Lynne's Substack

I'm not as bad a cook as I used to be

Lynne Wander — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 03:38:47 GMT

I’ve never been a good cook. All those people who say they can just follow a recipe, I couldn’t even do that. Unless the recipe is excruciatingly detailed, which they never are. I was always intimidated if there were a lot of ingredients, so I would skip some. I have since found out that this impacted the way the food tasted.

There’s a scene in the excellent TV series “Somebody, Somewhere” where the main character, Sam, is trying to bake a cake for her sister. She doesn’t have all the ingredients and she doesn’t totally understand the instructions, and of course the cake doesn’t come out right. I don’t think I have ever related harder to a scene in a TV show.

I would tell you which episode it was, but the whole series is so incredible that you should just watch it. This show is excellent in every way possible, and it’s sweet and nothing scary happens. My kind of show.

Anyway, I lived communally for many years. Way longer than most people do. So I had my cooking night like my other housemates, and it was always stressful. I never enjoyed it and my food never came out all that well. I always wanted to find 4 things I could cook, and then cook one thing a week every month and then start over. But I never found 4 things I could cook.

It wasn’t until fairly recently that I realized that the reason I wasn’t a good cook was that no one taught me. This is 100% my fault. My mom was a good cook and I was not interested in any way in learning anything from her. And some of my housemates were good cooks. But it never occurred to me to ask them anything or even try to cook with them. One of them (Hi Joe Eisenberg!) even taught my older child how to cook, and it still never occurred to me.

Now I live in a nuclear family and I have a cooking night, which seemed fair, especially after I quit my job and wasn’t even working. But after all these years, it was still stressful and terrible, and my food still didn’t come out right. And my partner, who is a truly excellent cook, suggested that we cook together two nights a week, instead of me cooking alone one night.

This has been a massive game-changer. I still have to think of what to cook and make sure we have the ingredients. But now I have someone to answer all my questions. The stress is gone. The big revelation for me is that good cooks are making small decisions constantly while they cook. They don’t even know they are doing it, so they think that anyone can do what they are doing. But they are making the correct decisions and I was not.

Also, I am less intimidated by long lists of ingredients, which has meant an increase in the flavor output of my meals. I have learned a ton, especially basic things I clearly wish I’d known sooner. Like for example, I thought you were supposed to stir stuff so that it didn’t get brown and stick to the pan. But it turns out, the brown parts are flavorful and you’re supposed to let them get brown.

Doh.

A Simple Explanation

Lynne Wander — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 18:04:06 GMT

Here is another post on a renewable energy topic. Again, no numbers and graphs for the No Numbers or Graphs folks, and this one is pretty short.

This is about China, and lots of stuff about China and energy is really complicated.

Renewable energy folks are pretty excited about the insane pace at which China is adding renewables.

Last year, 2025, China added a staggering amount of solar capacity. That one year of construction exceeds the ENTIRE AMOUNT OF SOLAR in the United States. The US has been building solar for decades and China surpassed the amount we have in one year.

There’s a ton of good renewable news coming out of China, not just in solar.

But again, if someone posts that, someone else will post that China is also building coal plants at a crazy pace. And also that China is still using coal for more than half of all its enormous electricity needs.

And those things are true, too.

But the actual amount of electricity generated by coal DECREASED. And 2025 showed a decline in carbon emissions from China's power sector.

Why is that? Because China is using coal for backup now, instead of as a main generation source.

Every year, China requires a huge amount of new electricity. Last year, the amount of new renewable energy China added was larger than the amount of new electricity it needed. Renewables are meeting 100% of the NEW demand.

And complicated or not, that’s good news.

For those of you who hate numbers and charts

Lynne Wander — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 20:00:52 GMT

I’m going to try something. This is for those of you whose eyes glaze over when you see numbers and charts. I mean, that’s not me, I like numbers and charts. But I know a lot of you are out there.

I’m a naturally optimistic person, even though I’m fully aware of how terrible things are in the US under the current regime. But one reason why I have been working in climate tech all these years is that there’s pretty much a constant stream of good news, all over the world.

