beauty and the real

adapted from my sent folder to a friend and fellow traveler:

another half-built cathedral

As with Chesterton before her and Thomas Merton after her, [Dorothy] Day’s ideas were never refuted, just misrepresented, overplayed, and then left for dead in media res, another half-built cathedral,...

ruling out flippancy

I wrote this summer about the need for the prescriptive disciplines in any university, but Brad East says it so much better:

anathema

Steven Scrawls:

the small path

Dougald Hine:

better than anything

Matthew Crawford reports on attending a recent symposium about social life and AI:

our choices overflow the container

The always-probing Mandy Brown muses on some findings about human behavior as it meets technology in The Ordinal Society. Brown picks up the book’s data on social media that complicates...

everyday imperfection, ordinary suffering

I’ve been teaching disability studies and design for more than a decade, and Freddie DeBoer is right to repeatedly sound the alarm about the warped cultural incentives for questionable disability...

not in a purely immanent frame

Elizabeth Oldfield:

the how and the why, part 5

This is the last in my series on higher education, which I’ll also summarize in a newsletter. (Update: newsletter here.) If you’re interested:

credential agnostic

Our 18 year old son, Graham, who has Down syndrome, just completed a summer working in our city’s youth employment program. His placement was as a classroom aide in our...

this keeps happening

I’ll be minding my own business, reading something — like now, Michael Crummey’s The Adversary — and some character will quote a line and indicate that it’s from the Bible....

the how and the why, part 4

We’ve talked about formation, readiness, and prescriptive disciplines. Today I want to talk about spaces for learning.

real autonomy

N.S. Lyons:

the how and the why, part 3

Part 1 and Part 2 in this series.

the how and the why, part 2

So we’ve looked at formation and freedom in the college decision process. I want to examine next the framework of readiness in higher education to get at formation in another...

not conferring a favor

“[St. John Chrysostom] was particularly sensitive to the fragility of the stranger’s identity — a fragility resulting from his or her dependence on others. In a number of homilies, he...

group dynamics

I guess three’s a pattern, right? I just finished William Egginton’s The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality and loved it so much. A...

the how and the why

This is likely to be the first in a series of meditations on the college decision-making process. My two younger kids are embarking on the process now, so I’m thinking...

public service

Long ago I heard an opinion editor for a major newspaper say he was looking for the most aggressive version of the truth in the pieces he runs. So: the...

against the sterner setbacks

Reverence for beautiful buildings does not seem a high ambition on which to pin our hopes for happiness, at least when compared with the results we might associate with untying...

twofold

Bear with me here, y’all — most secular humanists I know read about the Uncertainty Principle and think, well, sure. This is the pinnacle of wisdom, they say: to hold all...

an unconditioned whole

I am loving William Egginton’s The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality, not least because I just finished making a film that’s partly about...

not that kind of constraint

I see some folks misunderstand my “limiting virtues” meditation as a version of “constraints help designers make creative choices.” It’s instructive, I guess, to see — either I didn’t explore...

born of water

Water in the Writ achieves a different, more mysterious kind of sense at a moment in John’s Gospel where Nicodemus the Pharisee sneaks away from the Sanhedrin to talk with...

right?

I have often wondered about “right?,” the verbal tic many of us use (including me!) as filler, buffer, connective tissue in our speech. Jordan Castro is unsparing in his diagnostics:...

popular accounts

Carter Snead, in a recent senate testimony:

not equating reality with thinghood

Abraham Joshua Heschel, cited in the “Time” chapter of Iain McGilChrist’s The Matter With Things:

beyond the Standard Critique of Technology

Last week I spoke to a cohort of academics at a big public university, most of them engineers, who are together planning a big grant proposal for making ethical technologies....

an annoying slog without much drama

Matt Yglesias:

speaking of flourishing

Paul Griffiths:

profound-other-fascination

Zadie Smith:

the machine that makes the land pay

Michael Sorkin, in his masterful essay built of bits and pieces in alphabetical form called “Skyscrapers from A to Z,” an entry on architect Cass Gilbert’s Woolworth Building called “Cathedral...

a bulldozer for every fence

N.S. Lyons:

rises to the level of tragedy

Phil Christman on Marilynne Robinson:

does not hold

Becca Rothfeld, in her forthcoming book of essays:

a pull and a push

In the last two years, I’ve completed a number of short writing projects — a couple of chapters or essays for books (one out this year, and another two coming...

not the submission you're thinking of

Somewhere I heard this aphorism, I emailed to my friend recently: something like, “submission to God makes one less submissive to other people.” Yes, my friend said — it’s Christopher...

