Dining Room Table Research Articles

From the dining room table to the Galapagos

From the dining room table to the Galapagos

Shelving Spectroscopy and Atomic Clock Development of the Strontium 689 nm Intercombination Line

Abstract Precise timekeeping is crucial for a myriad of applications, including GPS, telecommunications, financial transaction time-stamping, and more [20]. The burgeoning demand for increasingly accurate clocks at a smaller scale has driven significant progress in atomic clock miniaturization over the past two decades [8][10]. Chip-scale atomic clocks have emerged by employing micro-fabricated vapor cells containing atomic species conducive to high-precision timekeeping [20][12]. Strontium has emerged as an exceptional candidate for atomic clocks, with the development of clocks exhibiting deviations of less than 1 second in 300 billion years [5]. However, a chip-scale strontium clock remains to be realized. This paper delineates the advancements made toward the development of a strontium atomic clock utilizing a micro-fabricated vapor cell. The proposed design involves implementing a shelving spectroscopy scheme that employs the 1S0-3P1 transition as the clock transition. Further refinement of the shelving scheme and the associated laser lock systems is necessary prior to the establishment of a functional clock. All components of this proposed design, encompassing both optical and electrical elements, can be miniaturized to chip scale, rendering it a promising solution for a wide range of applications with stringent weight and volume constraints. The strontium clock design outlined in this paper incorporates frequency and phase lock systems, which are critical for achieving precise resonance between the shelving and intermediate lasers with their respective transitions. This paper discusses the current limitations of these locking systems and proposes potential improvements. Once the frequency and phase locks are optimized and an additional frequency lock is employed, a clock is created by pairing a frequency counter with the laser resonant with the clock transition. Lay Summary I completed the work for this thesis under the supervision of Dr. Yang Li and Dr. Matthew Hummon at the Time and Frequency Division of the National Institute of Science and Technology. One of the aims of this research group is to produce increasingly precise and small clocks. High-precision timekeeping is essential to many sectors of the economy, from finance to telecommunications. However, a lot of new technology that requires the highest precision clocks does not have the space to accommodate the large atomic clocks of the past. The first atomic clocks occupied an entire laboratory. Today, the most precise atomic clocks can be as small as a dining room table. This research group hopes to make a clock that is the size of a computer chip. My thesis documents the progress I made in the pursuit of this goal. I primarily discuss the techniques used to measure and stabilize light. Light is essential for this atomic clock because it serves as the oscillator used to measure time, just like the pendulum for a grandfather clock. The name atomic clock comes from the use of atoms to stabilize the light. A group of atoms absorbs some of the light used for the clock. We then use a technique called shelving spectroscopy to amplify this absorption signal. This amplified absorption signal allows for better stabilization of the light through a technique called a phase lock. The phase lock prevents the frequency of the light from drifting too much, leading to a more reliable clock. My work contributes to the eventual development of a strontium-based atomic clock that is as small as a computer chip yet remains as precise as much larger clocks. Works Cited in Abstract [5] EurekAlert! Ultraprecise atomic clock poised for new physics discoveries, feb 2022.[8] S. Knappe, V. Gerginov, P. D.D. Schwindt, V. Shah, H. G. Robinson, L. Hollberg, and J. Kitching. Atomicvapor cells for chip-scale atomic clocks with improved long-term frequency stabil- ity. Opt. Lett., 30(18):2351–2353, Sep 2005.[10] Svenja Knappe, V Shah, Peter Schwindt, Leo Hollberg, John Kitching, Li-Anne Liew, and John Moreland.A microfabricated atomic clock. (85), 2004-01-01 2004.[12] Li-Anne Liew, Svenja Knappe, John Moreland, Hugh Robinson, Leo Hollberg, and John Kitching.Microfabricated alkali atom vapor cells. Appl. Phys. Lett., 84(14):2694–2696, April 2004.[20] Bonnie L Schmittberger and David R Scherer. A review of contemporary atomic frequency standards.2020. For the full text, please visit https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/undergraduate_honors_theses/5712m8055.

