Transportation of participants and event organisers represents unmatched harm to the environment when organising events. In the case of Conventa, transport comprises 70% of the overall carbon footprint, amounting to 190 kilogrammes per participant per day. Transport is thus a segment where we can drastically reduce carbon emissions. Above all, airport and car transport are critical segments. As in all cases we uncovered thus far, one can find numerous good practice cases and an equal number of misleading practices. In this article, we will delve into a few misguiding examples while sharing recommendations on how to start reducing the carbon footprint in the challenging world of transportation.

The editorial board of Kongres Magazine has been closely following and analysing various sustainability marketing campaigns. It seems their numbers have skyrocketed this year. As it turns out, many of them are misleading and purposefully used by greenwashers to increase sales or improve a company’s reputation. By doing so, they deceive well-intentional consumers and, ultimately, do not contribute to solving ecological and social issues. It is vital to stay aware of the ways in which they attempt to outwit us. Recognising greenwashing is how we can reduce its influence on our choices.

We have decided to prepare a series of articles that will uncover such practices and, hopefully, contribute to a more responsible meetings industry.

Our transportation was 100% carbon-neutral; our business is carbon-neutral; we drive carbon-neutral. Virtually anything we set out to do is or attempts to be carbon-neutral. In the past few months, we have been overwhelmed by the vast sea of messages stating event organisers will ensure carbon-neutral transportation. Beware, do not take such promises literally.

What’s essential is invisible to the eye; in current times, carbon-neutrality of events is possible only by carbon offsetting. Event organisers often keep the precise data about how they plan to compensate for the carbon emissions in the fine print or leave it out. Alternatively, they refer to planting trees. The devil is in the detail: a carbon-neutral event sounds far better than an event aiming to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Let’s see what experts say about electric cars to get a broader picture. The Chinese manufacturer of electric vehicles, Polestar, spoke rather candidly about this topic. Their Polestar 2 model produces 50 tons of CO2 in its lifespan, whereas a petrol-fueled Volvo XC40 creates 58 tons of CO2 over the same time. Hence, the difference is relatively small, with the electric vehicle emitting only 14 per cent fewer emissions. Find out more at

In short, as in every form of greenwashing, the problem lies in communication and presenting information selectively. However, that does not signal we should accept the situation. As event organisers, we can tremendously contribute to reducing our carbon footprint. Considering a train leaves only a third of the carbon footprint compared to a plane over the same distance, we have a basis for a paradigm change. I am a firm believer, though, that we should prioritise measures to reduce carbon footprint ahead of purchasing indulgences.

Photo Credit: Doris Kordić

You can substantially advance mobility by informing and spreading awareness among key stakeholders about the possibilities of sustainable transportation.

When flying is the only choice, you have the option to reduce your environmental footprint by selecting the most environmental-friendly flight. Direct flights are, for instance, far less burdening for the environment than flights with layovers. The class you fly in correlates to the amount of carbon footprint you leave behind. Flying in first and business class creates two to three times as much carbon footprint as in economy class due to an incomparably poorer use of space.

You can substantially advance mobility by informing and spreading awareness among key stakeholders about the possibilities of sustainable transportation. It is a great idea to offer your attendees the chance to calculate their carbon footprint. Amid a slew of calculators on the market, one of the most precise is the following:

Miracles in reducing carbon footprint can often be a result of changes in communication. I can confirm that first-hand, as in 2021, we increased the use of sustainable transportation by 30%, predominantly by advocating railroads and car-sharing (GO.Opti). Thus, selecting and publishing information about locations is vital: where an event takes place, the possibilities of arriving on foot, the options of renting a bicycle and, not least, information concerning public transport (stations, schedules, distance to the closest station etc.). Attendees also need to be constantly reminded of the possibilities of car-sharing. More importantly, event organisers need to prepare a holistic plan for how attendees can arrive at the event in a sustainable manner. To communicate the plentiful options of sustainable mobility, make sure to use all available channels and tools – website, e-newsletters, media publications etc.

Photo Credit: Velo-city 2022

If your event is partnering with a bus provider, you can request them to provide you with detailed information and meet the following environmental criteria:

• Meeting the standards of EURO V and EURO VI
• Usage of diesel fuel in litres per 100 kilometres
• Noise emissions (vehicles with noise emissions lower than 70 dB/A are acceptable)
• Equipped with a monitor to show gear switching
• Equipped with systems to control tire pressure
• Drivers educated in sustainable driving

Everything needs to be measured at the end of an event. You can use several indicators recommended by the Slovenian foundation for sustainable development, Umanotera:

• Measure the number of car transfers (number of vehicles, distance in kilometres)
• Measure the amount of public transportation (number of passengers, distance in kilometres)
• Bycicle transfers, distance on foot (number of cyclists and pedestrians, distance in kilometres)
• Fuel efficiency in the drive park (L/100 kilometres)
• Measured carbon footprint

We recommend creating a straightforward and simple mobility plan that can act as a tool for actively encouraging alternative modes of transport. In particular, this entails public transport, cycling and walking insofar as facilitating the responsible use of personal transportation.

Never forget that sustainable mobility comprises walking, cycling, the use of public transport and alternative modes of mobility. The ultimate goal of sustainable mobility is ensuring equal and easy access for all. It emphasises the need to limit personal transportation and the use of energy while facilitating the creation of sustainable travelling plans.

Note: You are welcome to send us your suggestions and ideas to share with our colleagues. Together, we can achieve more.

Environmentalist Jay Westerveld coined the term “greenwashing” in 1986. While on an expedition to Samoa, he was greatly upset by the hotel sign concerning the reuse of towels. He concluded that its purpose was solely a strategy to lower expenses instead of the hotel’s sustainable and responsible aspirations.

Westerveld was the first to use the term greenwashing in his expert article, and the rest is history. The term has survived till today and encompasses all areas of sustainability, including gender equality, poverty, hunger, health, education, paid work etc.

There are several typical examples of greenwashing. They have been around for some time, yet, we continue to be duped by them. We have summarised the most typical examples of greenwashing below:

1. Presenting information selectively

An example of greenwashing is emphasising environment-friendly information whilst withholding negative information. A typical example is ignoring the carbon footprint of event transfers which can amount to 75% of an event’s entire carbon footprint.

2. Lack of proof to back up claims

Let us suppose a company claims their event is green or eco-friendly but does not enclose any concrete proof. They should at least calculate their event’s carbon footprint and support it with a certificate issued by an official institution.

3. Ambiguity and vagueness of claims

Another way of misleading is using loose and undefined terms that are nearly impossible to understand in one way. A recurring example, for instance, is stating that an event is carbon-neutral without elaborating what that stands for.

4. Deceiving and irrelevant labels

Companies will often refer to certificates and labels that, in fact, do not exist or are misleading. Lately, there have been cases of green venue finders with no real foundation. This type of deception is embodied by companies that sell “products without CFC”, even though chlorofluorocarbons are forbidden by law.

5. Highlighting the lesser evil

Event organising is environmentally unfriendly. Hence, the claim that one event is greener than another is plainly false.

6. Selling lies

On occasions, companies choose to proclaim lies. Making false claims, certificates, and inventing facts will mislead customers.

7. Meaningless labels

Certificates, labels and awards can often have little or no meaning. In some cases, organisations even award themselves with certificates or endorsements not backed by any authority.

There are even cases when companies tell outright lies. Sooner or later, such practices are exposed, and information about them spreads like wildfire.

In Britain, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) is reporting a boom in the number of complaints about environmental claims – up from 117 in 2006 to 561 last year. “What we are seeing is claims about being carbon-neutral, zero-carbon emissions and use of words such as sustainable and organic,” says Lord Smith, chairman of the ASA.

