Thank goodness for Cameron Tonkinwise: “You just know the university managerial class making decisions to sign on with flailing organizations like Open AI will weasel a response like ‘the best way to learn what something is, is by using it.’ But I’ve been driving for 30 years and…

Our daughter drew images for our church bulletin, marking all seasons of the liturgical year. We made them into prints for grandparents’ Christmas gifts (Artifact Uprising).

Malcolm and I are nearing the end of Endurance, about the Shackleton expedition to Antarctica. The ship sank, sled dogs have all been shot or eaten, gangrene surgeries done, a marooned party awaits rescue while Shackleton and co brave the Drake Passage in an ill-equipped small boat. Yikes, y’all!

Highly recommend this conversation on the early days of the Catholic Worker movement, with key passages from Maurin and Day, the philosophical ties to personalism and the (first) back to the land folks, Luddism, more: open.spotify.com/episode/1…

James K.A. Smith: That’s the answer I stake a life on. (Glad he also had to get to his 50’s to really hear it.)

Glad to see this probing look at Bishop Barron by the wonderful Molly Worthen.

Just got tickets for T-Bone Burnett in April!

More interesting craft and guild schools that are humanities-led.

Big resolution for the next year is more weeknight hosting of friends for dinner. You know what I realized will make it possible? Telling folks (in a funny diplomatic way) that we need to be done by 9. My husband wakes at 5; we tag team various tasks around 2 ft jobs/3 kids/1 dog, etc. Will report.

The best around-the-table Thanksgiving exercise we did the last couple of years is “who taught me,” courtesy of Austin Kleon.

Once more with feeling: Word is the worst software ever. Why, why, why do institutions keep migrating toward MS products?

Reliable runner’s high again today courtesy of that extended drum solo at the end of “Burning Down the House.”

I can’t believe it took me this long to read David Bentley Hart’s The Experience of God.

“The ambient aunties (a great band title) were just there somehow, with their cars to collect me, their homes to go to, their abundant baked potatoes, their surprise trips to the cinema, their wooden jigsaw puzzles, and their benign curiosity about my life…https://sarahendren.com/2024/11/28/ambient/

I’ve been baffled by the success of cookie chains in recent years — their products are about on par with grocery store slice-and-bake processed crap — but then I realized they’re a knock-on enterprise arising from legalized weed.

Hitting a new low of discouragement about the widespread use of chatgpt among students, so if you’ve got links to frameworks, insight, even-more-creative assignment design, do please share.

This is my annual arrival-of-winter reminder that even if you don’t have ice cream in the house, there’s a good chance you have the makings of cinnamon toast for dessert.

My husband Brian edited and produced his latest Frontline production, airing tomorrow: China, the U.S., and the Rise of Xi Jinping. Eventually I hope Brian will teach a new generation of documentarians this craft: rigorously fact-checked, meticulously translated, deep-dive histories. Recommended.

Came to NYC for a fancy uptown symposium, but it was a much bigger thrill getting to see Maryhouse on a sunny cold Saturday. A bag of fresh bagels was hanging on the fence outside.

For beauty to be on the same footing as truth and goodness, it has to be constitutive of the real, not just downstream effects from the “really real” of truth and goodness: sarahendren.com/2024/11/2…

“As if I too could body forth His Heaven”: so much beauty-truth-goodness in this lecture by Malcolm Guite (via @mathewbattles)

Curious if fellow profs here have favorite books or articles about academic writing for new PhDs, generalizable across fields. Frameworks, exercises, generating what I call “fortified questions” etc?

I watched this terrific tribute conversation on Dorothy Day, and then I checked out what my hero Paul Elie is up to lately. A new book on art in the 80s! I hit pre-order so fast.

My daughter is an illustration editor for the school newspaper this year. Her latest.

“[Dorothy] Day’s ideas were never refuted, just misrepresented, overplayed, and then left for dead in media res, another half-built cathedral, surviving on a thread of memory and the steel of committed disciples and friends… sarahendren.com/2024/11/0…

“Is God? and Which is God? are questions on which everything hangs. To say this is not to prejudice the answers — perhaps they are No and None — but it is to rule out treating the subject flippantly, as akin to astrology or alchemy.” sarahendren.com/2024/10/3…

Great to see this partnership for ethics in engineering education — seems substantive.

