PicoBlog

I wanted to thank the team for Substack for featuring us this week; it has been amazing to see so many extra pairs of eyeballs on the newsletter via the Discovery page. I'll make it easy as possible - please do subscribe if you want more of this regularly. . In early November 1993, Radiohead appeared on Canadian TV and performed an earlier version of the song "Street Spirit (Fade Out)"

The mountainous, dry-expanse of the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in Lame Deer, Montana is lit by sunlight the deep hue of honey. Kids play amongst rusting box springs. A gaggle of scruffy dogs run across dusty sloping streets. Homes have a desolate pall. Hollowed out cars dot the horizon. A hazy, dimly lit bar; the neon hiss of the red Budweiser logo cuts through the dark. It is in this bar that you learn this is a film constituted of real faces.

It’s not about the books. I’ve said that phrase, written it, heard and read it dozens of times from the smartest minds in the anti-censorship world. And it’s true. Debates about books in schools and libraries (and bookstores) are almost always about something bigger than any one novel, memoir, or informational text: they’re about the value of public schools, or about LGBTQ inclusion and acceptance, or about factual sex education or honest discussions of racism, history, and society.

Last week over 500 faculty, alumni, staff and students of the Catholic Providence College issued a letter of protest in light of the resignation of E Corry Kole, the school’s nonbinary director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Kole had quit citing the college administration’s refusal to let them do their job. Queer employees of Catholic institutions feeling threatened or driven out is sadly an all too common phenomenon, and usually a horribly dispiriting one for the broader Catholic community in which it occurs.

Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage. - Lao Tzu Poetry illuminates that which prose doesn’t; it brings words and imagery to play in imaginative ways. Typically, poetry speaks to the essence of things. Poetry can be a tiny vignette or a larger universal truth, told through meter and rhyme, or not.  Poetry ruminates and reflects, explores thoughts and emotions, or a snapshot in time, without necessarily being linear.

This summer, as we watched a Cincinnati Reds team that was clearly flawed, I kept returning to the idea that, despite clear weaknesses (in the bullpen, especially), the team was just fun to watch. For the last couple of decades, despite an Adam Dunn here and a Johnny Cueto there, the Reds haven’t always been fun to watch. As fans of a team who rarely wins, at the very least, we would like to get a team that’s easy to root for and gives us a little excitement occasionally, right?

Nikhil and I recently had an interesting discussion with Carbon Health CEO Eren Bali on Carbon Health’s journey from software to clinics, tech strategy and future plans. You can listen to our conversation on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Eren described Carbon’s journey from a tool to share complex cases to a new EHR to actually running clinics including how they designed an EHR from scratch and thought about selling software vs building clinics.

In honor of Pride Month, today we have a fierce interview featuring the talented Dominique Silver, a NYC-based Black transgender model. This fabulous woman has starred in various campaigns such as Calvin Klein's Pride 2022 campaign: This is Love, strutted down the runways of Pyer Moss's Fall 2021 Couture show and Luis De Javier's Fall/Winter 2023 show, and graced the cover of the Richardson Magazine. Recently, Dominique starred in the jaw-dropping Renaissance Couture campaign, a couture collection collaboration between Beyoncé and fashion powerhouse Balmain.

I’m pretty sure I made the first contact. I randomly came across Brendan Garrone’s Instagram several years ago and decided to say hello because Incendiary had been the first hardcore band in a long while to give me that “first time at a show” feeling. They reminded me of bands I loved, like Snapcase, and even bands I’d played in, like 108. But it wasn’t quite exactly the music or the lyrics that took me there.