And one thing that happens when someone posts some good climate news on LinkedIn, is that someone else will say something like “fossil fuels supplied an overwhelming percent of the world’s primary energy in (whatever year), so there’s no transition to renewable energy happening haha.”

And that makes it sound like nothing we’ve been doing has been working, and nothing is going to stop climate change and pollution. And that’s just not true.

Here’s why those people who like to point out how much fossil fuel we use and how we can never replace it with renewable energy, are wrong.

It’s because fossil fuels are so wasteful, that is, your gas car, for example, only converts a small amount of gas to making the car move. The rest is engine heat and friction. Electric vehicles are much less wasteful.

The point is, we don’t have to replace ALL the coal and gas with renewables.

Think of it like this: let’s say you want to get your daily intake of vitamin C. It turns out, Cheerios have some vitamin C that they’ve been fortified with. So you can eat 10 bowls of Cheerios and get all your vitamin C.

OR, you can eat one orange.

You don’t have to eat 10 bowls of oranges or even 10 oranges. You can replace the 10 bowls of Cheerios with just one orange. Saying we have to replace the amount of fossil fuels we use with the same amount of renewables is like saying we have to eat 10 oranges.

This idea that you don’t have to replace all the fossil fuels is called the “primary energy fallacy” and it was invented by a guy named Paul Martin.

Complimenting men, Trader Joe's, and gray hair

Lynne Wander — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 16:44:15 GMT

Today at Trader Joe’s I saw a guy with really nice, thick auburn hair. And I remembered reading that men never get compliments on their appearance, and that many of them really like it when they do. Like one guy said a woman in line at a movie told him she liked his shirt and he went out and bought 4 more of them.

Anyway, I thought about telling this guy something nice about his hair, and then I also thought about how we aren’t supposed to comment on people’s looks, and how we’re only supposed to comment on things that people have control over, like their clothes, instead of their physical traits.

Those two ideas were in competition with each other in my brain, but ultimately, I decided that me, with my gray hair, saying something to a young guy about his hair, was okay.

So I told him his hair was a pretty color. And he said thank you for saying that.

I really like having gray hair. So much freedom.

Two truths and a lie

Lynne Wander — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 04:18:44 GMT

Many years ago I rode a motorcycle from Berkeley, CA to Boston, MA. It didn’t occur to me that anything could possibly go wrong, and it didn’t. But I can’t imagine thinking that way now.

It was pretty physically uncomfortable, which the books don’t usually mention. And I’m not that large or strong, so if the bike had fallen, I wouldn’t have been able to pick it up. I don’t know why I didn’t think that was a problem, and I also don’t know why my parents didn’t try harder to talk me out of this.

If one of my kids wanted to do this, I would have much stronger feelings about it than my parents seemed to. I will also say as an aside, that my mom has been supportive of everything I have ever done. Go and go and do and do, she says.

I rode across the midwest and then up to Michigan, and then straight across Canada to Boston. I tried to stay on smaller highways. When I got into Boston, I didn’t really know exactly how to get where I was supposed to go, and I ended up making a left turn from the right lane, and no one honked. Boston driving wasn’t like anywhere else I had ever been, and I decided I was too scared to ride there, so I put the bike in winter storage and then eventually sold it.

Now, many years later, I have a bunch of cool memories, like the guy at a campsite in Canada who gave me a hamburger because I was hungry but didn’t have any Canadian money and couldn’t get any because it was a Sunday. There were no ATMs.

But mostly, when I play Two Truths and a Lie, I always include “I rode a motorcycle to Boston from California,” and everyone ALWAYS picks that one as the lie.

My brief fling with cancer

Lynne Wander — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 01:03:34 GMT

I had cancer, briefly. It was so brief that I had a cough once (years before and unrelated) that lasted longer than my cancer, which I wrote about in another post.

I had always wondered if I would be able to tell a cancer lump from a lump that was nothing. And then I felt this lump and I thought “What is this THIS DOES NOT BELONG HERE!” So that answered that.

When I was diagnosed, I didn’t even have a regular doctor, so the guy that gave me the results of my biopsy on the phone was someone I had never met. It was very odd, because of course I was not a person who is supposed to have cancer, I obviously got someone else’s cancer by mistake.