You Were the Bird: On Petite Maman and motherhood

You Were the BirdOn Petite Maman and motherhood Georgia Cloepfil (bio) In the opening scene of Céline Sciamma's film Petite Maman, a young girl named Nelly moves from room to room saying goodbye to a series of unnamed women, all gray-haired residents of a senior care center. Behind the last door, Nelly finds her own mother, Marion, tidying up in her recently deceased grandmother's all-but-empty room. Her mother takes a seat and overlooks the grounds of the facility. There is a gulf between the threshold of the door, where Nelly stands, and that of the window, where her mother contemplates the reality of her new role as a motherless mother. The movie's title pans across Marion's back. Perhaps for the first time, Nelly is glimpsing the ocean of her mother's grief and experience–and she can't quite stretch across it. [End Page 74] One of the movie's strengths is its ability to lay bare a moment of realization that all young people have at some point: our parents were people (with loves, grief, ambition) before we came into the world. They had mothers. We watch as Nelly recognizes that her own life overlaps with Marion's, but it will never run parallel; the procession of generations marches onward. When they finish packing up her grandmother's room and drive away, Nelly reaches toward her mother around the headrest of her seat and feeds her cheese puffs one by one as she drives. Then a little sip of apple juice. Then a hug. The tender opening scene reminded me of a passage I read (and underlined) in Anne Truitt's Daybook long before I had any plans to have children: Mary's son was born early this morning. After hearing the news, I lay back in the predawn dark and, as the tide of happiness receded, I saw that it had pulled out on some long, bare inner shoreline of myself and had made the slope glisten for the last time: Both my daughters are now mothers and in the proper nature of things more mothers of their children than they are daughters of their mother. We reside on an axis between mother and daughter until birth, death, or another dramatic event threatens to tilt us abruptly in one direction or another. There is a sense of inevitability but also a deep melancholy to this sentiment, and I worried for a long time about making my own mother feel its truth. I discover that I am pregnant on an August morning. The test sits on my dining room table, its two decisive blue lines bisecting. The news is not a surprise, but it still brings with it a feeling that life has unexpectedly accelerated. To me, the passage of time has always felt like a fierce wind. It's something to take shelter from, something to brace myself against or evade. If I am not careful, everyone I love might be taken up by a violent rush of air and carried forward with me. The novelist Samantha Hunt once [End Page 75] Click for larger view View full resolution Joséphine Sanz and Nina Meurisse in Petite Maman. © Liles Films, courtesy NEON. [End Page 76] said that it makes sense to think of mothers as makers of death. She meant that we make our children's deaths. But I'm not there yet. What's inside of me barely feels alive, is barely felt. Embryonic and invisible, the pregnancy still seems like the impetus of some other change. Even if it is "the proper nature of things," my becoming a mother means that my own mother is, suddenly, a grandmother. I have the sense that by becoming pregnant, I am singlehandedly ushering my mother toward the next phase of her life and then toward her death. My worry hardens into fear. The week after I tell her that I am pregnant, my mother's mammogram reveals a tumor in her right breast. She waits weeks for news, for surgery, for a plan. In the silence she can barely sleep, and neither can I. Rationally, I know that the...

Acting and Race in Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Acting and Race in <i>Night of the Living Dead</i> (1968)

Leading by living – A personal journey towards values and goals-based leadership of self and others

Leading by living – A personal journey towards values and goals-based leadership of self and others

Communication Lake

Communication Lake

“Perchoo,” or the Music of Mourning

“Perchoo,” or the Music of Mourning

Architectural History or a Geography of Small Spaces?

Architectural History or a Geography of Small Spaces?

Cousin Marvin's Secret

Cousin Marvin's Secret

Transtocar, Three Fragments

Tra<i>n</i>stocar, Three Fragments

The First Crowdfunded Astronaut

IT WAS ONE OF THE PRETTIEST SIGHTS I HAVE EVER SEEN: our homemade rocket floating down from the sky, slowed by a white-and-orange parachute that I had worked on during many nights at the dining room table. The 6.7-meter-tall Nex⊘ II rocket was powered by a bipropellant engine designed and constructed by the Copenhagen Suborbitals team. The engine mixed ethanol and liquid oxygen together to produce a thrust of 5 kilonewtons, and the rocket soared to a height of 6,500 meters. Even more important, it came back down in one piece.

