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 and…
Our daughter drew images for our church bulletin, marking all seasons of the liturgical year. We made them into prints for grandparents’ Christmas gifts (Artifact Uprising).
Malcolm and I are nearing the end of Endurance, about the Shackleton expedition to Antarctica. The ship sank, sled dogs have all been shot or eaten, gangrene surgeries done, a marooned party awaits rescue while Shackleton and co brave the Drake Passage in an ill-equipped small boat. Yikes, y’all!
Highly recommend this conversation on the early days of the Catholic Worker movement, with key passages from Maurin and Day, the philosophical ties to personalism and the (first) back to the land folks, Luddism, more: open.spotify.com/episode/1…
James K.A. Smith: That’s the answer I stake a life on. (Glad he also had to get to his 50’s to really hear it.)
Glad to see this probing look at Bishop Barron by the wonderful Molly Worthen.
Just got tickets for T-Bone Burnett in April!
More interesting craft and guild schools that are humanities-led.
Big resolution for the next year is more weeknight hosting of friends for dinner. You know what I realized will make it possible? Telling folks (in a funny diplomatic way) that we need to be done by 9. My husband wakes at 5; we tag team various tasks around 2 ft jobs/3 kids/1 dog, etc. Will report.
The best around-the-table Thanksgiving exercise we did the last couple of years is “who taught me,” courtesy of Austin Kleon.
Once more with feeling: Word is the worst software ever. Why, why, why do institutions keep migrating toward MS products?
Reliable runner’s high again today courtesy of that extended drum solo at the end of “Burning Down the House.”
I can’t believe it took me this long to read David Bentley Hart’s The Experience of God.
“The ambient aunties (a great band title) were just there somehow, with their cars to collect me, their homes to go to, their abundant baked potatoes, their surprise trips to the cinema, their wooden jigsaw puzzles, and their benign curiosity about my life…https://sarahendren.com/2024/11/28/ambient/
I’ve been baffled by the success of cookie chains in recent years — their products are about on par with grocery store slice-and-bake processed crap — but then I realized they’re a knock-on enterprise arising from legalized weed.
Hitting a new low of discouragement about the widespread use of chatgpt among students, so if you’ve got links to frameworks, insight, even-more-creative assignment design, do please share.