Archives

new forms: Every interview with Christian Wiman is chock full of poetry and aphorisms to think with in every paragraph, and this one is no different. Especially grateful for this, though: Simone Weil says, “There are two atheisms, of which one is a purification of the notion of God,” which can be helpful. …

My daughter’s hand-printed thank you cards for her graduation gifts. ❤️

Thanks to Robert Coles for making me feel like less of an academic weirdo: “So what was he? Dr. Coles variously described himself as a doctor, child psychiatrist, wanderer, oral historian, social anthropologist, teacher, friend, storyteller, busybody, nuisance and ‘idiosyncratic …

In other news, I have reached the precise age known as Speaks Aloud to Nesting Birds Outside House Window.

I wrote about our strange contemporary wilderness of public bioethics.

My RA is teaching me the conics and quadratic equations. (Long story, for a project, I know absolutely nothing beyond very basic math.) She suggested we each do a 15 min zine in a meeting to see where our respective heads are. So helpful.

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] …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

…became this one. Moving is terrible, but designing a small room to feel big is fun.

Very pleased about how this space…

Finished reading: Transcription by Ben Lerner. A novella, perhaps even a long story. Thoughts to come, maybe. 📚

an architectural haven for slow thinking and writing: 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 …

gen ed or true core?: 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 …

I had fun speaking on the Art of Inquiry, a podcast created by two Northeastern engineering students interested in the arts and humanities. My strange career path, my mentor Krzysztof Wodiczko introducing me to interrogative design, raising a child with Down syndrome, studio + lab culture, more.

Our girl’s going to Fordham! She is so excited, and so are we.

It’s my birthday, and my teenagers are fully leaning into the old people cards (with very very sweet notes inside ❤️).

blog blues : 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 …

excerpt from my new Comment essay out from paywall: “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 …

No Omen But Awe : 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 …

Going to a structured deliberation with students about the conundrum of disability accommodations in higher ed this afternoon. (Private, unrecorded, Chatham House rules.) In case this is also a topic you’re willing to wade into, see this extensive, evidence-packed, and sympathetic report.

Sometimes the New Yorker still brings it.

End of classes this week. Office status = tracks.

“Cognitive surrender” is… vivid (via this excellent roundup of studies and reporting).

My boy, hatless, last Saturday. Newly 16. All the babies grow up.

a listener of last resort: “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 …

Kinda mad no one told me about Clare Carlisle before now. Glad that Transcendence for Beginners is in the mail.

Sperm whales gather up to help birthing mothers and babies.

no amount of debunking multi-tasking will diminish the behavior: 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, …

Chocolate chip pancakes on World Down Syndrome Day.

Currently riveted by this book — told by a man who was a young Catholic Worker in the mid 20th c, in the circle of both Berrigan brothers, plus Day, Merton, so many others. If you only see the draft-card-burner rabble-rouser in this character, you’re missing so much.

I’ll be speaking with my philosopher colleague Jacob Stump at a Veritas Forum event on March 25 on Northeastern’s Boston campus—a dialogue about the nature of anger. Register with this form.

on labels and kids and schools: 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. …

Friends in MA and NY: Skylark Ensemble performs a Lent program this weekend. I am so sorry to miss it — this group is incredible.

Officially: gonna make it

Currently reading: Burdened Agency by Travis Pickell 📚So many strong concepts and integrated thinking here.

Glad to see my colleague in disability/design @pauldefazio here on Micro! Do please welcome him.

A student-built ice cathedral at Notre Dame.

My PhD student is being advised left and right to let Claude do her lit review, write her qualifying presentation, summarize the books she needs to read to prepare. She is holding fast to the conviction that this slow, frictionful work is the work she signed on for. Immensely proud of her.

My son Malcolm (15) and I are on our fourth watch-through of Band of Brothers — a winter tradition. I think I’ve seen it twice more before that, so I’m officially versed in the 101st airborne. Other fans here?

Hundreds of tasks to go and still more snow coming down, but we’re in to our new place! It’s very quiet here.

here we go

I have plenty of complaints about the UI of Substack, but there is a burgeoning network of professors there sharing principled and ingenious pedagogy for the age of LLMs.

Current status: moving week, new apartment! We’re having to get snow removal just to fit the truck out front, but such is the process.

You guyssss Bruce Herman’s latest work.

I’ve been in San Francisco for a few days enjoying a break from winter, but this polar bear is living her best life.

Currently half-nursing along an idea for a book—intellectual memoir, I guess?—called After Sustained Reflection, I Changed My Mind.

Coming your way soon if you’re a Comment subscriber!

A great salve to trudge through the tundra yesterday for the 5 pm mass.

The soup kitchen at my church has an ongoing Amazon wishlist of clothing items for guests. Deep winter is a good time to re-up it, if you’re looking to help.

It’s so good to see George Scialabba really read Christopher Lasch and understand his neither-right-nor-left critique of modernity. Lasch “insisted on the fact of human scale.”

