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Missed Part 1? Read it here. Or keep scrolling for Part 2.

Hey there!

Before we get into this blog I just want to say an absolutely enormous thank you to everyone who read the first article a fortnight ago. I really cannot express how mind-blown and heartwarmed I have been by the support and vulnerability shown. So thank you and I hope you find the rest of the series interesting 💙

Now, let’s dig into part 2 and answer - what is chronic pain?

A weekend “getaway”

One year ago from today I went on a weekend getaway which changed my relationship with pain.

In a last ditch effort to get a grip on my latest chronic pain struggle in both of my hands, forearms and elbows, I resorted to big expensive magnets. Specifically the MRI machine kind. I wanted to know, once and for all, what was at fault in my body. Why else would I be in pain if not for a faulty body? Or so I thought at the time.

On the Saturday I had three scans done on my right arm. Having your arm outstretched in front of you for 30 minutes is not quite the embodiment of relaxation. But, keen for more, I returned the next day for my left arm.

So you might be wondering - why am I telling you about the time I spent lying in what seemed like a $2 million toilet roll?

Leading up to this, I’d briefly heard about the brain’s role in pain - but at most appointments I was told there was something wrong with my body, and that’s why I was feeling pain. For my hands/arms in particular - it was “lack of grip strength”, “tight muscles” and apparent “tendinopathy”.

Well, as it turned out, the scans revealed there was nothing physically wrong with either of my arms…

An aside, I did get lucky here. As we’ll soon see, many people have damage which doesn’t cause pain - so scans can be misleading.

But first, let’s nerd out for a moment on what was happening to me.

Something doesn’t need to be broken, to hurt (Pain ≠ Damage)

Until the 90’s, the leading explanation for pain was physical damage or injury. Think things like muscle, tendon, nerve or inflammatory issues.

In the decades since, there has been a gradual shift toward pain being looked at through three key components. Biological (i.e. the former model), psychological (what happens upstairs), and social (our environment). This is known as the biopsychosocial model.

With the realisation that pain is often caused by non-biological factors, in 2017 the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) formally recognised a new category of pain - nociplastic pain. In total there are now 3 recognised types of pain, each of which can be involved with chronic pain:

• Nociceptive: What you experience when you pull a muscle at the gym or give yourself a paper cut.

• Neuropathic: Caused by damage to the nerves in your body. Nerves are those small wires which send signals from your brain to let you scroll down this article and feel the sensation of your mouse/touchscreen.

• Nociplastic: Simply put, this is pain which is not caused by damage in the body. It also goes by other names including neuroplastic pain, TMS and more.

Back to my weekend getaway - my body wasn’t damaged, and my nerves were fine. Nothing was broken. So I was experiencing nociplastic pain!

But here’s the interesting thing - not only can pain exist without damage - often there is damage without any pain at all.

Just because something’s broken, doesn’t mean it hurts (Damage ≠ Pain)

You might be thinking - if I find I have damage, surely that has to be the cause of my pain?

Well, a 2015 study looking at over 3,000 people’s spines found something wild:

• 52% of pain-free 30 year olds had disk degeneration, and

• 50% of pain-free 40 year olds had at least one disk bulge!

This indicates that (also) damage does not mean pain!

In my journey of working out what was going on, I came across a tear in the back of one of my shoulders - probably from teenage Dan lifting too much weight at the gym. Yet, I had no pain or symptom in that part of my body. In fact a whole study was done on this exact type of shoulder damage, and results were similar to the spine study from before - most of the people (note, who were older) had no pain in spite of their shoulder damage!

So while it can be helpful to have scans done - particularly to rule out serious structural causes like fractures, significant nerve impingement or cancer - it’s worth knowing not everything found is necessarily the cause of pain. Even if it’s precisely where symptoms are felt.

Lets look at a common culprit we met earlier (and the source of my pain) - nociplastic pain.

So I’m made out of plastic?!

Don’t worry, you’re not turning into a tupperware container.

The term “plastic” in nociplastic refers to neuroplasticity - your brain’s incredible ability to learn new things and form new habits. In the context of pain, this plasticity can often lead to it becoming chronic. And it’s a big deal…

Nociplastic pain is estimated to affect 25-75% of chronic pain sufferers. Either directly (e.g. my situation where there was no clear damage) or alongside a structural cause. And given roughly 1 in 5 adults globally (not just in Australia!) have chronic pain, nociplastic chronic pain likely accounts for the suffering of approximately 600 million adults. That’s getting close to the population of Europe!

