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. But “This widget I made is so powerful *that it threatens the Platonic Forms*” is actually a great message if you want to make everybody adopt your technology. People will use something they regard as inevitable even if they don’t like it. I do it every time I drive a car or take a plane. Best to be loved and feared, but better to be feared than loved, as Machiavelli argued. So all those news stories about children zombifying themselves: they’re not necessarily fake, the anecdotes might all be real, the journalist’s motivation may even be sincere alarm, but the work such stories do in the aggregate is very much in line with Claude’s PR strategy.

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. Some hospitals deliver just 10% of infants via C-section; others, more than 40%.

These wide variations didn’t appear to be due to conventional explanations, the researchers found. It wasn’t the case that hospitals performing more C-sections had a higher number of complicated patients or patients who preferred the procedure. Nor was insurance a factor.

Instead, the researchers found, C-section rates were largely a product of how much pressure a labor and delivery ward faces. They deemed it the “pressure tank model”: high patient volumes, limited staff, and the volatility of labor and delivery create a complex, stressful, busy environment where communication is difficult and teamwork erodes. As a result, clinicians opt to perform C-sections, even when medically unnecessary, rather than letting patients continue to progress in labor. C-sections are faster, requiring fewer nursing hours at the bedside. And, once the procedure begins, clinicians no longer have to communicate back and forth as much to make decisions about a case.

“Research has demonstrated that the more dysfunctional a team is, and the more negative culture is within a labor and delivery unit, the more C-sections there are,” Weiseth said. “It makes sense, right? If people aren’t working well together, they’re going to use the release valve of a C-section more often.”

The team found other culprits driving too-high C-section rates, including financial pressures—obstetric care as a whole is poorly reimbursed and C-sections earn more money than vaginal deliveries—and inconveniently designed wards, with too many rooms placed too far away from each other, cutting off communication between clinicians.

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.e. that there is purpose to human existence that we can derive from reason) then our institutions can be re-organized in a more sustainable way.

But…this is exactly what the post-liberal right believes. It’s the exact same rhetoric. So…obviously there is a lot of disagreement about what ‘humanism’ really entails. Now maybe The Hedgehog Review actually does believe in Orbanism—in some right-populist takeover of liberal institutions—but if so then they ought to say that.

If they don’t believe in that, then it’s hard to really see what they want. All this mealy-mouthed stuff about how everybody else is ‘antihumanist’ is just cope. It’s saying, ‘Oh, these other people don’t actually want human flourishing, and if they wanted human flourishing then they would agree with me.’ But you yourself haven’t really articulated what you actually want or believe!”

I’m not sure I managed it successfully, but in my recent Comment piece I was trying to argue for design as a bottom-up set of humanist “arguments,” in a way, for lives worth living, for localist values embodied and enacted instead of (in addition to?) bullet-pointed and arranged rhetorically.

Anastasia Berg:

“Once we identify the problem—the sheer magnitude of what is being lost—it becomes immediately clear what any solution worthy of the name must accomplish: the hours must be recovered. How to do this is a good question. I have heard tales of complicated incentive schemes involving baroque grade distributions, of in-class writing samples used as internal benchmarks for outside-class writing, of Dead Poets Society reenactments. I don’t know that these won’t work. But I know what I think about when I confront this question: a big room. A pleasant-enough room with tables and chairs, and maybe some cookies at 9 p.m., budget permitting. A room that it is very easy for an instructor to require a student to spend time in—as easy as checking a box. A room with lockers for your bag, that you can walk into with just a book or a question to spend a few hours with, without distractions, without any offers of ‘help.’ Sometimes when I tell colleagues about it they express concern that requiring students to spend time in my room would feel punitive and paternalistic. But most people just say it sounds like heaven.”

Fordham debates holding onto its robust Jesuit core curriculum. I’m glad my daughter is starting prior to any dilution of its current structure. Christopher Cullen names the problem I see everywhere — words for the good used all over the place without any sustained examination of their root traditions:

“Taking general education requirements in ‘justice’ (merely one of multiple options for seminars) without a prior systematic and deep foundation of reflection on the question of ‘what is the good?’ and on the normative ethical theories that follow from this reflection will contribute to the incoherent discussions of ethics that transpire in the public square today. To debate justice, one must first know what the good is. Students will be using terms without really knowing what they mean, a malady that Alasdair MacIntyre famously diagnosed a generation ago. It will be like people using terms such as ‘neutrino’ or ‘atomic weight’ without ever having taken basic science courses, or like students doing algebra without ever having taken arithmetic. There is an order to learning in the sciences and mathematics. So too there is an order to learning ethics. The new proposal cuts out the basic ethics course and thus will send students to debate ‘justice’ with little idea of what the term may mean or of the sophisticated and complex millennia-long debates that have transpired over this very topic.