Our daughter’s boyfriend 3D printed her a paintbrush holder. Romance!

On prevention design.

One day I really will write about how going to Wheaton College — where dancing and drinking and sex and drugs were verboten — was an absolute riot of creativity among my friends. We just unearthed these tapes, just some of the many bands and solo acts who wrote and recorded original music.

“In such situations, I have to learn the meaning of simply standing by.” On an ethics of life and accompaniment at a Vienna hospital, in Plough. Thanks to @isaacgreene for the link.

Our little public domain symbol goes official in Massachusetts. Surprises from that project abound.

Is it…wholly accidental that my students struggle to find the bookstore plugin on Canvas to see their required paper book titles?

Friends: if you can think of an academic journal article in any field that is both well written and (sorta) accessible outside its subfield, I’d love a rec. (I don’t need to explain why finding these can be… difficult.)

Notable uptick in people reading paper books on the train. My love for my fellow human creatures abounds.

I’m in a podcast rut and would love some suggestions. I like conversations on: intellectual history, philosophy and theology, the craft of fiction and creativity generally. And strong narrative-led documentary production on literally any subject except true crime. If it’s told well, sign …

lost causes: 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, …

Looking forward to George Scialabba’s forthcoming collection.

Went to see Brazil at the Brattle tonight. Wow!

I wrote about 2025 in scenes: gift economies, pattern languages, one kid getting lost and found, keeping the chatbots at bay.

Best time of semester — a whole riot of finished models and also-ran models and early trashed prototypes and scraps in every direction. World building.

Our daughter just submitted her Christmas image for the church bulletin. Coming soon…

Unclear why it took me this long to read Thomas Cahill. That irreplaceable experience of seeing and hearing a lively intelligence on the page.

“Floating above the graphics are abstract sleeping babies, well swaddled and capped. A proprietary onesie and hat declare, “NYC loves me.” sarahendren.com/2025/12/0…

If, like me, you’re still enjoying homages to Alisdair MacIntyre and his long strange career, let me recommend this fine essay by Notre Dame’s Michael Baxter.

Christina Bieber Lake: “It is too facile to say that a reader learns a ‘moral’ by reading a story. What a reader learns is how to think about contingency when it appears in his or her own life…‘one learns it by guidance rather than by formula.'”

Culminating text with oral exams planned in my criticism class for architecture graduate students. We got liftoff as a group this term — a true seminar community. I’ll miss them.

An exchange with a student about being convinced.

I am finally teaching Byung-Chul Han’s The Burnout Society today. Wow — so much to tackle. My students are all in pre-professional design programs, and few have had any exposure to philosophy. If you teach this book and have recommendations for structuring conversation, I’d be happy to …

Here’s a bit of Skylark Ensemble’s Rachmaninoff Vespers at my parish last spring. I’m in the third row, trying to keep it together in the presence of such overwhelming beauty. This clip doesn’t quite show the astonishing basso profundo guys at full blast, but you can get a …

One of my (seven!) nieces had to dress up like an idiom for fourth grade today. She’s got on a fluffy white dress with a big cottony hem and a number 9 pasted on the front. Glorious.

I found out from a total stranger that Arthur Holmes’s entire History of Philosophy class at Wheaton is posted on YouTube. And I am…85% sure I am in that room! I recognize so many friends by the backs of their heads. What a gift to have this series at all, and what a set of memories it …

There are 80(!) people in my parish’s OCIA cohort, many of them students at the very fancy local university.

This girl is presiding over the Head of the Charles Regatta. An absolutely perfect day for it.

the best classroom change I made this year: The best procedural addition to my classroom this semester has been having two students act as recap leaders at the beginning of class. I got this from Lang’s Small Teaching. They present a summary of what we discussed in the last session; we all have a moment to add or sharpen some feature of …

Boston folks: I’m hosting Duke psychiatrist & professor Warren Kinghorn this Wednesday night at Northeastern. Join us! Kinghorn will address the behemoth of mental health and wellbeing under the mechanizing forces of modernity, and he’ll offer wisdom from the ideas of St Thomas …

This long review of Florence’s new Fra Angelico show is absolutely worth your time.

I enjoyed hearing Suzanne Vega look back on her long career in this podcast conversation. Pitching A&M records twice before a third time’s success; the hot/cold imagery that runs through her work; more background on the Luca hit.

I’m enjoying Task in part because I love Mark Ruffalo, but I also just love a complicated story with lots of children fully, inconveniently present — not just as background accessories.

Really pleased that Simple Machine continues its festival run (a dozen and counting!) with the Boston Globe’s documentary festival in late October. Online! So if you want to see it sooner rather than later, do please join us.