Victor Margolin’s Early Years

When I was a small child, my father used to take me to a novelty shop in Chicago called Uncle Fun. It was filled with rows of cabinets with tiny drawers that seemed, to my small self, to reach the ceiling. Each drawer contained a small wonder: little rubber chickens, stickers of Renaissance angels, woven finger traps, wax lips, kazoos. We would venture from our apartment in suburban Chicago to this shop in the city where he and I both delighted in opening the drawers and discovering small bursts of surprise, returning home with bags of treasures. We would lay these out on the dining room table, get out his big box of rubber stamps and spend hours making kookie, kitschy art together. Another clear memory: searching with him for the perfect Chicago hot dog. First we decided it was at Fluky’s, where they gave out bubble gum in the shape of a hot dog. Then we switched our allegiance to Poochie’s, where they grilled the onions and slathered on melted cheddar cheese. When my uncles visited from New York, my father eagerly engaged them in the search, taking them around the city to sample hot dog after hot dog. My father was a seeker of culture, someone who dove into the human-made world, be it looking at paintings at a high-end gallery, questing for hot dog perfection, or buying curios with his pre-schooler. I don’t think there was much difference in his mind. He was endlessly fascinated with material culture, engaging in innumerable collecting endeavors throughout his life. He kept catalogs of every film he had seen, had drawers overflowing with records and CDs of music from every continent, and for years devoted shelves of his university office to his “Museum of Contemporary Art”, his collection of cultural kitsch.

Viewpoint: Art library publishing during a crisis: a librarian's own research

Like most librarians, when I have a research question, I go to the databases to search the literature for comparable questions and possible solutions. The onslaught of COVID-19 and its impact on libraries (let alone every other aspect of life) has thrown librarians for a loop and disrupted all our standard modes of enquiry. In a matter of days in the spring of 2020, librarians went from business as usual to locking the doors behind us and trying to figure out how to run a Zoom research support session from the dining room table.

Hooked on Feelings: The Story of My Jewish Pathologies

Hooked on FeelingsThe Story of My Jewish Pathologies Jodi Eichler-Levine (bio) Keywords Jewish, feelings, illness, crafts I grew up in a house filled with objects. Plants covered the passage from the kitchen to the wood-paneled den; spider ferns hung from dangling baskets. Above the fireplace, dusty old brass candlesticks and a mortar and pestle loomed over the room, encased in a patina of immigration stories. Enormous crochet afghans from the hooks of cousins and great-aunts covered the couch. My mother’s vibrant oil paintings were displayed on every wall that wasn’t already occupied by a bookshelf. But then, there were the quotidian objects: the clutter. It went beyond the average sort, except in my room, where I kept the desk clear and everything at right angles. Piles of newspapers and what seemed like every copy of National Geographic ever written. Hosting any guests required preparation and maneuvering. It was like a Tetris game meets Hoarders, an Indiana Jones-esque excavation of the dining room table. Perhaps this is one of the ways I learned to love history. This New York Times is from a year ago. Remember when we thought Dukakis could win the election? It is certainly where I learned nostalgia. Dig down deep enough, and I’d find a two-year old service leaflet from our synagogue—remember that weekend? It was Stacey’s Bat Mitzvah! My family did not possess objects. We were possessed by them. I thought about these ancestral piles often as I researched Painted Pomegranates and Needlepoint Rabbis, my book about Jews, crafting, and resilience in contemporary America.1 From 2015 to 2020 I read books, newsletters, and blogs about objects; I entered people’s homes to touch and see mountains of their objects; I wrote on the road and then in my office on campus, surrounded by piles of paper; and I went over the final page proofs in my crowded guest-room-turned home office, under [End Page 5] a stay-at-home order, during a pandemic spring. I learned about other people’s heirlooms, and a few of my own. As so often happens, the process of writing this book left me with more questions than answers, more stories than I could convey in one volume. I have learned that I am hooked on feelings, though I embrace the ones from my fingertips while resisting the more charged ones we also call “emotions.” In truth, of course, that’s a false binary. “The habits of the heart are also the haptics of the heart, the religious tactility of the body,” writes David Chidester.2 In my research and in my own history, rituals of mind are deeply enmeshed with rituals of the body. I fall into repetitive, even compulsive, habits of feeling in both senses of the word. Hands and hearts are both collections of muscles, clenching and releasing habitually along well-worn grooves of sensation and sentiment. In this story, the habits and the haptics are one and the same. “the whole world will go away if that happens” Inheritances come with a mandate. In April 2017, I flew to Los Angeles for a week of interviews with members of the Pomegranate Guild of Judaic Needlework, a North American organization of Jewish crafters with some chapters that have met for over four decades. Gertrude, an octogenarian who prefers to sew by hand, sat in her sunny yellow living room, feeding me Passover treats and showing me her creations as her dog hovered protectively over us. Towards the end of the interview, she got to the heart of the matter: “It’s like a continuous, continuous thread,” she told me. “It’s a different way of leaving behind for the future generations the works of your hand, your heart, and your mind. To me, that’s what it is, you know. Because, look, I’m going to be 88 in a few months. I have all this for people to talk about, because they’ll be using it, they are using it now, they’re talking about it now, the pieces that I made for them.” Like Gertrude’s words—and in part because of her...