pluralism, redux

Danielle Allen, who sat on Harvard’s 2018 Presidential Taskforce on Inclusion and Belonging, in today’s Washington Post:

words for stuff everywhere

My new newsletter has an exercise I do with students on describing the built world. That’s here. But then someone asked me about using these lists in class, and it...

quieted

My father spent his working life as a small-town doctor in Arkansas, and the longest period of it in a clinic that was first owner-operated by the physicians themselves, and...

a studio

public-facing

"less surfacy"

Phil Christman:

new stuff

A couple of updates: 1) My reported piece on a radically imaginative partnership between professional artists and adults in a day center outside Edinburgh is up at Harper’s now, and...

loyalty and limits

I got off social media at the end of 2020 for lots of reasons, and one of them was a wish to focus my friendship efforts more intentionally on fewer...

the weight of liberty

Ursula LeGuin, near the end of The Tombs of Atuan:

writing about the built world

I’m teaching a course for graduate students in design next spring called Writing About the Built World. It’s got an architecture focus, but I’ll be including design criticism and tech...

a short film

I’ve got a short film in the making! A woodshop, an architect, the history of machines, and the art of making one-armed tools. With my partner in life and (increasingly,...

the last lesson

Dr. Von Haller, in Robertson Davies’s The Manticore:

forms of flattening

Amen to Jason Bailey on the inherent diminishment baked into the word “content”, flattening all artistic work and social media uploads and sponsored blog posts into the same banal and...

a meticulous account

It’s always a good day when the Paris Review arrives, because I’ll read their interviews with anyone. Here’s Robert Glück:

an enabling form of limit

Steve Connor, in A Philosophy of Sport:

less well rehearsed

— The song that you save, even hide from yourself and your audio landscape, so that you won’t hear it too often and therefore preserve the direct heat-and-light connection to...

his love of truth

Derek Parfit, with an unexpected near-short-story parked right at the top of his acknowledgements in Reasons and Persons:

inverted

Justin E. H. Smith:

birth, against cynical realism

Thank goodness for Jennifer Banks’s very timely Natality: Toward a Philosophy of Birth. I’ll be using at least its introduction in my course readings this fall:

shearing layers and finishing sentences

Useful to see Jarrett Fuller’s meditation on architect Frank Duffy’s “shearing layers” to understand what’s happening in architecture:

not a philosophy of architecture

My Design Tactics and the Human Body course will look at the assisted body over the life span, and I’m trying to articulate some organizing principles that we can use...

ugliness shouts loudest

Rachel Kushner in the new Harper’s:

design tactics: a new course

This fall I’m starting my new job at at Northeastern, and I’ll be teaching one of the “Design Tactics” seminars for students in architecture. Design Tactics can be organized around...

people need codes

Christine Emba is a national treasure:

positive gossipers

Amanda Ripley:

permanent relief

Dhananjay Jagannathan:

the fan communes with the game

Ethan Strauss:

to have the last word

Adam Shatz, on his collected essay collection called Writers and Missionaries: Essays on the Radical Imagination:

the limits of principlism

I used the term “idealism” together with modesty, but it’s not really idealism that’s called for in Curlin and Tollefsen’s The Way of Medicine. They are instead trying to push...

a hand on everybody's shoulder

James Conaway remembers old-school journalism life in New Orleans, including the observational aside that “booze has a hand on everybody’s shoulder in this city,” and I’m realizing what an apt...

idealism and modesty

Farr Curlin and Christopher Tollefsen:

the tent and the estuary

You work in inclusive design? Ah yes, ok, you say, so — what you inclusive designers want is a world built in ways that connect more people to the social...

dimension change

Last night I re-read a big magazine piece I’m working on, but this time I read it on my phone. (Normally I print it out and read it aloud, the...

ways you could remake an engineering school

— Everyone gets a double major: engineering and history. That’s it. That’s all we offer. There are some required history survey courses that you take in a sequence, and then...

state of exception

I found this conversation between Agnes Callard and Elizabeth Bruenig instructive. It’s on the nature and difficulty of forgiveness. Bruenig is spending a lot of her journalistic energy on the...

he knew he'd be welcome

Ted Hazdi-Antich with good news:

sloppy economy

Just re-read Lorrie Moore’s Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? Twenty years after my first read, it still holds up. And then some. Not even 200 pages. Possibly a perfect...

against descriptive projects

Becca Rothfeld, on her hiatus from academic philosophy while she joins WaPo as book critic:

an accounting

from the almost-sent files:

teens and social

Thank goodness Jonathan Haidt, Jean Twenge, and others are continuing to sound the alarm about social media and teens. My hope is that their ever-growing document of good studies will...

birthing

Leah Libresco Sargeant points to this passage on birthing in Kristin Lavransdatter:

judging

A much-needed close analysis of the actual records of old and new Supreme Court judges to counter all the sweeping certainty about who’ll do what. I have long felt that...

we're saving you a seat

I just suggested that my institution read Amanda Ripley’s book High Conflict as our campus read next year. Here’s an excerpt from her conversation on On Being that was profound...

he laughed again

By some strange serendipity, I happen to be reading the Lord of the Rings books for the first time, and I’m reading them alongside Adam Roberts, who is in conversation...