The always-lucid Yuval Levin is at the peak of his powers in this recent conversation — on order and disorder in the three federal branches, the real challenge of originalism, FDR and DJT, much more. Highly recommended.

refrain: The vertebrae texts of my architecture criticism are now Ruskin, The Nature of Gothic, a Wendell Berry collection called The World-Ending Fire, and Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death. And lots and lots of short readings and other media in between. I’m pleased with this historical sweep and …

Currently reading, and in that blessed state of exactly-right-book-right-time: The Year of Our Lord 1943 by Alan Jacobs 📚

Richard Hofstadter, via John Ganz: “The nation seems to slouch onward into its uncertain future like some huge inarticulate beast, too much attainted by wounds and ailments to be robust, but too strong and resourceful to succumb.”

Finished reading: Ravelstein by Saul Bellow 📚 Thoughts to come.

I’m teaching Ruskin’s The Nature of Gothic this fall, in which he contrasts the alienated industrial city with the humanity & beauty of medieval architecture. I’m seeking the echoes to be found among YouTube minimalists — the kind of spiritual transcendence sought in purging stuff. Recs please!

Currently reading: Ravelstein by Saul Bellow 📚

Bethel McGrew: “If people are unbothered by the fact that embryos in general are discarded all the time, whence the squeamishness at the proposal to focus on some embryos in particular? He does have a point.”

Churches and big AI.

Have never found the internet less compelling than now.

My experience of dating, love, marriage, and sex is so profoundly outside what this story reports as normal that 1) it productively sharpens how I can talk with my teenagers about these subjects and 2) makes me more eager than ever to help them experience young adult communities where a …

July 22 = 30 years of marriage to this man. <3

Looking forward to Holly Lawford-Smith’s book taking the widest possible left-and-right survey of feminist history.

Our daughter had a great experience as part of CCPL’s Public Good Generation. Recommended for teenagers you know and love next year.

Aquinas by other means: Allow me to boldly suggest that theologians teaching Aquinas 101 consider Warren Kinghorn’s Wayfaring as a first text. It’s about the history and limitations of the regnant model of mental healthcare — with its mechanistic framings, its commodification, its internalist individualism — …

For my fellow longtime Mac users: a revealing and beautifully designed history of displays, settings, and the digital workplace between 1984-2004 in Marcin Wichary’s “Frame of Preference.”

My husband Brian’s latest project Syria After Assad is out now.

Simple Machine will be in the Indy Shorts festival next month — Deadline write up here!

“Often the Dying Ask for a Map": Upon opening the new issue of Comment, that B.H. Fairchild poem stopped me in my tracks.

Passed much of a long solo road trip this weekend listening to Middlemarch. I forgot how funny it is! So many hilarious snarky asides.

I’m glad to see this decently fair coverage of the Abigail Adams Institute, which I have found to offer high-quality free humanities education and community, for students and beyond. The Great Conversation, in its online offering, was a great salve to me in deep pandemic days.

Howard Jones sings God Only Knows in memory of Brian Wilson.

Today I talked with a priest, longtime educator, former university president, now back in the regular classroom teaching ethics. He confirmed what I have been suspecting in midlife: that the invisible thread of teaching, the I and Thou encounter, is the most likely to survive us when we’re …

Finished reading: North Woods by Daniel Mason 📚 A book about architecture that’s not about architecture: one house and its many lives over centuries. Adventurous. Much to admire.

Thrilled to see this piece in Wallpaper, including one of my projects, about the just-opened show at the V&A on disability and design.

Glad to see this e-flux review of Looking After Each Other, now on view in Seoul.

Just talked with a friend about the Am Dash, and he speculated about whether the future of life-with-bots might have this quality of cat-mouse tactics. Introduce human-only elements; the bots lag behind, can only chase and imitate downstream; rinse and repeat?

RIP Alisdair MacIntyre.

Sometimes I still mistake people for Paul Farmer on the street in Cambridge. 💔

I wrote about prototyping, design for fourth graders, and Hannah Arendt’s natality.

Finished reading: What Happened to Sophie Wilder by Christopher Beha 📚

Opening in ten days: the Victoria & Albert’s new Storehouse, a behind-the-scenes look at collections, curatorial and conservation processes, and more. Especially cool: you can Order an Object!

My boy in the first seat, right side, River Charles. We read The Boys in the Boat together, and then watched the movie. Let’s just say that was an instructive case of “adaptation.”

The first of my two lectures on the virtues of dependence is up at For Your Consideration. This invitation got me to finally make some early sense of changing my mind in big ways starting ~4 years ago. Expansionist design, Alisdair MacIntyre, selective abortion, animality, faith, hope, Love.

Good news for Simple Machine: We were chosen as a Best Documentary in this festival, won the Audience Award for Documentary Short in this one, and I got nominated for Best First-Time Director in another.

The Ignatius Study Bible has a synopsis of salvation history that is as beautiful as it is concise. A few short pages lay out the epic themes of the whole text. If there’s someone you know who wants the big basic story — what is Christianity about? — I can scan and send it to you.

Thanks to @dorsalstream@mastodon.cloud for referring me to Madame Vo in NYC. I bought the cookbook; now trying my hand at habitual home cooking my favorite food.

