or house we’ve lived in. And sometimes she plays it when we go somewhere local to be outside for a few days as a family, so it reminds me of the forest and the cold summer air in Pennsylvania. It is very precious and special to me.

Help! by the Beatles

When I was young music was on tapes, and then CDs. (I missed the tape era but tapes were still around, lots of them, and all the sound playing equipment played tapes.) When we first moved to the United States my parents had Help! on CD and we listened to the CD all the way through, so I remember the whole album by heart. This is the song I know best and the one I like the most.

My grandfather learned English in part by listening to the Beatles. So I also associate this song and this album and the Beatles in general with him. I miss him, and when I hear this song I think of him happy and dancing and laughing and joking and young.

Песня полярных летчиков by Александр Городницкий

Перекаты by Александр Городницкий

Two more songs from an album that we had on tape or CD, and which I associate with the forest and with camping. Александр Городницкий was an extremely talented Russian songwriter and bard. My mom grew up with his music and I grew up with his music. When we first moved to the United States we lived in Chicago and we had a very tightknit group of friends who had also recently emigrated from the former Soviet Union, who were all around the same age and whose children if they had children were around my age. We would go camping together and we would all sit around the campfire and someone had a guitar and would play the music and everyone would sing these songs. My mom sings them beautifully and it is especially beautiful to hear everyone singing together. The smell of burning wood always brings me back to these memories, and camping, and the sounds of crickets and frogs and cold nights and trees overhead.

These are my two favorite songs by Александр Городницкий. They are both about facing challenges.

The first song (translated lyrics here) describes pilots stranded during a blizzard waiting for the opportunity to fly again. My favorite lyric is “Снова ночь нелётная даже для луны” (“Again the night is flightless, even for the moon”).

The second song (translated lyrics here) is called rapids, and it is about rapids, real and metaphorical. In the Soviet Union accurate maps were illegal, so people who went hiking/backpacking/canoeing drew unofficial maps—outlines/sketches. The song is about not knowing what is coming next, making your way as best as you can by outline/sketch rather than a real map, and reminiscing about cozier times (and, I feel, feeling comforted that those cozy times will continue to exist, somewhere, after you are gone), and it is about the end of the summer, and it may or may not be about death though death is of course discordant with the tone of the song.

This song is a bit of an enigma. I’ve heard various stories about what inspired it and they are all tragic and probably all wrong. There are very serious rivers (everywhere, including in the United States—not just in the former Soviet Union) that have specific ways you must move through them—you must turn right here or pass this rock on the left—, and if you miss any one of these turns, you will die. One version of the song’s backstory is that it was inspired by the author’s friend(s), who, missing one of the crucial turns, were carried through the rapids in their boat to their certain death with the whole rest of the party watching as they drifted away, helpless to save them. Another version of the song’s backstory is that a group of friends in Siberia are on a canoe or kayak trip and they know they will not make it to safety before the winter.

I listen to this song sometimes when I feel stuck. I love this song.

Slice Me Nice by Fancy

This is a very silly song and it is complete nonsense. My dad used to listen to it when he worked out and my first memories of it are hearing it playing from the basement sometime this past decade. It’s one of hundreds and hundreds of songs from my dad’s childhood and it is one of my favorites. My dad did not understand English when he originally heard and liked this song, so it was perfectly fine, maybe even better, that the lyrics are nonsense. I like to play it while I’m slicing things when we are making dinner. (I don’t usually cook, but I can slice.)

The next round of songs are from my parents’ adolescence, which means they are from my childhood.

In the Soviet Union when my parents were growing up tapes were smuggled in and sold illicitly (selling western tapes might land you in jail—not because western music was illegal, but because selling it was illegal entrepreneurship). You could buy a real tape like the ones sold in Europe, but it cost about a week’s salary, or for a day’s salary you could get a lower quality tape from a recording studio. The way you usually got tapes was by copying them from copied tapes that your friends had, but the copies got worse the farther along they were in the copy-chain, like a game of telephone. It was generally understood that if you had a tape, you would of course share it with all of your friends so that everyone could have a copy. (Before tapes people copied vinyl records onto old x-rays, jazz records especially.)

You could also listen to (and record) western music from AM radio, though that would be even worse quality, especially when you factored in the sounds the government would play on the same frequency to try to block it out. A lot of people got their music by listening to Seva Novgorodsev on the BBC Russian Service. (Seva was knighted in the United Kingdom for portraying the UK positively in the Soviet Union.)

These are the songs that are most burrowed into my brain from their respective CDs and tapes, which were among many, many CDs and tapes we had in Chicago. A lot of my memories of our first apartment (or maybe the apartment after that in the same building) when we moved from Moscow to Chicago have those CDs and tapes playing in the background.

Most of these songs are from 1970s Germany. Keep in mind that almost no one listening to this music in the Soviet Union understood any of the words.

In For A Penny, In For A Pound by Arabesque

Moscow by Dschinghis Khan

What in the heck was going on in Germany in the 70s.

Rasputin by Boney M

Media was tightly controlled by the government and Moscow by Dschinghis Khan and Rasputin by Boney M were not allowed to be played officially on the radio or TV, though you could listen to them at your own house. My dad says that when there was a Boney M concert in Moscow they started the concert with the intro music to Rasputin but did not play the actual song.

Daddy Cool by Boney M

My dad says he was so sick of Daddy Cool by the mid-80s that he couldn’t listen to anything on that record and still can’t listen to it. It was way too popular (in private, not on radio) and worse my dad had a copy.

Killer Queen by Queen

When I was 12 I started my new school for that year which was Whitney Young Magnet High School in Chicago, and I was in the Academic Center program that more or less tumbled 7th and 8th graders into high school classes, though we had our own separate classroom for core subjects. I met some of my best childhood friends that year; we had a very tightknit nerdy friend group and some of us still keep in touch. School let out early, 1:something instead of the 3: something I’d gotten used to, so when I got home I’d spent an hour or so eating and decompressing before thinking about homework. We had this Queen album on tape, which meant if I wanted to listen to a song on repeat I had to rewind it to just the right spot each time, and I played the album on our grey boombox in the kitchen and this was my favorite song to dance to.

Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd

The next year we moved to Central Pennsylvania, I started 8th grade, then I was in 9th grade and in Pennsylvania I became a different person, or more accurately I tried on two or three successive outer layers but was very much still myself underneath and with my family and closest friends.

Those first few summers in particular were very memorable to me, the kinds of months when years happen, probably because there was so much change happening in my life. We spent a lot of time wandering around outside. Wish You Were Here is a song from those summers to me; I most viscerally remember it playing in a cute hippie-vibe store called the Apple Tree downtown (not much of a downtown for me with childhood so far being in Chicago), which has since closed. This song, to me, is my childhood in the past and what Central Pennsylvania felt like in the summer and biking at 9pm with the sun still up and the whole idea of everything being transient and simultaneously happy and sad.

Where Is My Mind? by the Pixies

This song, too, is from around that same time for me. A boy I saw for about a year, who was/is an artist and who was very sweet to me, made me mixtape CDs sometimes and this was on one of them. I think making someone a mixtape is a very personal and underrated gesture. Back then we listened to music on CDs or on the radio so that was how we shared music with each other. Burning a CD is a lot of work compared to how we share music now and then after you made your CD you could decorate it or write things on it. Very special.

Dancing in the Moonlight by King Harvest

I have no idea where or when I first heard this song—probably around those same years. I really love this song.

This version is apparently not the original; the original was recorded two years earlier by Boffalongo.

In high school, our method of sharing music got more sophisticated. We, specifically the tiny subset of us in our school who had immigrated with our parents from the former Soviet Union, especially me and a boy I was rather desperately obsessed with who had a much better understanding of whatever we dreamed up former Soviet Union culture was and a cool older brother who presumably had enhanced cool older brother cultural knowledge, brought in USB sticks to transfer music between each other’s laptops, especially from his laptop to mine because he was older and more recently arrived and the one with more of the better music. These are my two favorite songs that I absorbed during that time, I think from those data transfers, both by Земфира. You can find roughly translated lyrics here and here.

Прогулка by Земфира

Итоги by Земфира

Сказочная тайга by Агата Кристи

This song is associated with a very particular memory. My family in my dad’s black Suburban, my dad driving, this song playing, us on our way to some lovely outdoorsy adventure. This song is kind of nonsense but I love the ping!-ping!-ping! sounds that sound kind of how stars look. It makes me think of my family and it makes me think of stars between tree branches directly overhead in a cloudless sky.

Like a lot of these the song itself is not particularly special except that it stuck with me. A friend from Chicago let us burn a copy of a disk with this song and that disk lived in the car, which is why we played it in the car. Tragically the writer of the song has gone completely nuts in a political way.

New Romantics by Taylor Swift

I started listening to Taylor Swift when I was in high school and she was about the same age and I was growing up in Pennsylvania not too far from where she had been growing up not that long before. Taylor Swift is special to me; my moods and life path have followed the moods and paths of her albums quite faithfully, from our shared origin in Pennsylvania to college and all the human complexities of college to the vicissitudes of grad school.