20 or 30 years

Cal Newport:

holding a view

Zena Hitz:

in praise of re-reading

My friend Lisa Brawley, a longtime professor and now dean at Vassar, told me she often bases her final course assignments around re-reading a text, as opposed to introducing a...

reframing, redux

Yesterday Alan saw my post about making art, not arguments and had this to say:

art, not argument

I majored in painting and minored in philosophy in college, which is a pretty good index of how my interests have been ordered for the last quarter century (or maybe...

a man may do both

My 12-year-old and I are now deep into The Two Towers. It’s a first reading of Tolkien for me! So, I know many of you will find this passage old...

without teaching

“He teaches without teaching, by simply enjoying his life,” Roberto Conlazo said.

solutions journalism

If, like me, you’re interested in helping students understand a framework of critique and repair, you might point them to the Solutions Journalism Network, which tracks and encourages the practice...

there is no contradiction

From the BBC:

education is engineering

My friend John Summers in the Boston Globe:

criticism as tribute

Ronald Ferguson’s recent tribute to Glenn Loury is an exemplar of beautifully specific criticism (and at a conference in Loury’s honor, no less), and Loury recognizes it as such:

milestone

Next April I’ll turn fifty and I’m…starting over? Have the odd sensation that I’ve learned nothing at all in adulthood? Have perhaps been sleepwalking through? It’s a weird place to...

no matter what the global temperature

I re-read Wen Stephenson’s review of William Vollman’s Carbon Ideologies every six months or so, so I’m re-upping it here. It’s the best example of a book review: equal parts...

to open a way

It is true that the classic origins of the doctrine of virtue later made Christian critics suspicious of it. They warily regarded it as too philosophical and not Scriptural enough....

is history history?

I thought this piece by David Frum was thoroughly reported and patiently considered:

two kinds of learning

James Baldwin, with the stone-cold perennial observation in The Fire Next Time:

introducing the sketch model podcast

I spent much of last year conceiving, creating, and producing a six-part audio series on STEM and the humanities: using the engineering classroom as a launching point for looking at...

prosthetics attached to people

I wrote a short piece for Art In America’s October issue, which has art and disability as its theme. It was a pleasure to get to write about Rebecca Horn’s...

small s, big s

[In thinking about advising a young professional woman on the verge of motherhood]:

life itself

Clare Coffey:

class credos

Finishing up my syllabi this week, and I’ve lightly adapted the terrific class credos from my likeminded colleague in disability + tech at McGill, Jonathan Sterne.

outdoors, specifically

In July, I went to Laity Lodge in the hill country of Texas—an incredibly raw and beautiful landscape—and twice I hiked to a swimming hole with my friend Claire. It...

building a PhD in ethical tech

Excerpt from my interview with Olin alum Emily Wang, who just finished her PhD in HCI at Northwestern and is now heading to Oberlin for her first job. Here she’s...

a rubric for taste and judgment

Alan posted a nice heuristic from W.H. Auden on Taste vs Judgment, which I think will be an excellent primer for the students in my nonfiction class this fall:

they don't miss it

Malcolm and I finished Lord of the Flies last month, after Animal Farm (brilliant, as though written yesterday) and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (what’s all the fuss about??)....

first contact

I’ve got several of Andy Crouch’s most recent books lined up to read. Getting them was a long wait from the bookstore, so I listened to some podcast interviews with...

a choir of soloists

Olga Tokarczuk, in her Nobel lecture:

incongruity, by degrees

Reinhold Niebuhr, “Humor and Faith”:

useful praise

One of many things I did on my sabbatical this past year is write fan letters to people whose work I admire. Sometimes they wrote back, and sometimes they didn’t,...

art is for seeing evil

Agnes Callard:

what greater condition

Phil Christman:

west coast math for romantics

Stephen Budiansky, in Journey to the End of Reason: A Life of Kurt Gödel:

a story above all

My son Malcolm, now 12, and I finished reading Orwell’s Animal Farm last night. Malcolm understood that the work is a political allegory—you know, kind of—and that the context of...

tour guides, persuaders, portraitists

This fall I’m teaching a craft of nonfiction class for the first time. It’s not a writing class, in the main, although students will do lots of response- and analysis-writing...

deference politics vs. constructive politics

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, from his chapter called “Being in the Room,” in Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else), bringing the most careful and deliberative...

acknowledging a hard problem

Of the many stunning scenes in Benjamin J. B. Lipscomb’s The Women Are Up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch Revolutionized Ethics, the one...

