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Introduction

The <dl>, or de­scrip­tion list, el­e­ment is un­der­rated.

It’s used to rep­re­sent a list of name–value pairs. This is a com­mon UI pat­tern that, at the same time, is in­cred­i­bly ver­sa­tile. For in­stance, you’ve prob­a­bly seen these lay­outs out in the wild…

Each of these ex­am­ples shows a list (or lists!) of name–value pairs. You might have also seen lists of name–value pairs to de­scribe lodg­ing ameni­ties, or to list out in­di­vid­ual charges in your monthly rent, or in glos­saries of tech­ni­cal terms. Each of these is a can­di­date to be rep­re­sented with the <dl> el­e­ment.

So what does that look like?

The Anatomy of a Description List

I’ve been say­ing “<dl>,” when re­ally, I’m talk­ing about three sep­a­rate el­e­ments: <dl>, <dt>, and <dd>.

We start with our <dl>. This is the de­scrip­tion list,note 1 akin to us­ing a <ul> for an un­ordered list or an <ol> for an or­dered list.

<dl>

</dl>

Fancy.

Next up, we want to add a name–value pair. We’ll use a <dt>, short for de­scrip­tion term, for the name, and we’ll use a <dd>, short for de­scrip­tion de­tail, for the value.note 2

<dl> <dt>Title</dt> <dd>Designing with Web Standards</dd> </dl>

To add an­other name–value pair to our list, we add an­other <dt> and <dd>:

<dl> <dt>Title</dt> <dd>Designing with Web Standards</dd> <dt>Publisher</dt> <dd>New Riders Pub; 3rd edi­tion (October 19, 2009)</dd> </dl>

But wait — what if I have a term that has mul­ti­ple val­ues? For in­stance, what if this book has mul­ti­ple au­thors?

That’s fine! One <dt> can have mul­ti­ple <dd>s:

<dl> <dt>Title</dt> <dd>Designing with Web Standards</dd> <dt>Author</dt> <dd>Jeffrey Zeldman</dd> <dd>Ethan Marcotte</dd> <dt>Publisher</dt> <dd>New Riders Pub; 3rd edi­tion (October 19, 2009)</dd> </dl>

There’s one last piece of the de­scrip­tion list anatomy to look at for most ba­sic use cases: what if I want to wrap a <dt> and its <dd>(s) for styling rea­sons?

In this case, the specs al­low you to wrap a <dt> and its <dd>(s) in a <div>:

<dl>

<div> <dt>Title</dt> <dd>Designing with Web Standards</dd> </div>

<div> <dt>Author</dt> <dd>Jeffrey Zeldman</dd> <dd>Ethan Marcotte</dd> </div>

<div> <dt>Publisher</dt> <dd>New Riders Pub; 3rd edi­tion (October 19, 2009)</dd> </div>

</dl>

A wrap­per <div> like this is the only el­e­ment that can wrap those <dt>/<dd> groups.

And that’s it! That’s the anatomy of the de­scrip­tion list, HTML’s se­man­tic way to mark up a list of name–value groups!

Why Do We Need Semantics For This Anyways?

Before we learned about the <dl>, <dt>, and <dd> el­e­ments, my team used to use nested <div>s for this pat­tern all the time. It looked a lot like:

<div class=“book-de­tails”> <div class=“book-de­tails–item”> <div class=“book-de­tails–la­bel”> Title </div> <div class=“book-de­tails–value”> Designing with Web Standards </div> </div> <div class=“book-de­tails–item”> <div class=“book-de­tails–la­bel”> Author </div> <div class=“book-de­tails–value”> Jeffrey Zeldman </div> <div class=“book-de­tails–value”> Ethan Marcotte </div> </div> <div class=“book-de­tails–item”> <div class=“book-de­tails–la­bel”> Publisher </div> <div class=“book-de­tails–value”> New Riders Pub; 3rd edi­tion (October 19, 2009) </div> </div> </div>

This has all the in­for­ma­tion about the book, right? Why do we need se­man­tics for a list of name–value groups in the first place if some­thing like a se­ries of nested <div>s could get the job done?

When de­ter­min­ing whether a se­man­tic el­e­ment might be ap­pro­pri­ate for a given pat­tern, I find it help­ful to ask, “What ben­e­fits — even the­o­ret­i­cal — could we get if com­put­ers could rec­og­nize this pat­tern?” In this case, what lift could we get if browsers could some­how rec­og­nize a list of name–value groups?

Answers to that ques­tion will be var­ied. I tend to spend a lot of time ad­vo­cat­ing for web ac­ces­si­bil­ity, so my first thought tends to be how screen­read­ers could in­ter­pret the pat­tern. Off the top of my head, I can think of a cou­ple of ben­e­fits screen­reader users could get from their screen­read­ers rec­og­niz­ing this pat­tern:

The screen­reader could tell the user how many name–value groups are in the list.

The screen­reader could tell the user how far into the list they are.

The screen­reader could treat the list as one block that the user could skip over if they’re un­in­ter­ested in it.