About the author

Gorazd Čad is a seasoned meeting planner who has dedicated 25 years of his life to the meetings and events industry. He witnessed the fall of Yugoslavia, the establishment of independent Slovenia, adapted to the internet revolution of the ’90s, overcame the economic crisis of 2008, the 2010 eruption of an Icelandic volcano, and the 2019 meetings industry burnout, 2020’s corona crisis and more. Among other things, Gorazd Čad is a professor of geography and history who is sincerely worried about the planet’s future. He strives for events that will be environmentally friendly and responsible to attendees and society.

Slovenian Advertising Code on greenwashing

What the Slovenian Advertising Code says about greenwashing:

Advertising that includes environmental argumentation should be presented in a manner that does not exploit the consumer’s environmental concern or his potential lack of knowledge about environmental themes. It should not contain claims or visual representations that could, in any way, mislead the consumers about products’ benefits from an environmental viewpoint or the environmental activities the advertiser will conduct. Messages can apply to concrete products or activities; they cannot, however, unjustifiably imply that they cover all activities of a company, group or sector.

Claims concerning environmental preservation are not allowed to be used groundlessly. Claims such as environment-friendly, completely biodegradable, greener, friendlier or organic may be acceptable, provided the advertisers prove their truthfulness.

Comparisons are acceptable if the advertisers can prove that their product improves from an environmental perspective compared to their own or competitors’ products.

Claims and comparisons can be misleading if they leave out important information.

When scientific opinions are divided, and the results are not final, the advertisement has to make that clear. An advertiser cannot quote that their claim is generally accepted if that is not the case.

In case a product never had any evidently harmful effects on the environment, the advertisement cannot suggest that its structure was altered to make it more environment-friendly. It is, however, lawful to quote claims about a product whose composition has been altered or has been used hitherto without ingredients that are known to be harmful to the environment.

The use of lesser-known expert terms should be avoided. If the use of a scientific term is unavoidable, its meaning should be clear and understandable or additionally explained.

A broader explanation of the most commonly used claims and terms is defined in the International Chamber of Commerce Code of Advertising and Marketing Practices.

For more information please check:


PYP Assessments Meet-Up
April 23, 2022
Watch recordings now
Cindy Blackburn, Jessica Vance, Levi Allison & Trevor MacKenzie
< 1 min read

Session 1

Making assessments visible in the early years

With Jessica Vance

How do we assess our earliest learners while maintaining agency and a sense of play? Join Jessica Vance to explore how your personal beliefs about assessments can be used as provocation in making learning visible in your PYP classroom. Uncover how thinking routines create practical opportunities to bring inquiry to life.

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Session 2

Developing self-assessors in single subjects

With Levi Allison

Single subject educators work with hundreds of students throughout multiple years of their journey within PYP and have a unique opportunity to see the development of skills over time. Join Levi Allison, as he shares his work as a music teacher and how he supports his students’ journey from self-assessing to self-adjusting.

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Fetal brain imaging predicts neurodevelopment of babies with congenital heart disease

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

Children with congenital heart disease (CHD) often have neurodevelopmental impairment. Until fairly recently, this was thought to stem from complications of cardiac surgery or reduced oxygen supply to the brain due to the heart defect.

Now we know that some babies with CHD have impaired development in utero because of low to the or as part of the genetic disease process that caused CHD itself.

The ability to identify CHD before birth allowed a team at Boston Children's Hospital to ask whether fetal brain imaging might predict children's neurodevelopmental risk. If so, it would justify early interventions, perhaps even before babies are born.

"A lot of brain development occurs during the fetal period that can influence a baby's future trajectory," says study leader Caitlin Rollins, MD, in the Department of Neurology and Cardiac Neurodevelopmental Program at Boston Children's. "Many babies with CHD receive , but the level of services can vary depending on local resources and level of concern. Prenatal MRI could help identify babies for whom we need to pull out all the stops."

MRI brain volumes and neurodevelopmental scores

Rollins and collaborators in Boston Children's departments of Cardiology, Radiology, and Psychiatry began enrolling pregnant mothers in 2014. Their first finding, reported last year in the Annals of Neurology, was that fetuses with CHD, particularly those with hypoplastic left heart syndrome (HLHS) or transposition of the great arteries (TGA), have smaller brain volumes than those without CHD.

A newer study, published in Circulation, correlates these smaller brain volumes with neurodevelopmental outcomes. The team compared 56 whose fetus had known severe CHD with 26 controls who had a family history of CHD but whose fetuses were healthy. Children with known genetic conditions or anomalies affecting organs other than the heart were excluded.

All the women had at least one interpretable fetal MRI brain scan. When their babies were 18 to 24 months old, the team carefully assessed their development and everyday functioning with the Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development (Bayley-III) and the Adaptive Behavior Assessment System (ABAS-3).

Smaller brain volumes on fetal MRI predicted the outcomes of babies with CHD, but not controls, across all domains of neurodevelopment. When the team looked at other variables, like , caregiver education, complications such as seizure or stroke, and neonatal surgery, total fetal brain volume was the most consistent predictor of neurodevelopment. It was also the only variable that reliably predicted adaptive functioning—skills necessary to navigate day-to-day challenges.

"To the best of my knowledge, this is the first paper to associate fetal brain development with later neurodevelopmental outcome in patients with CHD," says coauthor Jane Newburger, MD, MPH, associate cardiologist-in-chief and founder of the Cardiac Neurodevelopmental Program. "It suggests that fetal brain size could be used as a trigger for early postnatal intervention and as an outcome measure for efficacy of fetal therapies."

Prenatal intervention?

Rollins stresses that while brain volumes were predictive of neurodevelopment at the group level, they may not be predictive for individual babies. Nevertheless, she says, the findings could help direct more intensive postnatal interventions, and possibly prenatal interventions, to the babies most in need.

For example, studies indicate that stress in expectant mothers can influence their ' . The Cardiac Neurodevelopmental Program offers a Prenatal Stress Reduction Program, using mindfulness and cognitive-behavioral approaches, to all pregnant mothers whose fetuses have CHD. Rollins hopes to set up a clinical trial of this approach in the near future, using fetal brain imaging to help measure its effects.

Other potential neuroprotective approaches include maternal oxygen therapy and pharmacologic agents. "These are still controversial, and we haven't tried them yet," says Rollins. "In the future, I expect we will embark on trials of different agents, especially in high-risk fetuses with HLHS or TGA, and use prenatal MRI to as a 'biomarker' to help measure outcomes."

Future agenda

Rollins and her colleagues at Boston Children's and across the country are now setting up an infrastructure to do multicenter studies.

"We want to look the value of fetal brain MRI in different types of heart disease, which will require large samples," Rollins says.

In the meantime, the original cohort of children is now reaching school age (6 to 8 years). The Boston Children's team is starting to evaluate them to see the long-term effects of small fetal brain volumes, if any. Adaptive functioning is of particular interest, since it can affect self-care, communication, and social skills later in life.

"We want to see if there's a sustained effect," Rollins says. "For many children with CHD, higher-order deficits in executive functioning, attention, and social cognition do not become apparent until school age."