Initially, I had painted my dorm room green. My desk was against the wall next to my door, so when I sat at my desk I could see the whole long hallway and anyone walking through I could see and say hi to. The hallway was well-populated because it was one of the crossover sites between the two buildings at their shared wall, and my room was also by the back stairwell.

Random Hall has a smell. I don’t mean that in a bad way, just that the building itself and its walls and its carpet have a very particular smell that has a very particular feeling in the nose and the mouth and the airways that I remember vividly, and I remember that smell most vividly of course lugging bags or boxes from whenever I came back after a time away. (It’s probably because the building is very old.)

1989 was the end of college as it is usually defined and the start of this bizarre endless grad student state I didn’t realize I’d be in for quite so long when I started it. 2014 was initially supposed to be my graduation year but I stuck around for my MEng (my master’s) and I was very excited to have gotten into the program and to be making excellent progress toward my dreams, which at that point were to someday get into a PhD program, preferably at Harvard in part because my ex had dropped out of a PhD program at Harvard but especially because I wanted to stay in Cambridge. I’d gotten an extra year extension to stay in my dorm and even in my exact dorm room, so I got to extend my existing life by a year before needing to move on in any way at all. When 1989 came out, in October, I was focusing on teaching—I was TAing 6.005, Elements of Software Construction, which took up most of my time, and most of my time when I wasn’t working on my own classwork was grading or code review or answering student questions. I would have been sat at the same desk in the same room, a few years older and having painted my room a new color (brown, for some unfathomable reason—well, the reason was that I wanted to live in an apartment and brown felt like a grown-up color). I think my main personal struggle was getting through my workload and getting the confidence to look for a lab to do my thesis work in. This was a few months before I started in the lab I’m in now and I think it is about when time melted into itself and dissolved. (I still don’t know why it did that, and I haven’t been able to get it to come back together since.)

New Romantics is my favorite song on 1989. It was my phone alarm for a long time, which meant it was the first thing I heard when I woke up every day.

Moving To New York by the Wombats

Moving To New York is originally, for me, from a burned copy of the Wombats’ first album from one of my closest friends in 8th grade through high school—who, ironically, ended up in Chicago, where I started. He even included a CD cover and a replica of the album cover printed on a color printer (color printers being especially rare for me to encounter in high school). That album and this song as my favorite from that album are prominent in my memories of and have followed me consistently through high school and college and then my master’s and the year between my master’s and my PhD and now my PhD. And all the music the Wombats (and Love Fame Tragedy) have made since then (and there are other favorite Wombats songs—especially Pink Lemonade and 21st Century Blues and Flip Me Upside Down).

Finally, three songs that I just really like. I don’t remember when I first heard them. They are special to me for no reason at all.

Just What I Needed by the Cars

The Lovecats by the Cure

It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me by Billy Joel

It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me, recently, is rollerblading round and round a tiny outdoor basketball court with my mom and riding in my car, my mom’s old car, with my partner, on the way to the post office, with the windows down, feeling, like that song always makes me feel, a bit like we’re in a fancy convertible.

There it is again, Vecna, followed us on a tote bag, probably from one of those same career fairs.

(First part of blog post title by Cory.)

What I’ve Learned About Making Scientific Posters

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I was lucky to get to present our now published recent work, learning from last summer’s SARS-CoV-2 Delta outbreak in Ptown, at last winter’s Broad retreat. My goal was entirely to do justice to the work and the massive number of people who did that work, but to my surprise and delight we won a poster prize in the Computational Biology and Data Science category, which as you might imagine is one of the largest and most interesting categories at the Broad. I think our poster won primarily because of the project, not the poster itself, but I think the poster itself had to have also been pretty okay, at the very least clear and effective. I learned a lot putting it together, and I also learned a lot putting together other, not as astoundingly successful posters in past years and collecting my colleagues’ good advice.

Here is how the poster turned out:

The first thing I did was add the title, stretched in very large (size 85) font to cover the entire top of the poster, so that people could easily read it from far away. Our poster title was the title of our paper: Transmission from vaccinated individuals in a large SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant outbreak.

I divided the poster itself into two columns, expecting that after the title the reader would read the left column from top to bottom and then the right column from top to bottom. The left column starts with the author list and the graphical abstract side by side. The author list, which is huge, is in small-ish (size 18) font, with affiliations in even smaller font (size 12) below it. The graphical abstract is gorgeous and effective and was made by the Broad Pattern team in a process that was both extremely impressive and also very collaborative and iterative, a lot like the process of putting together the eventual journal cover with Thought Café. This project was my first time working with professional scientific illustrators, more scientific and detailed in the case of the graphical abstract and more abstract (a pun! yay!) in the case of the cover.

The rest of the poster dives into the science. Our abstract does a great job summarizing the work and our findings (the purpose of the abstract), so I organized our the bulk of the poster around the abstract, in its entirety, divided into five parts and shown in large (size 37) text.

The first sentence of our abstract covers background on the outbreak and gives context for the questions we ask in the paper. I put this sentence first after the author list and graphical abstract, on its own in the middle of the left column:

An outbreak of over one thousand COVID-19 cases in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in July 2021—the first large outbreak mostly in vaccinated individuals in the US—prompted a comprehensive public health response, motivating changes to national masking recommendations and raising questions about infection and transmission among vaccinated individuals.

The rest of the abstract presents the four takeaways of the paper, each in one sentence:

  1. To address these questions, we combined genomic and epidemiological data from 467 individuals, including 40% of known outbreak-associated cases.
  2. The Delta variant accounted for 99% of outbreak-associated cases in this dataset; it was introduced from at least 40 sources, but 83% of cases derived from a single source, likely through transmission across multiple settings over a short time rather than a single event.
  3. Genomic and epidemiological data supported multiple transmissions of Delta from and between fully vaccinated individuals.
  4. Despite its magnitude, the outbreak had limited onward impact in MA and the US, likely due to high vaccination rates and a robust public health response.

I gave each of these points its own results section on the poster, in order, in whatever way I was able to get them to fit in the two columns. The first point ended up at the bottom of the left column and the other three divided the right column more or less equally.

Each results section starts with its sentence from the abstract, in large font as a header for the section, padded by at least some whitespace above and below. The hope is that a person with not a lot of time to dedicate to the poster can grasp the main takeaways simply by reading everything that is in the largest font. In all cases but one the section’s header sentence is at the top of the section; in one case the content of the section was tall so the large-font sentence is in the top left, which is still easy to find and I think adds some pleasant variety to the layout.

Next, I pulled out the figure panels that contributed to the message of each results section. The figure panels in a section were not always from the same figures and were not only from the main figures. Here are the figure panels that ended up included in each section of the poster:

  • Section 1: Figure 1 in its entirety and Figure S1 in its entirety
  • Section 2: Figure 2A and Figure S4A
  • Section 3: Figure 3 in its entirety and Figure S5C
  • Section 4: Figure 2C and Figure S4B

I added the figure legends around the figures in very small (size 14) text, so that someone who really wants to can read them and someone who does not want to read them can easily ignore them. In a few cases I was able to fit the entire figure legend for a panel under that panel, but in most cases I had to clump the figure legends together with labels like Left, Right, Middle, Top, Left Top, and Left Inset. Like a game of Twister but for the eyes.

I did not include any figure and panel numbers or references to other figure panels, because I wanted the figures to be at home in the poster and not just visiting from the paper.

Finally, I added three QR codes, because I had seen QR codes on other posters and found them absolutely delightful and very novel. They are probably neither delightful nor novel at this point (and probably weren’t delightful or novel at that point either) but I think they were useful.

One QR code leads to our interactive tree, where you can examine the temporal and genetic relationships between our SARS-CoV-2 sequences in the context of other Delta sequences. This tree is most relevant to the second results section of the poster so I placed it there, with “Interactive tree” and a little arrow to the QR code.

The other two QR codes are relevant to the paper as a whole. One points to the preprint (the paper was not yet published in a peer-reviewed journal) and the other points to the tweetorial I wrote summarizing the paper both for people who are in our relatively small subfield of biology and hopefully also for people who are not. I put these two QR codes at the very bottom left of the poster, because that is the corner that had space. In addition to squishing them into a corner I also put a little box around them to signify that they are separate from the results section they are next to. I also labeled them: “Preprint” and “Tweetorial” with little arrows to the QR codes. (Really the arrows should point from the QR codes to the things the QR codes point to, and not the other way around, but that’s too complicated and not a hill I was willing to kill this poster on.)