#SendHelpNow: Mental wellness and virtual connection in the age of coronavirus

Coronavirus, coronavirus disease (COVID‐19) and social/physical distancing are among the words that have become household names amidst this pandemic. Not only has our vocabulary changed, but also the ways we connect with others. We have become even more reliant on technological advances for business, education, pleasure and other activities. In fact, 93% of Americans report that an outage in internet or cellular service during the outbreak would cause problems in their daily lives (Pew Research Center, 2020).

Quarantined

As an emergency medicine physician, I am used to being at work when most people are at home. At the end of February, the first patient in the United States to be diagnosed with COVID-19 without a travel history occurred in Sacramento, CA. Eighty-nine healthcare professionals who had contact with the patient were quarantined. At the beginning of March, I worked in the emergency department and treated a patient with viral symptoms without a travel history who was admitted to the hospital. It was also the first day the hospital implemented an internal laboratory test that was FDA approved to detect novel coronavirus. The next morning, I checked the chart and saw that the patient tested positive for novel coronavirus with the new lab test. It confirmed the growing suspicion that the virus was being transmitted within the community. I immediately started thinking of what I had planned for the day, which included signing closing paperwork on our first house. I spoke with the county health department who said that CDC used a different test and they were not familiar with the hospital test. They said to wait for the official county result for the patient and that I did not need to be quarantined. I let the title company know I had a potential exposure and postponed the signing for the next day. Over the next few hours, occupational health told me to be in a 14-day quarantine and to stay 6 feet away from my family; my family did not need to be quarantined. Then occupational health said my family needed to be quarantined. The CDC physician working with the county health department said I was under quarantine, but my family was not. Hospital infection control said I probably did not need quarantine since I was wearing a procedure mask when I saw the patient. When my kids came home, I asked them to keep 6 feet away from me. My 5-year old daughter thought I was playing a joke and came to me for a hug and I put out my hand and said, “Sorry, no hugs for now.” My family ate dinner at the dining room table, while I ate standing in the kitchen. The second morning after exposure, my 5-year old daughter asked me to play checkers with her. We found a way to play while staying 6 feet away from each other. She would move a piece and step away from the board, then I would move my piece and step away. After breakfast, I spoke with the county health department to clarify my quarantine status who said a physician would call me back. By noon, a CDC physician who specializes in healthcare professionals exposed to COVID-19 told me that the recommendations would be changing again. Given the high rate of community transmission in the area, I no longer needed to be quarantined. The title company also called the county health department and was told I was still under quarantine. After multiple phone calls, we designated power of attorney to my sister to sign the closing paperwork. The title company insisted on mailing the paperwork to my sister rather than have her come into the office to sign. By late afternoon, I received a call from occupational health who confirmed I no longer needed to be quarantined. I did a risk assessment and decided it was probably safe to eat dinner with my family at the same dining table. I am off quarantine and my next shift in the emergency department will be in a few days. As I approach the 14-day mark, I realize that I may have not gotten COVID-19 from this exposure but eventually I probably will.

Queer Healing: AIDS, Gay Synagogues, Lesbian Feminists, and the Origins of the Jewish Healing Movement