Another day, another white-hot post from Phil Christman that makes me think I really should just give up writing. He’s so good.

My friend Alexandra Lange has won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism!

So many good things to think about in this conversation with Nathan Hatch about his book on leadership. If only there were more like him! I’ll have some lengthier things to say soon.

Got to hear Skylark Ensemble singing Rachmaninoff Vespers at my parish tonight! I’ll be subscribing. Just sublime.

“In a garden, expertise was personal and anecdotal — it was allegorical — it was ancient — it had been handed down; one felt that gardeners across the generations were united in a kind of… sarahendren.com/2025/05/0…

Last night’s screening at IFF Boston was such a joy. Filmmaker portraits on the staff bulletin board.

a call for like-minded teachers: Should I… initiate a affinity group of professors who are both against AI in the classroom and also, crucially, willing to create and defend the formative guardrails and pedagogical moves to design around its use? We need more than strongheaded exhortations in syllabi, and we need more than …

…and Muir Woods shifts the inner clock like nothing else.

Got to visit with the many fine people at Creative Growth in Oakland yesterday. A life-giving salve to headlines of all kinds.

Taught my last class of the semester today! Tradeoff for a jam-packed year with only a short winter break built in. I’ll take it. Let long-summer commence.

My husband’s Peabody nominations grow: “From filmmakers Martin Smith, Marcela Gaviria and Brian Funck, China, the U.S. & the Rise of Xi Jinping investigates China’s emergence as one of the world’s wealthiest — and most repressive — countries, and the role of its longtime president, …

This report on how a couple revived “stoop coffee” and sparked a whole series of neighborhood events is the best thing I’ve read all month.

I’m excited to follow along with Boston College’s Department of Formative Education programs.

Tickets go on sale tomorrow (Apr 9) for the Independent Film Festival Boston! Simple Machine screens on Saturday Apr 26 at 8 pm, Somerville Theater, and again on Tuesday Apr 29, also at 8 pm at Somerville Theater. Brian and I will be there for both; we’d love to see you. More festivals to …

I met a student today doing more human-scale tech: Matte Lim’s Tobe, a YouTube interface where the only feed is your subscriptions.

Can’t decide if the further enshittification of Substack by means of video is a bad or good thing. On one hand: I’ve enjoyed it for aggregated Complete Thoughts. On the other: maybe just as well — shunts more hours toward offline life.

I purchased Paul Scherz’s book so fast after reading the latest from Matt Crawford.

I put Wendell Berry’s “agrarian values” in front of architecture students this week. Good conversation ensued.

Boston Independent Film Festival lineup is out! Simple Machine screens on the evenings of April 26 and 29 at 8 pm, Somerville.

It’s always a good day when you get to introduce another generation of students to Wendell Berry.

So glad to finally see proper reporting in The New Republic on Amy Coney Barrett’s actual record, which is not in the pocket of the far right.

“In their critique of medicalization, Illich and Zola might both be characterized as “against health,” to borrow a provocative phrase…The “health” they stand against is not any state of genuine wellbeing but a particular… sarahendren.com/2025/03/3…

So glad to know about the Little Sisters of the Disciples of the Lamb.

What a beautiful sermon by Matthew Milliner: art, typologies of Mary, Alan Watts, consuming fire. I bet that guy’s a top notch teacher.

Looking forward to listening to Motherhood versus the Machine.

From designer and critic Maggie Gram’s forthcoming book The Invention of Design.

Ted Gioia is reaching national treasure status with his regular championing of musicians just doing their thing.

it just takes one: A while ago I wrote a reported essay for Harper’s about a distinctive partnership between professional artists and adults with intellectual disabilities outside Edinburgh. (Trust me — it’s not the kind you’re thinking of.) I heard from exactly one reader about that piece, but it …

Ok, camera people — if you were going to recommend a camera that’s 1) lightweight enough to hang around my neck a lot of the time and 2) best value for quickly taking high quality digital shots, what would it be?

In response to Freddie deBoer’s latest, I wrote about the paradoxes of disability — an offering especially to you fellow teachers and caregivers of young people in our weird age.

Theologians and ministers of Micro who will administer ashes next week: What do you teach about leaving ashes on one’s head for the day? In college, I was taught by a priest to wipe them away: “when you pray, pray in secret,” etc. But I usually see folks marked for the day every …

Always be reading @ayjay: “How often do we think, perhaps in some unacknowledged place deep inside our minds and hearts, that when we come to church and say the appointed words and perform the correct actions, we are somehow… sarahendren.com/2025/02/2…

This podcast treatment of USAID — history, context, various critiques — is really well done.

I thought this review of Samantha Harvey’s Orbital got it right. And Metropolitan Review looks promising all around!

Looking forward to joining the good people of UF’s Christian Study Center in a couple weeks for two lectures on disability and the virtues of dependence.