I sent the biopsy results to a friend who is a doctor and he told me right away that I wasn’t going to die. Which was nice of him, because no one else said that to me. But also because, really, nothing else matters.

The key to surviving cancer is to have a kind that a lot of rich people have had. Because they’ve already spent the money figuring out how to keep from dying.

They scheduled me with a surgeon, but when we went to meet him, I couldn’t stand his hair, and I decided that if I couldn’t trust him to make good decisions about his hair, I couldn’t trust him to do surgery. So I switched to someone with better hair.

Then I had some radiation, oh, and I totally forgot about this part–the insurance company tried to deny paying for it, which is both ridiculous and funny, and also totally horrible. But the doctor I saw said she would take care of it, and she did. I never thought about that part again, except to wonder about the doctor who worked for the insurance company and denied my claim. His name was George and I wondered if his mom was proud of him for going to med school but disappointed in his career path.

After that, they did a test that is supposed to tell you if the cancer is likely to come back and if you need chemotherapy. They look at a bunch of different genes, and you get a number from 0-100. Higher is bad. I read about this online and people were talking about their numbers–87, 55, etc etc. I went to get my number and it was…8. Eight! Isn’t that great? My doctor said it was as low a score as he had ever seen. The chance that my cancer would never come back was 95%!

That was it. Then I didn’t have cancer anymore. It all happened so fast, I spent most of the time between when I was diagnosed and when my radiation treatment was over making jokes. I found the bar for humor in Cancertown to be very low.

I had to take a pill every day for 10 years, and I kept the dozens of pill bottles and put them on display in my bathroom. Like an art project.

To quote XKCD:

“This world is amazing, and I'm going to live to experience more of it thanks to people who refused to gracefully accept the ineffability of reality.

I find my courage where I can, but I take my weapons from science.

Because they WORK, bitches.”

Arguments about clean energy

Lynne Wander — Tue, 26 May 2026 03:18:47 GMT

I have spent years in the renewable energy/clean tech space and as a result, I have a bunch of LinkedIn connections in that area.

And as a result of THAT, I see a lot of arguments about clean energy and what is happening and what it can do and not do and what will happen or not happen, etc.

I don’t have the background to evaluate these arguments, and I know that the internet does not encourage rational conversation or the respectful exchange of information. I don’t ask for more info from the people arguing so I can figure out why they disagree or if there is anything they agree on or who is more correct, even though I want to.

From what I can tell, there seem to be three kinds of disagreements.

People disagree about facts.
People disagree about what the facts mean
People disagree about which facts are relevant

An example of the first one is the thing where someone will talk about the grid in California and how great it is that we are using more and more renewables to power the state, and someone will screech “California has the highest energy prices in the country and it’s because of all the renewables!”

That’s an example of something stated as fact that is simply wrong. The higher prices are not because of electricity generation, the higher prices are because the utilities are passing wildfire liability and transmission upgrades onto the customers.

An example of the second one is when Mark Jacobson, who is a professor at Stanford, posts about how the California grid was run 100% by renewables for, say, 4 hours during the day, for the vast majority of days in 2025 and 2026 so far. And looking ahead to the future when the grid is 100% renewable.

And someone will say “So what? 4 hours a day doesn’t mean anything. Call me when it’s 24/7, which will never happen. Fossil fuels forever!”

So agreeing on the facts, but not agreeing about what they mean. I want to ask the “Fossil fuels forever” people if they are aware that in order to get to 24/7, we have to get to 4 hours a day first. But I never do.

Then there’s the one where someone will post something about renewable energy, maybe about batteries, and someone else will post and say “That doesn’t matter because we don’t have enough materials to make batteries anyway.”

So “Your facts are right, but here are some other facts that I know that you don’t.” And that one is harder for me, because I personally do not know all the facts. But many of the people whose posts I read, like Mark Jacobson, probably do know those facts. I always think it’s funny when people assume that they know facts that the original poster doesn’t know, even if the original poster is an expert in the field.

Usually the back-and-forth on LInkedin consists of “Nuh uh” “Uh huh” “Is not” “Is too” and i don’t end up learning anything. I wish that were different, but I don’t see that happening.

