This weekend I read Tara Westover’s new memoir Educated in one sitting.
Read moreThe arts, for real.
So. They want to cut the arts. Just something else for the talking heads to get worked up about. Just another aspect of someone else’s lifestyle luxuries you’re being expected to support. Except it’s not. You’re driving home at the end of the day, punching the seek button because you are tired of the commercials, […]
Read moreMoving the house.
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 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 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 triggering town: some thoughts on pedagogy, warnings, and experience.
Sitting in my backyard on the first warm day of the year, I’m reading my first-year college students’ last papers: personal reflections on Plato’s “The Allegory of the Cave” and its application to education as they want to continue to experience it. Emphasis on experience. One after another, they return to Plato’s central image: a […]
Read more“Learn, little cousin:” Seeing with Signorelli.
Something about Christmas mixes emotion and memory like no other time. This is the hinge of the year, the liminal space where we could step one way or another way, where we can and can’t see what’s coming. Where we cannot avoid thinking about our relationship to time and how we perceive the world as […]
Read moreTouching through the glass: animals, people, reality.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fbahS7VSFs&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&version=3] Young parents laugh nervously as they film their child, whom they have placed up against the glass of a lioness’s cage in a zoo. Behind the glass, the lioness is deadly serious: she scratches and bites the barrier separating her from one good bite of food. Incredibly, the father giggles, “Say hi, kitty, kitty.” […]
Read moreAfoot in the world.
Back on the bike for a big day of riding today, the first in too long a time, under a sky so blue it hurt to look at it. This was the kind of sunny, windy April day that has you taking your fleece jacket off, then putting it on again, over and over. On […]
Read moreA world safe for children — really.
In Florida, an unarmed boy with dark brown skin, walking to a convenience store for some candy, is shot by a jittery, self-styled “neighborhood watch” vigilante. The reasoning of the white shooter and his supporters — who erupt all over the Internet and the political sphere, with astonishing malice and vindictiveness — is dismally transparent. […]
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