All of these could make the list more us­able than a se­ries of nested <div>s, which would treat each name and value in the list as noth­ing more than a stand­alone text node.

If you can come up with a cou­ple of even the­o­ret­i­cal lifts from the user’s de­vice rec­og­niz­ing a pat­tern, then there’s a good chance that the pat­tern is a strong can­di­date for hav­ing some as­so­ci­ated se­man­tics.

For what it’s worth, these screen­reader ex­pe­ri­ences aren’t hy­po­thet­i­cal — they’re ben­e­fits that screen­reader users re­ally get from us­ing <dl> in most browser/​screen­reader com­bi­na­tions. Admittedly, how­ever, sup­port for the <dl> el­e­ment is not yet uni­ver­sal. You may de­cide that screen­read­ers’ fall­back ex­pe­ri­ence — treat­ing the list as stand­alone text nodes — is­n’t suf­fi­cient for your use case, and in­stead opt for some­thing like a <ul> un­til sup­port im­proves.

Okay, Okay, One Last Example!

My fa­vorite ex­am­ple, the one that re­ally takes the cake for me, is Dungeons & Dragons stat­blocks, which are re­ally “Oops! All Name–Value Pairs!”

No, re­ally: just how many can­di­dates for <dl>s do you see in this stat­block alone?

I counted five pos­si­ble de­scrip­tion lists, per­son­ally. Here’s how I chose to mark this up:

<div> <h1>Kobold</h1> <small>Small hu­manoid (kobold), law­ful evil</​small>

<dl> <div> <dt>Armor Class</dt> <dd>12</dd> </div> <div> <dt>Hit Points</dt> <dd>5 (2d6 – 2)</dd> </div> <div> <dt>Speed</dt> <dd>30 ft.</​dd> </div> </dl>

<dl aria-la­bel=“Abil­ity Scores”> <div> <dt>STR</dt> <dd>7 (-2)</dd> </div> <div> <dt>DEX</dt> <dd>15 (+2)</dd> </div> <div> <dt>CON</dt> <dd>9 (-1)</dd> </div> <div> <dt>INT</dt> <dd>8 (-1)</dd> </div> <div> <dt>WIS</dt> <dd>7 (-2)</dd> </div> <div> <dt>CHA</dt> <dd>8 (–1)</dd> </div> </dl>

<dl aria-la­bel=“Pro­fi­cien­cies”> <div> <dt>Senses</dt> <dd>Darkvision 60 ft.</​dd> <dd>Passive Perception 8</dd> </div> <div> <dt>Languages</dt> <dd>Common</dd> <dd>Draconic</dd> </div> <div> <dt>Challenge</dt> <dd>1/8 (25 XP)</dd> </div> </dl>

<dl aria-la­bel=“Traits”> <div> <dt>Sunlight Sensitivity</dt> <dd> While in sun­light, the kobold has dis­ad­van­tage on at­tack rolls, as well as on Wisdom (Perception) checks that rely on sight. </dd> </div> <div> <dt>Pack Tactics</dt> <dd> The kobold has ad­van­tage on an at­tack roll against a crea­ture if at least one of the kobold’s al­lies is within 5 ft. of the crea­ture and the ally is­n’t in­ca­pac­i­tated. </dd> </div> </dl>

<h2 id=“ac­tions”>Ac­tions</​h2> <dl aria-la­belledby=“ac­tions”> <div> <dt>Dagger</dt> <dd> <i>Melee Weapon Attack:</i> +4 to hit, reach 5 ft., one tar­get. <i>Hit:</i> (1d4 + 2) pierc­ing dam­age. </dd> </div> <div> <dt>Sling</dt> <dd> <i>Ranged Weapon Attack:</i> +4 to hit, reach 30/120 ft., one tar­get. <i>Hit</i>: (1d4 + 2) blud­geon­ing dam­age. </dd> </div> </dl>

</div>

This is just one way you could have opted to mark up that stat­block.

I love this as a demon­stra­tion be­cause it re­ally goes to show just how ver­sa­tile the de­scrip­tion list pat­tern can re­ally be — the lists of abil­ity scores (STR, DEX, and so forth) and at­tacks both look very dif­fer­ent, and yet, the de­scrip­tion list pat­tern can span them all.

Takeaways

Lists of name–value pairs (or, in some cases, name–value groups) are a com­mon pat­tern across the web, in part due to their ver­sa­til­ity. HTML lets us mark up these lists with a com­bi­na­tion of three el­e­ments:

The <dl>, or de­scrip­tion list, el­e­ment, which wraps the en­tire list of name–value pairs

The <dt>, or de­scrip­tion term, el­e­ment, which rep­re­sents a name in our name–value pairs

The <dd>, or de­scrip­tion de­tail, el­e­ment, which rep­re­sents a value in our name–value pairs

Ascribing se­man­tics to pat­terns such as these gives our users’ de­vices the in­for­ma­tion they need to cu­rate use­ful, us­able ex­pe­ri­ences — of­ten­times in ways that we as de­vel­op­ers may not ex­pect.