“You could be the CEO of a company devoted to feeding the world, spend your life developing the Food-o-Matic which can feed everyone on the planet, but if you neglect to care for your kids, then your kids just have to live with your neglect.” sarahendren.com/2024/10/2…

I swore not to use Notes in Substack, thinking the Twitter-like UI would soon make the feed like its predecessor (despite early folks saying “gosh, it’s so nice here!”). I was, alas, correct — the dumbass dunks and oversharing and general smugness have fully taken over.

The last two weeks of class held field trips, and today, after a proper synthesizing seminar discussion, students said to me: thank goodness we’re back together to talk about all we’ve read and done! They like field trips, they said, but they crave conversation. My heart, she bursts.

Among the many treasures in the tactile museum at the Perkins School for the Blind this week, another field trip with students: architectural and technical models, animal heads and vertebrae, silk flags, maps. What a piece of history that institution is.

The big path and the small path: sarahendren.com/2024/10/1…

I’m the Myers Distinguished Visiting Fellow in the Humanities and Civic Engagement this year at the University of Scranton, one of the Jesuit institutions that’s newly on my radar! I’ll be lecturing, visiting a bioethics class, and speaking to a local high school group as well.

The fall issue — the Builder Issue — of The New Atlantis is out. They put out a call for short essays: What should we build? And I offered one of ten ideas.

Just noting here that @ tags only work as Mentions when the handle is at the front of a post as reply, not when embedded in the middle of a post. Twice lately I’ve seen my handle tagged in the middle of a post but only because I read the whole thing in my regular feed; they were not in my Mentions.

From “better than nothing” to “better than anything”: sarahendren.com/2024/10/1…

Took my design students to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, walkable from our campus. We met a conservator who’s also looking at designing accessible replicas of artworks: tactile 3D printing, textile models, more.

Helen Pynor, La Réunion, 2006, here.

Bought this way early for my husband’s bday.

“[V]ery common design patterns — retweets, quote tweets, replies, mentions — are all behaviors that users originated, which where then captured by Twitter… sarahendren.com/2024/10/0…

So much wisdom in this beautiful conversation with Father Greg Boyle looking back at 30+ years of Homeboy Industries. One of the humanitarian heroes of our time.

Still in my Lewis Hyde phase — unsure how I didn’t really know about Trickster before now.

Would love recommendations for books about Ignatian approaches to culture/making.

I wrote about disability social media trends and the question of imperfection.

I talked to students some weeks ago about affordances and limitations in technology, and I mentioned in passing the Ordo Amoris, the ordering of loves. They have really latched on to this ancient idea! Choices, tradeoffs, limitations.

David Cayley’s intellectual biography of Ivan Illich is nicely organized — I just finished the chapter on Deschooling Society; Cayley outlines the various reviews and criticisms of it as companion to its sources, timing in Illich’s life, highlight passages and arguments.

Finished revisions on a paper about interdisciplinary work using Howard Gardner’s idea of “fruitful asynchrony” in creativity, and positing my own framework for creative inquiry between art, design, and engineering. Looking forward to it being out in the world — a nice summation of my last decade.

Sublime afternoon hearing Mozart and Haydn requiems at Boston Symphony Hall with a friend. Mild autumn day, bus ride there and back.

“I need a way through what often feels like a binary choice when institutions disappoint us: adopt a “see no evil” denial about their failures and defend them from the barricades, or give up on them altogether. I think we’ve seen, as a society, where that second choice leads…

What a beautiful evening hearing Dougald Hine in conversation with Lewis Hyde and hosted by the generous @mbattles. Can’t wait to read Hine’s new book.

I need to write a Letter to a Young Woman Engineer Who’s Ambivalent About Her Standing in the Field post. It’s not the message you’re thinking of.

RIP artist Rebecca Horn. Her mysterious “prosthetic” sculptures and performances were so important to me early on. I wrote about Finger Gloves for Art in America a couple of years ago.