And that brings us to the poster’s final form:

Here are the five lessons I learned:

  1. Information should be presented in order along the path you expect the eye to follow.
  2. The more QR codes the better. This is half-joking, but three was clearly not too many.
  3. The most important takeaways should be in the biggest font, with font size corresponding to importance.
  4. The poster should be skimmable to the reader’s preference of skimmability. I used to think there should be minimal text, and I still do, but now I think it is also important to give an interested reader something to look at more closely. But any text that is not an important takeaway should be unintimidating and easy to avoid reading if a reader does not have time or spoons to read it.
  5. I’ve seen a lot of posters that show the background, methods, results, and conclusions, each in its own section, and in most cases I personally much prefer when a poster focuses on and is organized around the big takeaways of the work. I don’t remember a lot long-term; it helps to be directed to the important parts. (Of course, it is entirely possible that the next project I make a poster for will be perfect for the background-methods-results-conclusions format and I will take this all back.)

Here is the poster as a zoomable pdf:

PTown retreat posterDownload

Here is a video of the poster printing (!). It’s silly, but it was exciting for me:

I couldn’t get my poster to send itself to the poster printer (the morning of the poster session, because as hard as I try that is the timeline I apparently work on) and a fellow Broadie helped me because that is just what the Broad culture is like, a cozy and collaborative (and absurdly smart) home.

Here is the poster on its poster board, at poster spot 2, poster spot 2 itself being a great honor:

Because of its layout, the poster was very easy to present. The poster session was in person, which was also very fun. I was able to simply gesture to and summarize the main points and describe the takeaways from the figures that led to the main points. When a new person joined I was able to quickly interrupt myself to summarize the project overall, I think along with a quick list of the main points while gesturing to them, and then jump back into the point I was presenting. I cycled through the main points as people came and went.

I was lucky that I was very much on that day; it was absolutely one of my better presentation days, and the project itself had filled my entire brain for months. I really enjoyed presenting to the smaller groups that visited our poster; it felt more like a conversation than a presentation. I liked that people were comfortable interrupting me to ask questions and I liked that I was able to think about the questions for longer than I usually feel comfortable stopping during a talk. I have noticed over the past year that I really like being able to make eye contact with people and feel like we are in conversation. The more conversational and less formal the situation feels, the better I am at presenting the work, a little correlated (R2 being maybe about 0.65) with the number of people I am talking with. I have not recently given a talk in person, but the pattern seems to hold at least over zoom and in this one in-person poster session. I’d like to learn how to bring the same energy to all my presentations, including in contexts that are more challenging or high stakes. Something to strive for and remember very fondly. This poster session was amazing. I want all my communication about my work to feel like it felt.

Window View

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This is my favorite window view at work. It is right by the coffee machine in the little kitchenette on the 6th floor of the Broad, where I work. When I am waiting for my coffee I like to stand by this window. The view is of a corner of the Broad Institute and one side of the Whitehead Institute. Every square in this large grid is a part of a lab; each little window contains miniature people like me whose days are spent in the lab and in front of the computer—in my view, just a two-dimensional glass square and sometimes the publications that ultimately flow out of it; to them, everything, and if they looked out their window they’d see me waiting for my coffee and I would be small.

This is my favorite window view at home. We live in Peabody, which is not quite a suburb, more a small town in its own right but without the usual trappings of a small town, and far too far away to be an extension of Boston like Cambridge is. As I write this it’s raining, and foggy, and dark—the start of spring. Cars bring up rain from the street and their headlights illuminate it and the lights and the chimneys and the treetops are outlined in the bright night sky, and you can just see the lights on our fence. I grew up in a neighborhood without fences, low to the ground; now I live and I work exclusively in tall places, surrounded always by the little lights of other people’s lives.

In 2020, right before the start of the pandemic, I bought myself tickets to see Carmen at the Boston Ballet as a late birthday present. Carmen was postponed to August, then canceled, and now in 2022 I have transferred my tickets finally to see a ballet set to the Rolling Stones as a late birthday present.

Ballet has a magical effect. The last time I went to the ballet I saw Robbins. I was just about to start my PhD. On the way home on the train platform waiting for the Red Line, looking over the tracks at the other platform, everything seemed magical, timed. For a few hours I saw intention in everyone’s movements and postures and I felt a beautiful connection to the train schedule and to the city and everywhere I looked I saw mathematics and art. I felt myself a part of a giant clock, ticking and ticking and me so small in it. And tonight looking out at the windows and the fog I feel a part of a giant clock, ticking and ticking and me so small in it.

Tick tick tick.

Ten Strategies I Use to Work Through Burnout or Mild Depression or Scatterbrainedness (and Other Low-Motivation Moments)

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I spent a year in seventh grade at Whitney Young Magnet High School in Chicago before my family moved to Pennsylvania. At the start of the year the seventh graders were counselled to be working all the time, and efficiently—if you’re in the back of a car, you bring your textbooks and you work; if you’re on the bus, you bring your textbooks and you work; if you’re waiting in line at the grocery store, you bring your textbooks and you work. I think that year was the year that set me on track for the rest of my career—seventh grade was the year I learned how to work hard, high school and then undergrad at MIT was where I learned my limits and how to work through and around them, and grad school has been where I learned to self-motivate and direct that work (and I am very much still learning). MIT and grad school (and life) have also both taught me that work should not be my top priority, and that prioritizing work above all else does not end up being productive or happy for me in the end.

I don’t think I’ve ever been able to work through actual depression. But more minor or time-limited depression, or even burnout, if I can’t take time off, I have found I can work through, and I use the same strategies for standard low-motivation days or days when it’s just hard to get started or days when I’m scatterbrained or overwhelmed or can’t get myself to focus—Mondays, or days when I intend to work on a challenging task, or Tuesdays or Wednesdays or Thursdays or Fridays.

Here are ten strategies I use to work through burnout or mild depression or scatterbrainedness and other low-motivation moments—

I. Make it a priority to take good care of yourself.
II. Clarify your goals.
III. Reinforce your reward system.
IV. Rolling for Initiative: remove decisions.
V. Group tasks with similar tasks or with things you enjoy.
VI. Schedule as many tasks as you can.
VII. Join or form an accountability group.
VIII. Pomodoro.
IX. Do as much of a task as you’re willing to do.
X. Schedule breaks, accept your needs, and give yourself time.

I. Make it a priority to take good care of yourself.

Sometimes when I am having trouble focusing it helps me to first go through a checklist of my basic needs as an organism with a corporeal form:

  1. drink a glass of water (1 minute)
  2. clean my space, especially the space where I will be working—this tends to be speedier than I expect and have an outsized effect on how put-together I feel (5-30 minutes)
  3. light exercise, like a jog if the weather is nice or spinning the stationary bike if the weather is not nice (10-20 minutes)
  4. go for a short walk outside, especially with our housemate’s dog Pixel (10-20 minutes)
  5. meditation (3-10 minutes)
  6. eat a nice meal, especially a nice, large breakfast—preferably something with protein, carbs, fat, and some fruit and/or vegetables (20 minutes)
  7. get enough sleep, ideally in one big-but-not-too-big chunk at night like a respectable adult human person (hours and hours)

This is my list of things I need to do to feel physically well. Maybe you have other things you need to do to feel physically well.

All of this takes some time, but I always feel at least a little better after going through it, even if I can only get myself to go through two or three of these items. The time it takes to do everything other than sleep is usually a few hours, which is a lot less time than I am capable of losing to unproductive unhappy scattered feelings. Even if I step away from productivity entirely and spend a day on this list and nothing else, I am usually far more productive with far less struggle when I return the next day.

One month when I was feeling very stuck I found the Fabulous app to be helpful in reminding me to prioritize my health and giving me nice little dopamine rewards for doing some of the above things.

I use Headspace for meditation. I like that there are meditation series, which give me some continuity and a feeling that I am building something, as well one-off meditations on specific topics that I might want to focus on in a given moment. I also like that I can customize the length of time I would like to meditate, because sometimes I feel up for meditating for ten minutes and sometimes I am only up for meditating for three minutes. Lately, I have been meditating on the commuter rail on my way to or from work.

Here are some photos of my fancy breakfasts:

I like pickles and brie as a combination, or brie and chopped prunes, or brussels sprouts chopped small and fried, or oats with bananas and blueberries or bananas and cinnamon, or oatmeal with jam, or toast with butter, or an omelet with some vegetables, or some deli turkey, or maybe some chocolate or some berries.

If you like pancakes and you like oatmeal and you think you might enjoy a combination of pancakes and oatmeal, here is a recipe I like:

  1. Mash a banana, the more overripe the better.
  2. Mix in an egg until you can’t tell the banana and egg apart.
  3. Add between half a cup and a cup and a half of oats, or however much that the mixture looks to be about the consistency in the photo below and more or less kind of has some structure.
  4. Add a bunch of cinnamon, however much cinnamon is the amount of cinnamon you like (I like cinnamon).
  5. Heat some olive oil on a pan on medium heat.
  6. Spoon some of the oat mixture onto the pan. I like to make four pancakes at a time.
  7. Once the bottoms are solid enough that the pancakes can be flipped (you can tell by looking at the edges or poking under them with a spatula), flip them. Once the new bottoms are solid enough again, transfer to a plate.
  8. Repeat until you’re out of oat mixture or patience.

