“You could be the CEO of a company devoted to feeding the world, spend your life developing the Food-o-Matic which can feed everyone on the planet, but if you neglect to care for your kids, then your kids just have to live with your neglect.” sarahendren.com/2024/10/2…
I swore not to use Notes in Substack, thinking the Twitter-like UI would soon make the feed like its predecessor (despite early folks saying “gosh, it’s so nice here!”). I was, alas, correct — the dumbass dunks and oversharing and general smugness have fully taken over.
The last two weeks of class held field trips, and today, after a proper synthesizing seminar discussion, students said to me: thank goodness we’re back together to talk about all we’ve read and done! They like field trips, they said, but they crave conversation. My heart, she bursts.
Among the many treasures in the tactile museum at the Perkins School for the Blind this week, another field trip with students: architectural and technical models, animal heads and vertebrae, silk flags, maps. What a piece of history that institution is.
The big path and the small path: sarahendren.com/2024/10/1…
I’m the Myers Distinguished Visiting Fellow in the Humanities and Civic Engagement this year at the University of Scranton, one of the Jesuit institutions that’s newly on my radar! I’ll be lecturing, visiting a bioethics class, and speaking to a local high school group as well.
The fall issue — the Builder Issue — of The New Atlantis is out. They put out a call for short essays: What should we build? And I offered one of ten ideas.
Just noting here that @ tags only work as Mentions when the handle is at the front of a post as reply, not when embedded in the middle of a post. Twice lately I’ve seen my handle tagged in the middle of a post but only because I read the whole thing in my regular feed; they were not in my Mentions.
From “better than nothing” to “better than anything”: sarahendren.com/2024/10/1…
Took my design students to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, walkable from our campus. We met a conservator who’s also looking at designing accessible replicas of artworks: tactile 3D printing, textile models, more.
Helen Pynor, La Réunion, 2006, here.
Bought this way early for my husband’s bday.
“[V]ery common design patterns — retweets, quote tweets, replies, mentions — are all behaviors that users originated, which where then captured by Twitter… sarahendren.com/2024/10/0…
So much wisdom in this beautiful conversation with Father Greg Boyle looking back at 30+ years of Homeboy Industries. One of the humanitarian heroes of our time.
Still in my Lewis Hyde phase — unsure how I didn’t really know about Trickster before now.
Would love recommendations for books about Ignatian approaches to culture/making.
I wrote about disability social media trends and the question of imperfection.
I talked to students some weeks ago about affordances and limitations in technology, and I mentioned in passing the Ordo Amoris, the ordering of loves. They have really latched on to this ancient idea! Choices, tradeoffs, limitations.
David Cayley’s intellectual biography of Ivan Illich is nicely organized — I just finished the chapter on Deschooling Society; Cayley outlines the various reviews and criticisms of it as companion to its sources, timing in Illich’s life, highlight passages and arguments.
Finished revisions on a paper about interdisciplinary work using Howard Gardner’s idea of “fruitful asynchrony” in creativity, and positing my own framework for creative inquiry between art, design, and engineering. Looking forward to it being out in the world — a nice summation of my last decade.