My eight-year-old’s classmate Shyrin is officially missing in Phuket. So is her mother and her mother’s boyfriend. Look, here are their photos.

I don’t know what to say. But I have to say something.

Soon we’ll have to tell my daughter. Honey, one of your best friends is missing. Yes, she might be dead. No, we may never know. I don’t know what happens when you die. I’m waiting till her father’s here too, so for now I’m talking with other parents from my girl’s class while out of her earshot and keeping the television off.

There are 800 other Norwegians missing too, and many already found dead. Norway’s a small country. The prime minister said it may be the greatest disaster to hit Norwegians in peacetime. Ever. And obviously the Norwegians, though closer to my home, are just a handful compared to the tens of thousands of other victims.

Please: donate money to the Red Cross and their efforts to find people and help people, or to one of the other aid organisations. Here’s the Norwegian Red Cross, and you’ll easily find your local equivalent if you search.


Discover more from Jill Walker Rettberg

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.

Oh no. “How’s my dwarf hamster?” my daughter asks, on the phone from her grandparents’ moutain cabin. Oh, fine, I say, walking into her bedroom to check. I stop. “Uh… The cage door’s open. And, uh, the cage is empty.” She doesn’t sound worried. “Look under the bed, mum,” she instructs. I hang up, telling her I’ll hunt the house and ring her back. The dwarf hamster’s not under her bed, nor mine, nothing but dust bunnies there. I’m not cut out for this dwarf hamster thing. Obviously as the responsible adult I should have checked the cage before leaving. And as soon as I got home. Oh dear. I foresee a lot of cleaning of floor surfaces in the next few hours. If you were a dwarf hamster, where would you be? updateYou’d go behind the fridge and find a path behind the kitchen cupboards. When your owner’s mum ripped up the hench and leant down to pull you out you’d put on your best cute hamster look. And fortunately not run to the bits that big woman couldn’t reach. Phew.

Discover more from Jill Walker Rettberg

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.

3 thoughts on “missing”

  1. diane

    Oh dear, the Rodent ran amok!

    Years ago, when our Rodents took surprise vacations, my mother lured them back with peanut butter, bits of cheese, and sunflower seeds.

    MJ’s mother used to chase their Rodent around the kitchen and capture him under an upside-down garbage bin.

    No doubt there is a Rodent out there with Jane’s name on it. And sooner or later I’ll be Rodent-catching too.

    PS. How small is a dwarf Rodent? Our Rodents were the usual size, which was not very big. A dwarf must be very small indeed!

  2. Radagast

    Congratulations on catching the dwarf hamster 🙂 I fondly remember helping my parents catch my various childhood rodent pets (mice or hamsters) after they inevitably escaped.

    As a side note (especially for Dianne), if you want to get a rodent pet I’d highly recommend pet rats. They’re highly social animals (best kept at least in pairs; separating genders of course) that are very friendly, and thus a joy to handle and have around. I had many through college and loved ’em all. If you do get some, though, be sure to get ones that have been handled well; feeders are typically very aggressive.

  3. mcb

    Just how small is a dwarf hamster?
    And how do you say dwarf hamster in Norwegian?

Leave A Comment

Recommended Posts

screenshot of blogpost from sept 11, 2001, about blogger.com showing blog posts about the attacks
Networked Politics social media

25 years since September 11

I’ve been reading through my blog posts on September 11, 2001 and the days that followed. The things that stand out to me – in addition to the horror of the attack itself – are how massively we (or at least I) used the web to understand what was happening, […]

AI STORIES

AI-generated stories have longer endings than human stories

My colleague Jessica Witte has just shared a preprint where she compared the emotional arcs of the stories we generated using gpt-4o-mini to those of human-authored (pre-2022) stories from the subreddit r/WritingPrompts, conveniently gathered in this dataset. She found a distinct difference in the endings of the LLM-generated stories: both […]

How to peer review a paper in 2026

Dorothy Bishop, a psychologist, wrote a useful list of what reviewers need to look out now that so many papers are bad science that looks good thanks to LLMs. Read her whole blog post, she explains it well, but here’s a brief version because I’m pretty sure we’ll be needing […]

“So what if it was ChatGPT? It *could* have been true!”

I recently read a good article on the different kinds of truth a language model operates with by Luke Mann, Liam Magee and Vanicka Arora, Truth Machines: Synthesizing Veracity in AI Language Models, but despite its lovely typology of truths (consensus, correspondence, coherence and pragmatic) it doesn’t help me with […]

AI STORIES

AI shimmer and sparkle

I have this hunch that sparkles and glow and shimmer are somehow a point in the latent spaces of LLMs that have more connections than you would expect. Perhaps their connotation to magic and to the unknown matches some of the mystique of genAI? Or perhaps these words are used […]