Explore further

Impaired prenatal brain growth predicts adverse neurodevelopmental outcomes in infants with congenital heart disease

More information: Anjali Sadhwani et al, Fetal Brain Volume Predicts Neurodevelopment in Congenital Heart Disease, Circulation (2022). DOI: 10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.121.056305
Journal information: Annals of Neurology , Circulation

Citation: Fetal brain imaging predicts neurodevelopment of babies with congenital heart disease (2022, June 3) retrieved 10 August 2022 from https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-06-fetal-brain-imaging-neurodevelopment-babies.html

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Factors that Impact Healthcare Providers and Parents of Children with Cancer Under End of Life to Choose Complementary and Alternative Medicine

Use the 6 articles as references only**
This will be a literature review.
****Report your findings as a scholarly paper written in the third person, using strict APA format and including citations throughout.
Make sure strengths and limitations of the studies are presented (Did the research support the PICO question),
as well as opinion and justification (in 3rd person only), as to whether the studies provide enough evidence to warrant a change in practice.
Ideas need to be logical and well presented as it relates to end-of-life care and PICO format.
The PICO question will be:
“In children diagnosed with cancer, how do complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) compared to mainstream medical care improve patient comfort in end of life?
ALSO: please add the level of evidence for each article.
Please remember to mainly focus on whether each article supports the PICO question, or has weaknesses. And conclusion: would you advocate to support change of practice.
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Pride and Spite: An Interview with Tony Tulathimutte

Bill Cheng

I met Tony Tulathimutte over drinks one afternoon. We’d followed each other on Twitter and, on a rare social impulse, I thought I’d chance getting to know him better. Online, he was funny and incisive in his commentary. In person though, I wasn’t sure what to expect. To my delight, we spent our time surprisingly in-step with a minimum of lit-scene gossip and a maximum of day-drinking.

Reading Private Citizens (William Morrow, 2016), it’s hard not to see Tony in his work. The novel is thoughtful and sly, at turns eloquent and hilarious and caustic. It follows the post-collegiate years of four friends on the eve of the 2008 financial collapse. There’s Linda, the failed writer; the transient autodidact Henrik, the socially conscious Cory, and Will—the book’s one Asian character, whose racial neuroses borders on obsession. What astonishes me most about Private Citizens is the way these characters become so much more than their labels. Together and alone in the young urban landscape of San Francisco, they learn to create meaning in a world that keeps insisting they have none.

Tony and I met again to talk about Private Citizens last December at Black Forest Brooklyn Biergarten in Fort Greene, where we discussed—among other things—writing, race, and self-loathing.

Bill Cheng: Private Citizens is actually your second book.  Can you talk about your first book?

Tony Tulathimutte: I wrote a story collection, which I didn’t bother trying to publish as a book.  Except the novella, I drafted all the stories in undergrad and when I put them together I was unsatisfied with them. There was this unwashable stink of shame surrounding them because I suspected I was being a good boy. I’d never written an Asian character, except in one case where I retro-jected Asianness onto the character way after the fact. I know a lot of novice Asian writers who had this problem, they think, “Well, I grew up around mostly white people and so it makes perfect sense for me to write about them.”  It’s a way to rationalize internalized racism and justify what you’re really doing, which is trying to dodge the burdensome label of an ethnic writer, an Asian writer.

BC: In some ways, you try to address that with the character Will.  On the face of things, Will is a lot like you: he’s Thai, went to Stanford.  But what makes Will different from Tony?

TT: The name. (Laughter.)

Once time I had my roommate send me a piece of my novel while I was at work.  He said, “Sorry man, I just opened your computer and I saw a bunch of notes open.  I just wanted to remark that I did see on top of this file, a huge bold text equation that says ‘WILL = ME – WRITING + GIRLFRIEND.’”  That was sort of a joke to myself, but what I wanted was not to give myself any wiggle room, abstracting characters away from me because that’s what I thought good writing was.

BC: What did framing Will that way do for the writing?

TT: It removed the checks and balances from my psyche.  When I have these sort of insecurities or desires ruthlessly indulged I imagine I would become a kind of a monster.

What I didn’t want was to write the kind of novel people write when they set out to make a big statement about a racial experience.  In the attempt to give a voice to people of their race, they often end up over-generalizing.  There’s this total overreach.  What I did in this book is very specific.  If people are going to identify with the experience of Asian-ness this character has, it’s going to be in this heavily qualified way, just because in spite of the many stereotypical traits I deliberately saddled him with—short, angry, tech savvy, girl-troubled—you find that he’s nothing like most people, Asian or otherwise.  I’d be hard-pressed to compare anyone to Will, even myself, in spite of him sharing my biography.  In fact he doesn’t resemble me any more than the other three characters.

BC: Let’s talk about them. Most of the action is set in those years after college, when they’re each deeply invested in their individual lives and those bonds aren’t as present.

TT: I don’t know about you, but in New York I barely see my closest friends.  Everybody I know has a lot of banal obligations that take them away from regular day-in, day-out exposure to the people who’re closest to them.

If there’s one thing I am concerned with, it’s the experience of our fantasy life vs. our real life.  That, when your friends are not there, you’re still thinking, “What would Jenny say about this? What would Alice say if she saw me doing this?”  Even though they’re not actually there, nonetheless their influence is present.

In this book, the characters are deeply involved in each other’s mental lives, even more than their actual circumstances.  Everything Henrik does is a response to breaking up with Linda.  Everything Linda does is to move beyond Henrik.  Linda has informed Will’s resentment of women.  And Cory is constantly comparing herself to Linda. So there’s a skein of relationships that are operating even when one character is just sitting there alone.

BC: With four protagonists, how did you manage to capture the diversity of all these voices?

TT: I had to get at the book edgewise.  I spent two years floundering and not being able to just sit down and write.  What I had to do was tackle the alternate project of trying to write about everything that was happening in my life, everything I was thinking about, with no preconceptions about how they were interrelated or would cohere into a story.

BC: Like what?

TT: I was thinking about political obligations as somebody living comfortably in San Francisco.  I was thinking about technology, as a tech consultant in Silicon Valley, and race, and writing—like almost everybody, I felt like I had the talent to write but a total inability to do it.  And I was thinking about my inherited defects.  Right in the middle of my 20s all these new allergies kicked in. I couldn’t eat fruits with thin skins; I was diagnosed with exercise-induced anaphylactic urticaria. Literally allergic to exercise.  I had to have surgery to correct a deviated septum and enlarged nasal turbinates.

Having to descend into this crazy bureaucracy of health, just to feel like I was a normal functioning person.  Operating under all these strictures and paranoias about new illnesses.  And mental stuff as well.  I had conquered four psychiatrists and was feeling like I was looking down a long corridor of unwellness, and not really seeing where I was going to come through the other side—that’s a lot of Henrik’s neuroses come from.

None of these things are obviously connected. Putting it together literally amounted to writing out random sentences or thoughts in a million different text files and seeing, “Oh these two kind of relate to each other, I’m going to move them closer.”  Then I’d glom them together and they become kind of like a T-1000 pool of living metal.  I stitched those together into a passage, which gets stitched together into a scene, which gets assigned to a character.  This is the most ass-backwards way to write a novel, which is why it took seven years.

BC: What I enjoyed the most about the book is the strength in the voices of these characters.

TT: They tend to rant.  Part of that is Philip Roth’s influence, part of it is my desire to write criticism inside the novel.

BC: I feel like a lot of writers— and I include myself in this— are often paralyzed by that kind of interiority.

TT: Really?  I feel like that’s what everybody does when they want to self-indulge.

BC: Maybe I like movies too much.  But for me, there’s no “brain voice” in my head.  My brain doesn’t speak to me in English but rather this different, primal language.  Putting that on the page, I find, is difficult.

TT: Nabokov once said that only illiterates think in language, that people generally think in images. To me it’s not possible to mimic your brain voice, but you can translate it to English.  And oftentimes when we do it, we realize, “Oh shit, I’m a horrible person.”  When writers talk in this vague grandiose way about wanting to get at the truth, usually they’re just trying to figure out what they’re thinking.

I think there’s an E.M. Forster line that goes, “How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?”  That’s the idea.  If you’re not cornered into actually articulating what you’re after, then how can you endorse or deny it?

BC: In a lot of ways, Private Citizens is an examination of self-loathing.  Do you think this is something particular to where we are now as a generation?