To learn more about de­scrip­tion lists and what’s al­lowed or not al­lowed, I rec­om­mend the MDN docs on the <dl>, or go­ing di­rectly to the specs!

Footnotes

Prior to HTML5, this was called a de­f­i­n­i­tion list. This is be­cause the <dl> was orig­i­nally only in­tended to rep­re­sent glos­saries of terms and their de­f­i­n­i­tions. | Back to [1]

Prior to HTML5, this was called a de­f­i­n­i­tion list. This is be­cause the <dl> was orig­i­nally only in­tended to rep­re­sent glos­saries of terms and their de­f­i­n­i­tions. | Back to [1]

Previously known as the de­f­i­n­i­tion term and de­f­i­n­i­tion de­tail el­e­ments re­spec­tively. | Back to [2]

Previously known as the de­f­i­n­i­tion term and de­f­i­n­i­tion de­tail el­e­ments re­spec­tively. | Back to [2]

The most pow­er­ful rocket in his­tory just roared off its launch pad in a spec­tac­u­lar show of power and tech­nol­ogy.

SpaceX launched the newest ver­sion of its gi­ant Starship rocket Friday (May 22), from a re­cently com­pleted sec­ond pad at its Starbase man­u­fac­tur­ing and test fa­cil­ity in South Texas. Liftoff oc­curred at 6:30 p.m. EDT (2230 GMT), send­ing the mas­sive 408-foot-tall (124-meter) ve­hi­cle sky­ward on its 12th sub­or­bital test flight.

It was the first Starship mis­sion since October 2025, and the first-ever flight of Starship Version 3 (V3), a next-gen­er­a­tion build of the rocket that fea­tures a com­plete de­sign over­haul meant to evolve the ve­hi­cle to­ward op­er­a­tional mis­sions. And to­day’s sub­or­bital Flight 12 was a sig­nif­i­cant step to­ward that am­bi­tious goal, even if it was a day later than planned af­ter a glitched thwarted a first launch try on Thursday.

“Congratulations SpaceX team on an epic first Starship V3 launch & land­ing!,” SpaceX CEO Elon Musk wrote on X af­ter the launch. “You scored a goal for hu­man­ity.”

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There were some hic­cups.

During liftoff, one of the 33 first-stage Raptor en­gines on Super Heavy shut down, and the booster missed a crit­i­cal “boost back” manuever to con­trol its re­turn to Earth. Starship’s Ship 39 up­per stage also lost one of its six main en­gines dur­ing as­cent, but man­aged to reach space on the re­main­ing five.

“I would­n’t call it nom­i­nal or­bital in­ser­tion, but we’re in on a tra­jec­tory that we had an­a­lyzed, and it’s within bounds,” SpaceX spokesper­son Dan Huot said in live com­men­tary. “So, teams con­tin­u­ing to work through it with that en­gine out there, work­ing some through some steps on the en­gines.”

Starship con­sists of a first-stage booster called Super Heavy and an up­per stage known as Starship, or sim­ply Ship. The first no­table event af­ter the rocket cleared the tower this evening oc­curred about 2 min­utes and 20 sec­onds into flight, when Super Heavy ini­ti­ated “hot stag­ing” and sep­a­ra­tion from Ship. (It’s known as hot stag­ing be­cause Ship be­gins fir­ing its en­gines be­fore sep­a­rat­ing from Super Heavy.)

Unlike its V2 pre­de­ces­sor, which fea­tured an in­ter­stage ring that fell away at sep­a­ra­tion, Starship V3 is built with sim­i­lar hard­ware se­cured to the top of the booster, like a fence around the fuel tank’s dome to give some breath­ing room to the up­per stage en­gi­nes’ ig­ni­tion and ini­tial thrust away from the booster.

After stage sep­a­ra­tion, Super Heavy re­ori­ented and at­tempted to per­form a one-minute boost­back burn to­ward Starbase. However, some­thing went wrong and the burn did­n’t go as planned, Huot said.

SpaceX has per­formed booster re­cov­er­ies at Starbase on pre­vi­ous Starship mis­sions, catch­ing the rock­et’s first stage us­ing me­chan­i­cal “chopstick” arms at­tached to the site’s launch tow­ers. On Flight 12, how­ever, the com­pany planed to re­turn Super Heavy a soft splash­down in the Gulf of Mexico rather than risk a re­cov­ery mishap that could dam­age the pad on the first flight of brand-new hard­ware.

Instead, the mas­sive Super Heavy booster plum­meted back to Earth and crashed into the Gulf, beam­ing live views of its fall from space un­til the screen went black.

“The booster did­n’t com­plete its full boost back,” Huot said just af­ter li­fotff. “Its mis­sion ended a lit­tle bit early, but landed in the clear area that we had set in ad­vance.”

