New semester, new season: maybe you, like me, are trying out some new habits and patterns. Let me reassure us all with the Implementation Dip. It’s real. Be patient.
In the ongoing discovery of new-to-me books while still reading aloud to my youngest, let me add another Last Person Fanship to the list: A Wizard of Earthsea. Every sentence as musical as profound.
Maybe I missed wider discussion about it? But this piece by David Brooks on liberalism and assisted suicide is very well done as coalition-building work: www.theatlantic.com/magazine/…
Finally hit a good stride on fiction reading after a bunch of frustrations. This week Tessa Hadley’s Free Love and now Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow, alongside reading the first of the Earthsea books aloud to my 13 yr old.
These two got a magical Maine cove experience — sea kayaking alongside several pods of porpoises. Their surfacing breaths are so much more alive and grasping up close.
We saw Mission Impossible last night and loved it — sent me back to when I saw the very first one on a hot summer day at the Mann Chinese Theater in LA. Cruise came around a bend in one of those epic slow mo chase scenes and the whole theater erupted in laughter — the kind with utter joy in it.
I no longer think much about turning 50 — since the day has come and gone, months ago — but my inner disposition is still one of Re-Re-Beginning. What work is mine to do? What frame should shape my choices? Have I even been awake this last half century?
Last bit of summer
Derek Parfit on a consequential drive to Andalusia: sarahendren.com/2023/08/2… h/t @chrisfoley
And here’s a companion translation.
Miroslav Volf et al in the new book, “Life Worth Living”—what’s worth wanting? Like a tour through midlife. But also useful for my students this fall.
I reviewed David Gissen’s The Architecture of Disability for this month’s Landscape Architecture Magazine. Featuring the Acropolis, Yosemite, and Madrid’s Salon de Pinos: an interdependent take on the classical allée: landscapearchitecturemagazine.org/2023/08/0…
six verbs for accessible design (hint: nothing “universal”): https://sarahendren.substack.com/p/six-verbs-for-accessible-design?utm_source=activity_item
Shearing layers in a building, and teaching the big ideas in and via design. sarahendren.com/2023/07/3…
Not so interested in Barbie, but loved going back through some old Gerwig interviews about Little Women + Lady Bird (the latter far less successful as a film, but great to see her talk out each process): www.youtube.com/watch & www.youtube.com/watch
My mom on her first kayak trip at age 75. We had a blast in Olympic Natl Park this week and on glorious Lake Crescent (low nitrogen, clear as glass!). I love that she’s sufficiently offline that she told me about a woman I grew up with who’s “wanting to be an in-FLU-encer, do you know what that is?”
Planning a design class toward philosophy, not a philosophy of design: sarahendren.com/2023/07/2…
Olympic National Park! Unbelievable.
Same daughter reporting to the family chat on her other new July skills
My daughter’s foray into printmaking this week. She has just the right mix of hand-eye acuity and relaxed playfulness.