TT: My first workshop at Iowa hated my book. I had almost no defenders.  A lot of what I was perceiving as self-loathing was read as contempt.  They felt there was this authorial sensibility that was basically saying the equivalent of “ha ha look at these fucking Millennials, look how stupid and entitled and narcissistic they are”—and in a way that’s the critique I fear most, even if it’s positive.  Where somebody says “Check out this scathing takedown of Millennials!”  Because I think that’s bullshit.

Every generation, except the one that fought World War II, gets maligned as worse than its predecessor, and for the dumbest reasons.  “Oh, Millennials, they boomerang, and live off their parents.”  Well, you shouldn’t have dismantled America’s manufacturing base and rolled back financial regulations and cut every reliable job.  We didn’t ask for the gig economy. That’s not on us.

These kinds of generational critiques are misplaced.  So when people charge this generation as being exceptionally self-absorbed, exceptionally un-present because of their smartphones, that’s just a stupid generalization.  If that’s what I’m either criticized or lauded for doing, I think it’s just wrong.  I’m not trying to diminish or criticize the generation I belong to.  I’m not even trying to make a statement about them at large because, again, it’s an issue of overreach.  I’m just trying to write about my own experience in a way that’s not limited by my own experience.

BC: Do you identify as a writer, an Asian writer, or a Thai writer?

TT: Either way it’s a no-win.  One way, you are either pigeonholed as a Thai writer, an Asian writer.  The other way, you’re being dishonest, especially in my case where I am writing about race, among other things. If someone asks me, “Am I Thai and a writer?’” Well, that’s true.  Some of my writing is bound up in the question of being Asian in America.

But to drill down to the next level of your question, there’s actually a distinction between calling yourself an Asian writer or a Thai writer, right?  Because one actually presumes a healthy and nuanced enough discourse that makes significant distinctions between Thai writers, Chinese writers, Japanese writers, Korean writers.  And I don’t think that’s the case.  In spite of the staggering diversity of ethnicities within Asia, to most people what matters more than those differences is that you either look Asian or you don’t.  The particularities are completely paved over, including the things they expect of you as a writer or read into your writing.

In real life my Thai-ness only comes into play when I’m talking to other Asian people and they’re feeling out whether or not we have any deeper cultural ground than the experience of being treated as an Asian.  I didn’t know many Asian people my age until I went to Stanford, and even then, it wasn’t our Asianness we bonded over, it was writing.  I didn’t join the Asian-American Students Association, which I thought was corny—they had a newsletter called Communicasians, for instance.  There’s nothing to be ashamed of in terms of racial identity; there’s just also nothing to be proud of, except insofar as you know you’ve had to overcome shit because of it.

If there’s a basis for pride, it’s in spite.  Which, funny enough, were working titles for my novel.  Pride and Spite.

BC: Do you think your writing is in some way motivated by anger?

TT: Anger to me seems like the wrong word because it connotes a lack of control.  That’s why spite seems more useful.  It is this thing to stew over, to elaborate.  It can be intellectualized and rationalized and at a certain point it becomes less a feeling than a value.  A ton of my work had to do with that.  To say anger, I don’t know, I tend to turn my anger inward in self-destructive ways that later become material.

BC: Self-destructive how?

TT: Look at how the characters act out in the book.  Cory has an eating disorder, Will’s self-destruction becomes very literal, and Linda repeatedly nukes her situation and finds herself without a fixed address.  You can see how somebody could justify her behavior as standing up for yourself, or autonomy, but it’s also self-sabotage and a desire to be confirmed in your dismal worldview.

It’s that cog-psych principle of depressive realism, where you’re disposed to see the world as a bad place so that when bad things happen you feel validated by being right.  Every time people will take being right over being happy.  Every time.

Tony Tulathimutte is the author of the novel Private Citizens (William Morrow, 2016). A graduate of Stanford University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he has contributed to VICE, Salon, The New Yorker online, Threepenny Review, AGNI, The LA Review of Books, The American Reader, and other places. He has been selected for an O. Henry Award and a Macdowell Fellowship; his website is at

Bill Cheng is the author of Southern Cross the Dog.  He is a 2015 fellow in Fiction for the New York Foundation for the Arts and a 2016 recipient of a National Endowment of the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship.


Impressive, majestic and imposing medieval castles fill the Dordogne Valley and each one has an intriguing history with stories of high drama.

Built atop a cliff, the 12th century castle of Beynac boasts panoramic views over the Dordogne Valley and river below it. At the heart of the “on again off again” 100 Years War between France and England it remains one of the best preserved fortified castles of the region. Richard the Lionheart, King of England, once occupied this château and its thick defensive walls bore witness to attacking armies crossing the Dordogne River below it. From the vantage point of the castle, the river divided the English forces from the opposing French armies which stood against them in the distance, directly opposite in the Château de Castelnaud. Open throughout the year (except January), visits take place from 10am to 7pm daily. Audio guides available in English give unique insights into the architecture of medieval warfare and this magnificent fortress with its 12th century keep, guard’s room and fortified towers, opulent private quarters and banquet room.

Famous French film director Luc Besson shot Joan of Arc here and it has been used as the set of a multitude of other TV and film productions since, including Ridley Scott’s latest medieval epic. Visits begin from the equally pretty village of Beynac-et-Cazenac, directly underneath the castle at the river’s edge.

Nestled in beautiful oak forests and surrounded by deep gorges, the Tours de Merle overlook the river Maronne, a tributary of the Dordogne River. Named after the blackbirds that live in the area (merle in French), this majestic medieval ruin stands testimony to the ravages of war.

At the height of the 14th century this feudal castle was once at the heart of a thriving kingdom owned by seven noblemen. Coming under attack both during the 100 Years War and thereafter in the Wars of Religion it suffered significant damage and was eventually abandoned.Open from April until October, visitors can still climb the medieval steps right to the top of the towers and admire the views. In the summer months there is also a special programme of medieval themed shows and demonstrations full of colourful period costumes.

A château that exudes exquisite French charm, this 16th century castle is a key example of Renaissance architecture in the Dordogne Valley. Unusually, the Château de Montal was designed and built to the specification of a woman, the Lady of Montal - Jeanne de Balsac. Scattered throughout the castle, in sculptures and ornamental motifs are tributes to Jeanne Balsac’s lost son, Robert de Montal, killed during the Renaissance Wars of Italy in the 1500s. Her project was never fully realised before her death and the castle subsequently fell into disrepair. Falling into ruin it was eventually purchased in the 19th century by the avid art collector and rich industrialist Maurice Fenaille. Due to Fenaille’s wealth and extensive contacts in the art world, he set about reacquiring the contents of the château which had been stripped and sold off. He later gifted it to the French State upon his death. The château was famously used to hide Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and other Louvre treasures from the Nazis during the Second World War.

Beginning life as a medieval fortress in the 12th century it was at one time captured by Richard the Lionheart in 1183. Subsequently, this medieval castle was radically transformed during the 17th century into a luxurious residential château under the Marquis de Hautefort. Today, this castle stands testament to the lavish beauty of this bygone age with 19th century boxwood French gardens, meticulously manicured and maintained, serving to enhance the glorious views. Special night tours during the summer months see actors in full medieval costume bring back to life the history of the Château.