SpaceX in­cluded 22 pay­loads for Ship to de­ploy dur­ing its sub­or­bital jaunt to­day — 20 dummy ver­sions of the com­pa­ny’s Starlink broad­band satel­lites and two ac­tual Starlink space­craft equipped with imag­ing sen­sors.

The pay­loads were de­ployed as planned over a 10-minute span, be­gin­ning roughly 17 min­utes af­ter launch, via Ship’s “PEZ dis­penser”-like door. The two mod­i­fied Starlink satel­lites were tasked with scan­ning Starship’s heat shield tiles, in a test meant to as­sess the abil­ity to in­spect them for pos­si­ble dam­age prior to reen­try.

Shortly af­ter the fi­nal two Starlink sim­u­la­tors de­ployed (the ones with cam­eras that SpaceX nick­named “Dodger Dogs” af­ter the famed hot­dogs at Dodger Stadium), SpaceX broad­cast the spec­tac­tu­lar video they cap­tured as they flew away from Starship.

“That is a Starship in space,” Huot said.

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SpaceX ini­tially planned for the Ship 39 up­per stage to per­form an in-space re­light of one of its six Raptor en­gines in or­bit— an im­por­tant demon­stra­tion to prove the space­craft can re­li­ably ex­e­cute ma­neu­vers, as mix­ing and man­ag­ing cryo­genic fu­els and reignit­ing an en­gine in zero-g is nec­es­sary to al­ter Ship’s or­bit, send it on to the moon or Mars, and bring it back to Earth for re­cov­ery and reuse. But be­cause of the lost Raptor en­gine dur­ing launch, flight con­trollers skipped that test for Flight 12.

And so, the first Starship V3 space­craft be­gan its de­scent to Earth.

Ship be­gan its reen­try to Earth’s at­mos­phere about 50 min­utes into the flight, falling as its belly be­came en­gulfed in a bright plasma. During its de­scent, Ship 39 per­formed a se­ries of ex­er­cises de­signed to stress parts of the ve­hi­cle to their struc­tural limit. It also ex­e­cuted a novel bank­ing ma­neu­ver for its land­ing burn meant to mimic the tra­jec­tory and ori­en­ta­tion needed for a launch tower catch on a re­turn to Starbase.

Huge cheers rang out at SpaceX’s head­quareters and Starbase fa­cil­i­ties as the Ship 39 ig­nited two en­gines for a fi­nal land­ing burn. The manuever ini­tially called for three en­gines, but that one shut down early at liftoff. After the land­ing, Starship top­pled over into the ocean wa­ters and ex­ploded in a mag­nif­i­cent fire­ball (again, as planned) as SpaceX work­ers cheered.

Nothing Starship ac­com­plished on Flight 12 was par­tic­u­larly ground­break­ing for SpaceX; the mis­sion goals and tra­jec­to­ries were broadly sim­i­lar to those of the pre­vi­ous few test mis­sions.

However, even suc­cess­fully fol­low­ing a pre­vi­ously blazed trail was huge for Starship V3, given that it’s a brand-new ve­hi­cle with a va­ri­ety of mod­i­fi­ca­tions and up­grades over its pre­de­ces­sors. And V3′s road to the launch pad was a bit rocky.

SpaceX ran into some is­sues dur­ing the test­ing of the new V3 build in November last year, re­sult­ing in the loss of the Super Heavy booster orig­i­nally slated for the Flight 12 mis­sion. Now, with more than half a year be­tween Starship’s last two launches, SpaceX has some catch­ing up to do.

NASA is re­ly­ing on Starship as one of the crewed lu­nar lan­ders for its Artemis pro­gram, which aims to even­tu­ally es­tab­lish a per­ma­nent hu­man pres­ence on the moon. The space agency has also con­tracted Blue Moon, a Blue Origin space­craft, to land Artemis as­tro­nauts on the moon, and has in­di­cated a will­ing­ness to fly with whichever pri­vate lan­der is ready when it’s time for the mis­sions to get off the ground.

The next of those mis­sions is Artemis 3 — the fol­low-up to April’s Artemis 2, which flew four as­tro­nauts aboard NASA’s Orion space­craft on a suc­cess­ful 10-day mis­sion around the moon. NASA is tar­get­ing mid to late 2027 for Artemis 3, which will launch Orion to low Earth or­bit (LEO) to ren­dezvous and dock with one or both of the pri­vate lu­nar lan­ders, and late 2028 for the first lu­nar land­ing on Artemis 4.

As if to drive that fact home, NASA chief Jared Isaacman flew to Starbase to watch the launch per­son­ally.

“We’re look­ing for­ward to see­ing this thing fly, be­cause hope­fully at some point in the not too dis­tant fu­ture we’re gonna, we’re gonna join up in an earth or­bit,” Isaacman said dur­ing the live co­men­tary.

After the launch, Isaacman hailed the work of SpaceX’s Starship team.

“Congrats SpaceX team and Elon Musk on a hell of a V3 Starship launch,” Isaacman wrote on X. “One step closer to the Moon … one step closer to Mars.”