I don’t usually make it through the entire amount in one meal, so I usually end up storing leftover cooked pancakes for the next day’s breakfast or snack.

This is a tricksy food. It does not seem like a large meal, but the dry-ish oats keep expanding once they’re in your stomach and absorbing moisture and you can feel nice and full for a long time and trick yourself into eating a good amount if eating is a challenge at the moment—and a banana and oats and an egg are not the worst thing to eat a lot of.

II. Clarify your goals.

The point of this exercise is take the disorganized, scary, overwhelming pile of tasks in your brain (or at least that is the natural shape of tasks in my brain) and convert them into an organized, approachable, actionable system that is not overwhelming and is actually usable.

I use Notion, which I first learned about from the current generation of MIT Admissions bloggers, specifically Kathleen E. ’23.

  1. Digitally (easy to edit) or on paper (no distractions), write out everything you need to do or would like to do. This can be a very long list, and that is okay.
  2. Decide which things can possibly be delayed or dropped, including meetings on your calendar. When I feel very overwhelmed, removing things from my plate helps me feel much better rather quickly. Send quick messages to the people who are counting on you for those things or are planning to meet with you and ask for extensions or to reschedule. This can be challenging, but do it and do it quickly and move on. People are usually very amenable to delays or reschedulings if those delays or reschedulings are clearly communicated and do not happen too often.
  3. Decide which things you would like to focus on today. Make this set of things small and not overwhelming, maybe just one or two things. (You can always add more things later, if you get these done.) I recommend starting with things that are weighing on you—for me, that’s things that I have external pressure to complete, things that I worry I will let someone down by not doing. From these, start with the fastest things, because getting them done will feel like a weight off your shoulders and remove a bit of suffering and that will make the next task or set of tasks easier and the next day happier.
  4. Start a new document or chunk of document with just those few things you are focusing on today. Write out in detail and in order every step you need to take in order to complete the tasks, breaking the tasks down into the smallest possible steps—small like “find and download file X,” or “write a paragraph about Y.”
  5. Emphasize (highlight or make to have a dark font) those tasks that you can do now, that don’t depend on other tasks. De-emphasize (cover up or make to have a light font) those tasks that depend on things that haven’t happened yet.

This is your to-do list. Hopefully it is composed of small, doable tasks, and doesn’t contain any big tasks or big-picture goals. Try not to think about things that are not on this list.

I go through this process about weekly, on Sunday night or Monday morning, adjusting it as the week goes on or I gain new tasks or new information about my tasks or priorities. During the week I select small tasks from my large, digital to-do list for my daily, pen-and-paper to-do lists.

III. Reinforce your reward system.

I try to give myself some nice dopamine whenever I complete a task or move in a direction that I find productive or which contributes to my goals. The primary way I do this is in my to-do list notebook. My to-do list notebook is sacred to me. I buy a new one every year, identical but in a new color, and I carry it everywhere.

Every morning, or the night before if I can manage, I make a list of my tasks for the day, work tasks in a column on the left and self-care or other non-work tasks on the right. I include things I want to do that are not tasks but which I want to make sure I make time for, like calling my family or reading a chapter of a novel or building a Lego with my partner Cory. I write this list with my fancy flowy pens.

Every day, I select a gel pen for the day, sometimes a sparkly gel pen with glitter in the ink. I use the day’s gel pen to cross out tasks I complete. I cross out each task three times, with three lines, so I get to experience the joy of crossing out the task multiple times. When I complete a task that was not only on today’s list but also unfinished on a previous day’s list, I cross it out from each list it appears on, which means I get an extra rewards for completing a task that has taken me multiple days (or weeks) to get myself to do.

When I complete a task that brings me closer to a larger goal that is important to me, like a paper or another project I am working on, I give myself a shiny star. I also give myself a shiny star when I complete a task that is an important and challenging self-care task, like exercising or meditating. I stick the star in an empty part of the day’s page in my to-do list notebook, next to my to-do list. I write a short description of what I did to earn the star and I draw an arrow from the description to the star I earned.

I try to give myself my sparkly task cross-outs and star stickers as immediately as possible after I have completed a task, to make sure I associate the reward with the task.

I keep my to-do list notebook open next to my laptop all day as I work. Throughout the day I like to look over at my list and look at how nicely my gel pen cross-outs glitter in the light and how nicely my stars shine in the light. It is extra nice to get to see all my progress as glitter and sparkle; it is very, very satisfying.

In undergrad at MIT I kept my to-do lists in Habitica, formerly known as HabitRPG. You create a little virtual pixelated avatar. You list out your tasks on the site and when you complete your tasks your virtual avatar is rewarded. You can earn pretty outfits for your avatar and you can earn cute pixelated pets or steeds, some of them very exotic and fun, like octopuses (a famously exotic and fun animal) or mammoths and baby mammoths. You can go on special quests, which can last days or longer. It’s very motivating and fun. Habitica was very popular in my very nerdy dorm, Random Hall, and got me through a lot of challenging and overwhelming weeks at MIT. Habitica is also cited by one of my favorite authors, Mary Robinette Kowal, in the acknowledgments section of her latest book, The Relentless Moon.

Here is my Habitica avatar:

For some reason, another thing I have found helpful is Animal Crossing. I didn’t play video games as a child and am now very bad at them, but I do play Animal Crossing (and it is the only video game I play). I like that Animal Crossing rewards me immediately for doing small tasks. Somehow the feeling transfers over to real life—especially when the real-life thing I am doing feels like a slog with a distant or intangible reward, playing Animal Crossing seems to retrain my brain to remember that I should feel rewarded when I make progress. I found Animal Crossing bizarrely helpful for my motivation when I was studying for my qualifying exam, which felt endless. It’s an effect beyond just feeling refreshed from taking a break—Animal Crossing seems to remind me that positive feedback is possible and that I am capable of completing tasks.

Here I am being a grad student obsessed with little libraries and being comfy with books in Animial Crossing just like in real life. I am full of exactly no surprises.

IV. Rolling for Initiative: remove decisions.

We call this strategy Rolling for Initiative. I do it almost every day. I learned it from friends from MIT. It is one of my favorites.

I find Rolling for Initiative to be day-saving on days when I feel overwhelmed and can’t figure out how to prioritize, or when I feel unproductive and can’t get myself to feel willing to do anything. Sometimes, the thing that is holding me back from starting a task is that either the decision to start a task or the decision of which particular task to start becomes a huge hurdle. Often (almost always), the actual choice made matters a lot less than that some choice is made—and that there is some forward movement.

  1. First, I make a list of the tasks I need to do, usually by clarifying my goals using the previous two methods. I make this list in my sacred to-do list notebook (above), but you can make your list anywhere. This list always also includes non-work and non-urgent tasks and self-care, like cleaning or laundry or meditation.
  2. I also add activities that I am genuinely interested in doing, like reading a book or going outside for a walk.
  3. Looking through my list, I identify the six tasks or activities that I find the most tolerable at the moment, that I actually feel able to engage in from whatever happens to be my current state. I number these tasks one through six. If I am not able to identify six tasks that feel tolerable, I give the most tolerable-feeling tasks two numbers.
  4. I roll a dice. Whatever number it lands on is the task or activity I engage in.

I use my partner Cory’s fancy DnD and board game dice. I use a new die every day. It is a fun ritual to select the die that feels best today (and matches my to-do list gel pen for the day). Sometimes I have more than six tasks I want to choose from all at once (or selecting six tasks is itself too challenging a decision), and then I like to use a die with more faces.

Here is our very modest dice collection:

V. Group tasks with similar tasks or with things you enjoy.

Like in Rolling for Initiative, the goal here is to do whatever it takes to remove the challenge of starting a task.

If possible, pair something you don’t want to do with something you do want to do. If Cory and I want to run but also really don’t want to, we run to a nice destination. When we lived in Cambridge, Cory and I ran to Union Square Donuts once a week on the weekends. We ran and we got donuts at the end. I also pair laundry or cleaning or exercise with television. Lately I have been watching documentaries: on eugenics and Prohibition and Mark Twain and Hemingway and tuberculosis. If I’m watching a documentary it is easier to exercise or clean or do another task that does not actually require my eyes and ears.

You can also decrease the challenge of starting a task by removing the “start” part of it by tacking it onto the end of a similar task. If you need to write a bunch of emails, write a bunch of emails, instead of writing each email on its own. Task-switching is really hard for me—I find it a lot easier to do a task that is similar to the preceding task I did. (Of course, if “write a bunch of emails” as a task is overwhelming, then maybe just write one.)

VI. Schedule as many tasks as you can.

You can also make it easier to start a task by turning it into a routine. Where possible, try to do things at about the same time or in the same sequence every day. If you run or go for a walk right before lunch, then it becomes easier to do it. It helps remove the decision, which makes it much easier to get started.

One way to do this is to schedule something with other people.

