Tag Archives: education

The Girl Who Fell to Earth – a memoir, by Sophia Al-Maria

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An eye-opening recollection of growing up Bedouin-American around the turn of the twenty-first century.  Daughter of the tenuous union between a blue-collar American rebel and a job-seeking illegal immigrant nominally from Qatar – but more truly of the Al-Dafira tribe, a nomadic Bedouin people historically accustomed to roaming a desolate chunk of sandscape alternately claimed and reclaimed by the shifting borders of multiple kingdoms and nations – Sophia (to her mother’s world) or Safya (to her father’s) is whipsawn between cultures, generations and technologies as she shuttles between Puyallup, Washington and the perpetual construction site necessitated by an Emirate’s leap from the twelfth-century to the twenty-first in a single bound.

Where other essays on the Gulf nations tend to emphasize their wealthy leaders or their Ferrari-driving, Vuitton-clutching, nouveaux-riche spouses and offspring, this one focuses on the shadow populations who live off their government subsidies, house-keep their boudoirs, roughneck their earthworks and oil platforms, and line the fringes of their ever-expanding metropoles with camel-hair shelters and goat pens fabricated from desiccated shrubberies and the gleanings of garbage piles.

Al-Maria is charming and entertaining as we see her garden-variety teen angsts inflated to monumental proportions by the economic marginality of both her families, the uncertain legal status of stateless nomads (or half-nomads who’ve had their passports stolen) and the challenges of learning Arabic, Islam, Americanism and independence simultaneously and with vanishingly few competent examples of mature adulthood to emulate.  That she succeeds in travelling back and forth several times and surviving assorted school systems to eventually enter the American University in Cairo and establish something of a career as writer and artist, is quite impressive.  Most of all, though, her tale is a reminder that family – even a wildly extended, chaotic and perennially impoverished family with few (legal) breadwinners – can provide children a crucial sense of belonging and acceptance even as the elders’ insistence on traditions and restrictions are driving those same children away.  The women, especially, of her Al-Dafira clan show resilience and flexibility in keeping their families and love alive and fed, despite what seem the best efforts of their men to destroy them.

Al-Maria’s Bedu relations, of course, represent only one of uncountably-many parallel worlds with whom we share our time and geography.  By allowing a mile’s walk in their sandals, The Girl Who Fell to Earth makes a generous plea for understanding of all the cultures and peoples around the world who do not live, speak or behave as mainstream Amero-European media and opinion so blithely presume they should.

A worthy use of space on the bookshelf!

P.S. – to learn about another parallel world, read E Unum Pluribus, a new speculative fiction imagining the end of the USA, and what may fester in its place. 

Packed with intrigue and fueled by politics, economics and murder (as well as gender, class, language and even the origins of faith), E Unum Pluribus examines how much we stand to lose if we allow our current culture wars to shatter this precious nation.  This thrilling novel is currently available in six online installments, totally for free, simply by navigating to the home page of this website and selecting E Unum Pluribus from the top menu, or via this link: https://robinandrew.net/2026/01/01/e-unum-pluribus/

Novel Words – fictional pronouns for the actual future.

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John McWhorter published an Opinion piece recently* about the evolution of pronouns, with particular attention to a new character gaining attention among users of the Mandarin language (X也, shown in image above, combines features of the characters for both he and she, rather as some persons do). Along similar lines, a new novel, E Unum Pluribus, speculates a future American city/state called Confluence in which government edict directs all official communications to employ non-gendered pronouns. The novel’s events make clear that Confluence’s government has plenty of faults and weaknesses, but this one of its policies merits some consideration.

For generations the convention in English was to use ‘he/him/his’ as default and inclusive of all, regardless of their sex/gender. Appropriately, that has now been perceived as favoring male identity over female; simultaneously reflecting historic inequality and perpetuating it. Replacing all those instances with ‘he or she,’ ‘his or her,’ etc. is hardly workable, especially in spoken communications, and still carries a hint of misogyny by placing one gender ahead of the other, whereas ‘she/he’ risks offending insecurities on the other side of the identity coin.

Recent efforts to innovate ‘they’ as a singular pronoun for persons who choose to declare themselves non-binary run aground first on its pre-existing function as plural, generating confusion where they intend clarity. That usage also seems to open the door to a trickle of additional new pronouns as various groups or orientations demand similar recognition; one need only read the snarky online critiques of how LGBT has grown to LBGTQIA2S+ to know that is not a path to tolerance so much as a guarantee of further friction. Worst, in this opinion, ‘they’ singular requires persons who prefer not to be stereotyped as either ‘he’ or ‘she’ to state that publicly, thereby outing themselves and very possibly inviting prejudice, at least at this point in our societal evolution.