Congrats @SpaceX team and @elonmusk on a hell of a V3 Starship launch. One step closer to the Moon…one step closer to Mars 🇺🇸 pic.twit­ter.com/​jjetQxnkiR­May 23, 2026

Congrats @SpaceX team and @elonmusk on a hell of a V3 Starship launch. One step closer to the Moon…one step closer to Mars 🇺🇸 pic.twit­ter.com/​jjetQxnkiR­May 23, 2026

Starship has a num­ber of boxes to check be­fore NASA cer­ti­fies the ve­hi­cle to fly as­tro­nauts, but V3 has been built with those goal­posts in mind.

The new Starship V3 ve­hi­cle in­cludes four pas­sive con­nec­tion ports on its back, or lee­ward, side (opposite the heat tiles on its belly), which are de­signed for dock­ing and ship-to-ship fuel trans­fers.

In or­der to fly be­yond LEO, Starship re­quires the as­sis­tance of ad­di­tional Ships to meet up in or­bit to top off its fuel tanks. This is es­pe­cially im­por­tant for its use as the Artemis moon lan­der; ex­perts have es­ti­mated that each lu­nar Starship mis­sion could re­quire a dozen or more re­fu­el­ing launches to ad­e­quately sup­ply enough pro­pel­lant to get to the moon, land and launch back to lu­nar or­bit.

Ship has yet to demon­strate in-space re­fu­el­ing, or even a launch that fully reaches Earth or­bit. And there are other boxes it needs to tick as well.

For ex­am­ple, NASA is re­quir­ing both Starship and Blue Moon to demon­strate un­crewed lu­nar land­ings be­fore they fly as­tro­nauts down to the lu­nar sur­face, putting SpaceX and Blue Origin on a short time­line to ready ve­hi­cles for the planned Artemis 4 land­ing in 2028.

Starship’s launch to­day helps put it back on track to­ward meet­ing that goal, but SpaceX will have to pick up its launch ca­dence sig­nif­i­cantly. Just over a year ago, in March 2025, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk posted on X that he ex­pected to be launch­ing V3 at a “rate of once a week in [about] 12 months.”

While that ca­dence still seems a long way off at Starship’s cur­rent state of de­vel­op­ment, the suc­cess of Flight 12 bodes well for the near fu­ture. And hope­fully the near fu­ture fea­tures an­other Starship launch — a gi­ant rocket get­ting off the ground in a mat­ter of weeks, ver­sus the seven months that sep­a­rated to­day’s mis­sion from the pre­vi­ous test flight.

Josh Dinner is Space.com’s Spaceflight Staff Writer. He is a writer and pho­tog­ra­pher with a pas­sion for sci­ence and space ex­plo­ration, and has been work­ing the space beat since 2016. Josh has cov­ered the evo­lu­tion of NASA’s com­mer­cial space­flight part­ner­ships and crewed mis­sions from the Space Coast, NASA sci­ence mis­sions and more. He also en­joys build­ing 1:144-scale model rock­ets and space­craft. Find some of Josh’s launch pho­tog­ra­phy on Instagram, and fol­low him on X, where he mostly posts in haiku.

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Last year, health wear­able maker Oura be­came em­broiled in a so­cial me­dia shit­storm af­ter ink­ing a deal with the Department of Defense and Palantir. Some cus­tomers feared their data would end up in the clutches of the Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion. The scan­dal blew up so much that my part­ner, an Oura ring user, drew my at­ten­tion to it.

Oura rings are health-mon­i­tor­ing hard­ware wear­ables worn on a fin­ger. These bat­tery pow­ered rings keep track of a per­son’s health data, like heart rate, sleep pat­terns, men­strual cy­cles, and dozens of other data points, in­clud­ing their lo­ca­tion. Oura keeps a lot of sen­si­tive in­for­ma­tion about its users on its servers.

As a se­cu­rity and pri­vacy nerd re­porter, and the part­ner of some­one who uses hers, I won­dered: Where does all that data go, and how does it get there? You might as­sume it does­n’t mat­ter. But the way that com­pa­nies set up their prod­ucts and servers makes all the dif­fer­ence be­tween whether gov­ern­ments (or hack­ers) can also ac­cess that user data.

This was a good op­por­tu­nity to dig into how Oura rings work, how they send data and how the data is stored, and who has ac­cess to it. I wrote a de­tailed lon­gread ex­plain­ing why Oura’s se­cu­rity de­sign choices al­low gov­ern­ments to tap records from Oura’s vast banks of user in­for­ma­tion.

Oura is not unique in this, and many (if not most) com­pa­nies de­sign their sys­tems to al­low their staff to ac­cess user data, per­haps for trou­bleshoot­ing cus­tomer is­sues or be­cause it was the eas­i­est and cheap­est setup for a once cash-strapped startup. But Oura is now one of the largest health tech wear­able mak­ers to­day, val­ued at over $11 bil­lion ahead of go­ing pub­lic. The com­pany has a re­spon­si­bil­ity more than ever to en­sure that its users’ data can­not be ac­cessed. And, Oura can no longer ar­gue that it does not have the fi­nan­cial re­sources to do it.

