AN AUSPICIOUS DEBUT EXAMINING THE CULTURE OF HAIR FROM THE RONA JAFFE FOUNDATION AWARD-WINNING CARTOONIST Hot Comb offers a poignant glimpse into Black women’s lives and coming of age stories as seen across a crowded, ammonia-scented hair salon while ladies gossip and bond over the burn. The titular story “Hot Comb” is about a young girl’s first perm—a doomed ploy to look cool and to stop seeming “too white” in the all-black neighborhood her family has just moved to. In “Virgin Hair” taunts of “tender-headed” sting as much as the perm itself. It’s a scenario that repeats fifteen years later as an adult when, tired of the maintenance, Flowers shaves her head only to be hurled new put-downs. The story “My Lil Sister Lena” traces the stress resulting from being the only black player on a white softball team. Her hair is the team curio, an object to touched, a subject to be discussed and debated at the will of her teammates, leading Lena to develop an anxiety disorder of pulling her own hair out. Among the series of cultural touchpoints that make you both laugh and cry, Flowers recreates classic magazine ads idealizing women’s needs for hair relaxers and product. “Change your hair form to fit your life form” and “Kinks and Koils Forever” call customers from the page. Realizations about race, class, and the imperfections of identity swirl through Flowers’ stories and ads, which are by turns sweet, insightful, and heartbreaking. Flowers began drawing comics while earning her PhD, and her early mastery of sequential storytelling is nothing short of sublime. Hot Comb is a propitious display of talent from a new cartoonist who has already made her mark.

Wonderful short stories that sharpen awareness, from a brilliantly gifted Syrian refugee Personified animals (snakes, wolves, sheep), natural things (a swamp, a lake, a rainbow, trees), mankind’s creations (trucks, swords, zeroes) are all characters in The Teeth of the Comb. They aspire, they plot, they hope, they destroy, they fail, they love. These wonderful small stories animate new realities and make us see our reality anew. Reading Alomar’s sly moral fables and sharp political allegories, the reader always sits up a little straighter, and a little wiser. Here is the title story: Some of the teeth of the comb were envious of the class differences that exist between humans. They strived desperately to increase their height, and, when they succeeded, began to look with disdain on their colleagues below. After a little while the comb’s owner felt a desire to comb his hair. But when he found the comb in this state he threw it in the garbage.

To keep up with the ever-increasing data transmission speed needs, data center interconnects are scaling up to provide multi-Tbit/s connectivity. These links require a high number of WDM channels, while the associated transceivers should be compact and energy efficient. Scaling the number of channels, however, is still limited by the lack of adequate optical sources. In this book, we investigate novel chip-scale frequency comb generators as multi-wavelength light sources for Tbit/s WDM links.

This is the first detailed study and catalogue of a comb type that represents a new technology introduced into Britain towards the end of the 4th century AD and a major signifier of the late fourth- to fifth-century transition.

Death by Comb is Camari Carter's debut collection of poetry and prose centered around the trials and triumphs of black womanhood, the fight to normalize the beauty of black hair, and tales of humanity at its most fragile, broken, and glorious. Death by Comb commands the heart to open and the soul to evoke emotion through works that explore her beliefs when encountering life-altering events. This book is an essential read. "Death by Comb, the debut collection of poetry by Camari Carter is a tour de force of wit, brevity, and lyrical grace. At once arresting and beautifully tender, Carter's poems run the gamut of human experience, never shying away from the darker fringes of the beating heart. Tragic, angry, and bristling with beauty, Death by Comb is ultimately a work of redemption that speaks to the light, wavering in us all." - Dennis Cruz, Author of Moth Wing Tea