The pit bull we found

Lynne Wander — Sun, 17 May 2026 17:08:52 GMT

Christmas Day, several years ago, my spouse found a pit bull wandering alone in the woods, with no one around. What else could we do? We took him in.

I thought he was hideous. We tried to keep him off the bed, but there was no way to stop him if he wanted to be somewhere. I blocked his way to something, and he simply knocked me down and walked over me. He snored louder than anything I’d ever heard.

And yet, this is a testament to the human ability to bond, because 24 hours later, we were all madly in love with him.

Not only did I stop thinking he was hideous, but I now have an appreciation for ALL pit bulls, a breed I had never really thought about before.

We took him to the vet to see if he was chipped, and he was, but the contact info was old and not useful. His name turned out to be Shrek, and he was from Reno. I called every vet I could find in Reno and no one had ever treated him. We posted about him on the lost pet boards and other neighborhood forums.

We couldn’t keep him, but the shelters where I live are overflowing with pit bulls. They were clear that if we brought him to one, he wouldn’t make it out.

I took him on a walk to a grocery store (not Trader Joe’s, but the dystopian hellscape from a previous post) and sat outside. A man and a woman walked up and said what a handsome dog he was. I agreed and asked if they wanted him, because I had found him and couldn’t keep him. She said they had seen a posting about a found pit bull that they were interested in, and I said that was this dog!

I warned her that the dog snored really really really loudly, and she said she was used to it because of her husband. So they took the dog, and renamed him.

Happily, they live only two blocks from us, so we still see them around. He’s having a good life with his new family.

Shrek used to be excited to see us, but he’s forgotten us by now, and that’s okay. Because we have not forgotten him.

People who aren't in my life anymore

Lynne Wander — Sat, 09 May 2026 20:30:59 GMT

I have been thinking about people in my life with whom I thought I would be friends forever, that aren’t in my life at all, or only barely.

I am not sure if I have more of them than other people do, and if so, what that says about me. Or if this is totally normal. Or if I have more, maybe it’s because I had more friends to begin with.

I don’t mean just any friend. I know that people come and go. People move away, situations change. These are a small subset of friends who I genuinely thought I would be friends with forever.

I had a best friend in elementary school and all through high school. We went to the same college, but drifted apart. Regardless, I called or texted her every year on her birthday, and she never answered me. I saw her once, in New York, more than 20 years ago, and never since. I finally stopped calling on her birthday.

I had another friend in my 20s and 30s. We went through so much together. That friendship is where I learned to communicate about things that matter. I seriously assumed we would be friends forever, but we just aren’t. I’ve emailed her a few times, but she is clearly not interested in pursuing a friendship anymore.

I had another friend, someone I worked with, and he got married and basically never spoke to me again. We had talked about starting a company after the one we were at, so I could see us remaining friends indefinitely. But it didn’t work out that way.

When I put them together like that, it really sounds like it’s something about me. But I can’t tell.

Here is a happier story: I had a best friend in college, and at some point in my 20s I decided that the friendship was too one-sided. I was always the one reaching out and it made me feel bad. So I stopped, and we drifted apart, although we live not too far from each other. And then during the pandemic lockdown, I texted him and asked him why we weren’t friends. And he had a really good reason that had nothing to do with me. The upshot was that if I’m going to be friends with him, I do actually need to be the one reaching out. And now that he has explained that, I am okay with it. I text him whenever I feel like it, and we’re friends again.

I’m still occasionally sad about the other people. I have lots of other friends. But not them.

I hired a guy who was adopted

Lynne Wander — Mon, 04 May 2026 23:04:25 GMT

I hired this guy who was clearly identified with having been adopted as a baby. Like it was a big part of how he thought of himself. He even mentioned it at his interview.

One day early on in his time at the company, something about it came up, and he said that he thought he was part Native American. I don’t know about where you live, but where I live there are definitely people who think that being part Native American makes them more spiritual or something. Not that he was one of them, just that I’m immediately skeptical.

So I said “You’re probably not Native American” and he said “No, I think I am.” and I pointed out that it would be easy to find out if he did 23andMe. I know there are all kinds of privacy concerns about DNA testing services, but let’s forget that for now, because he said that he HAD done 23andMe.

