When Joanne Ramos and I were interns together at the Economist New York bureau about 18 years-ago, she was struggling to make ends meet — after leaving a career in finance — to the extent that she used to collect the advance review copies of books sent to the newsroom by publishers, and bring them down to the Strand bookstore to sell for extra rent-money. So it was that much more poignant to see her last night speaking at her sold-out event at the Strand for the the publication of her own book: The Farm, a novel about a commercial surrogate birthing operation for the ultra wealthy. Joanne and I stayed friends all these years in part because of her seemingly effortless ability to transcend journalistic, financial, and social scenes in my hometown. But last night at the Strand, Joanne spoke about how actually difficult that had been for her, as a first generation Filipina-American from Wisconsin, to believe in herself as a New York writer; but how her background -- and getting mistaken at her daughter’s private school for being a nanny — gave her an awareness of the shallowness of the meritocratic American dream, knowing how little separated her from the thousands of immigrant women sacrificing their own families to raise our families. We also stayed friends because Joanne is awesome, brilliant and kind. Word is her book is too.

My dear friend Lauren Kassell is the Professor of Witchcraft and Wizardry at Cambridge University. Well, actually, she works in the History of Science department, but her research on medicine in the Elizabethan era -- a period with only blurry distinctions between science, astrology, and alchemy -- has been fodder for pop-culture fantasies like the AMC TV Series "A Discovery of Witches" in which a female expert on alchemy at Oxford starts dating a sexy vampire. But now there is a more historically accurate way for you or your post-Harry Potter adolescent to investigate the medical mysteries of plague-era London -- an iPad game called "Astrologaster" -- which puts you in the shoes of Simon Foreman, a self-taught doctor and fortune teller from the time of Shakespeare who left behind hundreds of casebooks in which he recorded the ailments and remedies and melodramas of that magical moment. Foreman actually existed, his Casebooks are one of the oldest and largest sets of medical records in history, and Lauren's real work has been to interpret and publish them. But since you or I are unlikely to need an authentic remedy for the French pox, or a protective charm against a hex, the game designers inspired by Lauren have provided just the right amount of immersion into the bubbling cauldrons of yore while sparing us the leechcraft.