Anthony Galluzzo explains the oddly united forms of “biotechnological Prometheanism” on left and right.

San Miguel chapel, the oldest church structure in the US, Santa Fe.

Jack Goldsmith writes another very reasoned and helpful history of the unitary executive theory.

We’ve reached the melodrama stage of winter in New England. Summer has never existed! I have never been warm and never will be again!

“Our intellectual errors are often, although not always, rooted in our moral errors. For both types of mistake the best protections… sarahendren.com/2025/02/1…

My short film Simple Machine will run in three festivals this year, and counting! We have worked and reworked it; gratifying to anticipate it going out further into the world.

Anyone else learn to draw flapping foreshortened flags from Mark Kistler on PBS in the 80s? This was a lovely memory.

This particular Chang and French exchange is especially good.

Saw and heard the stunning soprano Joélle Harvey yesterday, two Handel cantatas at the Jordan Hall jewel box. We’re spoiled in Boston.

What a beautifully lucid walk-through of Pieper’s Leisure, the Basis of Culture by Therese Cory.

I don’t do a lot of academic publishing, but it was gratifying to think through Howard Gardner’s “fruitful asynchrony” idea in creativity studies alongside my own “disposition, language, house” framework for the maker-thinker: …

Fantastic conversation with Nicolay Boyadjiev of Re-Arc Institute on a “paraphilanthropic” approach to humanitarian architecture, public-private partnerships, innovative contracts, and more: scratchingthesurface.fm/263-nicol…

An evergreen topic: design public spaces for children! sarahendren.com/2025/02/0…

My friend Jack Goldsmith and his colleague Bob Bauer are doing us all a favor, explaining and historicizing presidential power with the Executive Functions newsletter.

One goal for this spring is to write and pitch a longform book review. Curious if folks here have methods or frameworks that set up that particular writing process well.

I really enjoyed talking with architect and podcaster Erin Peavey about design for interdependence, family life, disability and more: open.spotify.com/episode/7…

Intrigued by Architectural Uprising.

Leah Libresco Sargeant is that rare journalist looking hard at the post-Dobbs landscape.

Another week of frigid walking commutes, but I’m cheered by spotting paper flyers advertising IRL mixers for millennial singles — “apps are out, meetups are in.” Go go go, y’all — undigital habit shifters unite.

“I had no interest in subverting things — monogamy, moral norms, courtship, the nuclear family, faith, a classical education — that I’d never had or known in the first place… sarahendren.com/2025/01/2… (h/t @ayjay)

A couple of my projects will be in this exhibition at the V&A this summer. I wish I could see it!

My grad student from Istanbul brought me some real-deal Turkish Delight.

Our daughter now has her driver’s license. New era of “excuses to go to the grocery store” commencing.

It has been forever since I listened to Erykah Badu’s Badhuizm, and my goodness. A stunning and enduring record.

On choosing.

Off to purchase blue books for my students’ quiz like it’s 1993

I have some work in a show opening next week at MoMA called Pirouette: Turning Points in Design.

It’s the first day of classes and I will be talking with students about @ayjay’s thoughts on being a self-deceived rational utility maximizer.

On Magnum Opus Syndrome and coaching PhD students: sarahendren.com/2025/01/0…

I wrote about people as object lessons.

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 …

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, …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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…

an unconditioned whole: “If more thinkers were willing, like William Egginton, to extend and elucidate the philosophical implications of physics in the actual physics classroom, we’d quickly realize much more of the so-called interdisciplinarity that so many of us claim to want. But the mastery of calculations is …

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…

dreaming: Dreaming about a one year gap year program in great books, suitable as “core curriculum” prep for other college experiences — you come for trivium-style foundational structures, head out to uni or trade school or whatever. Co-op style, too, with lots of physical exercise and campus …

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 …

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.

Spent this last evening of the year with my littlest nieces and nephew — chocolate fountain, dance party with strobe effect bulbs in the suburban living room can lights — and with my niece & her husband, expecting my first great niece or nephew in June. In snowy Indiana. A beautiful close.

“My mind is still open to revision, thank God.” — Francis Spufford, naming that truly rare virtue, alongside many other jewels from his singular imagination: amp.theguardian.com/books/202…

“But if democratizing politics would go some way toward improving culture, the reverse does not hold: democratizing culture has gone no way toward improving politics… sarahendren.com/2023/12/2…

Advance copy of Becca Rothfeld’s forthcoming essays ❤️❤️

Soon I will tell you all the back story for the Stolen Bonsais. Tragic. But here is our older son’s suggested attempt to get them back.

Finally got around to seeing The Sound of Metal. Highly, highly recommended.

Buying my tree-loving husband a membership and subscription to the Arnold Arboretum’s magazine based on this beautiful essay from editor @mbattles. The doctor’s office, Gaza, nursing our wounds and the living flora all around us: matthewbattles.substack.com/p/balm-fo…

Speaking of this tiny urban footprint: I’ve been walking the 75 minutes or so to office or studio lately. Down Mass Ave, the city’s pulsing artery, over the bridge and the magificent Charles River, every mixed zone of life and work. For a professor of the built world and locomotive thinker: heaven.