Identity Crisis and Alienation in The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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In the postcolonial texts, identity is an important term, especially regarding some key concepts, such as immigration or enslavement, since experiencing these terms might create a great deal of change in one’`s identity depending on the environment toof which they become a part. This change might occur in a negative way and cause individuals to isolate themselves from what is around them, which can be defined as alienation. The term aAlienation, as put forward by Jaeggi, in a broadly sense means “… the inability to establish a relation to other human beings, to things, to social institutions and thereby also—so the fundamental intuition of the theory of alienation—to oneself.” (Jaeggi 3-10). Therefore, alienation does not necessarily mean that individuals gradually become estranged to the others, but also to themselves. The concept of alienation, its reasons and results may vary from one person to another depending on the personal experiences. The term started to be widely used in literature, especially after the first and second the wWorld wWars I and II, when Western people started to experience war-related traumas and psychological disorders. Thus, it became one of the central themes in modernist literature. It is also one of the major key themes in Adichie`s short stories, as her characters are going through alienation due to many reasons including the ones of gender, race, the conditions of their corrupted environment, and having to adapt into a new land. As mentioned above, traumatic experiences of the individuals have been a common theme in literature, especially of those who areof the minorities or marginalised communitiesoutcasts, as stated by Satkunananthan: “The collective experiences of marginalised communities, be they third‐world, postcolonial, coloured or otherwise subject to collective trauma, are often commodified in mass‐produced literature, art or advertising.” (Satkunananthan 42). However, in Adichie`s work, besides the racial alienation, female alienation also forms an important part component as the her black women are the ones who are exposed to both racism and sexism in a colonial setting. The importance of the effects of the colonial mindset and the practice of enslavement on black women is defined by Patterson:
“It was women who first lived in terror of enslavement, and hence it was women who first came to value its absence, both those who were never but lived in dread of it and, even more so, those who were captured and lived in hope of being redeemed …” (Patterson 168)Women, more specifically black women in regard to Adichie`s work, have been under the gaze of the colonisers on the streets, at work and even at home. Therefore, their alienation from the means of authority is not only linked to the British colonialism in Nigeria, but also to their position as women in relation to being a part of a patriarchal society. Consequently, Adichie`s choice to depict ordinary women in her stories allows the her readers to empathise with these characters and comprehend their psychological state sof their minds.
The Portrayal of Social and Female Alienation in the Characters of a Ccolonial Land in The Thing Around Your Neck
The first story of The Thing Around Your Neck, “Cell One”, is mainly about Nnamabia, who is the brother of the narrator and supposedly a member of one of the cults formed with teenagers. He is going through a sense of estrangement from the society; therefore, a social alienation. This rebellious character even steals even from the family, which can be explained in a way that in a corrupted society, in which there are various cults and the mother needs to bribe the officers for his son to receive a better treatment in prison, he is trying to gain his own voice and assert his own identity. The effects of Western life on Nigerian teenagers is also mentioned in the story with a specific focus on American rap which is believed to provoke the spread of cults, and it is suggested that the teenagers in Nigerian society are adapting themselves into this new trend that is introduced by the to them via media. However, Nnamabia`s attitude gradually changes as soon as he is put sent into the prison and begins to deals with the attitude of the officers towards the prisoners. He even feels a sympathy for an old man, who is treated badly and never receive sees any visitors. This situation evokes such a feeling in Nnamabia that he wishes to give the food that ihis family s brought to ings him by his family to the old man. His transformation from the rebellious boy to a sympatheticcompassionate adult represents his transformation from being an isolated character, who needs to prove himself through rebellious actions in order to survive in that society, to a character who cares about for solidarity, as it might be the only way for these individuals to stand against corruption.
Although corruption in the society is an important major theme in the text, Adichie shows how the reasons behind the alienation of the characters in the text are also linked to the family ties. As sensed with the depictions by the narrator of the same story, there is a rivalry between the two siblings, which stems from the attitude of the parents and the people surrounding them.
“When my mother took us to the market, traders would call out, “Hey! Madam, why did you waste your fair skin on a boy and leave the girl so dark? What is a boy doing with all this beauty?” And my mother would chuckle, as though she took a mischievous and joyful responsibility for Nnamabia`s good looks. And my mother would chuckle, as though she took a mischievous and joyful responsibility for Nnamabia`s good looks.” (Adichie 6)
Nnamabia is the mostre beautiful and loved one with a fair skin, which adds up to his beauty according to the generalised beauty standards, whereas the sister is confined to darkness. The fact that the narrator stays unnamed throughout the story gives provides evidencea clue about how lost she feels in that her family, as having the concept of having a son is believed to be superior tobetter than having a daughter. Not only does she suffer in a society in which safety is a big major issue, but also, she has to be reminded that she isas a woman, she is and inferior to men even in a small and loving community like family. Therefore, the narrator`s alienation as a sister has various dimensions linked to her colonised and unsafe homeland and its patriarchal mindset.
Adichie brings along family issues many times throughout the book, as exemplified in Tomorrow is Too Far, in which jealousy is also a common problem between two siblings. No matter how skilled or interested the narrator is, she is overshadowed by her brother, Nonso, and her grandmother favours him by neglecting the potential of the narrator since she “She is the incidental the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the subject, he is the absolute.” (Beauvoir 16). The feeling of not being loved and realised by the family members is what leadsmakes the narrator to take an action to prove her existence. Provoking Nonso into climbing up the tree and resultsing in his death., Tthe narrator aims to get rid ofeliminate him and receive all the love for herself from her mother and grandmother for herself. However, her plan does not work as she thinksplanned, and she stays asremains the Other, even in the absence of the brother since male figure in the family is superior to the female figure as “in a wide range of countries a sizeable preference for sons is found.” (Hank and Kohler , 4)
The issue related to patriarchal mindset is portrayed by Adichie in various contexts throughout the book. “In “Jumping Monkey Hill” , for instance, the experiences of Ujunwa’s experiences are told in a writer`s conference around Cape Town, in
“”the kind of place where she imagined affluent foreign tourists would dart around taking pictures of lizards and then return home still mostly unaware that there were more black people than red-capped lizards in South Africa.” (Adichie 95).
Along with dealing the stereotypes of Africa, Adichie shows that how this woman author Ujunwa is constantly under the gaze of the British organiser Edward and exposed to sexual harassment as “… he always looked at her chest rather than her face …” (Adichie 109). The fact that he is married does not hold him back from attempting to ignite an intercourse with Ujunwa since the African woman is “authentic and different” and as put forward by Hooks “to these young males and their buddies, fucking was a way to confront the Other, as well as a way to make themselves over, to leave behind white “innocence” and enter the world of “experience.” (Hooks 368). Not only does he feel superior to Ujunwa due to his race but also his gender.
The colonial mindset Edward has is again revealed again when he attempts to teach an African woman about African staples and makes assumptions of Africa by underestimating her knowledge about her homeland and looking down on her as well as deciding to what extent the story of Ujunwa is “real African.” In that way, Rodriguez states that
“”Edward’s authority threatens this diversity of representation as he expects the workshop participants to represent, in their own behaviour as well as through the stories they write, his single image of Africa and African writing.”” (Rodriguez 6-7).
The way Edward sees Africa is a separate world, far from the Western conditions, and he wishes to impose this image into the African woman by creating his own reality. Ujunwa`s identity and background are ignored by him. C; consequently, she has to suffer from both the results that come along with her race and gender. The fact that Edward is more concerned about her body and rarely looks at her face is an example of his perception of her, the one that is as nothing less but the one of a sexual object. However, as in all the stories in the book, Adichie also gives also Ujunwa her own voice and thea chance to establish her identity by making her ask thea simple question: “Why do we always say nothing?” (Adichie 112), whose the answer of which might give a solution for the de-humanised women to get over the instinct to isolate themselves from the society as well as her personal ability to create stories that allows her to gain power.
The attempt of non-Africans to show offdisplay their knowledge about of Africa is depicted in “The Thing Around Your Neck” through Akunna`s story as well, which is about the opportunity that she obtainsgets to apply forobtain the American visa and start working as a waitress. Even though people around her in Nigeria exaggerates the life conditions in the USA and encourages her to set up her life there, she faces the bitter truth by realising that the American Dream is simply not tailored for the immigrants when she arrives. She is a foreign n immigrant woman , who is exposed to sexual harassment by her own uncle and needs to work hard but to gains earn less money than the other workerss. During her encounter with the customers, she realises that many people try to make assumptions of about Africa with the same attitude than the event organiseras Edward`s in “Jumping Monkey Hills”, the one of the people who are far from understanding their culture. When she gets to knowmeets a certain special customer, who relatively knows more about Africa than the others, another moment strikes her to and she make her realises that the idea of travelling to Africa, getting to knowcoming across people and observing the poor is highly romanticised among Americans. However, the fact that the man refrains from defining her as his girlfriend gives clues aboutprovide an indication of hism deep-down feeling of superiority.
As stated above, the author portrays the patriarchal colonialism has been portrayed by the author in many stories, especially through the idea of marriage and giving birth. The United States is portrayed as a land of opportunities for Nigerians.; Ttherefore, getting married to ying someone from the USAAmerican is thea key thato opens the doors for the Nigerians who are forced to leave their home countryies. This idea is exemplified in the short story “The Arrangers of Marriage”. The protagonist Chinaza, the protagonist, is made to marriesry Ofodile, a doctor who lives in America. The marriage is arranged named Ofodile by her aunt and uncle, which is supposedly a way toof rescueing herself from the supposedly bad second-rate living conditions in Nigeria. Even though they have been married for less than a month, Chinaza already feels that something is wrong. The story is an example of the dominance of the male authority over femalewomen, as the husband refuses to let the his wife speak her mother tongue or cook their traditional dishes. Chinaza is forced to live an American life under the gaze of Ofodile, and not only when they are among other people but also in their private house, which results in her identity crisis since she is forced to adapt into her new identity and “to be as mainstream as possible and not left by the roadside” (Adichie 173). Especially, the fact that now she is to be called Agatha leads toemphasises the loss of her original identity as she is forced to leave change her name and its cultural associations dimensions behind. The theme of namelessness or renaming is a key concept n important theme in colonial and postcolonial literature and colonial settings in regards to identity as put forward by Kabore:
“… in the new world they find themselves in, names are so important that not having a name means one has lost one’s original identity and is reduced to mere archetypes …” (Kabore 4)
Chinaza needs is forced to adopt into thea new identity and the American way of lifeving , which is created by her husband for her, and consequently, she is in a way tamed and enslaved by the her husband in this new environment. Although she now is now in a country with “full of opportunities”, she is not allowed to make her own choices or introduce herself to whomever she wishes to, using with her real identity. However, the fact that he is not an genuine American-born citizen and that he also had to go through hardships when he arrived in America, feeds the discussion of , in a colonial system, how victimised also the colonisers also are. Ofadelia`s shift from the colonised to the coloniser gives him an opportunity to be in charge, a concept which that he used to be far from, as stated by Turkmen: “The colonialist identity for the colonizer breaks out with his arrival to the colonial lands. On arriving he goes into a sudden shift of identity. Being a mediocre man in his own country, the colonizer suddenly turns into a master, giving orders, earning money which he cannot otherwise dream about, having facilities exclusively at his disposal. ” (Turkmen 195)
Due regard being had to this statement, even though the readers of the story are more prone to empathise with the colonised, it is vital to understand how the a colonial atmosphere creates victims of in both sides and results in an identity crisis for both as well.
The idea of marriage failure iss also representeds itself in the story “Imitation”, when Nkem, the protagonist, Nkem needs to ignore the affairs of her husband’s affairs in Nigeria, while she lives estranged, with her children, in America, so as to provide them with a luxurious life for them. The affairs of the husband are known by others as well as by Nkem, and she fulfils the need to talk about it by communicating with the her maid, who is “her only source of companionship in America” (Rodriguez 12). However, her husband`s affairs indiscretions are simply justified byas his status as aof man, and additionally, his wealthy allows him to impose his way of lifestyleving. Nkem`s attempt to decisionde to shape her life according to her will, is a determining step which she takes to integrate with her husband and recover from her isolation estrangement from him. Her transformation, from thea silent figure to thea woman who stands up for her wishes and by decidinges to leave America, represents how frustrated she feels about her new land and her relationship with her husband, Obiora. Therefore, the ideal America, which Nigerians are dreaming of, does not necessarily bring happiness to them as portrayed in the story. The fact that Adichie includes problematic relationships in her book shows that either the alienation of the Nigerian characters begins in their private spacespheres, at home, or the way they are living isir daily life is simply affected by the hardships they come across due to the problems occurring in where the environment they are a part of live.
Violence-Related Traumatic Experiences and the Consequences
The psychological aspects of the stories become more dominant in “Ghosts”. The protagonist James is openly talking about death, and with the presence of extradiegetic analepsis, readers are able to see how the Nigerian Civil War, or in another name the Biafra War that occurred in 1967-1970, has left memories in his mind. The fact that he claims to be visited by the ghost of his dead wife suggests that he is suffering from traumatic neurosis due to the effects of war as stated by Kardiner:
“The war situation definitely contributes to the frequence of incidence of traumatic neuroses and allied disease and is undoubtedly responsible for the difference in character between these neuroses and those which occur in peace time in a more attenuated form.” (Kardiner 69)
The feeling of loss he is experiencing puts him into thea situation , in which he is treated as a mad man by his friend Ikenna. However, his supernatural interaction with his wife suggests that he feels alienated from the people around him and simply wishes to maintain the connection with the woman who had had a bond with him, before she passed away. James liveis in fear of being sent to America by his daughter if he mentions that Ebere is still visiting him, which is linked to his fear of being introduced to another environment and feeling more isolated than before.
The feeling of losing a loved one appears in “The American Embassy” as well, this time about a woman who is experiencing the death of her son. The idea of a corrupted story presents itself with the portrayal of many people waiting in the line to obtainget the American visa to improve their life conditions, such as in the case of t, he narrator`s life, herher journalist husband being in danger, the death of the her son and the narrator`sher decision to give up her career. The narrator feels distant to the people in the line, stays silent and thinks about “why she did not share in any familiarity that had developed among the others in the line.” (Adichie 129). However,; despite what she has been going through or when she is refused to obtainget the visa at the end of the story, the fact that she makes an attempts, even by showing upbeing present in the line, gives a sense of her wish to continue her life. Therefore, the author suggests that the idea that whatever happens in the lives of these characters`s, they always try to find a way to continue. Comment by Eleonore Grave: Informal word
The desire to continue pursue someone`s life is also portrayed in “A Private Experience,” in which two women with different religious backgrounds come across in a shop while en there is a riot between Muslims and Christians of Nigeria is happening ion the street between Muslims and Christians of Nigeria., but They still manage to have a daily conversation about their experiences in the shop where they need to protect themselves. It is sensed in thise story that alienation, which is experienced by the characters of the stories, is not practically essentially about Nigerians as being the Others. The Muslim woman, who has been experienced ing many riots, is under the gaze of an Igbo Christian Igbo woman, Chika, who is from the same country, and has read about the riots only in newspapers. Chika doubts that whether the woman is able to grasp what Chika she is talking about since she has been exposed to the fact that they are the inferior ones due to their religions, and their socioal and economic status.; Ttherefore, as a result of the Christian Igbos’this way of thinking of the Christian Igbos, the Muslim woman is forced to be isolated from a part of the society. They are both going through a violence-related traumatic experience in Nigeria due to the chaotic atmosphere, yet the shop is isolated from the riots on the streets symbolising the woman`s isolation from society. However, the situation in which they are brings along solidarity between these two women who belong to different sides, yet get have the chance to listen to one another.
“She hardly ever lies, but the few times she does, there is always a purpose behind the lie. She wonders what purpose this lie serves, this need to draw on a fictional past similar to the woman`s …”” (Adichie 50)
The fact that Chika is lying about her family to create something mutual between herself and the woman, suggests that she feels an inner bond with the woman. Chika is experiencing something that has not been mentioned in the media: not all the Hausa-speaking Muslims are violent against the non-Muslims, as it is written in “The Guardian” (Adichie 55). These two women with different backgrounds are experiencing a short-term friendship, which changes their opinions about the other side, and Chika`s wish to keep the woman`s scarf is the symbol of her adopting a new point of view. At the end, both these women are from the same chaotic and colonised country and solidarity between them might bring a solution to the chaos and their forced alienation, as in the case of Nnamabia in “Cell One” standing up for the old man in the prison.
In Adichie`s short story collection The Thing Around Your Neck, the portrayal of the alienated characters differs from one another due to the various reasons that cause their isolation. Although each story analysed in this paper includes an identity struggle, Adichie manages to present to the readers that the aftermath of their psychological deterioration is not necessarily the same. Nnamabia in “Cell One” and Chika in “A Private Experience” find a way to get overcome their alienation and survive through solidarity as well as; Chinaza in “The Arrangers of Marriage”, Nkem in “Imitation” and Akunna in “The Thing Around Your Neck” through their determination to take an action for themselves and keep their dignity, the narrator in “The American Embassy” through her wish to continue her life and Ujanwa in “Jumping Monkey Hill” through creation as an author. However,; James in “Ghosts” still pursues a bond with his dead wife and whether this situation helps him to hold onto life or isolates him is open to debate. Despite the fact that the stories ofin this postcolonial work collection deal with various themes through many characters with different backgrounds, the mutuality is that Adichie refrains from putting placing the chaotic setting experienced by Nigerians due to colonialism as a central theme, but she rather focuses on representing their struggles in their daily lives. The way Adichie brings along the gender-related alienation of black women is highly related to the colonial mentality. ; Ttherefore, the stories are not only about the colonised nation and their sufferings but also women as colonised beings by the patriarchal authorities. The experiences of these black women involve the exposure to racism as well as sexism.; Cconsequently, they are the double victims of a colonised country.