Anne Snyder is a visionary thinker, writer, convener, and this conversation gets at some of her earned insight. Recommended.

Cambridge celebrities: Saw Jill Lepore this morning. She was post workout, headphones in, so I decided not to fangirl. But so tempted!

We all went up to Halibut Point yesterday. Glorious.

I hit pre-order so fast for my friend Chad Holley’s debut novel, coming out in November!

This analysis from Bethel McGrew on party politics and abortion is genuinely great: razor-sharp, unusually attentive, erudite.

Good heavens, I loved this conversation with Vinson Cunningham on Know Your Enemy.

Good day. My book was the campus read for Stevens Institute of Technology, and I gave the convocation address. Students were absolutely delightful, river view incredible.

First day of high school for all three — the only year they’ll all be together again. 💔

Long ago, when I was getting almost-a-phd in history, an advisor told me that I had the inconvenient problem of being interested in absolutely everything. Never a truer thing said.

This conversation with Fordham president Tania Tetlow is great.

LOVED this conversation on Genesis between Marilynne Robinson and Miroslav Volf.

A beautiful thing to see Ted Gioia’s report on live music ticket sales just booming, including at the jazz club around the corner from my building! substack.com/home/post…

I gathered my higher ed posts into an excerpted new newsletter: Unmuddling the University.

I wrote the last in my series on thinking through higher ed. I’ll also summarize it in a newsletter, but here are Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.

I wrote about how people who work in “special needs” assistance have skills that are orthogonal to credentials and training: sarahendren.com/2024/08/2…

Thrilled that I have (late to the party) discovered Dumbify and similar apps.

above is free: sarahendren.com/2024/08/2…

I do love an elder statesman on a crowded city bus — the guy confidently barking move on back.

I find Elizabeth Oldfield’s “micro monastery” residential arrangement so attractive. A rule of life, shared prayers, hospitality and support outside the nuclear family, all of it in the city of London: faith.yale.edu/media/ful…

Can folks recommend some YA nonfiction about 20th century history? I find the offerings in our local bookstores thin. My 14 yo son loved the YA version of Unbroken, for ex, and we just read Escape from Camp 14 together, which is also what I’m looking for — very accessible but not formally YA.

(related?): I really don’t spend time being the language police, and I don’t intend to start. But I do cringe at the use of “-‘tard” as a name-ending for all the stupidities folks despise about their political and culture war enemies.

Colin Farrell is opening up a foundation on the future of housing, work, thriving for people with intellectual disabilities. Impossible to be unmoved by this: youtu.be/JDiD8Z3lW…

Soon I’ll finish William Trevor’s The Story of Lucy Gault, but I picked up Michael Crummey’s The Adversary at the library and got hooked right away!

My 16 yr old daughter is perfecting the art of parallel parking — yes, right away. Essential for this family in Boston, esp since we’ve never had a driveway. My kids’ll be able to drive anywhere after learning in this dense urbanism.

We’re pitching our short doc film to distributors and festivals now! If you know of festivals devoted to science, architecture, disability, technology, let me know.

I’ve worked in disability for years, so the rhetoric of “care” should be a natural and appealing extension of that scholarship. But I find it annoyingly vague and hand-wavey. What do people mean when they invoke it? A ballooning of municipal or state services? Grassroots organizing? Virtue ethics?

An image from Lewis Hyde’s The Gift: Welsh funeral ritual of handing out food and drink over the coffin of the departed.

I see Sarah Perry’s new book is listed for the Booker Prize. I confess I gave up halfway through — maybe my expectations were too high after the transcendent Essex Serpent? I thought the observations of fundamentalist faith were cartoonish, wooden.

I am really pleased to be among this cohort of fellows developing courses on human flourishing at the Notre Dame Institute for Ethics and the Common Good! ethics.nd.edu/fellowshi…

spending the day learning how to read chant notation basics

summer.

Part 4 of my thinking through the college search alongside my teenagers. This one is on the architectural spaces on campus: sarahendren.com/2024/07/2…

Read-aloud update: Malcolm and I finished Escape from Camp 14, kissed the ground of this wacky and troubled country we call home, and went back to the Earthsea series. Now at Tehanu.