Queer Healing:AIDS, Gay Synagogues, Lesbian Feminists, and the Origins of the Jewish Healing Movement Gregg Drinkwater (bio) In September 1987, Paul Cowan, the celebrated Village Voice writer, memoirist, and activist, was diagnosed with leukemia.1 He died in September 1988, days after turning forty-eight.2 After his death, Cowan's wife, Rachel, then a rabbinical student at the New York campus of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, the Reform movement's seminary, gathered with friends and colleagues around her dining room table. They lamented that there were few Jewish spiritual care resources available for those facing serious illness and their families.3 At the time, there were well-known Christian models of spiritual healing services and other non-Jewish, spiritually-based healing rituals. But the relevant Jewish communal resources were limited to Jewish hospital chaplains, a few Jewish hospices, rabbinic visits for seriously ill congregants, and the traditional practices of bikur holim (visiting the sick) and communal prayers for the ill.4 Rachel Cowan and this group of Jewish feminists who had been gathering at her home recognized a widespread hunger for Jewish communal resources devoted to spiritual and physical healing, especially outside of medical contexts. Cowan and her circle identified this spiritual need at the very moment that gay and lesbian Jewish communal leaders in California were themselves developing new rituals and language to support spiritual healing in a community ravaged by the AIDS crisis.5 Unbeknownst to [End Page 605] Cowan and her friends, in Los Angeles in October 1987, Debbie Fried-man and Rabbi Drorah Setel, two feminist innovators deeply connected to Judaism's Reform Movement (and then romantic partners), revised one of the core Jewish prayers for ill people—the Mi Shebeirach ("The One Who Blesses") prayer for healing. At the time, the prayer was rarely used in Reform communities. These two women, both then immersed in the AIDS crisis and the gay and lesbian Jewish community, re-wrote the traditional Mi Shebeirach as an egalitarian, empowering, and spiritually contemplative song for use in communal settings. And just five months before Paul Cowan's death, Yoel Kahn, a young gay rabbi working at Congregation Sha'ar Zahav—a gay and lesbian synagogue nearly 3,000 miles away in San Francisco then being decimated by AIDS—had created a model Jewish healing service.6 Indeed, Jewish healing services based on Kahn's model, and this new Mi Shebeirach prayer for healing, both coming out of lesbian and gay contexts, would transform not only the nature of personal prayer, but also the very visibility of illness, spiritual healing, and the body in liberal Jewish communities. Within overlapping feminist and gay and lesbian Jewish communities on either side of the country, mourning, loss, and gay communal solidarity set the stage for the elaboration of new forms of Jewish healing rituals. Gay, lesbian, and feminist Jews in California met the AIDS crisis with new forms of prayer and ritual, while in New York, the newly ordained rabbis Rachel Cowan and Nancy Flam, along with Rabbi Susan Freeman, the feminist activist and journalist Ellen Hermanson, and the novelist Nessa Rapoport continued their conversations around Cowan's dining room table.7 These women envisioned new Jewish spiritual support resources for the ill; along with trainings for clergy, social workers, and medical professionals. They also imagined advocating for research into health and spiritual healing and developing new liturgy and rituals centered on the spiritual needs of the ill, their loved ones, and their caregivers in a Jewish context. Out of these conversations, the framework for what would later become the National Center for Jewish Healing (NCJH) emerged. By the mid-1990s, dozens of newspapers and magazines profiled the national Jewish healing movement that Cowan, Flam, Freeman, Hermanson, and Rapoport had sparked.8 This high-profile media coverage and word of mouth helped move the healing movement into the [End Page 606] mainstream of Jewish life.9 By 1995, the NCJH had trained hundreds of rabbis and other Jewish leaders on their innovative rituals, liturgy, and program ideas.10 These included the new Mi Shebeirach song and a complete healing service modified by Nancy Flam and others but based on...