To help illustrate how common this is - fibromyalgia, migraine, chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) and irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) are just some conditions where nociplastic chronic pain plays a big role. It’s not just joint or tissue pain.

Given its endemic prevalence, this blog will mainly focus on nociplastic pain. From now on when you see the phrase “chronic pain”, it will mean chronic nociplastic pain (i.e. not tissue/nerve damage) unless otherwise called out.

Let’s explore some of the irregular things many of these 600 million regularly encounter, through some more personal examples.

Hypersensitivity: Feeling cooked whenever I’d cook

When I was living with chronic pain, things would just hurt more - and more often. Anything from light touch or exercise would lead to me not feeling well in those parts of my body.

Whenever my grandfather and I would shake hands, something we’ve done since I remember having hands, I would feel a bruising/fatigue sensation in my hand and forearm.

Whenever I would cook dinner, my wrists and elbows would (figuratively 👨‍🍳) get cooked.

Whenever I was typing away on my computer for more than an hour, (surprise!) my fingers would feel numb, bruised, tingly or like they were being lightly shocked.

In short, my brain’s pain processing abilities had become hypersensitive! We’ll dig into the details of this fascinating concept in the next article.

Widespread symptoms: The ol’ block of Swiss cheese

I had symptoms in a variety of places. Sometimes in the span of a day I would go from having pain in my upper limbs to pain in my achilles. Sometimes it would leave my legs alone and bounce between both of my arms.

It’s not uncommon for pain to move around to different parts of the body when someone is experiencing nociplastic pain. For conditions like fibromyalgia, part of the diagnosis criteria is having pain in multiple parts of the body.

While this sounds strange and should have been cause for me to realise earlier this wasn’t a normal tissue (or nerve) issue, when you have chronic pain the irregular becomes the regular.

Emotions: Pain as a language

Imagine for a moment you’re about to give a speech to a large room of people. Or you’re feeling a bit annoyed at your housemate who hasn’t cleaned their dishes in 3 days. In the first case you might feel a pain in your gut or like you want to break the 100m sprint world record to get to the bathroom. In the second it might be tension in your chest or neck. In these situations, physical discomfort can be a sign that you (and therefore your mind) are not ok with what’s happening.

Similar to this, during my chronic pain journey I would often notice flare-ups of worse symptoms around stressful moments. For example if I had a conflict with friends or if I was running late to something I cared about.

Even now, if I’m feeling overwhelmed or anxious (like when I released blog post #1 recently), I notice my body wanting to communicate with familiar sensations. However, because I now understand this connection I am able to respond instead of react.

As emotions and psychological distress are inseparable from pain, they will feature often in the next two articles.

Let’s look at a person you might know who went through this journey

No not me. Someone famous.

Some of you may know the TV shows ‘Seinfeld’ or ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’. It turns out the creator of these shows, Larry David, suffered from chronic back pain and was able to recover by recognising the role his brain was playing.

Skip to 1:28 in the video clip below 📼

That’s it for now!

Next time, we’ll be opening up the hood of our car - I mean brain (drops spanner) - to understand the causes of chronic pain. We’ll then be in a great position to explore how to recover!

See you then ⛵️

Hey, I’m Dan. I had chronic pain for several years, and now I’m writing to spread awareness about this condition as well as what I did to recover. I’m not a medical practitioner so please consult with one as part of your journey.

Got any questions or feedback? I’d love to hear from you!

With a charismatic host and charming book readings and reviews, the hit series “Reading Rainbow” stands as a beacon of children’s literature

Kayla Randall - Digital Editor, Museums

July 15, 2025

For generations of readers, four words convey what it means to love books: “butterfly in the sky.” These are the opening lyrics of the famous theme song for the beloved children’s program “Reading Rainbow,” hosted by actor LeVar Burton. PBS premiered the show in 1983, and it ran for 23 years, received 26 Emmy Awards, and won the hearts of millions. The series, like the song, encouraged young readers to “take a look,” because whatever knowledge they sought, “it’s in a book.”

As those who watched the show know, “butterfly in the sky” became the words that always preceded a good story. The words are so significant to the legacy of “Reading Rainbow” that they serve as the namesake for the 2022 documentary about the cult classic program, Butterfly in the Sky: The Story of Reading Rainbow.

In recent years, numerous reports have warned of a national literacy crisis, for children and adults alike. “Reading Rainbow” is the essential example of a show about the importance of literacy, reading comprehension and the joy of storytelling, loved by viewers of all ages and from all backgrounds.