Subway maps of downtown Boston reassure visitors: this place is tiny. You’re looking at the whole “downtown” and you can easily traverse it all day long.

And so glad to see my hero Danielle Allen weighing in on higher ed and the latest free speech thicket: www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/…

All synapses firing! Philip Bess on the sacred city: urbanism as spatial or anti-spatial, human flourishing and sacramental form, the Nolli map of Rome, the ten minute walk as the heart of pre-modern towns. Recommended. thejosias.com/2023/11/1…

Moss really does grow everywhere.

Foreboding, spare, approchable, organic, monumental: I wrote about learning to describe the built world. sarahendren.substack.com/p/vocab-l…

something-something about the way my teenage daughter takes most selfies and friend photos with fish-eye or other distorted lenses — the latest incarnation of self-consciousness, or the photographic equivalent embodied in the distancing of “like” in spoken language

quietude in the face of stranger’s messes: sarahendren.com/2023/12/0…

So so glad to see my friend and likeminded thinker-writer-maker @mbattles here on micro.blog! Welcome him, will you?

Two mentions in one week of Whit Stillman’s films in my feeds/podcasts. Time for a house festival, I think.

Three-hour seminar structure: favorite practices to break it up? Student-led presentations, guest lectures, pair-and-share discussions, writing about reading prior to class, quizzes to warm up, journaling, what else?

Blank slate. New studio space for the next three years. Thank you, City of Boston, for subsidizing artists’ work in the year of our Lord 2023.

I realized that I have a public-facing dog: sarahendren.com/2023/11/2…

So far just opting out completely from Substack Notes, but I see they’re more and more foregrounded in the UI.

Curious if fellow profs have general wisdom about setting up a grad student as research assistant when you’re in the earliest stages of inquiry. How do you send them off to do good work when you’re not sure what you’re looking for? Looking for frameworks, meeting cadence advice, …

“Sometimes, ‘This’ll do’ is experienced not so much as ‘settling,’ but as the hard-won apprehension of a great transcendent truth.” www.the-hinternet.com/p/news-of…

Finally saw Master and Commander. What terrific storytelling. Peter Weir is the real deal.

I wrote about a radically imaginative partnership between artists and adults at a Scottish day center for the December issue of Harper’s. Intelligence, art, and encounters outside the logocentric ideal: harpers.org/archive/2…

I loved talking to Krista Tippett, after having her regularly in my head for a couple decades. onbeing.org/programs/…

Loyalty, the “limiting virtues,” and my newly discovered love for the voice memo mode of friendship: sarahendren.com/2023/11/1…

A fellow academic said to me recently, just offhand: I’m a professor, so of course I like answering questions. And I thought: that’s my worst fear. I’m a professor because I always want to be improving my capacity to *ask questions. Of people, of the world, in every way.

Ursula LeGuin on the weight of liberty, and a road trip with kids that set her dreaming: sarahendren.com/2023/11/1…

Rediscovered Blur’s Think Tank today. Like I forgot it ever existed, which is all but impossible in the network era. Time machine. What a great record.

One of our staples around the house is a berry compote—just frozen raspberries and frozen cherries dumped together and cooked down a bit. No sugar needed. We have it around all the time for oatmeal, French toast, dessert.

You’d think after all this time being encouraged, cajoled, now forced to use Outlook, I’d give in and accept it. And yet

I’m teaching Writing About the Built World next spring. I’d love to hear your favorites (criticism on architecture, design, or technology, with “criticism” very broadly defined): sarahendren.com/2023/11/0…

Triumph of the diagnostic? (At least) two opposing narratives on disability and freedom. Trying to get to some of the complexity in my field these days: sarahendren.substack.com/p/triumph…

One big engine of my work remains something like: Revenge-Love Songs from the “Physics for Poets” crowd

A wood shop, an architect, the history of machines, and the art of making one-armed tools. I have a short film in the making: sarahendren.com/2023/11/0…

Robertson Davies on charity as the last lesson: sarahendren.com/2023/10/3…

And I get to hear the Faure Requiem again this coming All Souls Day. A good week.

New Alice McDermott novel comes out tomorrow. Can’t wait.

This q and a with David French on authoritarianism and the threat of Christian nationalism is so good. Even if you disagree with him on most political matters, his careful position and sense of history here is clarifying, sobering, generous and generative. www.youtube.com/watch

We’re hiring at Northeastern: Design, Civic/Social Values, and Democracy. Open rank, broadly defined. Please share with folks you know? northeastern.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/car…

Never been so glad to be paying $$ for newsletters and journalism, rather than get analysis on latest news via social. I am not the product to be bought and sold. I pay and I get reliably smart and mixed strong thinking.