Remembrances of Sarah Woolfolk Wiggins

Remembrances of Sarah Woolfolk Wiggins Ruth Smith Truss and David E. Alsobrook Click for larger view View full resolution IN MEMORIAM Sarah Woolfolk Wiggins 1934–2020 Photo courtesy Rebecca Minder ruth smith truss Remarkable. This word has many connotations and is overused. Yet, it captures much about Sarah Wiggins—who she was and what she accomplished. Other terms are just as meaningful and apt: elegant, strong, intelligent, forthright, supportive, demanding, exceptional. Trying to capture the essence of Sarah Wiggins in a way that would make her proud and reflect well on her life’s work is a daunting task. Indeed, even as I write this tribute, I hear her voice and feel her influence. I met Dr. Wiggins in 1985 when I visited her office, in an old home (since razed) on the campus of the University of Alabama. That home, with its high ceilings, wooden floors, tiled bathroom, and wide porches front and back, situated in a yard of mature oak trees, came to symbolize so much of my sense of Sarah Wiggins. Here more than any other place, she passed on her love of Alabama history, her dedication to the profession, and her work ethic during countless hours in the “parlor” area of that house, reading manuscripts submitted to the Alabama Review. At an old dining room table, Dr. Wiggins evaluated submissions, assigned them to her research assistant for source- and fact-checking, and proofread multiple revisions on the path to publication. If an error crept in at any stage of the process, it did so at its own peril, because Dr. Wiggins’s eye, like her mind, was keen. From October 1976 (vol. 29, no. 4) to April 1996 (vol. 49, no. 2), Dr. Wiggins edited the Review. As editor, she allowed the author’s voice to shine; her work and contribution remained behind the scenes. The result was a journal that was uniformly polished, professional, [End Page 196] and recognized as a model for state-level publications. In short, she had the rare ability and rarer willingness to enhance rather than override the author’s voice. She was satisfied knowing that the published article was the best and most accurate work possible. Click for larger view View full resolution Dr. Ruth Truss (left), professor of history at the University of Montello, and Sarah Woolfolk Wiggins attend the induction of Sarah Haynsworth Gayle into the 2016 Alabama Women's Hall of Fame. Truss and Wiggins co-edited The Journal of Sarah Haynsworth Gayle: A Substitute for Social Intercourse, published in 2013 by the University of Alabama Press. Photo courtesy Rebecca Minder. A native of Montgomery, Sarah Woolfolk early developed a love for the stories of Alabama, both the state and the people. She left for Baton Rouge to attend graduate school, taught briefly in Virginia, and then in 1961, twenty-seven-year-old Sarah returned to her home state, to Tuscaloosa, to take a history faculty position at the University [End Page 197] of Alabama. On the day she moved into one of three apartments in a converted house, a charming fellow tenant with a wonderful smile knocked on her door and offered lunch—a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich and a Coke. In the telling, over twenty-five years later, she smiled reminiscently as she recalled the meeting that eventually led to her marriage to Peyton Wiggins, a young English professor. In my five years as her research assistant, Dr. Wiggins rarely shared personal information, making this story even more special. I quickly realized that Dr. Wiggins had definite priorities, in this order: daughter Henrietta, first; work, second. Her family retained always that ranking in her heart; by the time of her death, her family included not only her beloved Henri but also her son-in-law and two granddaughters. I trust that her granddaughters will come to appreciate fully their maternal grandmother and know that she was immensely proud of them, appreciating and valuing their individual identities, talents, and accomplishments. Dr. Wiggins’s work as a historian never ended. In her own research and writing, she was meticulous, a perfectionist; her approach was to be concise, accurate, and true to the sources—and to use...

Knowledge is Power: On Writing and Responding Together

Knowledge is Power:On Writing and Responding Together Lila Corwin Berman (bio), Kate Rosenblatt (bio), and Ronit Y. Stahl (bio) Reading these eight full and generous responses to our article reminded us of the benefits of collaborative scholarship. Were we to rewrite our article now, after having digested our colleagues' responses, we would undoubtedly clarify, rework, and change certain sections. And, happily, the scholarly pursuit continues beyond the publication of an article, so we trust we will have the opportunity to continue to refine and reconsider our argument in light of these illuminating responses to it. I. FORMS OF KNOWLEDGE We start by invoking the benefits of collaborative scholarship not only to offer necessary gratitude to our colleagues but also to reflect on our own process of knowledge production. We produced this article—and now this response—by committing ourselves to collaboration. And we will be the first to admit that this kind of rigorous collaboration has not been the common coin in any of our prior scholarly experiences, so we had to learn how to do it on the fly. Indeed, our collaborative method is constitutive of the intellectual claims we are making and, thus, warrants discussion as we reflect on this set of responses. When all of this started in the summer of 2018, we found each other on a common thread on Facebook. We knew each other already—Rosenblatt and Stahl attended graduate school at the University of Michigan together, and Berman had met both when she was a fellow at Michigan's Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies. As our friends and colleagues started to parse Hannah Dreyfus's reporting about Steven Cohen, the three of us began to puzzle out (first as comments to threads and then over Messenger) what we perceived as a difference between the individual dimensions of Cohen's then-alleged sexual predation and the structural framework in which his scholarship, power, and authority rested. At the time, one of us was a full professor (Berman), one a postdoctoral research fellow (Stahl), and one a contingent faculty member (Rosenblatt). We were aware of our own power differentials, and as we thought about writing something for a broad audience, we appreciated the way that collaboration could amplify our voices and shield us from certain risks of speaking alone. [End Page 243] Over the course of a morning, we moved from Facebook to a Google document and started to write together. We took the skeletal framework we had crafted over Chat and expanded it, writing over one another, stopping to ask questions about what a word or phrase meant, correcting or rephrasing one another's prose. It was dizzying and exhilarating. In motion, we were building trust in one another's thought process and crafting a collective form of knowledge. When the editors of American Jewish History asked if we would expand our Forward article, we each hesitated. By then, between us, there were new jobs to start, books to finish, and family obligations to fulfill. But we also knew that what we had written for the Forward only skimmed the surface of applying historical understanding to the structures of power that delimited Jewish continuity discourse. We decided to meet in person to draft a new article in the summer of 2019. First around a seminar table at the University of Pennsylvania's Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies and then around Berman's dining room table, we sat together, computers open to a shared Google document. We talked and typed, debated points, went down research rabbit holes and came back out with references, some used and others left on the cutting room floor. It felt freeing at times—when one of us could not think of the right word or turn of phrase, another one would supply it. But it was also constraining to have to listen to voices outside of one's own head and to get such immediate feedback. In the process, we learned that we had some very different perspectives, depending on our own experiences with Jewish communal pressures and our own encounters with scholarly conversations and research. We saw, as Harriet Hartman writes here, how "our personal...

