Sean Cole

As am I. And at first, she insisted, insisted that her drug naming and her haiku-ing have nothing to do with each other.

But finally, she conceded that yes, in both pursuits, the sound of the thing is really important.

The tonality.

You should read your haikus out loud when you're writing them, she says.

And you should do the same with a drug name.

Is that a real drug name that she's singing, Toujeo?

Yeah, it's an insulin shot for diabetics.

And it's with Toujeo that I think you can really see the poetical nature of Arlene's thinking when she sits down to name a drug.

So explain what you mean.

So the thing about Toujeo is that it's longer lasting than a similar drug that came before it.

Instead of 24 hours, it's effective for like 30 hours, give or take.

And as Arlene and her team were brainstorming, they developed this, they do this sometimes, they developed a prompt, they call it a platform, this prompt to riff off of.

And the prompt was, your friend for life.

And from there, Arlene unspooled this whole story in her head, a kind of romantic story about young people, young adults, just beginning their adult lives.

But if you're worried about having to take your next insulin shot, you can't be spontaneous.

Unless, again, that shot lasts long enough to give you the freedom to stay out later.

So she's got this whole narrative arc that she wants to express somehow in a word, in a musical word.

She doesn't need people to know the story.

She just needs them to feel its resonance.

That's right.