“In a garden, expertise was personal and anecdotal — it was allegorical — it was ancient — it had been handed down; one felt that gardeners across the generations were united in a kind of… sarahendren.com/2025/05/0…

Last night’s screening at IFF Boston was such a joy. Filmmaker portraits on the staff bulletin board.

Four mini Polaroids, including one of Brian and me, pinned to a bulletin board of filmmakers at the Independent Film Festival Boston

Three teenagers on a hillside in Marin County, surrounded by young goats.

a call for like-minded teachers

Should I… initiate a affinity group of professors who are both against AI in the classroom and also, crucially, willing to create and defend the formative guardrails and pedagogical moves to design around its use? We need more than strongheaded exhortations in syllabi, and we need more than handwringing complaints that students won’t read. It’s still unclear whether GenAI will be world-changing across many industries. But even if it’s underwhelming in total, it can eat the entire educational enterprise in the near term, at generational expense.

Continue reading →

From behind, two of my teenagers walk a Marin coastal trail with a wooden ladder at one key juncture.

…and Muir Woods shifts the inner clock like nothing else.

One of my teenagers stands in the distance on the Muir Woods trail, surrounded by enormous redwoods.

Got to visit with the many fine people at Creative Growth in Oakland yesterday. A life-giving salve to headlines of all kinds.

Sara walks on the sidewalk near the entrance of Creative Growth, its sign hanging from the brick building's entrance.

Taught my last class of the semester today! Tradeoff for a jam-packed year with only a short winter break built in. I’ll take it. Let long-summer commence.

My husband’s Peabody nominations grow: “From filmmakers Martin Smith, Marcela Gaviria and Brian Funck, China, the U.S. & the Rise of Xi Jinping investigates China’s emergence as one of the world’s wealthiest — and most repressive — countries, and the role of its longtime president, Xi Jinping…

This report on how a couple revived “stoop coffee” and sparked a whole series of neighborhood events is the best thing I’ve read all month.

I’m excited to follow along with Boston College’s Department of Formative Education programs.

Tickets go on sale tomorrow (Apr 9) for the Independent Film Festival Boston! Simple Machine screens on Saturday Apr 26 at 8 pm, Somerville Theater, and again on Tuesday Apr 29, also at 8 pm at Somerville Theater. Brian and I will be there for both; we’d love to see you. More festivals to come.

The poster for Simple Machine shows an overhead shot of a man at a garage work bench, his left hand surrounded by tools. The title and its subtitle — physics at the speed of life — are printed in white along the bottom.

I met a student today doing more human-scale tech: Matte Lim’s Tobe, a YouTube interface where the only feed is your subscriptions.

Can’t decide if the further enshittification of Substack by means of video is a bad or good thing. On one hand: I’ve enjoyed it for aggregated Complete Thoughts. On the other: maybe just as well — shunts more hours toward offline life.

I purchased Paul Scherz’s book so fast after reading the latest from Matt Crawford.

I put Wendell Berry’s “agrarian values” in front of architecture students this week. Good conversation ensued.

Boston Independent Film Festival lineup is out! Simple Machine screens on the evenings of April 26 and 29 at 8 pm, Somerville.

It’s always a good day when you get to introduce another generation of students to Wendell Berry.

So glad to finally see proper reporting in The New Republic on Amy Coney Barrett’s actual record, which is not in the pocket of the far right.

“In their critique of medicalization, Illich and Zola might both be characterized as “against health,” to borrow a provocative phrase…The “health” they stand against is not any state of genuine wellbeing but a particular… sarahendren.com/2025/03/3…