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, documentation help.
“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…