VII. Join or form an accountability group.

On weekdays I meet up with a group of other trainees over zoom for a little more than an hour at 9:30am. We are all overscheduled, so there are between two and four of us on any given day, and there are four of us in total. We start by asking each other how the previous day went and setting goals for the following 45 minutes. Then we leave the zoom meeting and work independently on the goals we set. We meet back up at 10:30 and report on how the 45 minutes went. Finally, we set goals for the rest of the day. In addition to setting productive goals, we also try to each set a wellness goal.

We started meeting as part of a short-term accountability group organized by Harvard’s Academic Resource Center in September 2020. When that short term ended we kept meeting. Our first meeting was Monday, September 14, 2020. We’ve met almost every workday for 17 months.

On my least productive days, I don’t get anything done after our meeting ends, but at least I move forward during that hour. Accountability group usually breaks through the difficulty of starting work in the morning and always breaks through the difficulty of starting work for the week. While I still have days when I don’t get much done, the stretch of “dark” time is much shorter. I no longer have entire weeks when I don’t make progress toward my goals.

Accountability group has also made me better at setting realistic goals and estimating how long a task will take. I get daily practice setting both 45-minute goals and goals for a day.

Not to mention that the group has become my very good friends and an important part of my support network, and that I look forward to us seeing each other and starting our day together.

VIII. Pomodoro.

Pomodoro is also helpful for getting me to start working on a task (or start working at all). In the Pomodoro technique, you work for a set length of time (I set my sprints to 20 minutes). Then you take a break for a short amount of time (I set my breaks to 5 minutes). Then you work, then you take a break, and so on. After a certain number of sprints, you get to take a longer break (I set my long breaks to 15 minutes). During your sprints, you turn on “do not disturb,” don’t open email or social media, and put your phone away. It is much easier for me to resist distractions when I know I can be comfortably distracted by them without guilt in 20 minutes.

Pomodoro means that instead of approaching a whole task, I approach the concept of working on it for 20 minutes. Sometimes it is easier for me to convince myself to work on a large or ambiguous task for 20 minutes than it is to convince myself to work on it until some benchmark, especially if the task is ambiguous enough that there aren’t any benchmarks. Those 20 minutes are usually enough time for me to become engaged in a task (and then I just keep working), understand an ambiguous task enough that I can break it down into well-defined smaller tasks or ask for help, and identify and possibly resolve the barriers that were making the task difficult to approach.

I use the Be Focused desktop app. I like that I can make a to-do list and select which item I am focusing on for a sprint, and I like that the app tracks how many sprints I have dedicated to each task. I also like the sounds it makes. My friends from accountability group recommend the Bear Focus Timer app.

IX. Do as much of a task as you’re willing to do.

Sometimes a task is too large for me to feel willing to do, even if it is not a large task. Sometimes I’m able to make progress by being okay with doing one small part of the task, whatever that small part is. For example, I might not feel up for doing laundry, but I can get myself to put all the laundry in my laundry bag and leave the laundry bag by the door. Or cleaning the kitchen might feel impossible, but cleaning a small part of the kitchen feels doable. Or I might feel up for working on something for just 15 minutes, and then I let myself work on it for just 15 minutes and pick it back up later. At least it is progress and that is what matters.

X. Schedule breaks, accept your needs, and give yourself time.

Finally, I find it helpful for my productivity to not be productive all the time. I think it is important to schedule breaks. I think it is very important that these breaks are scheduled—that they happen regardless of whether or not you have completed your tasks and that they are not something you have to earn. During these breaks, you should do things you actually enjoy, not things you think you should enjoy. (I once again recommend Animal Crossing.)

In addition to vacations, I give myself a break for a full day every week by observing Shabbat: every week, I try not to work between sunset on Friday until after sunset on Saturday. I don’t observe particularly strictly, but I try to only do the things I genuinely want to do and I try not to do or even think about anything related to my job. I also write planned breaks and other things I am looking forward to into the monthly calendar view of my to-do list notebook.

Similarly, often when I am having trouble motivating myself to be productive (especially if it’s not the start of the week), I just need a break, preferably guilt-free. It is hard to face that I am not going to be productive for some chunk of time when I had hoped to work, but feeling guilty and struggling usually is not as pleasant or productive an experience as calling it earlier and trying again in a few hours or the next morning.

Things you can purchase:

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. This blog post includes links with my Amazon referral code. If you click one and buy something, I get about 4% of the price as commission. You don’t have to buy these things from Amazon—actually, you don’t have to buy these things at all. You can also support me by buying merch of my art, by buying me a campground store decaf coffee, or by simply reading and enjoying. Thank you!

My sacred to-do list notebook is a Moleskine daily planner, this year in green. (I buy whatever color is cheapest in December, which gives me a nice variety of colors from year to year.)

I write my to-do lists with black 0.5 mm uni-ball pens. I also use these pens for line art, and otherwise I do not use them. They are my sacred to-do list and art pens.

I cross out completed to-do list items with gel pens, usually but not always glittery. I keep them in their nice carrying case they came in. I took out the ones I didn’t love (and left them in a little library) so that my daily choice of gel pen would not have any possible wrong answers. I do not use these gel pens for anything other than for crossing out to-do list items. They are my sacred to-do list gel pens.

I also have an absolutely absurd collection of shiny star stickers in different colors and sizes. Lately I have been using almost exclusively the smallest star stickers. I keep the two or three or four sticker sheets I am currently using in my to-do list notebook and I keep the rest in the pocket of my gel pens’ carrying case.

Finally, dice.

@techroastshow

my life is good now #techbro #techie #softwareengineer #siliconvalley #seattle #sanfrancisco #bayarea #engineeringlife #comedy #character #fyp

♬ original sound – socially inept
@themorsecoda

this is a good plan, I think. this will go well for me

♬ original sound – Morgan Morse

The Story of Our Cell Cover

lydiaandreyevnakrasilnikova4 Comments

Possibly the coolest thing that’s happened to me, definitely the coolest thing that’s happened to me professionally, is getting to be a part of a project that not only got to be in Cell, but also got to be on the cover of Cell. In this blog post, I want to tell you about the process that created that cover, because it’s very different from anything else that has happened to me and I think it went extraordinarily well.

We worked with Thought Café, whom you might recognize because they also illustrate CrashCourse videos. We worked with Julia Nadeau, Head of Production, and with amazing illustrator Eric Diotte—check out Eric’s instagram and web site:

Initial Brainstorming

A few of us (Katie S., Gage, Bronwyn, Danny, Steve S., and I) from deep in the science of the project on the Broad side of the collaboration met and brainstormed as a group before engaging the illustration team. This was a very fun meeting—we all pitched ideas for the cover and riffed off each other. After our brainstorming session, I sent an initial email to the illustration team. In this initial email, I included:

I also included a summary of our group’s initial brainstorming—

Looking at existing Cell covers, we think we’re going to want to go for something more abstract, with mostly metaphorical connection to the work and with some elements added in literally.

(Can you tell I love Escher?)

The one thing I did not include but should have included is examples of existing Cell covers that we liked. (Julia asked for links to existing Cell covers and we provided them in a follow-up email.)

Initial Sketches

Because we had brainstormed ahead of time, Eric already had sketches of the four most promising of our ideas ready for our initial meeting.

We talked through each of the four:

  • In A, a dandelion flower has SARS-CoV-2 virions in place of the seeds. Its seeds, the SARS-CoV-2 virions, blow off the flower and into the air; in the background are rolling hills of many, many dandelion flowers.
  • In B, a tree has many dense branches (like a phylogenetic tree of an outbreak) and roots made of genetic material, with SARS-CoV-2 virions growing like flowers on its branches and appearing in the air around it.
  • In C, a wave represents the different “waves” of COVID, SARS-CoV-2 virions appearing in the foam.
  • In D, colorful wildflowers shaped like SARS-CoV-2 virions represents the many introductions of Delta into the outbreak; in the background are fields of identical flowers showing that only one plant had taken over, one Delta introduction accounting for most of the outbreak.

Eric modified the dandelions live during our meeting, confining them to a bubble to convey that the Ptown outbreak was successfully contained.

At this stage the dandelions were my personal favorite because I love dandelions as a metaphor for pretty much anything, but the dandelions were getting complicated in their bubble and they didn’t neatly fit the actual messages we wanted to convey. We couldn’t decide on a favorite as a group, so we polled the covid side of the lab over slack to choose between the two top contenders, Hokusai and the dandelions. Hokusai was of course a very clear winner.

