…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.
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 a backlog and need to chase down these software details that come with being on more open web applications.
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 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.
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 cognates; form, fate. Now I am here. No diamond, no time, no omen but awe that a whirlwind could in not cohering cohere.
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 I would drop by to see how it’s going.’ He never identified himself as ‘Father Daniel,’ just Dan.
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, 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.