LinkedIn: a love song

O LinkedIn, never change! Your clunky blue-and-gray boxes suit you so well. Like bad office park furniture, you are nondescript, interchangeable, buttoned-up and formal by the water cooler. All this...

superabundance + suffering

Two things that are easy to overlook in Christianity and that I have so many questions about:

critical assent

When I was in grad school the first time around—for European history, long before design ever entered my consciousness—one of my classes was held in the UCLA faculty club lounge,...

every decline is surfable

Robin Sloan, folks, in this arresting prediction-slash-invitation:

two kinds of presentism

Alan Jacobs, being his usual polymathic, incisive self:

values clarification

James Mumford, on the therapeutic as a metaphysical paradigm:

taste, boldness, and grade-school math

Venkatesh Rao:

flesh becomes ensouled

What a long and tricky process, no? To meet someone, to get to know them, to want to possess the good for all time by passing it down with them,...

concentrate

She had become somewhat of a stranger to me in her time away, and just as a familiar place can seem smaller and clearer when you return there after an...

they get a double whammy

Leah Libresco Sargeant at Other Feminisms, referring to Stephanie Murray’s recent piece on Social Security in the Atlantic:

the idea you have

The idea you have when you’re young, to reach the edge of what can be done with your abilities and find out what might happen if you went past it?...

the opposite of jargon

The opposite of jargon is not “plain language.” It is sparkling lucidity. Too many academics translate from theory to the everyday by employing a kind of verbal shrug — they...

fiction: not all interiority

I’m focused on writing short stories this fall, and I loved coming across this strong-headed affirmation by Lydia Millet about the range of concerns in fiction, outside pure individualism and...

I hadn't thought of that before.

A couple of weeks ago I gave a talk for some young people, grades 6-12. When I finished speaking and the floor was opened for questions, one of the older...

with jer thorp at his book launch 5/5

I’ll be hosting Jer Thorp for the launch of his book Living with Data: A Citizen’s Guide to a Better Information Future on Wednesday, May 5, 7:30 pm eastern, hosted...

in media res

In a work of fiction, starting in the middle of things is a standard way to grab the reader’s attention. The action is more lively, the stakes become instantly vivid,...

the rattle 2/19

— This was a good conversation with Austin Kleon, and reminds me of how my friend Chad always says, half-serious: Curiosity is a holy thing.

the rattle 2/12

— “Your average city council is largely in a shape that people from the 19th century would recognize—maybe the 20th century if we’re being charitable—but really not in the right...

the rattle 2/5

— Since reading The Hobbit to the kids, I picked up Humphrey Carpenter’s biography of J.R.R. Tolkien. I keep thinking about this passage:

de-ing and re-ing

Often radical politics begins in critique—an effort to uncover the inconsistencies and limits of a doctrine, ideology, or orthodoxy. Intellectually, critique is undertaken for its own sake; politically, people undertake...

templates

The world wants our lives to fit into a few rigid narrative templates: how I conquered disability (and others can conquer their Bad Things!), how I adjusted to disability (and...

the rattle 1/29

— “Essentializing anything in order to contain or dismiss it is always a false friend to reform. For essentialism is extremism, extremism in its denial of plurality, possibility, ambiguity, double...

digital clean-up 2021

Some software changes I’ve made in the last few months:

the rattle 1/15

—I’ve been reading Tolkien’s The Hobbit to my ten year old and hearing JRRT speaking to late fall of 2020: “It was a weary journey, and a quiet and stealthy...

the rattle: 1/8/20

Gonna try out doing Friday posts called “The Rattle”—for the things that I’ve been reading that are still rattling around in my brain and heart since first encountering them. I’ve...

A.M.C.s, the wringing of hands, and the courage to seek first principles

I think a lot of people my age might remember reading about Paul Farmer for the first time in the New Yorker profile by Tracy Kidder in 2000. It contains...

thesis advice

I’ve been working with thesis students for some years now, at various institutions and in various roles. I’ve learned some things that may be worth collecting here, for folks who...

a living canon

Edward Said offers us some beginner’s words on the nature of the canon—what it is and what it isn’t—in his lectures from 2004, collected as Humanism and Democratic Criticism. A...

fact + imagination

This is the best description of the artfulness required in non-fiction writing that I’ve seen. From Francis Spufford, “True Stories,” in True Stories and Other Essays.

critique or repair? thoughts on the media lab director hire

[Part 1 is an opening set of thoughts about the affordances of critique and repair. Probably best to start there.]

critique or repair? a call to know your post

It’s a time for speaking out: for dismantling and rebuilding alike. 2020 is full of both critique and repair, in the rhetorical sense—and beyond, of course, but let’s stick with...