“In terms of child literacy rates going down, that was really what ‘Reading Rainbow’ was designed in response to, and in particular the ‘summer slide,’ they call it, which is when students are out of school, their literacy levels slide backward,” says Ryan Lintelman, entertainment curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.

Lintelman says plenty of research confirms that, when students come back to school in the fall, teachers need to take some time to bring them back up to speed to the levels of literacy and reading comprehension that they were at when they ended the previous school year. “Reading Rainbow” was made to bridge this reading gap for children and improve their reading skills—and to be a show that kids wanted to watch.

It was known that kids were watching TV all summer, Lintelman says, “So why not do something with it?”

Butterfly in the Sky - Official Trailer (2024) Reading Rainbow Documentary

On each half-hour episode of “Reading Rainbow,” Burton introduced the real-world subject matter of a children’s book through field trips, from going to the barbershop to visiting an orchestra in a concert hall, and then the book itself was read by a performer. Ruby Dee, Helen Mirren, Keith David, Ed Harris, Gregory Hines, Jeff Bridges and Pete Seeger are just a few of the actors and musicians who graced the show with their voices. The chosen books are childhood staples, such as If You Give a Mouse a Cookie by Laura Numeroff, Amazing Grace by Mary Hoffman and Stellaluna by Janell Cannon. The program mixes the calm, steady presence of Burton with the warmth and coziness of getting wrapped up in a book. And at the end of the show, kids review books they’ve read.

For over two decades, the show achieved its goal of not only reading to kids, but also making kids want to read. In 1997, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting released a study about the use of television and video in classroom instruction. Current, a news outlet covering public media, reported that “teachers responding to the survey rated public TV programs as the best they’d used for educational purposes in 1996-97. ‘Reading Rainbow’ was named by a higher percentage of teachers than any other program.”

“I think it’s been shown to be super successful,” Lintelman says, adding that the show inspired a lifelong love of reading in its audience. “People who have been interviewed for this documentary talk about how ‘Reading Rainbow’ was such an important part of their lives and the entire generation. I count myself among them, of people who grew up watching that show and learning about new books through it.”

The curator notes that “Reading Rainbow” was unique in how it spoke about books, showing both the featured book’s illustrations and Burton’s real adventures seeing the people and places represented by the books. The show also made its host, Burton, who had been known for his role as Kunta Kinte in the 1970s miniseries “Roots,” into an icon of education. He later went on to star as Geordi La Forge in another beloved show, “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” which ran from 1987 to 1994.

“Hearing the story from the people who made the show and hearing their evident passion and commitment to doing this children’s television show, every person feels like they were making a significant contribution to culture,” Burton told the Associated Press in 2024. “And they care deeply about what we were doing. I get it, I understand the importance that y’all have placed on this part of your lives, your childhoods. And I’m proud, genuinely proud, to be a part of your lives in this way.”

During the AP interview, Burton was asked if he ever thought that his most meaningful legacy, despite all his acting work in film and television, would be tied to “Reading Rainbow.”

“I’m good with that,” Burton said. “As a son of an English teacher, as a Black man, coming from a people for whom it was illegal to know how to read, not that long ago, I’m good with that.”

The story of “Reading Rainbow” begins in Buffalo, New York, as a WNED-TV program idea before it made its debut on PBS. Three people who worked on and helped make the show, Tony Buttino Sr., Barbara Irwin and Pam Johnson, collaborated on a 2024 book about the process called Creating Reading Rainbow: The Untold Story of a Beloved Children’s Series.

Working with educators and librarians on summer reading programs, Buttino led WNED-TV’s Educational Services Department at the time. Johnson was the liaison with the executives working on the show. And Irwin was an intern in that department at WNED, working alongside Buttino and Johnson. She worked on community outreach and on production of the book review segments of the show that were done in Buffalo for the first several years.

Buttino, as director of the department, led in the creation of the show. In searching for a “Reading Rainbow” host, Irwin says, “Tony knew that he wanted someone like Mister Rogers. He wanted a real person, somebody who could really communicate well with children.”

Burton was mostly known then for being on “Roots,” Irwin says. The team at WNED, who recognized his capability as a magnetic speaker and reached out to him about the job which he accepted, had found their host.

Today, Buttino is retired from his role at WNED, Irwin is retired from her work as a communications scholar at Canisius University, and Johnson is the executive director of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s Ready to Learn education initiative. The trio speaks fondly of their time working on “Reading Rainbow.”