Furthermore, in the name of freedom for students, the proposed smorgasbord of courses will in fact imprison them in the ignorance of their own culture and civilization, not knowing who they are, where they came from, to what civilization they belong, or of what stories they are a part. Such general education requirements, masquerading as a core curriculum, will produce ‘hollow men.’ Hollow for many reasons—hollow for not knowing where or when they are but hollow also because they will never have engaged in the first task of education: ‘to know thyself,’ to explore the inward caverns that are the human mind and heart.”

The blog function on my web site is broken, and I don’t know why, and I don’t want to know why. I just want it to work. Something about Siteleaf and GitHub and repos, maybe. I’ve chatted with some backend help folks, but they can’t really see all the connections, and it’s just bumming me out to have a backlog and need to chase down these software details that come with being on more open web applications. I already wrangle way too many software glitches that are required in programs for my job! I like the spirit of open web tools, and I’m glad my designer set me up this way. He’s so great (and no longer doing web design, on to bigger things!). But I’m not sure I’ll do it again when I seek out a redesign soon. It might be Wordpress or similar again in the next go-round.

“It can be hard to fully appreciate this kind of design for the astonishing, radical statement in its provision: that the babies of strangers carry the kind of dignity that is tantamount to those of close kin and tribe. It’s an idea that had to be invented, that goes against the self-preserving optimization of communities adapted for fitness. This kind of dignity makes claims on a collective, perhaps a polity. “Design for dignity” is easy to affirm at the high level of uncontroversial principles, but in practice it too often takes on the straightforward structure of unidirectional charity, as though dignity were a good or service extended from those who somehow “have” it to those who somehow lack it. A sharper term from theologian Helmut Thielicke might get us closer to what’s true: Dignity is not a possession to be more fairly meted out but a universally contingent relational force—a bracing state of human dependency on divine sustenance, a vitality on which each human life hangs every second. Thielicke called this an “alien dignity”: the shape of a reality utterly not of our own making. Our task is first to recognize it before wielding it—to recognize it in ourselves as in others, and perhaps to recognize its force in the designed DNA of the inherited built world, a form of material argumentation that so easily goes to sleep in our imagination. You don’t need to have a maximalist theory of the state—either for or against—to see the sense of possibility on offer.”

I’m trying to think through my many still-forming questions for the domain of design in this essay.

A friend just shared this Christian Wiman poem:

No Omen but Awe

I thought it would all resolve one day in diamond time. Life like a gem to lift to the squint as through a jeweler’s loupe.

I thought every facet and flaw neither facet nor flaw in some final shine; chance and choice uncanny cognates; form, fate.

Now I am here. No diamond, no time, no omen but awe that a whirlwind could in not cohering cohere. Loss is my gift, bewilderment my bow.

[apparently “bow” here is the one that rhymes with “cow”]

“Via a parent or sister or nun or friend, a spouse or former spouse, names and addresses of the AIDS afflicted had a way of making their way to Dan. One visit tended to lead to another until death intervened. A typical first sentence: ‘I heard from so-and-so that you were ill and thought I would drop by to see how it’s going.’ He never identified himself as ‘Father Daniel,’ just Dan. ‘I wanted to make it as clear as possible that I was seeking no conversions or last-minute confessions,’ he told me. Dan often presided at funerals of people whom he had met only months or weeks before. He described himself as ‘a listener of last resort.’”

Jim Forest, At Play in the Lion’s Den: A Biography and Memoir of Daniel Berrigan.

Went to a recent school district committee meeting and: almost all council reps on laptops the whole time. Annual symposium at my university today: laptops during presentations. Was visiting consultant to big tech company to speak with staff about an r&d mandate that is open-ended, well-funded, ambitious and: laptops. Endless scrolling while presentations, hearings, talks are happening. I make an absolute rule in my classrooms or it would be the same. At this rate I could run for president if only because I actually sit and pay attention.

I need to write a long post about the many parents I know who come to me for advice about accepting an ADHD/related dx and the requisite IEP or 504 bureaucracy for their very average kids. It’s a well-meaning move from all parties to “do everything we can to help” by intervening. But the longitudinal data on labels is pretty damning and on medication is mixed at best. Again: good intentions from everyone. But parents need to be ruthlessly honest with themselves: Will intervening and saddling kids with labels really enhance the child’s school experience? Or will it salve a parent’s need to have a self-concept of Good Parent, one who Fights for the Child? Or will it solve a teacher’s (sometimes justified) need to have an optimized classroom? Those questions have very different protagonists. So much of parenting requires tolerating the inner uncertainty about how to attend closely to one’s individual children, including the attendance that is the most challenging and vital: watching, listening, and waiting.

Great to hear Matt Dinan further expound on his last couple of years in the classroom on Know Your Enemy (after publishing this post). Dinan’s experience echoes so much of my own, and it feels amazing to be starting 2026 with confidence and clarity about what I’m doing in the classroom, even if it’s rare in my institutional setting. And Dinan’s aside that he is hopelessly devoted to a triad of lost causes — cooperativism, the Catholic church, liberal education — made my heart swell.