Revision and Final Version

Having chosen our overall vision of Hokusai’s Delta wave, we then went through a series of (very) fast revisions with Eric and Julia. Eric revised, Julia sent us the revisions, we discussed internally and suggested, Eric revised, and so on. This was a very collaborative and iterative process: seeing the image converge in the direction of its final form made that direction much clearer, and in almost all cases, we didn’t know what we wanted until we saw something almost but not quite there. The final, polished version looks like this:

I’m very proud of this image. Eric did an extraordinary job, and every detail is something special to us. Here is the write-up I sent Cell describing each of the details:

This cover is a reference to Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa—in this case illustrating instead the SARS-CoV-2 Delta wave in Provincetown, Massachusetts. In “Transmission from vaccinated individuals in a large SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant outbreak,” we use genomic sequencing to learn from the first wave of the Delta variant in Massachusetts, which resulted in a large outbreak in the coastal tourist town of Provincetown. The proposed cover image shows waves containing SARS-CoV-2 virions crashing into a lighthouse. The lighthouse shines a light at the waves, illuminating the single-stranded RNA genomes in the SARS-CoV-2 virions. In this illustration, the waves represent waves of the Delta variant, while the lighthouse represents Provincetown, the site of the outbreak we studied. The light emanating from the lighthouse represents genomic sequencing. The wave that is illuminated, or sequenced, is the first wave approaching Provincetown; it represents the Provincetown outbreak, which was the first wave of Delta in Massachusetts. The Provincetown outbreak was not the largest wave of Delta in Massachusetts, and so the illuminated wave in the illustration is similarly closely followed by another, larger wave. The water to the right of the waves is calm, to signify that Provincetown had very few COVID-19 cases before the outbreak. The lighthouse itself recreates the distinct and consistent coloration and silhouette of the real lighthouses in Provincetown.

If you’ve enjoyed the cover and the process behind it, you might also enjoy the paper it’s about, “Transmission from vaccinated individuals in a large SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant outbreak,” out in Cell.

Tweeting About Your Science: My Guide/What I’ve Learned

lydiaandreyevnakrasilnikova2 Comments

All of the notable things I have ever done—being born, my weird space cow art, my long-form blogging about my mental health, my long-form blogging about underwear, probably other things—were on October 21st rapidly surpassed or at least matched in measurable viewership by 35 words, one emoji, two images, and a link.

The characters in question live in my twitter thread summarizing our study on the July COVID-19 outbreak in Provincetown, Massachusetts—then a preprint, now out in print on the cover of Cell. As I write this sentence, the first tweet of the thread has been viewed over 100,000 times, most of those views having happened within days of the tweet—which means that more than twice the population of my hometown saw at least a summary of our main findings at the moment they had the greatest potential for public health impact. I am quite delighted that the research we all poured our minds and hearts and summer and autumn into was seen by so many people so quickly. I am very impressed by how fast it spread and to whom.

Tweeting about science isn’t something I thought I was good at (and this was my first time doing it), but since it went so well I want to share with you what I’ve learned—for a long time as a consumer and now apparently as a creator. Here is my guide to writing a good twitter thread (tweetorial or tweetstorm, though I’m not a fan of either word) about your research.

Step 0: Before You Tweet

Before you start drafting your tweets, think about who your audience is and what you want your audience to take away from your work:

  1. What are your key scientific findings?
  2. How do you hope your key scientific findings will contribute to people’s everyday lives, immediately or someday?
  3. What action do you want to inspire? Are you hoping that people will alter their behavior? Are you hoping that people will use your tool? Are you hoping that people will build on something you’ve started?
  4. As you wrote the above, whom did you think of? Who are the people who are positioned to use your work immediately? Who are the other people who might also be interested in knowing about it? Who else might stumble on it?
  5. Do you have strong emotions about your work? Do you feel delighted? surprised? grateful? horrified? Is there a particular emotion you want your audience to feel? Are you hoping to delight? to surprise? to horrify? How strong is your own emotion? Does it contribute to your message or does it detract from your message?
  6. In what ways can your work be misinterpreted, misunderstood, or misused, unintentionally or maliciously? Can your work be used to fuel misinformation? Can your work be used to fuel hatred? What content did you personally find helpful in understanding how your work fits into a compassionate, good world? What content might help correct possible misinterpretions of your work?

Step 1: The First Tweet

The first tweet in your thread is the most important tweet of your thread. Most people will not click your link to read your paper and most people will not click your first tweet to read the full thread. For many people, this first tweet is all they will see of your work. It should communicate enough of your main findings and your call to action that not seeing the rest is more or less okay.

To maximize the chance that someone scrolling will read and understand it, your first tweet, more than any of the other tweets in the thread, needs to be short, be easy to understand, and not look like a block of text. Where possible, I recommend using bulleted lists and breaking up your text with plenty of vertical whitespace.

Your first tweet should include a link to the paper (though some people save it for late in the thread, as a sort of reward). If you don’t like the preview that appears when you paste in the URL, you can attach an image. I attached two images: one with the title and one with the abstract. Maybe you have a very pretty image, or a graphic that nicely summarizes your main findings—those would be nice to attach instead. We did not have a graphical abstract yet when I posted this thread, but if I were posting it today I would attach our graphical abstract instead of the images I did attach.

Your first tweet should have some indication that there is a thread attached to it. That indication can be the thread emoji (🧵) or the word thread, perhaps with an arrow (⬇), or it can be a a 1/, or it can be something else.

The first tweet also needs to do the important work of appearing in search results when people look up keywords. Try searching terms related to your work. Look at what results appear on twitter, how many results appear, what kinds of discussions are happening around those terms, and if those discussions involve the audience you are hoping will see your work. In my case, I knew that my twitter thread needed to contain the following keywords:

  • COVID-19
  • SARS-CoV-2
  • Provincetown
  • Ptown
  • outbreak
  • Delta
  • vaccinated
  • vaxxed
  • vaccine
  • public health
  • symptoms

(I don’t see any reason to use hashtags for these keywords—the terms appear in search results regardless of whether or not they have a hashtag in front of them, and having that many hashtags just seems a bit alarming. But I could be wrong.)

These 11 words account for almost a third of the 35 total words of the tweet. I made sacrifices to ensure that they all appeared. (Vaccinated, for example, is much longer than vaxxed, and Provincetown is much longer than Ptown—but they each produce their own search results and I wanted our paper to appear in all of them.)

If you would like and if it comes naturally, you can also (or alternatively) include in your first tweet some kind of a hook—a funny joke, a cliffhanger, an unanswered question, or content that elicits an emotional response. With a hook people will be more likely to click to read the details, but they are also less likely to walk away understanding your work if they don’t click. If the thing that is important to you is that as many people as possible walk away with some understanding of your work, you probably want to summarize your work in the first tweet. If you would like to connect more deeply with a smaller number of people, rather than shallowly with a large number of people, it might be better to use a hook. (I of course did not do that.)

Finally, I think it is important to include yourself in the work. The science is done by people and people like other people. I start the first tweet with Our and many of my other tweets in the thread start with We. I am a person who likes exclamation marks so I include exclamation marks—because exclamation marks best capture how I feel about this paper.

Things to Know

Here are seven general principles to keep in mind as you draft your twitter thread.

  1. I recommend you draft your tweets in Google Docs or similar, and that you get feedback from your co-authors and revise at least once before posting. This thread took me three days with feedback from multiple co-authors: Katie, Bronwyn, Gage, and Pardis all helped me revise this thread and made it much better. (In its original form, it didn’t even have capital letters.)
  2. Each tweet should be its own complete thought. If a person retweets one tweet from your thread and not any of the others, its message should be clear. It should not be possible to take any individual tweet out of context to mean something you did not intend.
  3. Where possible, and especially when making important points, make your text easier to digest by breaking it into bullet points or breaking it up with vertical whitespace.
  4. If you include a url in your tweet, your tweet will have a nice link preview. If you attach any images to your tweet, the link preview will not appear. The link preview in the final, posted tweet will look the same as it looks in the draft tweet before you post.
  5. If you end your tweet in a url (if the url is the very, very last thing in your tweet) and you have not attached any images, the url itself will not appear in the tweet when it is posted (but the link preview will).
  6. Most people do not click on images. You should size your images so that the preview that people see on twitter looks the same as the image itself. If you are attaching one image, it should be 1500 pixels wide and 850 pixels tall (or scaled with that same aspect ratio). If you are attaching more than one image, all of your images should be square. The final cropping of the images does not always match the preview of your tweet draft, nor is it consistent between devices. If it is important that people see the entire image, including the edges, add some white space all around your image so that the content of the image will still be visible even the edges are slightly cropped. (If you do not have image editing software, you can download and use GIMP for free.) I do not recommend attaching more than two images—the previews will be too small to see without clicking, and most people will not click.
  7. Create a secret fake twitter account to test out your tweets before posting them for real. Delete your test tweets immediately. Do test post the actual images you intend to post to make sure they appear as you expect them to appear and are cropped as you expect them to be cropped. Do not link to your work or post any of the actual text you intend to post—not even for a moment. Other than images, replace your actual text with dummy text and your actual urls with dummy urls when you test post. You can also use this account to draft your actual tweets (without posting them) to make sure they fit within the character limit—don’t rely on other applications to count characters; they all seem to count in their own ways.

Step 2: Context, Background, Collaborations

This part is easy. I initially had this tweet closer to the end, but my co-authors encouraged me to move it to the front and I think it is much better here. We start off by acknowledging the organizations involved in this study, because the list was huge. If it were a much smaller study, I might start off by acknowledging the individual authors. It is also helpful to start off with some context—has this work been peer reviewed? Does this work build on previous work? Does this work build on anything familiar to the audience?