toward me, toward you

It’s often said that an essay is “taking an idea for a walk.” It’s a handy metaphor, whether for reader or for writer. It implies the unfolding of time, a...

origin stories

Speaking of Elizabeth McCracken, the new book has a number of disabled characters. McCracken names the condition of disability in ways that both matter and don’t matter for people making...

figments and fragments

In Elizabeth McCracken’s new novel, Bowlaway, there are main characters who abruptly leave and side characters who come rushing to the foreground. It’s got that speedy and jerky passage of...

people with the thing

Social problems like intellectual disability are in fact social constructions … built from a variety of materials: the desire to help and the need to control, infatuation with science and...

no one dares touch moral function anymore

NYT: Do books serve a moral function, in your view? How so? Jeanette Winterson: Do books serve a moral function? Absolutely. And it isn’t a question of subject matter, because...

variety and disorder

Digging through Astra Taylor’s new book and thinking a lot about the iterative process of living democracy:

What can a body do?

My book has a title! WHAT CAN A BODY DO? How We Meet the Built World. The chapters are organized by objects and environments—Limb, Chair, Room, Street, and more—and it...

there really are changes

Q: In your National Magazine award-winning New York Times Magazine article you chronicled the difficulties previously-incarcerated individuals face in overcoming societal stigma and getting a second chance. Do you see...

it me x a thousand

Jill Lepore’s essay, The Lingering of Loss, is packed to the gills with ideas, as is always the case with Lepore. But it was especially nice to have this experience...

public things

It’s thanks to my friend and (and Vassar colleague this past spring) Lisa Brawley that I’ve come across Bonnie Honig’s book, Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair. Honig has some of...

hornby on craft

I’m reading Nick Hornby’s collected book criticism from The Believer magazine called Ten Years in the Tub and lapping up every word. How is it that reviews from more than...

a need to answer

An artist, Pinsky writes, “needs not so much an audience, as to feel a need to answer, a promise to respond. The promise may be a contradiction, it may be...

crip technoscience for beginners

In the late 60s, a group of disabled students attending [UC Berkeley] for the first time lived together in the Cowell Infirmary where they began to form a disability culture...

poetry is not printout

Thanks to my friend Shane for the pointer to this review of Seamus Heaney’s The Redress of Poetry, which I just ordered. Here’s an excerpt from J.D. McClatchy’s review in...

we were all transformed

By the end we were all transformed. I know the experience changed me. Things you planned turn out to be meaningless, and that which you accumulated without knowing it becomes...

to grow in my wrongness

The work of a critic at one point was—and maybe still is—to imagine themself as a person who was certain enough to tell people what they should and shouldn’t be...

co-design and criticism

Here’s Victor Papanek in 1971 on the limits of co-design or “user testing” as it was commonly practiced in his day. It sounds so much like the present—from its location...

both too large and not large enough

Bess Williamson’s new book, Accessible America: A History of Disability and Design, is a beautifully concise and integrative text for any reader who wants to know both the origin stories...

not half-human hybrids

When I first read Vivian Sobchak’s essay called A Leg To Stand On: Prosthetics, Metaphor, and Materiality back in 2011, it was just the right thing at the right time:...

not an intrusion

There was a time, when I first found out I was pregnant with twins, that I saw only a state of conflict. When I looked at theater and parenthood, I...

they will come to us as products

The discussion of biotechnology often centers on ethical questions, like when, if ever, inheritable genetic modification might be permissible or even desirable. These questions matter, but the actual choices will...

practical, inventive

I wrote some words about how the digital public sphere operates in my practice for the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Lots of folks assume that the digital means a familiar set...

worldly space

Without a politically guaranteed public realm, freedom lacks the worldly space to make its appearance.

i thought you could think it through

I read this profile of Paul Chan ten years ago and I still think about it often:

speaking for and speaking against

When parents and others do speak about or for people with intellectual disabilities, we need to do so responsibly. For a start, that means surrendering rhetorical techniques that are crude...

sympathy and family

George Estreich’s opinion piece on Chinese scientist He Juankui’s claim to have produced the first genetically edited babies does a beautiful job of taking apart the narratives that tend to...

no list could hold

And no list could hold what I wanted, for what I wanted was every last thing, every layer of speech and thought, stroke of light on bark or walls, every...

thousands

“So do you really believe that in the future we’re going to have the kind of trouble you write about in your books?” a student asked me as I was...

"how's the writing going?"