In my pre­vi­ous blog, I re­vealed that Oura data is not end-to-end en­crypted. That means that an Oura user’s health data can be un­scram­bled at cer­tain points as it trav­els from a per­son’s ring, through their phone app, over the in­ter­net, and as it lands on Oura’s servers. The com­pany con­firmed that it stores user data in a way that al­lows some staff to ac­cess it. This also means oth­ers can as well, such as a pros­e­cu­tor with a war­rant, a hacker with stolen keys, or a dis­grun­tled in­sider who wants to leave be­hind a fuster­cluck of a mess.

Out of the three, we know at least one of those things has hap­pened.

When I reached out for com­ment be­fore pub­lish­ing my last ar­ti­cle, an Oura spokesper­son told me that the com­pany does “receive in­fre­quent re­quests from the gov­ern­ment.” Oura said it looks at each re­quest “for le­gal­ity, scope, and ne­ces­sity,” and that it pushes back “where re­quests are in­valid, over­broad, or in­con­sis­tent with our com­mit­ment to pro­tect our mem­bers’ pri­vacy.”

Oura would not say how many re­quests it re­ceives, how of­ten it turns over user data, or what kinds of data are re­quested. Oura has sold over 5.5 mil­lion rings to date as of around the time of my last ar­ti­cle, giv­ing some scale to the size of the com­pa­ny’s cus­tomer base.

I asked Oura back then if it would dis­close how of­ten it re­ceived these re­quests, such as by pub­lish­ing a trans­parency re­port. A wave of tech com­pa­nies be­gan re­leas­ing in ag­gre­gate how many gov­ern­ment de­mands they re­ceived on a semi-an­nual ba­sis. This was largely to counter the claims that they were se­cretly hand­ing over reams of user data to the gov­ern­ment upon re­quest, stem­ming from the NSA sur­veil­lance scan­dal in 2013.

There was some hope in Oura’s ini­tial re­sponse. A spokesper­son told me at the time that while Oura does not pub­lish a trans­parency re­port, the com­pany said it was “actively eval­u­at­ing how to share ag­gre­gate data in a way that main­tains se­cu­rity and does not in­tro­duce risk to our mem­bers.”

It’s been eight months, dear reader.

I re­cently reached out to Oura again to see if it would re­lease a trans­parency re­port, and af­ter sev­eral fol­low-up emails, the once-re­spon­sive Oura has not yet replied to any of my in­quiries, or com­mit­ted to re­leas­ing the num­bers. I’m hope­ful that Oura will re­con­sider and pub­lish how many de­mands it re­ceives as other tech com­pa­nies have.

Without see­ing the num­bers, it is im­pos­si­ble to know how of­ten, if ever, Oura re­jects gov­ern­ment de­mands for data. As the fron­trun­ner in the health wear­ables mar­ket, Oura should share how of­ten the gov­ern­ment de­mands ac­cess to users’ in­for­ma­tion if it wants to earn or keep the trust of its cus­tomers.

~ ~

Thank you so much for read­ing ~this week in se­cu­rity~. If you liked this ar­ti­cle, please share it! Feel free to reach out with any feed­back, ques­tions, or com­ments about this ar­ti­cle: this@weekin­se­cu­rity.com.

In the sum­mer of 2000, I could never have imag­ined be­com­ing a fa­ther. I was 34, liv­ing in New York City, with a good job in so­cial care, but still in a tiny apart­ment. I had been with my part­ner, Pete, for just over three years; we were se­ri­ous, but we did­n’t live to­gether. Becoming a par­ent was not on my radar.

One August evening, I had fin­ished work late and was hur­ry­ing to a din­ner reser­va­tion I had with Pete. I was rush­ing to­wards the turn­stile at Union Square sta­tion when I no­ticed a bun­dle of clothes in a cor­ner. I saw it move and stopped in my tracks. I walked over, peeled back a dark sweat­shirt, and saw him: a new­born baby, with the um­bil­i­cal cord still at­tached.

I was in shock. I sprinted up to the street and found a pay­phone to call 911. “I found a baby,” I blurted out. I rushed back to the plat­form and crouched down next to the baby. I stroked his head to com­fort him but he pulled a face. “OK, you don’t like that,” I said. We stared at each other. My heart was rac­ing.

It felt like hours, but it was prob­a­bly only a few min­utes be­fore the po­lice ar­rived. I had to give a state­ment, and went home for a large drink. Pete and I talked all night; why would the mother have left the baby, why had she cho­sen to leave him here, in the cen­tre of gay New York?

After a short pe­riod of me­dia in­ter­est, life re­turned to nor­mal, un­til 12 weeks later, when I was asked to tes­tify at a court hear­ing as the mother could not be found. To my sur­prise, the judge asked if I had any in­ter­est in adopt­ing the baby. The idea had­n’t even en­tered my head, but in­stantly, I desperately wanted to say yes. I told her I needed to talk to my part­ner but, in my own mind, I had de­cided that was what I wanted to do.