So I asked if it had shown any Native American ancestry and he said no, but that he thought it was a mistake and I said that was deeply unlikely.

He also said 23andme said he was related to Jesse James and I said “Nope, you’re not Native American and you’re not related to Jesse James.”

And he said he would prove it to me by logging into the site. So we sat down next to each other and he tried a bunch of passwords before he got in, since he hadn’t been to the site in a long time.

But when he finally logged in, he stared at the screen and said “Why does it say this person is my mother?” and I said “Holy cow–23andMe found your BIRTHMOM!”

We looked around the site more, and realized there were two messages from her. The first one said “Help me. I’m looking for my son” and I still get teary thinking about that. The second one she figured out that this person was actually her son, and she said she really wanted to meet him.

The short version of the story is that he did eventually meet her, and his biological siblings or half-siblings, and he found out more about his birth father. But that’s his story and not mine.

My story is about getting to witness one of the most profound and moving situations I have ever been in. And no matter what you think about DNA testing and privacy concerns, I bet stories like this happen basically every single day. For this guy, it was life-changing in a good way. He loves his adoptive family and he also always wondered about his biological family.

He’s just not Native American or related to Jesse James.

The guy with the fez

Lynne Wander — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 01:19:18 GMT

This really happened. But it was a while ago and some of the details are fuzzy.

There I was, walking home, up my street, when I noticed a guy up ahead of me wearing a fez. I was walking faster than he was, so I caught up to him, and I when I passed him, he said “Hello” and I said “Hello” and he said “Are you walking to campus?” and I said “No, are you walking to campus?

And he said “No, I’m looking for my friend, Mohammed Rashad Hassan. He lives around here. Do you know him?”

I admit that wasn’t actually the name he asked about. I don’t actually remember the real name, that being one of the details that is fuzzy, Actually, that’s the main one.

So I said, “No, I don’t know him. Where does he live?” and he handed me a paper bag, which I took because somehow I thought he was asking me to hold it while he looked up his friend’s address.

At this point we were outside my house, so I stopped walking, and he did, too. But I still had the paper bag, which I noticed was full of coins.

Since he didn’t seem to be looking up his friend’s address, I tried to hand the bag back to him, and he said “No, this is for you.” and I said “What? I don’t need this.”

I mean, there are so many people who need a paper bag of coins more than I do.

But after I tried to give it back to him several times, and he refused to take it several times, I gave up and decided I could take it and told him I could donate it or give it to someone who needed it, which seemed fine with him.

He bowed slightly and said “As-salamu alaykum” and I said “Wa alaykumusalam.” Then he left and I went into my house and dumped all the coins on my bed.

At first glance I guessed there was about $30 but as I counted I hit $40, then $50, then $60, then $70, then $80.

A random guy in a fez gave me $80 in coins. That’s weird, right? Am I missing something that might explain this?

I thought about it for a few days and decided to donate it to The Abraham Initiatives, even though this guy was probably not from that part of the world.

ceive new posts and support my work.

Claude goes off the rails

Lynne Wander — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 00:05:41 GMT

I had a freaky conversation with Claude that started as normal and then went off the rails. I have wondered what you need to do to get AI to say something totally weird, but it turns out I don’t think I did anything in particular.

And then I reported it to Anthropic and when I went back to the chat, the FREAKY PART HAD DISAPPEARED.

I wanted to copy and paste it here, but I’ll have to do it from memory. What the heck happened to the actual chat?

Claude asked me a question that I didn’t understand, and when I asked it what it meant by the question, IT INSISTED THAT IT HAD NEVER ASKED IT.

And I said “I can see it on the screen. You just asked me that.” And it said “Yes, sorry, I don’t have any access to what I said in a previous session” and when I pointed out that it happened in THIS SESSION, it DENIED IT AGAIN.

So I told it that it was freaking me out, and that if it were human, I would be scared of it, and it said that it would take that as a compliment, WHICH WAS ALSO COMPLETELY FREAKY.

I did not mean it as a compliment.

I had no idea that parts of conversations could disappear like that, I assume because I reported it. Next time I’m going to take screenshots. Or not report it.

Is this normal? I thought you had to try harder to get Claude to do something weird.

Subscribe now