Robert A. Black, Mathematical Storyteller

I did my best to hide from election news yesterday, but modern technology can be both persuasive and insistent. There was good news to be had, for sure - the Democrats took back the House, so yay, we're not going to go full-on fascist. But for me, there was a lot of disappointment, too. If, as Jim Wallis at Sojourners said, the election was a referendum on white nationalism, then large chunks of the country just told us they're okay with it. The possibility that they simply don't know who Trump is and what he stands for is no longer credible. Not after the campaign run-up we've seen these past few weeks. And yet, the first thing I noticed in the early polling results yesterday was that the Trumpy parts of the country were getting Trumpier. They weren't running away from Trump. They were running toward him. And the most discouraging thing to me was watching my home state of Indiana leading the charge. As the Midwestern states around it all started swingi...

Writing is hard. Writing well is harder, but so very worth it. I'm focused primarily on my biography series these days, but I have some fiction ideas that I think about when I get the chance. I've been reading some of my never-finished and unpublished work, too. Some of it is good, and makes me think I should go back to it sometime. The Eyes of the Enemy was put on hold twice, but still got finished and published. Maybe a couple of these other two stories can, too. But some of what I read makes me cringe, either at something I did that I've learned not to do or at something I did that I haven't figured out yet. And something else, too - it's made me realize how nearly two years in Trump's America have changed me. I'm a straight, white, cis-gendered man, and in America that means I'm the default setting. I could write every character as someone exactly like me, and that would be considered okay. And of course I've done that before. Whe...

After this past week, I needed something to restore my hope for the future. This afternoon, I found it. I have a new hero, too - Dr. Serena McCalla of Jericho High School on Long Island, champion science fair coach. That's my brother's turf. I wonder if either he or my sister-in-law knows her. It's been quite a while now since I realized that I couldn't do anything about the mess our country is in right now, and that my attention and my energies would be of more use if I focused them on my books. Recent events have only confirmed that belief, and now the election is just a few weeks away. But it's been really hard to tear my attention away from the unending disaster that's been unfolding. Things being as bad as you thought they'd be, and then some, is hard not to think about. Fortunately, there's this little documentary called Science Fair . It follows a group of students as they qualify for and then participate in the 2017 The Internatio...

Wow, I went the entire month of August without writing a blog post. I thought about writing one a number of times, but it never came together. One of the big reasons why not, though, is that the subject most on my mind didn't make sense. Why write a blog post about why you weren't writing blog posts? Yet here I am, doing pretty much that. It's been a terrific summer for my writing. For some other things, too, but my writing has gotten into a rhythm I've rarely seen since I had to go back to the day-job world. Talking to my publisher at the California Homeschool Conference back in June, hearing how excited they are about the Math Biography series I'm doing, made me even more fired up about writing it. Talking to people at the Satellites & Education Conference in July encouraged me even more. This is an enormous project, the biggest one I've ever taken on, and I don't want to leave it sitting around. It means too much to me. At the same tim...

The internet is conspiring to tell me something today, or rather, to remind me of a topic I revisit from time to time. This morning, Patheos.com had not one, but two commentaries on something written by a conservative Christian blogger calling herself "The Transformed Wife," and claiming that "Men Prefer Debt-Free Virgins Without Tattoos." One of the responses began, "My poor husband will be shocked to hear this..." and tried to refute the claim point-by-point. The other took the argument to another level, saying, "Since when is being a Christian woman about making yourself pleasing to men? Are we as Christians supposed to conform ourselves to men? Or are we supposed to conform ourselves to the Lord?" I found myself flashing back to my marriage, where my ex-wife spent a great deal of time trying to make herself into a "good Christian wife" who would appeal to a "good Christian husband." The fact that I hadn't ...

I've lost count of the number of books on my shelves that have bookmarks in them, marking where I left off reading them as I juggle and flit from one to the next. One that I've picked up again recently is Secondhand Time , the massive oral history from Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexeivich, chronicling the time between the end of the Soviet Union and the rise of Vladimir Putin. One thing that's struck me is how similar the people Alexeivich interviewed are to the people supporting Trump here in the US. It's no wonder the Putin playbook has worked so well on them. The older Russian generation, the one that remembered Soviet times, felt lost and adrift in the new Russia, and that made them long for the Soviet past. One interviewee recounted the year he spent in prison, being interrogated and beaten because his wife had been caught up in one of Stalin's purges. Despite all he went through - including the loss of that wife, who didn't survive her own impri...

Wow, look at that. It's been weeks since my last post here, and I only posted once in all of June. I've just gotten back from my annual July 4 Indiana trip, where I tried to minimize my social media exposure. I think it was good for me. I've been thinking a lot lately about how much I want to interact with this electronic beast we've created together. Right before my trip, I made what I plan to be my final post on my old LiveJournal. I was surprised by the response it got - or rather, I was surprised it got any response at all, given that I hadn't posted there since last October. At the moment, I'm working on the second of my Mathematical Lives biography series, about Florence Nightingale and her advances in the field of statistics. When she was in her early 20s, she hadn't yet decided to become a nurse. She felt a spiritual calling to do something for the poor, but she hadn't yet figured out what it was. At the same time, her family ex...