Terrified of being plodding. Terrified of being sentimental. Terrified of not remembering to cite every source I think I should, though some inadvertent omission, despite all earnest attempts, is inevitable....

not a contrarian

From this series of questions to Zadie Smith comes Teju Cole’s question:

knowing the present

And speaking of history: I just rewatched my friend Anab Jain’s talk at PopTech from a few years ago, where she cites this passage from Lebbeus Woods:

history is contingency

In the early 2000s, I was in graduate school for the first time around, in the History department at UCLA. During a holiday break, one of my very smart relatives...

no replacement parts for this

So few people in my design-and-disability networks will read this devastating piece by Rachel Aviv for the New Yorker about the ways race compounds the mistreatment and neglect of children...

stop denigrating your early work

I came across this conversation between Porochista Khakpour and Salman Rushdie last year, and the character of this exchange about Rushdie’s first novel stayed with me:

and speaking of the unmarked default

Speaking of the unmarked default, this new profile of Rei Kawakubo has some interesting complexities to consider:

quirky

[T]o call Comey’s fashion “quirky” is less a description than an evasion. “It’s so rude, ‘quirky,’ ” she tells me over dinner at La Mercerie, the busy café at Roman...

rethinking table fellowship

Earlier this year, I read Sunaura Taylor’s book, Beasts of Burden—wolfed it down, as it were, in a couple of days. It’s full of excellent analysis all around, linking together...

a drop of blood in it

An acquaintance of mine, actor and theater director, likes to say that a good work of art has a drop of blood in it. And what I think he means...

form giver

I loved this conversation between Jarrett Fuller and Robin Sloan on Scratching the Surface, Jarrett’s podcast about design + writing and adjacent topics. Robin is an ideal guest there because...

marked

Hear me out on this—I introduced my ten-year-old daughter to Legally Blonde recently. I wasn’t sure how it would go over, and I get it if you object to the...

domus

Worldwide, wheat covers 870,000 square miles of the globe’s surface, almost ten times the size of Britain. How did this grass turn from insignificant to ubiquitous? Wheat did it by...

more-than-oneness

Israeli scholar Avivah Gottleib Zornberg [outlines] her own interpretation of the creation story. Pointing to the first day of creation in the biblical version, when God “separated the light from...

encumbered with survivals

“In thought as in life, the only surpassings we know are concrete, partial, encumbered with survivals, saddled with deficits.”

an unbodied abstraction

Olga Rachello has a perceptive review of Mark O’Connell’s To Be A Machine: Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death in the winter ‘18...

the language of newness

It’s now been 25 years since I first read Walter Brueggemann’s The Prophetic Imagination in a theology class. I still have my original copy, from the era when I first...

conflict/change

From a new collection of interviews between Ursula LeGuin and David Naimon called Conversations on Writing:

contagion and quality of life

From the Kansas City Star:

residency re-imagined

I recently returned from round two of my four-week residency at the Carey Institute for Global Good. I was a Logan Non-fiction Fellow, working in the company of journalists, documentary...

art at work: unselfing, donor figures, opiated adjacency

I’ve been revisiting Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just, which I first encountered many years ago via Zadie Smith’s novel inspired by it, called On Beauty. The first part...

we stood saying I

Adrienne Rich’s “In Those Years,” which I came across today while re-reading some works of Maxine Greene, the late philosopher who wrote so well about the arts, ethics, and the...

they took us by surprise

More from Matthew Zapruder’s Why Poetry, which I have half a mind to give to my engineering students who will graduate in a couple of weeks:

wordless

Perhaps there is no social joinery more magical than the shared spotting of a heron, its legs shin-deep in the banks of the river that runs through the city, all...

openings and closures

One of the themes of my book is about how all states of the body and its gear make for what I’m calling openings and closures in a life—openings and...

"everything's a prosthesis"

One of the tricky things about writing on design and disability is trying to represent multiple truths: that 1) yes, the experience of using what might be called prosthetic tools...

the denial of time

Another bit in my fledgling collection of words that capture “one of the great under-narrated pleasures of living: long-term fidelity and love.” This is just a passing glimpse caught in...

nothing compares?

I always chafe at the notion that once a professional becomes a parent, all other ambitions fall a distant second to the new identity of caregiving. It’s not that I...

april is the cruelest month

Those of us on the east coast are starting April with snow and wind and rain, the stuff of deep winter. We lie in wait. So it was a particularly...

two halves for the writer

I think a lot about this passage from an old Paris Review interview with John Updike:

a pedagogy for the art of changing your mind

On my morning run, I was dreaming up an exercise for undergraduates in the art of changing one’s mind, as an early-semester experience that would ready them for a course...

stop literalizing the design process

This is your semi-regular reminder that collaborative, ethical design is not synonymous with customer service, taking orders from “users,” retail-style. It’s synthesizing and recombining ideas from insights gained by deeply...