Adichie, Ngozi Chimamanda. 2009. The Thing Around Your Neck. HarperCollins, 2017.
De Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. Translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier. Vintage Books A Division of Random House. 2011.
Jaeggi, Rahel, and Alan E. Smith. “‘A Stranger in the World That He Himself Has Made’: The Concept And Phenomenon of Alienation.” Alienation, edited by Frederick Neuhouser, Columbia University Press, 2014, pp. 3–10. JSTOR,
Hank, Karsten, and Hans-Peter Kohler. Gender Preferences for Children Revisited: New Evidence from Germany. Max Planck Institute , 2002.
Hooks, Bell. “Eating the other: Desire and Resistance”. In Black looks: Race and Representation. South End Press, 1992.
Kaboré, Andre. “Migration in African Literature: A Case Study of Adichie’s Works”. Littérature, Langues et Linguistique. No.4, 2016, pp. 1-17.
Kardiner, Abram. The Traumatic Neuroses of War. National Research Council, 1941.
Oroskhan, Mohammad Hussein, and Esmail Zohdi. “Doubleness of Identity in Adichie’s ‘Imitation.'” International Journal of English and Education, vol. 4, no. 4, Oct. 2015, pp. 300–310. Academia,
Patterson, Orlando. Freedom in the Making of Western Culture. BasicBooks, 1991.
Rodriguez, Ivette. “Reimagining African Authenticity Through Adichie’s Imitation Motif.” Florida International University, FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2017. Digital Commons,
Satkunananthan, Anita Harris. “Textual Transgressions and Consuming the Self in the Fiction of Helen Oyeyemi and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie .” HECATE: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Women`s Liberation, vol. 37, no. 2, Nov. 2011, pp. 41–69. Research Gate,
Turkmen, Serap. “Identity in the Colonial Lands: A Critical Overview of the Postcolonial Studies .” Alternatives: Turkish Journal of International Relations, vol. 2, no. 3&4, 2003, pp. 188–203. Dergi Park,