Sean Illing is a national treasure, and this deep discussion of Nietzsche and his legacy intellectually and politically is a great example of the best kind of podcast convo with a disciplined academic: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas…

16 yr old daughter discovering architecture this summer.

Today’s much-needed runner’s high courtesy of TV On The Radio. A bed of roses! A rollercoaster! www.youtube.com/watch

Good to see my grad history program getting a nice influx of support: www.latimes.com/californi…

Trying to lean hard into some advice a priest gave to a friend, and by extension, to me: Don’t push the river.

Gonna be following along eagerly with Paper Shoot cameras: papershootcamera.com/. My friend Jesse pointed me to that product, a perfect companion for the email-based photo app of his that I use with my family and friends: finite.photos/.

This’ll be me all week

Picking up our eldest from Down syndrome camp. Dance party to end the night! There are no dance parties like Trisomy 21 dance parties. Y’all are missing out.

I’ll be a great aunt today. My niece is at the hospital! We’re all so excited.

Oh MAN the Boston French Film Festival lineup looks so good: www.mfa.org/programs/…

Part 3 in my series on considering college. First was on formation, second on readiness, and this one on the prescriptive disciplines: sarahendren.com/2024/06/2…

I wrote about the big beautiful world of adaptive fashion, past and present, in this conversation with Grace Jun on her new book: sarahendren.substack.com/p/the-sha…

Sara H, apparently world’s worst Bostonian: why are all these ppl in the train wearing Celtics gear

Some days it feels like all intellectual roads lead to Erich Fromm’s having and being.

People with Down syndrome who were hospitalized with COVID were six times more likely than others to have a DNR order: news.harvard.edu/gazette/s…

Still amazed at how few people know how to ask questions in a social setting. It’s not hard! But people only know how to talk, tell stories, show their expertise. Then they pause, silent, and wait to be asked something else. I am freakishly curious, so I’ll do it, but it’s not a conversation.

All you southwest region folks would laugh — schools here sent out a heat advisory for next few days, when we’ll be having 97-98 temps. (And yes, this is finally their last week!)

This conversation on Camus, Algeria, and the parallels and distinctions of Gaza is just terrific. Robert Zaretsky is a treasure. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas…

Part 2 in my essay series about choosing colleges. This one’s about education as two kinds of readiness: sarahendren.com/2024/06/1…

Just wrote a short summary of my new film for the museum exhibition it’s in. The summary is for the audio description tour, part of accessibility work in museums. As ever, there’s more than one use for adaptation. I now have the clearest summary of the film for further festival submissions, etc.

Apparently the interwoven group biography is exactly my thing: sarahendren.com/2024/06/1…

Took my baby 3 to his scale modelers club meeting on Cape Ann. It’s held at a small Catholic school, behind which lies a big old cemetery where I walked during the meeting hour. The long-gone Dooleys, Ahearns, McShanes of the Victorian era. Mildest summer evening.

I wrote the first of several posts about how I’m wading through the assumption-laden process of choosing colleges with my teenagers. sarahendren.com/2024/06/1…

For the third year in a row, I’m setting up the easiest summer hangs: a Google doc with several weeknight dates we’re in town and free, sent to a bunch of friends. They pick a date, we all get BYO takeout and meet in a park with picnic tables, no endless emails and texts, no cleanup.

“the most aggressive version of the truth” as a public service? sarahendren.com/2024/06/0…

“In its ineffectiveness, architecture shares in the bathos of gardening: an interest in door handles or ceiling moldings can seem no less worthy of mockery than a concern for the progress of rose or lavender bushes… sarahendren.com/2024/06/0…

I am certainly watching Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s trajectory with interest.

An excellent panel of unusually sharp presentations on liberal education, civic education, and the purpose of the university. Conference host ASU SCETL is interesting all around. www.youtube.com/watch

Spent all weekend re-orging and spring cleaning. Finishing with a trip to the goodwill donation center in the next town over from me, which is conveniently near the only decent bbq in a many-mile radius

I have officially entered the sandwich era of middle age — and I’d like a better metaphor?

