Where a writer thinks things through
I took the dog for a late walk this evening around 10, and listened to the array of explosions all around. They were coming from six or eight unique locations, a couple of bangs at a time from one direction followed by half a minute s silence and then a couple from somewhere else. At one Continue reading "Happy Birthday"
Back in 1990, I was a grading assistant for Paul Groth s course in American vernacular architecture. As the junior member of the teaching team, I was sent downstairs to get fancy coffees for the rest of the team and myself. When I came back up the stairs, I had the cardboard cup tray on the Continue reading "The Hustle"
I was having my weekly coffee with a friend this morning, who d recently finished reading my book Sons. He had another commitment to get away to, but he asked if we could talk about the book next week. And he asked a question I ve never been asked before: How would you like to talk Continue reading "Proxy for the Unlived"
Okay, I know I left off my last post with more again tomorrow, but things have intervened. I ll have more to say about that further below. For now, let s get back to the work of failing to measure up. Part of what it means to produce work of quality is to locate the work accurately Continue reading "Belated Followthrough"
So yesterday, I used my lapsed bowling career as an example of the distance between people who are merely reallyreallyreally good and people who are at the peak of whatever endeavor they ve chosen. I think, in principle, that the same general logarithmic distance is true in whatever field of practice we might consider. Every step Continue reading "Immeasurable"
I hate to bring us back to eleventh grade, which at least for me was miserable, but I want to talk about logarithms. (Sister Claudette would be pleased that I remember what they are.) Specifically, I d like to talk about logarithmic scales of measurement, of which the Richter scale for the measurement of ground movement Continue reading "Log Scale"
See the gloryOf the royal scam Steely Dan (Donald Fagen/Walter Becker), “The Royal Scam,” 1976 We had no reason to imagine that our doctoral hoods were merely emotional courtesy prior to execution. The blindfold before the guillotine. Most of us in academia, eighty percent or more of all new research doctorates, will be exiled from Continue reading "Expelled from Paradise"
Lots of discussion in certain circles last week (probably didn t enter conversation on the porch of the general store, for instance) about the egregious behavior of star chef René Redzepi, of the restaurant sequence Noma. Verbal and physical abuse of his employees for decades, unpaid servitude billed as internships. Angry men excused again and again Continue reading "Hollow Art"
You may have heard about the red protest hats, drawn from similar hats worn in Norway during the Nazi occupation as a wordless sign of resistance to authoritarianism. The Minnesota fiber store Needle Skein is selling patterns for knitting and for crocheting at $5 per, and have raised nearly three quarters of a million Continue reading "Zombie Capitalism"
I m doing some assessment research, and one of the steady findings is that students in the program feel less welcomed by the professionals around them at mid-project than they did when they started. This shouldn t be a surprise. For a lot of people, the day they were hired was the last day anybody told them Continue reading "Flatline"