“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived [….] Our life is frittered away by detail […] Simplify, simplify.” […]
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 moreIn the country of frac-sand mining.
Yesterday, I took an all-day bus tour (sponsored by and including many Allamakee County Protectors) to see frac-sand mining up close in Trempeleau and Chippewa Counties, Wisconsin. In our group were filmmakers, writers, lawyers, water-quality specialists, Winneshiek County Protectors, journalists, farmers, geologists, a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation, a long-distance hiker, and ordinary citizens from […]
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 moreA terrible fantasy.
He dressed himself in camoflage. Amid the wordless shock and horror and grief, that’s a detail that sticks. He dressed himself in camoflage and gathered his weapons — including Sig Sauer and Glock handguns and a Bushmaster .223 M4 carbine, purchased legally — and went to an elementary school. There he killed twenty children under […]
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 […]
Read moreCommon ground: politics, water, and life.
Checking my email on what is going to be my last full morning in Alabama for a while, I found some very troubling news: fracking may be coming to our beautiful little corner of northeast Iowa. You might say it’s technically not fracking, since the proposed mine in Allamakee County would be for what’s called […]
Read moreMoving home: (re)thinking the organic South.
Sometimes I think “home” in my mobile life has become less a specific place than a kind of place where certain conditions obtain — the sense of comfort, practicality, and freedom that comes from being able to move around on foot and bike as well as car; the ability to eat healthy food that didn’t […]
Read moreGardening in public.
Our little town’s gardening group has been buzzing after two of our members — following a neighbor’s anonymous complaint — were notified recently that they might be in violation of a city ordinance against gardening in the “boulevard,” the strip of grass between sidewalk and curb in front of most houses. The issue: our members’ […]
Read moreRoots.
This stem of Hibiscus mutabilis, a.k.a. Confederate rose, flourishes in a Mason jar on my kitchen counter, ready for repotting. Its mother plant, originally a cutting from my parents’ yard in Alabama, is resprouting too. Last summer I planted a cutting like this in my yard to see whether, as the plant encyclopedia promised, it […]
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