On the morning of November 9, 2016, I walked out of my front door into a world I wasn’t sure I’d recognize. It was the warmest November ever, but with just enough nip to the air to remind us it was still November after all. The sky was creamy blue, the air exhilarating, with a […]
Read moreJohn Milton, the morning after.
Wednesday, November 9, 2016: 7:30 a.m. I have a lot of thoughts but for now, as a college professor, will confine myself to this: What happens now to education, in a country where everyone claims to value it but our new president-elect, and those who voted for him, have just rejected its actual results? I’m […]
Read moreThe idiot box.
All sin starts from the assumption that my false self, the self that exists only in my own egocentric desires, is the fundamental reality of life to which everything else in the universe is ordered… And I wind experiences around myself and cover myself with pleasures and glory like bandages in order to make myself […]
Read moreEntertaining angels, unawares.
I took my late grandmother’s nativity scene out early today. It’s white ceramic that looks like china: three kings, a shepherd, Holy Family, and two sheep. This could have been a graceful afternoon project I imagine my grandmother doing with her medical auxiliary or book club lady friends, her elegant fingers smoothing the glaze, placing […]
Read moreThe angels of Bread Loaf.
All around me in the half-light of thirty thousand feet, people abandon themselves to sleep: mouths slack as babies’, heads lolled back. A brown-skinned woman in a pale turban dozes under an airline blanket that in this light is startling persimmon-gold. A child curls across two seats, pink headphones clamped against her silky hair. My […]
Read moreDandelion wars.
It’s that time again: the latest round of the anti-weed, lawn-spraying wars. In our town, this plays out not only in individual lawns but on the campus of our college, which routinely comes under fire from lots in the community and some on the faculty for its annual spraying (usually around Memorial Day.) I am […]
Read moreThe second disruptor: an open letter to our college’s president on the “digitization of learning.”
September 30, 2013 An Open Letter to Our College President on the Digitization of Learning From The Cheapskate Intellectual Dear President, Thank you for being a thoughtful leader and serious colleague who has invited us to wrestle with the challenges and opportunities facing us and all other colleges these days. At your State of the […]
Read moreResilience.
Nine o’clock after my evening writing class in the community arts center and I’m coasting on my bike through the river bottoms, on my way home. Not a sound but tire-slurp in mud, animals, birds. Mist rises from the water. A rustle in the grass becomes a garter snake, a long stripe with a darker […]
Read moreMOOCs in Citizenville.
What happens when you use technology to “serve people” by taking people and their physical presence in particular places – and thus their sense of responsibility and relationship to one another and to that place – out of the picture entirely? One result is MOOCs, or “Massively Open Online Courses,” packages of videotaped lectures and […]
Read moreAfter the election, the way forward.
Today a friend of mine, an African-American woman and PhD candidate, writes: “I tested a subject today whose very existence is the opposite of mine. He is an older (near octogenarian), White Republican, and I am…not. But during the session, we spoke respectfully of our political differences. Though there were the inevitable moments of awkward […]
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