ties and insight

Jill Lepore on the writing of Rachel Carson, in the new New Yorker:

not in any particular order, and not exactly a gospel, but

Some things the young people in your life might need to hear:

the art you cannot avoid

The profession of architecture critic is a small one, and not one scheduled for growth, but the ability to write about architecture—either as a language or a stage—is relevant to...

say instead

Reader, when you have spent some time in the presence of someone using a wheelchair, or flapping their hands, or wielding a cane, or bearing up under a cloud of...

the elasticity of grief

Twenty or so years ago, I was casual acquaintances with a woman who, in the space of a year, lost one of her three children to an accident and her...

the least enlargement of ideas

From Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1838 lecture on nonviolent resistance, entitled “War.” I got this from Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows, about which more to come. But it’s this notion...

a rat is killed, a man broken, a horse splashes

It’s hard not to read James Scott’s Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed without thinking about the hubris, the homogenizing effects, the...

crip time is time travel

From Ellen Samuels, “Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time,”:

a cutting of chai

alexa / snips

Sometime in the past year my son, nearly 12 and has Down syndrome, got to play with Alexa at a friend’s house. I only knew this once I went to...

love's austere and lonely offices

I went to hear Matthew Zapruder and Alex Zapruder at the Houghton Library last week, both of whom were interviewed by Michael Downing—and what a terrific conversation, about language, memory,...

sycamore key

—what is she to him, after all? He cannot settle his mind. He does not miss her, since she seems so insistently present, in the yellow lichen wrapping the bare...

the performing of a very complicated act

John Chris Jones’s 1992 book, Design Methods has a selected historical list of the definitions for design work. Jones offers us these, gathered from the era just after the 20th...

on a cloud

Gizmodo has a story on the last remaining users of the iron lung—a 1950’s technology that forces the human body to breathe, used by some who contracted polio in that...

grad school advice

I have a longer post in me about this, but for now, adapted from my sent folder:

available in response

Rob Giampietro’s Lined and Unlined had this excerpt from Lawrence Weschler’s terrific book on the artist Robert Irwin, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, way back...

math melodrama

My colleague Oscar Mur-Miranda has been kind enough to walk me through some basics of higher mathematics in the last couple of years: the conics especially, as I try to...

building

Jarrett Fuller has an excerpt from an interview with Dan Hill here, but it’s this idea from Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn that grabbed me the most:

common language

I’ve spent the last 72 hours in Montreal and in southern Belgium. In these places, every encounter starts with the question of which language we’ll proceed to speak, and always...

grief, rage

“What was this? Not grief. Grief she knew. Grief was the stepsibling they’d grown up with, unwanted and inevitable. Grief the amniotic fluid of their lives. Grief she could look...

a reminder to sponsor

Autumn 2017 seems to be as good a time as any to remind you: there’s a difference between mentoring and sponsoring women and their work. This is for men and...

reminiscence of being a woman

that lego aesthetic

I had to sit through the latest LEGO Ninjago movie recently: a treat for two of my children but not for me. The story elements were hopelessly thin, but I...

unguarded

Couldn’t help but love coming across novelist Jim Harrison’s saying that he’d “rather give full vent to all human loves and disappointments, and take a chance on being corny, than...

summoning a public

Lisa Brawley recently pointed me to Corey Robin’s 2016 essay, How Intellectuals Create a Public. I can’t believe I didn’t see it before now, because it names something so vital...

designer as

ninety percent of the job

I loved this interview with Rory Hyde:

the uses of history

“A culture comprises unfinished intellectual and emotional journeyings, expeditions now abandoned but known to us in the tattered maps left behind by the explorers; it is composed of light-hearted adventures,...

don't look

While reading to my three children at night, my youngest, age 7, will often be lolling in bed while I narrate. Or maybe he’ll be fiddling with Legos or other...

to grow and cook a message

“Meaning is not what you start out with but what you end up with. Control, coherence, and knowing your mind are not what you start out with but what you...

all grown up

“I always reel for a few days after I witness someone’s personal truth. I walk around feeling like I’m wearing their essence like a tight sweater. With Greta, it’s a...

muybridge, animal locomotion

the past is another country (again)

From Bill McKibben’s introduction to the 2010 reissue of E. F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered:

avoiding the high-brow freak show

Oliver Sacks is probably the only author many people have read about disability at length. Sacks wrote many books with such a keen eye for description and also a literate,...

seeing-as, and free indirect style

Michael Berube’s book, Life As We Know It, was an absolute lifesaver for me after my eldest son, Graham, was born with Down syndrome in 2006. I was looking in...

under-narrated

The last couple of years have been a busy season for weddings in my immediate circles. These seasons come and go, and I’m always thrilled when they come back around....

radically careful, or carefully radical

I’m working on a book in earnest now, and for that I’m getting caught up on my woefully patchy knowledge of design history. The last bunch of years have been...