After finishing Wendell Berry’s magisterial Jayber Crow, I started and stopped several novels before picking up a favorite writer from the 90s: Robertson Davies. Every bit as enjoyable as remembered, stylistically, and thank goodness I have forgotten the stories. Reads like the first time.

Depressing as hell: even very smart folks with YouTube channels do that thumbnail treatment with colorful ALL CAPS PROVOCATIONS to get clicks. It must be working, because it’s everywhere.

Curious if profs/teachers here do a module on “how to reasonably argue in seminar.” We can easily *say: refer to the text specifically; your anecdotal experience is welcome, also insufficient on its own; no “vibes” critique, no ad hominem. But I sure would like an elegant activity to demo all.

“All sports involve some kind of disabling impediment, in the form of rules that restrict the ways in which one can achieve the object of the game…. sarahendren.com/2023/09/1…

Two things I might have studied, if I hadn’t been such an incurable melancholy poet type: midwifery or constitutional law.

New semester, new season: maybe you, like me, are trying out some new habits and patterns. Let me reassure us all with the Implementation Dip. It’s real. Be patient.

In the ongoing discovery of new-to-me books while still reading aloud to my youngest, let me add another Last Person Fanship to the list: A Wizard of Earthsea. Every sentence as musical as profound.

Maybe I missed wider discussion about it? But this piece by David Brooks on liberalism and assisted suicide is very well done as coalition-building work: www.theatlantic.com/magazine/…

Finally hit a good stride on fiction reading after a bunch of frustrations. This week Tessa Hadley’s Free Love and now Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow, alongside reading the first of the Earthsea books aloud to my 13 yr old.

These two got a magical Maine cove experience — sea kayaking alongside several pods of porpoises. Their surfacing breaths are so much more alive and grasping up close.

We saw Mission Impossible last night and loved it — sent me back to when I saw the very first one on a hot summer day at the Mann Chinese Theater in LA. Cruise came around a bend in one of those epic slow mo chase scenes and the whole theater erupted in laughter — the kind with utter joy in it.

I no longer think much about turning 50 — since the day has come and gone, months ago — but my inner disposition is still one of Re-Re-Beginning. What work is mine to do? What frame should shape my choices? Have I even been awake this last half century?

Last bit of summer

Derek Parfit on a consequential drive to Andalusia: sarahendren.com/2023/08/2… h/t @chrisfoley

And here’s a companion translation.

Miroslav Volf et al in the new book, “Life Worth Living”—what’s worth wanting? Like a tour through midlife. But also useful for my students this fall.

I reviewed David Gissen’s The Architecture of Disability for this month’s Landscape Architecture Magazine. Featuring the Acropolis, Yosemite, and Madrid’s Salon de Pinos: an interdependent take on the classical allée: landscapearchitecturemagazine.org/2023/08/0…

six verbs for accessible design (hint: nothing “universal”): https://sarahendren.substack.com/p/six-verbs-for-accessible-design?utm_source=activity_item

Shearing layers in a building, and teaching the big ideas in and via design. sarahendren.com/2023/07/3…

Not so interested in Barbie, but loved going back through some old Gerwig interviews about Little Women + Lady Bird (the latter far less successful as a film, but great to see her talk out each process): www.youtube.com/watch & www.youtube.com/watch

My mom on her first kayak trip at age 75. We had a blast in Olympic Natl Park this week and on glorious Lake Crescent (low nitrogen, clear as glass!). I love that she’s sufficiently offline that she told me about a woman I grew up with who’s “wanting to be an in-FLU-encer, do you know what that is?”

Planning a design class toward philosophy, not a philosophy of design: sarahendren.com/2023/07/2…

Olympic National Park! Unbelievable.

Same daughter reporting to the family chat on her other new July skills

My daughter’s foray into printmaking this week. She has just the right mix of hand-eye acuity and relaxed playfulness.

Currently obsessed with watermelon sprinkled with Stardust chili lime mix.

Seeking readings and resources for my new course on design for the assisted human body: sarahendren.com/2023/07/1…

Thinking about how one might organize an architecture/planning class around the themes of US transience, family structures, social mobility, the choice to stay rooted in adulthood, rather than chase jobs only. We got that discourse in Wendell Berry when I was in college, but almost nowhere else.

So pleased my teenagers can still get excited about building a fort on a summer day. How much longer?

My social design collaboration called the Accessible Icon Project is now on view at the Cooper Hewitt, as part of Give Me A Sign: The Language of Symbols: www.cooperhewitt.org/channel/g…

I see my preferred podcast app, Stitcher, is folding later this summer. What other podcast services are folks into these days? I also use the Apple Podcast app, but its UI is…about as good as iTunes.

[School superintendent] Marlon Styles did the opposite of what most leaders do in conflict: he asked for help. He called on local ministers and a group of well-informed community members, whom he called his “positive gossipers,” to speak up… sarahendren.com/2023/07/1…

Possibly the most milestone-birthday-year cliche ever, but I have gone ahead and scheduled a call to explore working with a marathon coach.