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In a 1976 book, McCartney recalled that it was his work, saying, "I liked In My Life. Those were words that John wrote, and I wrote the tune to it. That was a great one."

But in a 1980 Playboy interview, Lennon said McCartney wrote only the harmony and the bluesy middle-eight melody

So the researchers ran their statistical model twice, once to determine who wrote the middle-eight melody, and once to determine who wrote the rest of the tune.

Harvard senior lecturer Mark Glickman, one of the researchers, told Inverse that the "McCartney wrote the middle eight" theory seemed plausible.

"The middle eight sounds like something McCartney would write," Glickman said. "When the middle eight goes, 'So I know I'll never lose affection,' the note changes aren't on the beat, they're off the beat. So they're syncopated. And McCartney does that quite a bit."

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How To Write A Good Introduction In Your Essay On Trust My Paper

Ben Jonson first used the word essayist in 1609, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. Other English essayists included Sir William Cornwallis, who published essays in 1600 and 1617 that were in style on the time, Robert Burton (1577â1641) and Sir Thomas Browne (1605â1682). In Italy, Baldassare Castiglione wrote about courtly manners in his essay Il Cortigiano. In the 17th century, the Spanish Jesuit Baltasar GraciÃ¡n wrote about the theme of wisdom. While Montaigne’s philosophy was admired and copied in France, none of his most instant disciples tried to put in writing essays. But Montaigne, who favored to fancy that his family was of English extraction, had spoken of the English people as his “cousins”, and he was early read in England, notably by Francis Bacon.

You might imagine that you need to write your introduction first, however that isnât essentially true, and it isnât all the time the best approach to craft a great introduction. You might discover that you simply donât know exactly what you’ll argue at the beginning of the writing process. The writing course of can be an important method to arrange your ideas, think through difficult points, refine your ideas, and develop a complicated argument. However, an introduction written initially of that discovery course of won’t essentially replicate what you wind up with on the end. You will need to revise your paper to be sure that the introduction, all of the evidence, and the conclusion replicate the argument you propose.

Thesis Type Description Example Persuasive Statement The persuasive statement presents the central argument that the writer plans to argue for in the body of the essay. Healthcare is a primary human proper and must be provided by the government. Expository Statement Expository thesis statements are written to be unbiased and to present information in a straightforward way. The smallpox vaccine was the primary vaccine; it was developed in 1798. Analysis Statement An evaluation thesis assertion is utilized in essays that analyze a selected matter, such as a specific piece of literature.

This persuasive essay introduction highlights the three examples the author will use to backup their thesis. Start with the fundamentals — what do you concentrate on the topic? Once you’ve an argument, start jotting down the evidence for the argument.

An obvious tip for a history essay is to put in writing in the past tense. Watch out for blended tenses when proofreading your work. One exception to the rule about previous tense is when writing about the work of contemporary historians (for instance, âKershaw writesâ¦â sounds better than âKershaw wroteâ¦â or âKershaw has writtenâ¦â). A historical past essay is only more likely to succeed whether it is appropriately referenced. Your essay should support its data, concepts and arguments with citations or references to reliable sources. Your conclusion need not be as long or as developed as your body paragraphs.

A thesis statement is often on the end of an introductory paragraph. The sentences that precede the sentence will introduce it, and the sentences that comply with will help and clarify it. Just as a subject sentence introduces and organizes a paragraph, a thesis assertion helps readers acknowledge what is to follow. Write a sentence that begins every supporting paragraph by introducing the brand new matter for that section and connects readers again to the primary thought of your piece of writing.

Most of the work on an informative essay is done earlier than you truly sit all the way down to kind. Now that you know how to start off an essay, check these helpful ideas. Theyâll help make an excellent paper and obtain excessive grades. As soon as you seize an concept of it, you may continue studying about the way to start an essay.

The distinction between these two kinds of essays may be exhausting to spot at first look, however they do have a number of key differences. For starters, informational essays are designed to teach the reader on a specific subject. Expository essays, then again, are more targeted on informing thÐµ reader on a particular subject material. Expository essays are often written for standardized exams or for assignments the place you’re required tÐ¾ expound on a particular matter.