If someone has clicked your first tweet to read the thread, they are already in and willing to skim. Your second tweet does not have to be very exciting.

You might notice that while this tweet includes an attractive preview of the link, it does not include the actual url. That is because the url is pasted after the 2/. Because the url is the very last thing in the tweet and there is no image attached to the tweet, the actual url does not appear.

Step 3: Paper Summary

The paper summary will likely be the bulk of your thread. As much as possible, each tweet should include one complete and clear idea and be retweetable on its own. Where relevant, you should include figures from the paper. Try to add some emojis. You can also include links to previous work or work that you use or build on. I start many of these tweets with We.

The order in which ideas appear and the ways you present those ideas might not match their order or presentation in the paper. Your audience on twitter is almost definitely broader than the audience you wrote the paper for, and your language and narrative should adapt. Your focus should be on communicating the findings that are most relevant to this broader audience in a way that is understandable (and not condescending), with minimal jargon. In some cases you might want to delve into more detail, and that’s okay—tweets including jargon should be easy to skim and easy to grasp at least the purpose of without extensive background in your field and should not be necessary for understanding the overall story.

Step 4: Findings Summary

Your paper summary should end in a tweet summarizing the findings that are most relevant to your audience, or most actionable.

Step 5: Your Findings Out in the World

This is the hardest part.

This section is about the role you hope your work will play in the world, and it is a part of your efforts to shape that role. Here, you need to anticipate the ways in which your work could be used to misinform or hurt. You should address possible misinterpretations explicitly and head on. You should provide links to informative content people can engage with to address possible misinterpretations before they arise. Wherever possible, that content should be readable by people outside your field.

If you are less worried about misinterpretation or misuse of your work, you can instead or additionally use this space to explore the life you hope your work will live in the world—how you hope people will use or build on your work, or your own emotional response (if you have one you’d like to share) to your findings.

In either case, it is nice to end with a positive or hopeful feeling before your call to action, because hope is empowering.

Step 6: Key Takeaways/Calls to Action

Finally, at the very end, I have the final takeaways (the third time I am adding takeaways—but that is what this thread is). These takeaways do not relate to the content of the paper itself; instead, they are focused on how I hope the paper’s findings will be useful in the real world. I end by making explicit the calls to action I tried to imply in the first tweet and have been building toward throughout the thread.

Step 7: The End/Thank Yous

This part is fun (and easy). Thank your co-authors—the first and last authors first, if the full author list is very long, and the full author list listed out or in summary. If anyone is on twitter, tag them.

When you are ready to post, use twitter in a web browser on your computer (not the app on your phone) to prepare the thread in advance and then post the entire thread at the same time.

The time you post your thread is important. Don’t tweet when your target audience is having dinner or asleep. I think it’s probably best to time your thread for when your target audience is browsing twitter at work, but there are tons of more informed articles on timing of tweets that you can read instead of using my guesswork.

Finally, the number of people twitter shows your tweet to is determined not only by the number of likes and retweets your tweet gets, but also by the speed at which it gets them. Tell your colleagues and co-authors about your tweet immediately after you tweet it. Hopefully they will engage with it quickly and help it spread.

That’s all! I hope this guide helps your work reach its audience.

If you would like, you can view (and retweet!) this thread in its home on twitter and read the paper the thread is about. You can also read an article about the power of twitter to disseminate scientific research, which I found on twitter.

Secret Santas and the Icy Cheer

lydiaandreyevnakrasilnikova2 Comments

The man living alone in the $4 million mansion across the street has over the past month gradually accumulated not one, not two, but six Christmas trees, at least, with lights and decorations on all the trees and outdoor lights on all his trees and fences outside, which he doesn’t have on a timer, like I thought he would, but turns on by hand every day at sunset, and garlands and strings of lights on the stairs and walls, lit up like a Christmas Gatsby mansion projecting green and red and blue and yellow onto the road when it rains at night, a million tiny colorful moons reflecting off our little river of a street. Every day he sits alone in his home office on the other side of the house facing the main road until dark, when the sun sets and the dark sets in and he sits in the dark lit up by his computer screen and then walks through the house and around the house turning on all the lights and makes dinner in the big open kitchen behind the big bay window with one of the larger trees, which has a nearly identical tree of just slightly smaller size situated precisely above it like an axis of cheer crossing the ceiling through the next floor up. That tree is the one he had last year, too, and the year before it, and usually he leaves it up for months into the new year. (Usually it’s just the one—the profusion of lights inside and outside is a new development, just for this year, or at least hasn’t been around when I’ve been in town, and I’m always not by now.)

This is my first winter break away from my family and my first winter break with my Cambridge family. Our roommate goes to work and my partner Cory goes to work a few days a week and I work remotely from home and occasionally go to the grocery store. We watch movies and TV shows and we cook elaborate meals and we undersleep and oversleep and stress out about work. We go for walks at least once a day on most days. Sometimes we drive around.

Here is our Christmas tree, which we got from Ricky’s Flower Market in Union Square. It is small, because our apartment is small and also because we are hoping that if it lives through the winter and the weight of the decorations we’ve burdened it with we might plant it someplace where it can live a good life.

Another cheerful Christmas thing we did was to send out Christmas cards. They looked like this:

—All very strange. It bothers me that the couples-jacuzzi one has the marshmallows literally skewered. Most menacing is the marshmallow face melted into the hot chocolate surrounded by little marshmallow body parts floating next to it, and more marshmallow body parts on the ground by the cup. (I am also bothered by the happy messages inside reflecting for the reader how lovely it is to spend Christmas with family, in a year when most people safely can’t.)

These aren’t the Christmas cards we ordered. Shortly before Christmas we got a Christmas card from Cory’s uncle, which was very classy and nice and made us very happy and also regretful that we had nothing prepared to send to give those same good feelings in return. We ordered some Christmas cards with cute animals on them. (I like to optimize and look at every option before making a choice, but Cory saw them and knew he liked them and we bought them right away without evaluating other options, which is a new feeling for me.) We got these instead. Cory decided that we should salvage the whole situation by including hot chocolate and stickers (two stamps for two ounces almost exactly!). They turned out nice.

The actual process was a very fun assembly line, perfect as a background task during a movie. It reminded me a lot of our lab’s holiday card assembly lines, only while doing them just the two of us I got to do every stage myself, which was fun. Cory writes pithy and clever messages that make people laugh. I write really long and heartfelt and far less funny messages, which takes a lot more time, signing some or most of the cards: “Wishing you and yours health, safety, love, cheer—and maybe even happiness.” Here is one early stage of our assembly line:

Christmas card giving seems to have increased this year, or at least it feels like it has. We got five Christmas cards! I am going to be using two of them as proof of residency for a parking permit. I do not think we usually get five Christmas cards.

The week before Christmas we had a magical snowstorm (like a foot of snow) and our first time shoveling cars and even sidewalks, which was great exercise and a lot of fun. It was the kind of snow that makes the sky pink at night and makes our usual streets feel unfamiliar and quiet and perfect, and everyone says hi when we pass each other even though we don’t usually do that and don’t know each other at all. I bought shovels the night before, and then I got up before sunrise and I got to spend most of the whole day outside, with breaks to get warm and change my socks and gloves. In the morning it was just me and the plows and the snow falling and the light beams from the plows made gorgeous lighthouse light beams through the dense snow falling. A few people were skiing. There was an incident with a FedEx truck that got stuck in the snow and shredded a parked car. I got to see a family of rats playing in the snow, which was actually delightful. It was overall an eventful day.

On Christmas Eve we went for a long walk during the day and again at night to look at everyone’s lights in our neighborhood and the nearby neighborhoods. We called our families and opened presents, then Cory made a lasagna by a new recipe and I fell asleep on the couch, and then he fell asleep and we burned the lasagna and that whole experience reminded me a bit much of undergrad. (We did end up trying what was between the top layer of burn and the bottom layer of burn and it must have been a very good lasagna.) The next day was warm and raining, which melted most of the remaining snow, and we had a lovely warm walk under the rain looking at lights in other neighborhoods and then when it got too cold and windy we went home and opened our presents to each other and made duck by another new recipe, which we did not burn and which turned out wonderfully, and watched Christmas movies and built wintry Lego sets. The day after we drove to a friend’s empty apartment for a change in environment and did a virtual Secret Santa with Cory’s friends from high school and looked at Christmas lights in another neighborhood. My Secret Santa got me a candle called Exhilarating, which in this case means peppermint and rosemary, a sugar scrub called Exhilarating, which in this case means peppermint, rosemary, coconut oil, almond oil, and shea butter and is apparently not edible despite tasting delicious, and honey and almond and olive oil soap that is not called Exhilarating—all very lovely smells, the former two of which give me the same good feeling as one time when I accidentally got mint toothpaste in my eye.