Irwin says the first proposal that WNED submitted to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for the show was for one season’s worth of episodes. That proposal was rejected. But the team was told to work on and submit a proposal for a pilot episode. The pilot episode was funded and then shot in November 1981, says Irwin. After the pilot, the team did more research to put together a new proposal to get the show made.

WNED partnered with Great Plains National in Lincoln, Nebraska, to submit the new proposal to the Kellogg Company and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. That proposal was a success. In Buffalo and Nebraska, test audiences got to see the show before it made its national debut on PBS.

“This was intended to be a summer series,” Buttino says. But, of course, it ended up transcending that. “People loved the program.”

Like the fans who watched “Reading Rainbow,” Irwin, Buttino and Johnson have their own favorite episodes and books among the 155 total.

“The book that I really love is called Enemy Pie,” Johnson says. The 2000 book by Derek Munson tells the tale of a boy befriending a peer who he didn’t like at first after eating pie with him. “It’s a beautiful theme about welcoming in others,” she says.

Buttino and Irwin both appreciate Tight Times, and Irwin adds Bringing the Rain to Kapiti Plain as another special book, read by James Earl Jones on the show.

“Stories and storytelling are so important to the human experience,” Irwin says.

In the case of “Reading Rainbow,” those stories opened diverse worlds of possibilities for children. “Offering these opportunities to meet different kinds of people, to travel to different places, to experience different things, to go back in time, to go into the future, that’s the power of storytelling,” Irwin says. “And no series did it any better than ‘Reading Rainbow’ did.”

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Of all freestanding power tools, perhaps the jigsaw or scrollsaw would be the most fun for kids to use, as they allow freeform cuts. They're also pretty darn dangerous, with the jigsaw being powerful enough to remove fingers.

A much safer way to introduce kids to power tools is this ChompSaw, developed by product designers Kausi Raman and Max Liechty. The material it's designed to cut is cardboard, allowing parents to turn Amazon boxes into projects.

The tool is essentially a nibbler, using an oscillating cutter that's safely tucked beneath a puck-like protrusion, completely preventing finger contact.

The nibblings are collected in a bin below, allowing you to recycle the waste.

The ChompSaw runs $250.

For years, I’ve felt that writing lines of code was never the bottleneck in software engineering.

The actual bottlenecks were, and still are, code reviews, knowledge transfer through mentoring and pairing, testing, debugging, and the human overhead of coordination and communication. All of this wrapped inside the labyrinth of tickets, planning meetings, and agile rituals.

These processes, meant to drive quality, often slow us down more than the act of writing code itself because they require thought, shared understanding, and sound judgment.

Now, with LLMs making it easy to generate working code faster than ever, a new narrative has emerged: that writing code was the bottleneck, and we’ve finally cracked it.

But that’s not quite right.

The marginal cost of adding new software is approaching zero, especially with LLMs. But what is the price of understanding, testing, and trusting that code? Higher than ever.

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LLMs shift the workload — they don’t remove it

Tools like Claude can speed up initial implementation. Still, the result is often more code flowing through systems and more pressure on the people responsible for reviewing, integrating, and maintaining it.

This becomes especially clear when:

• It’s unclear whether the author fully understands what they submitted.
• The generated code introduces unfamiliar patterns or breaks established conventions.
• Edge cases and unintended side effects aren’t obvious.

We end up in a situation where code is more straightforward to produce but more complex to verify, which doesn’t necessarily make teams move faster overall.

It’s not a new challenge. Developers have long joked about “copy-paste engineering”, but the velocity and scale that LLMs enable have amplified those copy-paste habits.

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Understanding code is still the hard part

“The biggest cost of code is understanding it — not writing it.”

LLMs reduce the time it takes to produce code, but they haven’t changed the amount of effort required to reason about behavior, identify subtle bugs, or ensure long-term maintainability. That work can be even more challenging when reviewers struggle to distinguish between generated and handwritten code or understand why a particular solution was chosen.

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Teams still rely on trust and shared context

Software engineering has always been collaborative. It depends on shared understanding, alignment, and mentoring. However, when code is generated faster than it can be discussed or reviewed, teams risk falling into a mode where quality is assumed rather than ensured. That creates stress on reviewers and mentors, potentially slowing things down in more subtle ways.

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LLMs are powerful — but they don’t fix the fundamentals

There’s real value in faster prototyping, scaffolding, and automation. But LLMs don’t remove the need for clear thinking, careful review, and thoughtful design. If anything, those become even more important as more code gets generated.

Yes, the cost of writing code has indeed dropped. But the cost of making sense of it together as a team hasn’t.

That’s still the bottleneck. Let’s not pretend it isn’t.

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