Dr. Margrit Talpalaru

They are never open when I walk by during the week :(

“It also promotes a form of individualization in which relational issues become framed as mismatched preferences instead of relational processes that require ongoing work.”

fingers crossed for you!

Cover of Ben Rein’s Why Brains Need Friends: The Neuroscience of Social Connection , showing an illustration of two colourful brains hugging each other

“Humans are often willing to put ourselves through uncomfortable things to be with others“ because “social interactions make the brain release rewarding chemicals.”

Ben Rein explains Why Brains Need Friends: The Neuroscience of Social Connection

#BookSky #nonfiction

Cover of Mike Curato’s Gaysians, displaying an illustration of the four protagonists against the Seattle skyline

Mike Curato’s Gaysians is the epitome of a comfort read and I could not put it down. Do yourselves a favour, #BookSky friends, and pick up this balm of a story.

Same! I had not had such a strong urge to write for a while before starting this book. The complexity! The wittiness! Such a treat indeed—also such comfort to know there’s always this long series to go back to reading.

E-reader displaying end-of-book screen for The Hydrogen Sonata by Iain M. Banks with 5 stars and the following stats: 35.1 hours of reading, 6 average minutes per session, and 0.5 average pages per minute

First #BookSky accomplishment of the year: finishing The Hydrogen Sonata by Iain M. Banks in spite of the short attention span documented here. I liked it so much, I’m actually going to start the Culture series from the beginning. (This was the last one).

For all #SciFi and #SpecFic #writing folks, this IDEaS contest run by the Government of Canada might seem interesting: www.canada.ca/en/departmen...
Deadline: January 16, 2026, 12:00 pm ET

Cover of Ada Palmer’s Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age.

“The Renaissance is not a set of years, it’s our name for the idea that there was a period of change between medieval and modern, during which some special innovation, some new ingredient, some X-Factor, arrived and made the world different.”
Ada Palmer’s Inventing the Renaissance: 💎📙😎 #booksky

The Telemetry All the news the headlines missed in 2025.

“But nuance doesn’t sell. Pessimism does. It sounds smarter, more sophisticated, proof that you’re a clear-eyed realist... You get to be the prophet who saw it coming, brave enough to tell hard truths while collecting your advance and planning your next speaking tour.”
fixthenews.com/p/the-teleme...

Polarizing times call for Nietzsche's practice of 'passing by' | CBC Radio Nineteenth century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche offers us a method that can help us navigate the highly polarizing discourse that’s afflicting democracies today. IDEAS shares lessons on heal...

"That you can in fact free that space in your mind where you're obsessed with all those names and devote that space and time to something that's distinctively for you, and that's distinctively an expression of who you are rather than a reaction to someone else." www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/...

“Hype is seldom based on concrete promises,” explains Stewart. “It is, by design, a speculation boom: it generates a narrative of innovation and future value, but it is driven by logics of business and media, not education or the public good. Hype’s purpose is to generate investment.”

Let’s not forget the tariffs

Arts sector contributes billions to Canadian economy, but funding challenges remain, report says | CBC News Canada's arts and culture sector contributed $65 billion to the economy last year, but an increase in public investment is needed to offset a drop in private funding and a rise in costs, says a new re...

“The report, released this week, says every dollar invested by the federal government in arts and culture generates $29 in economic activity”
www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

“Nearly nine in ten Canadians (88 per cent) say they are concerned about AI deception in the news, with over half (52 per cent) “very concerned.””
cjf-fjc.ca/digital-dece...

so pretty! My diamine damson never looks quite so purple when I write with it

KJ Charles—never gone wrong :). Recently enjoyed EH Lupton.
Happy to take recs, too.

With the Serial Numbers Filed Off: The Problem with Trad Pub Fanfic - Reactor Jenny Hamilton looks closer at three Dramione fics-turned-novels publishing this year.

“Instead of telling their own stories, creatives are funneled into pre-existing IP, often with corporate-issued limitations on what kind of stories they can tell.”
#BookSky
reactormag.com/with-the-ser...

You’ve articulate so well why I can seem to make myself click play. It’s just the pov is so relentlessly bleak, which is not my cuppa in spite of everything else being well done.

The Humanities Aren't Dead Yet | The Local Enrollment in the liberal arts has been in freefall for years. But despite apocalyptic declarations about the end of the humanities, in my own classroom I see signs of life.

“I wonder if the emerging threat of AI is restoring a sense of vitality to the humanistic mission... the humanities enable people to feel whole within themselves...[they] help us form coherent narratives…out of the contradictions, challenges, and terrors of daily life. thelocal.to/humanities-i...

Lavanya Lakshminarayan's Interstellar Megachef.
Grace Flahive's Palm Meridian
Natasha Pulley's The Mars House
Jess K. Hardy's Sunastara & the Venusian (with a dash or romcom)

German cuisine truly does not get enough credit (or any at all?)

I’m pretty sure this this THE best closet ever!

“Moral convictions & emotions play a critical role in escalating disagreements. The damage caused when civil arguments are subtly replaced with moral convictions & moral emotions can impact how we co-operate & interact with one another, even in our day-to-day conversations with families & friends.”

As disinformation and hate thrive online, YouTube quietly changed how it moderates content | CBC News YouTube, the world's largest video platform, with 20 million videos uploaded each day, appears to have changed its moderation policies to allow more content that violates its own rules to remain onlin...

"What we're going to see is a growth in the economy around hate and disinformation."
www.cbc.ca/news/enterta...

When billion-dollar AIs break down over puzzles a child can do, it's time to rethink the hype | Gary Marcus The tech world is reeling from a paper that shows the powers of a new generation of AI have been wildly oversold, says cognitive scientist Gary Marcus

“In short, these models are very good at a kind of pattern recognition, but often fail when they encounter novelty that forces them beyond the limits of their training, despite being, as the paper notes, “explicitly designed for reasoning tasks”
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Audiobook player for Woodworking by Emily St. James

Back to my regular #BookSky posting:

I loved Woodworking by Emily St. James for its loving portrayal of different White trans women’s experiences, and the reversal of the generational flow of wisdom.

“Biderman herself doesn't have any illusions that the likes of OpenAI will […]start being paragons of ethical data sourcing. But she hopes her work will at least get them to stop hiding what they're using to train their AI models.
"Even partial transparency has a huge amount of social value"

I would totally love to see you in your MHA ears!

“OpenAI’s push to A.I.-ify college education amounts to a national experiment on millions of students.

The use of these chatbots in schools is so new that their potential long-term educational benefits, and possible side effects, are not yet established.”