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 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.
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 employer and a professional reputation, the median comment tone shifts correspondingly, and bad-faith quote-dunking becomes rarer. There are also no anonymous accounts and almost no sub-tweeting; the median post reads more like a memo than a hot take.
People can still disagree or criticize you heavily if you post something provocative, but they are much less likely to do it in a mindless or righteous way. In some ways, LinkedIn feels like an academic conference: people are civil, sometimes too nice, and not always willing to criticize a colleague openly. That conference-style politeness can smooth over real disagreement, but it is a much better failure mode than ad hominems and pile-ons.
This is also my observation, along with what I wrote in 2022.
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 theology, etc.
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 rate has hovered around one in three for the last decade, but with great variation across hospitals.
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 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.
…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 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.
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 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?
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.
