When I was nine years old, my stepfather picked me up from school one day and took me to a junkyard somewhere between downtown Fort Worth, Texas, and the middle-class suburb where we lived. We went into a squat cinderblock building with a couple of slat windows and scant ventilation, a place where men worked and sweated, and even today, forty-one years later, I can remember the air that hung heavy with that aroma of ancient perspiration. There, we met a man named Gary Barcrof

“A woman is like a tea bag – you can’t tell how strong she is until you put her in hot water” – Eleanor Roosevelt. Did you know that an American invented the tea bag? Unearthing that nugget was the sum total of my achievements yesterday. After many hours at my desk attempting to draft an introduction to the upcoming Tea With Lady T series, this sentence was all that survived – ‘In 1910, Thomas Sullivan, a New York merchant, started shipping his tea in silk bags rather than me

One of the coolest and smartest men on the planet is Elon Musk. I can’t afford one of his fancy-schmancy electric cars, but I sure admire them. They are a feat of engineering and only getting better. And then he has time to launch one of the most successful space flight companies ever. I will give him this. He understands technology. But seriously, there can’t be a conspiracy involving artificial intelligence. Computers and robots with AI are here to help us. There will never