Regular random reminder that, bang-for-buck wise, homemade salad dressing and homemade granola beat anything you can buy. For very little effort (except making sure you’ve got ingredients always around).
Pleased to see the BBC at least engage a theologian (the great Rowan Williams) in the public bioethics of assisted dying.
I loved this KYE episode on Talarico and his faith in politics. Names the range of feelings I have about his self-presentation of faith. And much more to think about too, as always with Sitman and Adler-Bell.
This q and a with Ben Sasse shows how crucial it is to have proper historians in politics. Worth a listen at 14:17 alone: the way he helps young AEI interns keep the political in its place inside a much bigger story. “So…one, one-and-a-half cheers for [enormously vital] government.”
K-12 for our daughter (baby 2 of 3) = done. Wild. And yes, our high school’s graduations are more party than ceremony…
Trying to send to long-term memory: My teenagers sometimes still greet me in the morning by silently presenting their foreheads to be kissed and their shoulders to be hugged. Thin and gangly big people, bleary-eyed and walking slowly, but retaining an echo of cuddling instinct from early childhood.
Our old place had no outdoor space; Brian is SO happy to have these bonsais outdoors again. And this is the site of our grad party for Freddie this coming weekend! Sizeable back patio. Can’t wait.
At two conferences this week, but being Great Aunt Sara for a couple days was the best job of all.
Finished reading: Burdened Agency: Christian Theology and End-of-Life Ethics by Travis Pickell 📚 What an achievement: a beautifully synthesized and articulated set of ideas for thinking through both death and life.
Absolutely divine walk tonight in Fresh Pond Reservoir.
It made me happy to see and hear voice teacher Jaron Legrair talk through the singing technique of Diljit Dosanjh.
inevitable, even if they don't like it
Phil Christman: [O]ne anecdote [in Jill Lepore’s If Then] that has really stuck with me is the following: Right at the moment when Simulmatics made its big entry into politics, the 1960 election season, Harpers ran a very critical, where-will-this-all-end piece about the company. Unbeknownst to readers, and perhaps to Harpers, the whole thing was written by a guy who was part-timing for Simulmatics. I’d always thought of “Gee Whiz, This Tech Sure Is Neat” stories as the result of PR flacks doing their best, but—naive fellow that I sometimes am—it had not really occurred to me that PR could also speak in the voice of the forelock-tugging cultural pessimist, the person who wonders whether a particular technology will permanently diminish the meaning of being human.
Finished reading: The End of the Affair by Graham Greene 📚
Alexander Kustov on LinkedIn as the Switzerland of the Internet:
LinkedIn’s format (longer posts, real names tied to real careers, a less snarky default register) does a lot of the work of civilizing discourse without needing heavy moderation, because when the poster is visibly accountable to an employer and a professional reputation, the median comment tone shifts correspondingly, and bad-faith quote-dunking becomes rarer. There are also no anonymous accounts and almost no sub-tweeting; the median post reads more like a memo than a hot take.
People can still disagree or criticize you heavily if you post something provocative, but they are much less likely to do it in a mindless or righteous way. In some ways, LinkedIn feels like an academic conference: people are civil, sometimes too nice, and not always willing to criticize a colleague openly. That conference-style politeness can smooth over real disagreement, but it is a much better failure mode than ad hominems and pile-ons.
This is also my observation, along with what I wrote in 2022.
Fordham passes its new reduced core curriculum — from 17 required classes to 12. Maybe it’s a good thing; I don’t know enough to fully comment. But I’m very glad my daughter, as the last cohort to do so, will operate under the 17 rule, getting two classes each in philosophy and theology, etc.
I love this: Conor Foran’s Dysfluent Mono typeface for representing the orality of stuttered/stammered speech.
We hosted twenty five high school boys on the crew team tonight for pasta/pizza carb loading. Race day tomorrow. Delightful young people, looked me in the eye, offered many thanks, cleaned up after themselves, talked and laughed for two hours straight. The kids are all right.
design and birthing
I’ll write much more about design for birth and death in coming months — I have a fellowship next year and will teach two new courses on this subject — but this story nicely details the ways that design processes can assist in some pretty big changes in health outcomes: The U.S. C-section rate has hovered around one in three for the last decade, but with great variation across hospitals.
arguing for and against
Naomi Kanakia has some things to say about The Hedgehog Review. She’s taking some issues apart in good faith, I think, and pondering a real question for many small magazines doing Big Idea Cultural Criticism: Are you making efforts to argue for plenty of specific things to counter your arguing against? “Right now the journal keeps saying that we need a revival of ‘humanism.' That if people accept that human beings are ‘normatively ordered’ (i.