It’s going to take a lot of effort to create a countervailing narrative to a generous-seeming “autonomy-led” idea of the good life — to situate autonomy in its right-sized place among a panoply of other strong virtues and civic goods…https://sarahendren.com/2023/07/10/permanent-relief/

Currently reading: Stephen Buoro’s The Five Sorrowful Mysteries of Andy Africa, and Jay Baruch’s Tornado of Life: A Doctor’s Journey through Constraints and Creativity in the ER.

This girl’s three years old today.

Very glad to see Richard Reeves heading up a new institute on boys and men: https://ofboysandmen.substack.com/p/some-news-i-cant-wait-to-share?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

In a few weeks I’ll be around Port Angeles, WA with my mom for a much-anticipated walking trip celebrating our two milestone birthdays this year. Would love recs for day hikes (on the easy end of things), food, sights.

[She] once told me she did not publish a certain writer I admired because he wrote to have the last word on a topic, rather than to open it up. sarahendren.com/2023/06/2…

SO glad to see @dorsalstream@mastodon.cloud here on MB; I recommend you follow what he’s up to. Always good.

I loved this profile of Molly Burhans, a Catholic GIS cartographer working to help the RCC understand its land usage and climate work: www.technologyreview.com/2023/06/2…

Also, I just realized why I had trouble initially with alt text: the tap on the thumbnail only works if you originate the post in the MB app. So, no starting from the photo gallery in iOS, for ex, and selecting MB from there. cc @jean

Gonna have two of my teens work through this text this summer. Geared for younger kids, but I figure the straightforward and easy language will be right for a summer/chill vibe in the assignment.

I have so enjoyed the very protracted process of re-finding some friends I made from Twitter—mostly one at a time, frictionful, and usually via surprise email. No regrets about leaving that platform! And glad that some connections have regrown.

The limits of “principlism” in medical ethics: autonomy, authority, and the search for supple moral foundations. sarahendren.com/2023/06/1…

Trying again to use alt text here… no “done” button once you’ve added text, but gonna see if this works. Weeknight walk to the local ice cream shop. (And update: works!)

Got my colleague Deb Chachra’s book in hand. How Infrastructure Works. Coming this October! This is gonna make some big waves. Deb is one of the best thinkers I know.

Took our three teens to see Past Lives last night. Beautifully done! Worth the price of the theater.

“Booze has a hand on everybody’s shoulder in this city.” sarahendren.com/2023/06/0…

“The World Health Organization errs when it defines health as “a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being.” A related error is made by the agrarian poet and social critic Wendell Berry, whose work… sarahendren.com/2023/06/0…

Currently reading: The Way of Medicine: Ethics and the Healing Profession (Curlin/Tollefsen). Prepping for a seminar!

We saw Bruce Cockburn at the Cabot in Beverly last night. Best kind of concert: small sit-down venue, beautifully preserved old theater, BC with bright white beard and voice as strong as ever. Acoustic, 12-string, Dobro, dulcimer.

Can folks here recommend some good reading on what unites sports that have balls of any kind? Looking for philosophical, theoretical, historical treatments especially. What does a ball as equipment do to the character of a game? How is its presence most effective in making fun/suspense/challenge?

My daughter had her last lacrosse team dinner last night. She’s in 9th grade, first time on a big team. I’ve been skeptical about the lofty claims people make for sports and character, but I have to say: one brilliant coach can be transformative. Here, a sweatshirt with her last name on the back, a …

the tent and the estuary: sarahendren.com/2023/05/3…

One lucky Mass MoCA visitor got to ride EJ Hill’s roller coaster for one—like a track of stretched pink taffy, very Wonka-esque. Hill says roller coasters are “public monuments to the possibility of joy.”

Today I learned the word “opusculum” from Hernan Diaz—something less than a novella even, a “minor literary work”—and now I feel immense relief that one can just claim the modesty for a project up front. www.nytimes.com/2023/05/1…

Just half the haul from U Chicago Press I got to pick for doing peer review. 🙌

We got some shirts designed for our son’s Unified track team. Today was the state meet. If you have Unified near you, allow me to recommend it: kids with and without disabilities playing together. A natural evolution of Soecial Olympics.

Design is commitment + provisionality. sarahendren.substack.com/p/design-…

I have an essay in Elizabeth Guffey’s new book, After Universal Design. On Carl Sagan, wonder and skepticism, and lessons learned from social practice and critical design.

“Women, the ancient lie, the unattainable mystery, / the apple high on paradisal branches, / the history of heaven and hell, of fall and pardon; / innocence unmasked in God’s own Garden.” Gilbert ends with an affirmation: “Nuns are the fictions / by whom we verify the usual contradictions.” via …

Everyone gets a double major: engineering and history. That’s it. That’s all we offer… sarahendren.com/2023/05/1…