Student move-out season in Boston-Cambridge is a whole mood.

Finishing up an academic paper about the unproductively vague affirmations of interdisciplinarity and the framework I’ve developed to help sharpen what’s happening in my work.

With my youngest’s scout troop at the local city council meeting. (He’s seated, out of frame.) We were warmly welcomed. So good.

Still over here astonished at the deep challenge (twofold, at least!) of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. It’s not just “hold your views with humility”: sarahendren.com/2024/05/2…

Zadie Smith bringing the wisdom as usual: shorturl.at/qxIS2

So glad to see this call for “time to build” submissions from The New Atlantis. I have too many ideas! Due date June 17: www.thenewatlantis.com/publicati…

Upon meeting another wide-eyed and middle-aged pedestrian on the sidewalk, early spring burst of blossoming life, this half-conversation exchange: “Do you see—?” “I know, it’s—” “I just, green—.” (clutching heart) “Everywhere.”

Teaching takes a lot of energy; it also keeps a person disciplined and specific, resistant to sweeping generalizations about The Youth. Glad for it.

Reading aloud David Chang’s memoir, Eat a Peach, to 14 yr old Malcolm. He enjoys the sweary diatribes about running a restaurant. I was moved by the chapter with strikethroughs and revisions made plain.

Curious if folks have honest thoughts about new Buckley doc, out now on PBS and an archival beast to tame, thanks to my husband who was editor. No talking heads! But so important, useful in this election cycle, etc.

I never tire of design school detritus. World under construction!

not that kind of constraint: sarahendren.com/2024/05/0…

first goslings sighting along the River Charles!

Just bought this print for my office from the Sr. Corita Kent center store: store.corita.org/collectio…

“born of water”: sarahendren.com/2024/04/2…

Parenting is Mostly Restraint, edition 361: Teenagers will silently process your advice to them, even while leaving the room a little early or averting their eyes. And a few months later they’ll parrot back your words. You nod, you concur, you do NOT remind them that it came from you.

Q: How do I do things (3 kids, no default parent, 2 ft jobs, big project-driven deadlines)? A: I don’t drink alcohol or do social media. The former by necessity, the latter by choice. It’s other things too, but those are big. I look back and wonder, truly, how I *ever did those two things regularly.

the refuge of the Mass 💓💓💓

I love seeing this rationale and linked variations on “hello pages”: alastairjohnston.com/introduci…

First year of classes at Northeastern clocked! Giddy. My students were great this week. It’s only the start of spring, weather-wise, but my summer has begun.

My 18 yr old with Down syndrome bossing his younger sibs around on the family group chat. This is as alpha as he gets.

Is it a coincidence that we had a consult about Paying for College and then, on my run right after, one of the book ideas I’ve been working on snapped right into shape? Prob not. Smelling salts for the brain.

Springtime runner’s high thanks to The The’s “Giant.” First flowers!

I just want to say: in keeping with the “limiting virtues” spirit of my latest newsletter, I am ever more resolved not to utilize any of the promotion tools in Substack. It drives me bananas to see them copying the quote-tweet and algo-pushed design features of Twitter, and I am officially old enough to be that one lady shaking her fist at the sky, so—

James Bridle consults LLMs for advice about building chairs, has mixed results: booktwo.org/notebook/…

Anyone here know students at St. Michael’s College at the U of Toronto? I’m intrigued on my kids’ behalf.

On the city and the “limiting virtues”: cafe, church, library: open.substack.com/pub/sarah…

My youngest is 14 today. 💔 Should I just openly tell my grad students that being a wife and mother is orders of magnitude more meaningful than any work I’ve done (and I need work like oxygen)?

Yikes! Jordan Castro’s unsparing look at the ubiquity of “right?” as a form of commanding consensus in professor-speak: sarahendren.com/2024/03/2…

Good to see this reasoned testimony by Carter Snead to the senate, offering principles and correcting the record on misconstrued cases after Dobbs. https://ethicscenter.nd.edu/assets/562574/snead_senate_judiciary_20240320.pdf

Our 15 yr old daughter reports that her friends laugh, in a friendly way, at the idea that we have “family dinner.” Apparently few people among her cohort do this??