Pete was fu­ri­ous. We had never talked about start­ing a fam­ily. We were in debt — there were a hun­dred rea­sons why bring­ing a child into our lives did not seem sen­si­ble. But I was convinced.

Pete agreed to visit the baby in fos­ter care with me. As soon as I saw him, I took him in my arms. “Remember me?” I said. Pete says when he held the baby, every morsel of re­sis­tance in­stantly evap­o­rated. We left that house united.

We were called back to court on 20 December, and granted cus­tody. “How would you like him for the hol­i­days?” the judge asked. We bought par­ent­ing books and read them cover to cover in 24 hours, and I moved into Pete’s flat.

We named him Kevin. Pete had an older brother named Kevin who had died be­fore he was born, and his par­ents al­ways said he had a guardian an­gel named Kevin watch­ing over him.

Taking baby Kevin home was in­cred­i­ble but ter­ri­fy­ing, as it is for any new par­ent; but, un­like them, we’d had just a day to pre­pare. For weeks, we took it in turns to sit up round the clock with him to make sure he was still breath­ing.

We wanted to make sure Kevin knew he was wanted and loved, so we wrote a story for him about how we be­came a fam­ily. He made us read it over and over, and took it to school.

When Kevin was 11, New York le­galised same-sex mar­riage, and we told Kevin we would like to get mar­ried. He said, “Don’t judges marry peo­ple?”, and sug­gested the judge who asked us if we wanted to adopt him. We were de­lighted when she agreed to do so.

Not every­thing has been easy. When he was a teenager, he had a lot of ques­tions about his birth mother. He wanted to put up posters in the sub­way, and we would no­tice him look­ing at strangers’ faces to see if they looked like him. He’s made peace with the sit­u­a­tion now, though.

Pete’s writ­ten a mem­oir, and we also turned the story we wrote for Kevin into a chil­dren’s book and had a short an­i­ma­tion made. We want other chil­dren to un­der­stand there are lots of ways to be­come a fam­ily.

Now, Kevin is an in­cred­i­ble young man and we are tremen­dously proud of him. He works out of state as a soft­ware de­vel­oper but, for­tu­nately, he is still happy to spend time with his dads.

Even 26 years later, we can’t quite be­lieve that, by some mir­a­cle, it was us who were given the priv­i­lege of be­ing part of Kevin’s life. How lucky we are.

As told to Heather Main

Do you have an ex­pe­ri­ence to share? Email ex­pe­ri­ence@the­guardian.com

There is a the­ory, not nec­es­sar­ily a re­ally good the­ory, but a the­ory nev­er­the­less, that all mem­o­ries are a kind of fur­ni­ture in the head. The good ones are arm­chairs. The painful ones are fil­ing cab­i­nets, usu­ally full. And then there are the mem­o­ries that are nei­ther: the ones that ar­rive un­in­vited, set­tle in, and start ter­ror­is­ing the other oc­cu­pants by kick­ing over the chairs.

Sir Terry Pratchett, who knew more about fur­ni­ture1 than most, put it this way:

Rincewind tried to force the mem­ory out of his mind, but it was rather en­joy­ing it­self there, ter­ror­iz­ing the other oc­cu­pants and kick­ing over the fur­ni­ture.

Rincewind tried to force the mem­ory out of his mind, but it was rather en­joy­ing it­self there, ter­ror­iz­ing the other oc­cu­pants and kick­ing over the fur­ni­ture.

I was six­teen when I first read that sen­tence. I was sit­ting in the back row of a French class­room, next to my friend Mathieu, and the teacher was ex­plain­ing some­thing im­por­tant about a comma. The pocket edi­tion was cheap, the cover was a weird mix of grey and lurid colours, and Mathieu and I had read every Pratchett the school li­brary would lend us, plus sev­eral it would not.

The sen­tence has been in my head ever since. It re­fuses to leave. Occasionally it kicks over the fur­ni­ture.

The li­brary at the back of the class

There is a kind of read­ing you only do at fif­teen, and only re­ally in places you are not sup­posed to be read­ing. The back of a class­room counts. So does the bot­tom of a sleep­ing bag, the wrong bus, and the ten min­utes be­tween some­one an­nounc­ing din­ner and din­ner ac­tu­ally ar­riv­ing. The book has to be small enough to dis­ap­pear when a teacher looks up. Pocket edi­tions, as their name sug­gests, were en­gi­neered for this. Pratchett’s were small, thin, and printed on a kind of flimsy pa­per that made it eas­ier to dis­re­spect, and there­fore ended up slightly bat­tered.

He wrote books that were the right size for hid­ing. A whole cos­mol­ogy, a whole flat world bal­anced on a tur­tle, and you could slide it (poorly) in­side a maths text­book with a cen­time­tre to spare.