I really like American Christmas. I don’t think any of us expected it when we moved here, because Christmas in Russia (at least in the Orthodox church) happens on the Julian calendar two weeks later and is a purely religious holiday, and the usual Christmas things—the presents and the party and the tree with the lights on it—are all New Year’s things to us. My mom likes to tell me that our first year in America, in Chicago, I, probably not yet fully speaking English but apparently already properly indoctrinated into the tradition of the American Christmas, was the one to pull the rest of the family into the proper ritual. On Christmas, which was going to be a regular day for us, I said: “But where are the presents? Aren’t we inviting everyone? Mom, don’t you know it’s Christmas?” Mom took me to the store and we picked out presents for the other recent Russian immigrant children living in our neighborhood, and we invited our small immigrant fold and had a lovely last-minute American Christmas party in Russian and everyone had a lovely time.

My most special memories of Christmas music in particular are from Chicago on an outdoor ice rink that doesn’t exist anymore, where I used to skate twice a week from right after school until late in the evening. My mom used to pick me up from school and drive me to the rink with dinner in a tupperware I’d eat on the drive while doing my homework, and then I had karate lessons sometimes and then a few hours of downtime on the rink, then skating lessons, then more skating until Mom was done with work and ready to pick me up, and sometimes she’d skate with me too. I loved skating. The rink was downtown, hidden from the road between tall buildings, and was never crowded even when the other rinks were. A lot of the time the staff played Christmas songs over the big outdoor speakers and sometimes the snow fell while I skated. Whenever I hear certain older Christmas songs that is what I think of, the snow falling and the cold air and the taste of blood from the cold and the pink sky and the tall Chicago downtown just barely darker than the night sky all around me and above me with its beautiful lights.

I miss my family, especially after Skype calls and missed messages that should be days and meals and adventures lived together in person. I just couldn’t justify risking the rest of our winters for this one.

The lesson, if there is one, I guess is to prioritize and be grateful for your health and the health of your loved ones and to make the best of what you have.

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The Christmas cards we actually bought were these. The Christmas cards we received were these, and the roll of stickers I bought was this one. It isn’t too late to send cards. You can say they got lost, or that you’re feeling Russian and your cards are meant to arrive by New Year’s.

If you like them, my Christmas lights are these, which I also own in Halloween colors, and my icicles are these. (I also really like these curtain lights, which I bought for my parents in off-white and for a friend in off-white and pink.) The combination of the icicles and colorful lights, reflecting off the wall and off and through the icicles, especially at night, gives a very nice effect of a snowy-rainy street in the winter, and makes it feel like there might be cozy snow and adventure outside even if the snow is melted or it’s raining instead. Bonus points if you arrange the lights around and behind winter Lego sets. Extra bonus points if you build the winter Lego sets while watching some classic American Christmas movies.

My parents got us skis, for which I’m counting down the days until our next big snowstorm (there were a few people skiing on the road in the early morning when it was just the plows and few adventurers and me). I got them a portable-ish pull-up bar that seemed pretty similar to ours, two cozy candles, and a wintry 3d puzzle and a salt-tree activity. Cory got me a book of Taylor Swift songs adapted to the piano, which I think I will just write the notes in because I still can’t sightread and life is too short to not play songs I want to play, and a watercolors and paper set with paper small enough to be a low-pressure art commitment, which is very important to me (unless I’m drawing something very special and fancy I always fold the page I’m drawing on in half first to make it less scary). Our friend in Florida sent us a box of starfruit from her backyard, which is a hilarious contrast to the weather here.

My Secret Santa asked for baking things and for a candle and said they like beach things, which in New England means something that got washed up and raked over the rocks in the cold, so I got them this driftwood candle and a danish dough whisk and a lame and a really exciting cookbook of bread recipes. Last winter Cory and I took a no-kneed baking class at Harvard that changed our lives, and the recipes from the class were based on those in that book. A lame is a special tool for carving designs into the bread, and is actually what gave away that I was that person’s Secret Santa—they were opening parts of the present and started opening the razors and I had to warn them that those were razors and to please not open them any further in a manner that was appropriate only for things that aren’t razors. (I also got Cory that same book and a lame, with a similar worry about the razors, and I’m very excited to try carving fancy patterns into our breads.)

This year’s present that I am most proud of was to two children of a close lifelong friend, one of whom I met when they were very young and one of whom I’ve only seen on Facebook. I got them a fancy hardcover Fortunately, the Milk by Neil Gaiman, which has absolutely gorgeous black-and-white illustrations, and crayons to color them with. A really good, funny book with beautiful illustrations is a very nice present, I think, especially if it comes with permission to color.

Here are ten nice presents to give to someone you’re not sure how to give presents to, perhaps because they’re your Secret Santa and you don’t know them that well:

  1. Tiny notebooks. Everyone needs tiny notebooks. They can write down their ideas, or their todo lists, or five nice things that happened to them that day, or their unwritten novel. If you’d like, you can suggest things you think they might like to write, and they may or may not follow your suggestions. Texture is important here, and the line type and spacing. Get them something that is pleasant and interesting to hold and has classy thin lines or even a grid.
  2. Nice inky pens. I like these pens, which are my favorites, for todo lists and fancy or important writing and art, and I like these pens, which I used to borrow from lab, for flowy-mind, lower pressure writing. It’s most important that the ink flows nicely. If the person you are shopping for has a favorite color that you know about, you can get them pens in their favorite color and they’ll probably like that.
  3. Little circle sleds. A lot of adults in cities don’t have sleds, or space for sleds. I couldn’t find a satisfactory modern American version of the little butt sled I had as a kid (as well as an actual, much larger sled). A little butt sled is not as fun as a real sled but it’s very easy to store and transport, and is much better than having no sled at all. If you buy them several they can bring a friend or you can keep one.
  4. Nice candles and fancy soaps. A nice way to gift a smell. Texture is also valuable here, albeit secondary. It’s nice to get them something varied and interesting, like a soap with little oats in it or a candle with coffee beans on the sides. Take care not to get anything containing lavender or tea tree oil (which is sad because I love tea tree oil, and still use it even though I know I shouldn’t) if the product is meant to go on the skin.
  5. Soft and fancy socks, or socks with neat pictures or patterns on them. One of the other people in our Secret Santa group got Batman socks with little capes on them.
  6. A star finder, which can tell you what stars are in the sky at any given moment. (Stellarium is even better, but not as portable.)
  7. Hot chocolate, which almost everyone likes and which is apparently available online mostly in absurd quantities. (If they don’t like hot chocolate, they definitely at least like someone who does.)
  8. A book you really like, maybe with a custom bookmark you drew or post-it notes on your favorite pages with some notes on why you liked that part. Don’t write in the book itself, maybe, in case they don’t like it and want to sell it later.
  9. A nice teacup, maybe with a little saucer for it. My grandmother on my mom’s side sometimes gives me nice teacups. They all make me very happy every time I want to feel fancy, and someday maybe I’ll have tea parties. I like to occasionally gift people flowering tea. Tea is a low-stress gift you can give a person lots of times, which is nice.
  10. A nice potted plant that is not too likely to die soon. Plants are nice. Bonus points if you made or decorated the pot, or if you put some special rocks from a special beach or haunted warehouse or other special destination on the surface of the soil, or if the plant is a clipping from a larger plant of yours that you particularly like or particularly don’t like or if the soil contains the ashes of their enemies, delivered as a message of goodwill for the coming new year and a release of your debts. Hopefully they don’t think of the plant as a metaphor for your relationship.

Here are ten things you probably shouldn’t give people:

  1. A copy of your dissertation, probably—especially if you don’t know that person that well, especially if that person is not your thesis advisor or otherwise on your committee (because if they are your thesis advisor or otherwise on your committee then a copy of your dissertation would actually be a very good present).
  2. A book you don’t like, with a note saying you do like it, with the absolute worst and most boring parts highlighted—with real highlighter marks so they can’t resell it to buy something nicer.
  3. Dante’s Inferno, probably.
  4. Their dissertation, with lots of comments in red—especially if they’ve already graduated but still have nightmares about grad school.
  5. Pencils with the lead pre-broken inside, probably.
  6. Someone else’s dissertation.
  7. A plane ticket, given the pandemic.
  8. A surprise visit (or any kind of visit), given the pandemic.
  9. A blank notebook with “Your Dissertation” written on the cover. In fact, I find this potential gift so distasteful and cruel that I made one really quick that you can buy online. Here are two blank notebooks (click the images), one with “Your Dissertation” written on the cover and one with “Your Thesis” written on the cover:


You can also get them as clocks or drink coasters if that would upset you more, or magnets or stickers or postcards or t-shirts or mugs or laptop cases or clothes for your child or blankets and pillows to hug at night or the smallest zipper bag.






You can view all “Your Thesis” products here and all “Your Dissertation” products here. Enjoy.

  1. Live bugs, like 1000 mealworms or 1500 ladybugs (pretty much the only thing worse than a blank notebook with “Your Dissertation” written on the cover).

Wishing you and yours health, safety, love, cheer—and maybe even happiness.