This week, in honor of the start of the holiday season, we're presenting stories about parents — and the ways our relationships with them intersect with science.

Part 1: As a kid, Dan Souza finds it hard to appreciate his mother’s nursing expertise until he sees it in action after a series of fateful incidents.

Part 2: When Michaella Thornton shares her struggles with infertility with her bachelor farmer father, his response stuns her.

Dan Souza is Editor in Chief of Cook’s Illustrated and a cast member of the Emmy-Award Winning television show America’s Test Kitchen. Dan is the kitchen editor of the New York Times bestseller “The Science of Good Cooking” (2012) and James Beard Award-nominated “Cook’s Science” (2016). He is a regular contributor to The Splendid Table radio program, and his personal stories have been featured on the Peabody Award-winning The Moth Radio Hour. After graduating first in his class from the Culinary Institute of America, Dan cooked in restaurants in Boston, New York, and Hungary before finding his true calling: helping home cooks succeed in the kitchen. 

Michaella A. Thornton's essays and flash prose have appeared in New South, The Southeast Review, The New Territory Magazine, Midwestern Gothic, and a University of Missouri Press anthology, Words Matter: Writing to Make a Difference (2016). She is also a staff writer for The Common Reader, "a journal of the essay," at Washington University in St. Louis. She loves her almost two-year-old daughter Lucinda, all the cannoli, Hall & Oates, and Jo Ann Beard.

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