A brief the­ory of why he worked on teenagers

Most fan­tasy, at the time, took it­self ex­tremely se­ri­ously. It had maps. It had ap­pen­dices. It had Heroes, cap­i­tal H, walk­ing grimly to­wards their Destiny across a land­scape that smelled of dwarves. Pratchett had a wooden chest with legs.

His the­sis, more or less, was that the uni­verse was very large and very ridicu­lous, and the two facts were re­lat­ed2. He also treated his read­ers as if they were in­tel­li­gent, which, to a teenager be­ing treated as any­thing else by al­most every­body else, is the clos­est thing to a love let­ter. And you could buy it in a train sta­tion book­store.

“The trou­ble with hav­ing an open mind, of course, is that peo­ple will in­sist on com­ing along and try­ing to put things in it.”

“The trou­ble with hav­ing an open mind, of course, is that peo­ple will in­sist on com­ing along and try­ing to put things in it.”

I read that line at an age when adults were en­thu­si­as­ti­cally try­ing to put things in mine. It did not stop them. But it did mean that, from then on, I no­ticed them do­ing it.

Rincewind, and the City Watch, and the Witches I never quite got to

I loved Rincewind. Mathieu loved Rincewind. Rincewind, I should clar­ify, did not love any­one, in­clud­ing him­self, and would have run away from the feel­ing if it had ever cor­nered him.

He was the per­fect pro­tag­o­nist for a mil­lenial teenage boy: a cow­ard, an un­der­achiever, tech­ni­cally a wiz­ard but only on a tech­ni­cal­ity, and the most pow­er­ful spell in the uni­verse was lodged in his head against his will.

The City Watch came later, the way read­ing the Watch books al­ways comes a lit­tle later than read­ing the Rincewind ones, on the same shelf but a lit­tle fur­ther along. Vimes, who started as a drunk and be­came, slowly, painfully, and with a great deal of swear­ing, the moral spine of an en­tire city. Carrot, who was tech­ni­cally a king and de­cided, with some em­bar­rass­ment, not to be one. Angua. Detritus. Reg Shoe, who had voted, and con­tin­ued to vote, de­spite a num­ber of in­con­ve­nient deaths.

I never quite found my way into the Witches. I think you need to have known a small vil­lage from the in­side, and to have been afraid of an old woman who saw too much, and I had not yet been ei­ther. Granny Weatherwax is wait­ing for me. She is good at wait­ing. I will get there.

The em­bug­ger­ance

He called it that, be­cause he called every­thing what it was. The Alzheimer’s, the long fade, the slow theft. He gave a lec­ture called Shaking Hands With Death, which re­mains the best thing any­one has writ­ten about dy­ing since sev­eral Stoics gave up try­ing.

He scripted his own end­ing, which is a Pratchettian act in it­self. There was even a steam­roller (six-and-a-half tonne “Lord Jericho”), and a hard drive, and in­struc­tions to be fol­lowed ex­actly.

What we lost, and what teenagers lost

Terry Pratchett died in 2015. I was no longer six­teen. Mathieu was no longer sit­ting next to me. The class­room was some­body else’s now, and the comma had long since been ex­plained.

What I miss, self­ishly, is the next book. There were al­ways go­ing to be more.

What I miss, less self­ishly, is what­ever Pratchett-shaped ob­ject is sup­posed to be reach­ing teenagers now, and is­n’t. The on-ramp to read­ing, for a kid who finds school bor­ing and home­work worse, used to be a small, thin, slightly bat­tered book with a lurid cover and foot­notes that talked back. I don’t see them, lately, in the back of any class­room I walk past. It is pos­si­ble I am not walk­ing past the right ones.

But some­where, pre­sum­ably, there is a six­teen-year-old who has just read a sen­tence that will not leave their head. It is kick­ing over the fur­ni­ture even now. I hope they pass the book to the per­son sit­ting next to them.

“In the be­gin­ning there was noth­ing, which ex­ploded.”

“In the be­gin­ning there was noth­ing, which ex­ploded.”

A note from later: this post met the in­ter­net, which is to say it met sev­eral hun­dred peo­ple with strong opin­ions about com­mas, and AI. The ver­sion above re­moved or rephrased some sen­tences that peo­ple found to be non­sen­si­cal. The orig­i­nal is kept on the prin­ci­ple that crush­ing one’s own first drafts un­der a steam­roller is a priv­i­lege re­served for Terry.

Footnotes

Especially one huge wood chest that would oc­ca­sion­ally move on its own and start wreak­ing chaos. ↩

Especially one huge wood chest that would oc­ca­sion­ally move on its own and start wreak­ing chaos. ↩

He also be­lieved that if you put any two things next to each other for long enough they would be­gin to de­velop a per­son­al­ity, and quite pos­si­bly griev­ances. This is par­tic­u­larly cor­rect about cats. ↩

He also be­lieved that if you put any two things next to each other for long enough they would be­gin to de­velop a per­son­al­ity, and quite pos­si­bly griev­ances. This is par­tic­u­larly cor­rect about cats. ↩