Iain McGilchrist citing Heschel on the tyranny and inadequacy of “thinghood” for capturing the world’s complexity: sarahendren.com/2024/03/2…

Helping STEM academics get clearer about ethical tech, by way of @ayjay’s generous concision with the Standard Critique of Technology: sarahendren.com/2024/03/1…

Still on McGilchrist over here — a good intro to his argument is in this lecture: www.youtube.com/watch

Got a fabricator making me a bunch of samples for semi-sculptural “canvases.” Finishing up a short film and then heading to the studio for the loooong summer.

And reading McGilchrist, I suddenly see why Sufjan Stevens’s “Chicago” speaks to so many people: all things go / all things grow / all things know.

About 50 pages into McGilchrist, The Matter With Things. It’s good to be alive and in the awestruck presence of a contemporary magnum opus.

Holy wow the Know Your Enemy episode on Rene Girard with John Ganz. So good. Based on this series: open.substack.com/pub/johng…

JRRT doesn’t need me to hype him, but man what a relief to give up on Dune (sorry, still excruciating at 150 pp+) and go back to The Hobbit at my 13 yr old’s request. The beauty and freshness of the sentences is a salve for the brain.

No train ride is too long in company of John Tavener’s sublime “Funeral Canticle.”

I’m pleased to have an essay in the catalogue accompanying SFMOMA’s exhibition opening later this year on the design of sports: Get In the Game, starting October: www.sfmoma.org/press-rel…

My five year old niece: “Jesus is the son of God, and he glows in the dark.” You said it, kid.

So much of parenting teenagers is choosing what *not to say. Sometimes all my brain cells are going toward an inner monologue: keep your mouth shut, keep it shut, nope, shut shut

ok! You can now sign up for weekly digests of posts here. If I have friends out there using RSS for this (I have no idea if that’s true) and/or want something in an inbox instead, here you go: ablerism.micro.blog/subscribe…

A cathedral of motion pictures, a cathedral of learning, a cathedral of commerce. A “machine that makes the land pay.” sarahendren.com/2024/01/2…

On set this past weekend with an architect making one-armed tools in his wood shop. Film premieres in May at the Design Museum Zurich! And hoping to find an online distributor after.

Rewatched The Crash Reel for my class on disability. It’s really, really well done — no simple answers, and an incredibly beautiful look at the family unit as a strong organism. Recommended.

My architecture master’s students are even more astute and curious than I hoped. Now accepting recs for poetry and songs about the built environment — the weirder, the better!

Today’s runner’s high courtesy of frigid weekday temps and a mid-morning outing, making it possible to sing a joyous and warbling version of Making Plans for Nigel, unobserved and unheard

My heart! One of my architecture grads in the writing class asked me to help him launch a blog as he finishes up grad school.

Also sorry to be a heretic, but Dune is…badly written? 13 year old son and I are 70 pages in and I just don’t care about these overwrought storylines.

Oof, got conned last night at a gas station in the most cynical way. I’ve lived in cities long enough that I should’ve trusted my spidey sense that something was off, but this guy saw a mom with two kids in tow, knew I’d have animal-mama flight mode overruling my cognition.

Attention folks who work with exceptionally curious undergrads: two-week workshop with Becca Rothfeld and Jon Baskin at UChicago! Sure to be great. www.publicthinking.thepointmag.com/workshop

Today in optimism: these many efforts supported by the Consistent Life Ethic Action Fund. www.consistentlifenetwork.org/action-fo…

And speaking of my kids in high school, I am truly less certain than ever what to even wish for, college-wise, for my two neurotypical youngers. Some days I think: Great Books or nothing; other days I think it doesn’t really matter at all. La la laaa….

Trying to decide if it’s worth it to go to bat for more paper-based work in my kids’ public high school. Every last thing is on screens. And the “saving trees” rationale is ludicrous compared to meat-heavy cafeteria lunches. ??

RSS Anything

Topics schedule, formal and social, for Writing About The Built World. Seven grad students and me. So excited.