Informative essays are usually written within the form of an argumentative essay or a persuasive essay. An argumentative essay requires the creator to investigate a subject, after which present a thesis assertion. A persuasive essay is an editorial that presents a case for a specific opinion and attempts to persuade the reader to merely accept the opinion.

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Social Networking : Defamation 1

Home » Legally Speaking Posts » Social Networking : Defamation 1

Q: I own a chain of restaurants.  One day, somebody transmitted text to a newspaper’s internet discussion forum.  The text accused me of maintaining dirty and unsanitary-looking food-service places and allowing trash from those establishments to drift into the nearby river.  That text was published, to the general public.  A month later, somebody else (it seems) transmitted text to the forum.  The text accused me of torching a beautiful historical home it, to make way for one of my establishments, and having no sense of decency.  I want to sue these posters for defamation.

A: The law is that posters have a First Amendment right to retain their anonymity and not be subject to frivolous suits for defamation.  On the other hand, meritorious causes of actions for defamation should not be barred in the Internet context.  The courts do not want to limit free speech on the Internet, but they do not want to unjustifiably inhibit you from pursuit of a meritorious defamation claim.

When a trial court is confronted with a defamation action in which anonymous speakers or pseudonyms are involved, it will require the plaintiff to do three things.  One, you must undertake efforts to notify John Doe that he is potentially a defendant in your lawsuit, like posting a message of notification on the site’s message board.  Second, you must you must give John a reasonable opportunity anonymously to file and serve opposition to your proposed lawsuit.  Third, you must set forth the exact defamatory statements supposedly made by John.

Once you have met those three requirements, the court will still need to determine whether your complaint has set forth a ‘prima facie’ defamation action against the anonymous poster.  From what you have told me, the answer sounds like ‘no’: these posters merely are voicing an opinion, concerning a restaurant owner who operates in the public arena.

Even if you have made out that ‘prima facie’ case, a court still can decide that any injury to you is relatively trivial.  Here, that seems likely to be the case.  The court will conclude that, on balance, the anonymous poster’s First Amendment right of free speech far outweighs your prima facie case of defamation and any necessity for disclosure of this poster’s identity.

By: Scott Baron,
Attorney at Law Advertorial


Hepatitis D-Associated Hospitalizations in the United States: 2010–2018

Paul Wasuwanich; Catherine W. Striley; Saleem Kamili; Eyasu H. Teshale; Eric C. Seaberg; Wikrom Karnsakul

J Viral Hepat. 2022;29(3):218-226.

In This Article

Hospitalizations of hepatitis D in the United States were uncommon with no significant changes in hospitalization rates overall in the 2010–2015 and 2015–2018 periods. Additionally, the burden of hepatitis D was disproportionately greater in certain demographics and geographic regions. Hepatitis D hospitalizations did not result in increased frequencies of mortality compared to HBV only hospitalizations; however, complications such as liver failure were significantly more frequent in the hepatitis D cohort. Nevertheless, we found that within the hepatitis D cohort, older age and the presence of alcoholic cirrhosis were both major risk factors of mortality. And while pregnant persons and their foetuses/neonates did not seem to be at increased risk for morbidity or mortality if they were infected with hepatitis D compared to HBV only, further research is needed with larger cohorts.

Hepatitis D appeared to be largely underdiagnosed in the United States. There is a need for routine hepatitis D testing after a confirmed chronic hepatitis B diagnosis, especially considering the severity of the disease as well as the future availability of hepatitis D-specific therapy.


Social Media

WhatsApp declared ‘good’ for psychological health: report

Faisal Saeed Written by Faisal Saeed · 1 min read>

The Facebook-owned messaging app WhatsApp has been declared “good” for our psychological well-being according to a recent research study published in The International Journal of Human-Computer Studies. the research study claims that social media particularly WhatsApp, has a positive impact on the users’ psychological health.

The research study was published by Dr. Linda Kaye, a senior lecturer in Psychology at Edgehill University. She found that the social media messaging app which offers a group chat feature in it has a positive impact on the mental comfort of the users. The research was performed on a total of 200 WhatsApp users, which included 158 females and 41 men with an average age of 24. It was concluded in the study that people use WhatsApp for an average of 55 minutes, and it is mostly popular because of its group chat feature.

The results reveal that the more time people spend on WhatsApp per day, the less lonely they felt which in-turn lead to higher self-esteem as a result of feeling closer to friends and family. This study also rejects the common notion that social media only leaves a negative impact on the minds of users and affect their mental health.

Dr Linda Kaye said, “The more time people spent on WhatsApp, the more they feel close to their friends and family and perceived these relationships to be of good quality. The more closely bonded these friendships were the more people felt affiliated with their WhatsApp groups, which was related to positive self-esteem and social competence”.

She also stated, “It gives rise to the notion that social technology such as WhatsApp may stimulate existing relationships and opportunities for communication, thereby enhancing aspects of the users’ positive well-being”.


Artificial Intelligence in Medical Sciences and Psychology: With Application of Machine Language, Computer Vision, and NLP Techniques

Nokeri, Tshepo Chris

Get started with artificial intelligence for medical sciences and psychology. This book will help healthcare professionals and technologists solve problems using machine learning methods, computer vision, and natural language processing (NLP) techniques.

The book covers ways to use neural networks to classify patients with diseases. You will know how to apply computer vision techniques and convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to segment diseases such as cancer (e.g., skin, breast, and brain cancer) and pneumonia. The hidden Markov decision making process is presented to help you identify hidden states of time-dependent data. In addition, it shows how NLP techniques are used in medical records classification.

This book is suitable for experienced practitioners in varying medical specialties (neurology, virology, radiology, oncology, and more) who want to learn Python programming to help them work efficiently. It is also intended for data scientists, machine learning engineers, medical students, and researchers.

What You Will Learn

  • Apply artificial neural networks when modelling medical data
  • Know the standard method for Markov decision making and medical data simulation
  • Understand survival analysis methods for investigating data from a clinical trial
  • Understand medical record categorization
  • Measure personality differences using psychological models

Who This Book Is For

Machine learning engineers and software engineers working on healthcare-related projects involving AI, including healthcare professionals interested in knowing how AI can improve their work setting

Tshepo Chris Nokeri harnesses advanced analytics and artificial intelligence to foster innovation and optimize business performance. In his functional work, he has delivered complex solutions to companies in the mining, petroleum, medical sciences, and manufacturing industries. He initially completed a bachelor’s degree in information management. Afterward, he graduated with an Honours degree in business science at the University of the Witwatersrand on a TATA Prestigious Scholarship and a Wits Postgraduate Merit Award. They unanimously awarded him the Oxford University Press Prize.


Rama Tulsi Glycerite

Tulsi, aka Holy Basil, is soothing to the heart, uplifting to the spirit, and gently moves energy where it is needed. Rama Tulsi is the sweetest of the three holy basils and makes this glycerite especially delectable. Rama Tulsi has countless beneficial properties and tastes divine!

Give it a shake and add 1 to 5 droppers full to water, milk, tea, coffee, your smoothie or anything you like.

Glycerites are an alcohol-free alternative to tinctures. They naturally taste sweet without any sugar.

Food grade vegetable glycerin* and filtered water infused with: Rama Tulsi Leaves**, Love**.

**grown on Wildwood land

Store away from heat and direct sunlight.

Made in Haines Junction, Yukon.

Medicinal Properties

Rama Tulsi is considered to be an adaptogen and to have balancing effects on a lot of body systems, including the heart and the nervous system. As many other plants in the mint family, it is also said to support digestion, improve cognition, and strengthen the respiratory system.

Disclaimer: This information is for educational purposes only and has not been evaluated by the CFIA. It is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Please consult a health care practitioner if you are pregnant or have any medical conditions.