Living With Alzheimer's Disease: A Shared Caregiver's Story.

Living With Alzheimer's Disease:A Shared Caregiver's Story Catherine M. Politi It started with simple statements like these: "I know I forget things. It's tiring. Every day, when I wake up, I feel like I'm starting all over again." Over time, Mom started asking us questions like: "When am I going home?" ("Mom, look around. Here's your furniture, your clothes, your photos on the piano. This is your home," we would respond.) "Why don't my sisters and brothers visit anymore? When will I see them again?" (I thought, but never said, "Soon, Mom, very soon. But not on Earth.") One day, when we were walking in her yard, she said, "You see that tree? It's a metaphor for how I feel." It was a tree in the woods that had uprooted, but it was leaning on another tree and didn't hit the ground. My mother began exhibiting symptoms of memory loss in her mid 80's. By age 89, my siblings and I recognized she needed intervention for her care. Mom was widowed at age 48. There were five of us: my older brother had just returned from Army basic training. I was in college, I had two sisters in high school, and a younger brother in 7th grade. She did her best to keep our lives as normal as possible while we all grieved our Dad's sudden death due to cancer. She stayed up well past anyone should in order to pore through paperwork, bills, and complete household tasks. She made sure we completed homework, socialized, visited with family, and went about our normal days. So to say we were devoted to our Mom would be an understatement. As we each married and had our own children, Mom guarded her independence with ferocity. She frequently visited our homes and watched her grandchildren, but would never consider living with any of us, even when one of my sisters offered to purchase a home with independent space for her. She relished hosting dinners and holidays in her home through her 70s, even though we increasingly took on more responsibilities for grocery shopping, table setting, and cleanup. Whenever someone stopped in to visit her, she was always ready with a cup of coffee, tea, and a plate of cookies while we talked at her dining room table covered with a special tablecloth that rotated according to the season or upcoming holiday. Thus, as her decline began, her wish to remain in her home, the central place of gathering for so many, was paramount. Mom's health care was always shared by all of us. One sister took her for eye exams and cataract treatment. One brother and I handled her checkups by an internist, cardiologist, and otolaryngologist. At age 77, she had cancer of the parotid gland, and my sisters and I shared driving her to her radiation appointments, timed around our work hours. Maintenance of her home when she became unable to care for it independently was also arranged by us, and even handled by our husbands, her grandchildren, or any of the large family network she had built and cultivated. Once Mom's cognitive slips became noticeable, my siblings and I held a meeting. We decided that we had to slowly ease her into allowing help from a home health aide. One brother and sister began the process of applying for health and senior benefits for her, and another sister visited with a "lesson plan" to stimulate her brain. I applied for and obtained coverage for her very expensive drugs to slow her cognitive decline. Another brother, an attorney, prepared her living will and wishes for who would be legal and medical proxy before her Alzheimer's disease worsened. And he played the piano while she sang. Remarkably, she continued to play piano and said as she aged, "you know, I just can't play with my left hand anymore." We hired someone to be with her from 9 AM to 1 PM so that her breakfast and morning pills would [End Page E8] be supervised, and her lunch would be prepared and supervised. One of us (on a rotating schedule...