The fictional founders of Confluence have taken another approach; directing official communications to use ‘e/em/eir’ for all individuals. This treats everyone with equal respect and does not require the clunky ‘my pronouns are…’ , which can itself incite prejudices. The specific form, ‘e,” ‘em,’ and ‘eir’ are brief and efficient, similar enough to other pronouns that they quickly feel familiar but with sufficient difference to avoid confusion**.

By applying equally to all possible personal preferences ‘e’ equalizes all in one swoop while tacitly expressing the truth that for virtually all public or official interactions there is no proper reason to indicate what genitalia an individual bears or with whom they choose to become intimate. Those are – and should remain – irrelevant.

There’s nothing revolutionary here, by the way, modern English already has gender neutral pronouns – ‘they’ does not presume the gender of a group or any of its individuals. ‘It’ can be used for all objects – unlike French, say in which some nouns require feminine constructions and other nouns masculine, despite the objects having no actual sexual function or accoutrements. Most prominently, ‘I’ is the same for any individual regardless of sex, gender or other characteristic. It is really only in the second person singular that our language’s evolution has codified an unfortunate and outdated discrimination.

In the world of E Unum Pluribus, that governmental edict for official communications also does not mean ‘e’ is used by everyone all the time. Non-official conversations use gendered pronouns wherever a subject’s preference has become clear, sticking to gender-neutral when an individual’ presentation is itself gender neutral. As in real life, casual usage and common courtesy have the final word in how language evolves over time.

(For what it’s worth, future posts on this site may selectively incorporate ‘e/em’eir’ pronouns to explore just how functional they are – or are not.)

*“This Novel Word Speaks Volumes About How an Entire Language Works” N. Y. Times online edition, 2026-01-22

** E Unum Pluribus does not claim to have invented the ‘e/em/eir’ construct.  Variations on what are sometimes called ‘Spivak pronouns’ have been noted at least as far back as the late 19th-century.

P. S.: E Unum Pluribus is a tale of murder and conspiracy set a decade or so in our future in one of many small sovereignties sprung up in wake of the USA’s self-destruction. The novel explores multiple themes – language and gender, identity, guilt and even the origins of faith and belief – but speaks loudest in its depiction of how much we all stand to lose if we continue to retreat into factions which each act only for their own needs and interests.

The manuscript is available in six instalments, starting at:

E Unum Pluribus

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Why We Sleep – Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams, Walker, Mathew, PhD

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An in-depth summary of current knowledge on the subject, by a researcher and sleep-geek unafraid to sound like a prophet in the wilderness.  His central creed is the imperative of 7 to 9 hours of sleep for every adult (more for children, varying by age), of an early to bed early to rise schedule that aligns with the sun’s presence and, most diabolically, of later school start times that would allow developing brains the early-morning REM sleep which data prove are critical to their ability to learn and, even more, to complete the complex brain-development necessary to achieve a healthy adult personality and abilities.

The many research citations go a long way to convince, as they also amaze with the cleverness of researchers, finding ways to determine what goes on during sleep, in minds that are, by definition, in no condition to report it.  Brain wave analysis is an obvious technical aid, but the comparison experiments he relates – involving specific sorts of lessons and challenges presented before and following specific extents of specific types of sleep – are more surprising. As is just the simple revelation that there are so many stages of sleep, each with its own character and purpose. 

A subject as broad as this naturally demands a polymath, and Walker is enough of one to cite pharmacology and chemistry in support of his arguments, literature regarding the origins of our long held illusions and more literature to show that humans have known at least some of this for generations, we’ve just allowed other priorities to blind us to what our bodies are screaming.  If we are to rise to the many challenges we humans create for ourselves ( politics, wars, climate change, social change, pandemics and general pandemonium, to name just a few), we’d do well to follow his advice.

Saving his most potent Jeremiad for last, the author addresses sleep aids, crying out against profitable products that make no effort to treat underlying conditions, but rather, simply sedate the user into a simulacrum of sleep with none of its functions.  If my own experience with Ambien during a week of all-nighters and 12-hour jet lag had not already been enough to turn me off of the stuff, this book certainly would.

Deserves to be more widely read.  And followed, though one holds out little help for that, in this age of pods, pads, tablets, laptops and streaming, screening, screaming masses.

Sleep well!