a walrus on the beach

Lawrence Weschler in the edited collection called The New New Journalism:

better citizens

“In 2006, the municipal president of Neza, a tough area of two million people on the easter edge of Mexico City, decided that the members of his police force needed...

the invisible editor

Jill Lepore talks about translating academic work for wider audiences, and more over at Public Books.

something to say

Last year I read—inhaled, really—the newest novel from Ann Patchett, Commonwealth. I went deep into interviews with Patchett afterwards, including this great conversation on the Lit Up podcast, from whence...

the moon and the tide

Leslie Jamison has one of many essays in the new collection on writers and money, Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living. It’s a good one in...

rip edith ackermann

Everyone knows 2016 was just one big heartbreak of loss after another—so many brilliant and creative people who died in those 12 months. These days I’m thinking a lot about...

an introduction to disability studies for engineers

I'm sitting on the thesis committee for a graduate student in biomechatronics—a PhD project that will be entirely technical. This student reached out to me to ask about placing engineering...

ramps in seoul

There's much more detail to come on this, but you can see here some images from Slope : Intercept's most recent iteration, a collaboration with dancer Alice Sheppard. MediaCity Seoul...

academic structure and safe spaces

Lots to think about in this piece by Henry Farrell over at Crooked Timber:

uproot

“When you are not the person for whom a piece of technology is ‘user-friendly,’ you experience its limitations at a visceral level, so deep-seated that it can often feel as...

introducing a plus a

Finally live: aplusa.org! A + A is the Adaptation and Ability Group, my lab at Olin College. It's the first of a three-in-one site designed to keep distinct the work...

my first commencement speech

Readers, there's a brand new site coming soon: a 3-part site, with lots of overdue documentation of new work, my lab, teaching, writing. The featured image is from a collaboration...

3, 2, 1 at Eyeo

I'm so pleased my talk at Eyeo is now online, with closed captions available, and another version with audio description. Eyeo folks are super to work with, and I'm grateful...

carmen papalia at olin, 9/25-29, and more collaborations

This fall's version of Investigating Normal will include several dream collaborators: Lacy Gillotti of NEADS, a service dog training organization, Alex Geller of Fathom Info, with whom we'll be exploring disability and...

a new icon site

Coming soon: a new home and new direction for the Accessible Icon Project. Next week! Thanks to a bunch of you for the exhortations we've needed to write more clearly...

update: alterpodium

There's a full report coming about students' work on the alterpodium, along with images of the final prototype (in carbon fiber!), but I'm just sharing with you this gif so you...

corporeal anticipation

For a while I was running posts on a separate personal site, but I stopped and closed it down some time ago. Abler will be my only house for now....

exoskel urban climber

The Exoskel Urban Climber caught my eye, via @bldgblog. It's another story in military/defense gear that has all kinds of potential prosthetic applications—a strap-on set of shin guards that have...

beyond alt-text: the new "chief accessibility officer"

In the last 2 years, at least four big tech companies have created positions in accessible technology — a move that seems to signal a serious commitment to making products and services...

anna schuleit's "bloom"

Anna Schuleit's Bloom is one of my long-held favorite installation works, and it's a perfect Abler project. So why haven't I featured it before now? It was staged at the...

open style lab

This past summer I was a mentor and speaker for a brand new pilot program at MIT, called Open Style Lab. It was a 10-week program for students in engineering,...

an alterpodium (design for one series)

This post marks the first announcement of a new series of projects that I'm hoping students will join me in producing at Olin College: a Design for One series of objects, radically tailored...

disability / visibility

2015 marks the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, and there are a number of efforts underway to publicly acknowledge that milestone: its importance and its still-needed work...

unintended consequences

  Poking around online for a good interview with Natalie Jeremijenko, I came across her unusual deployment of the term "unintended consequences," which is so often associated with negative byproducts. As ever,...

guiding principles for an adaptive technology working group

I've been thinking about the studio/lab/workshop environment I want to foster at Olin. So herewith a manifesto, or a set of guiding principles, for young engineers and designers working critically, reflexively,...

slope : intercept in toronto

Next Thursday and Friday, August 14 and 15, I'll be back in Toronto with Interaccess and the Inclusive Design Research Centre, to give a lecture and run a workshop and...

manipulate the social web all by yourself

  Facebook's experimentation with its users' feeds was a big story this summer. And last week, tech writer Tim Carmody pointed to the curiously less-scandalous news that online dating site OKCupid...

the school for poetic computation: assistive tech, fall 2014

I've been following the work of the School for Poetic Computation, for some time now. What an irresistible name! And one of its founders, Jen Lowe, wrote this absolutely beautiful...

reprise

I read through some of the series of essays that set up the original mission of Abler, and I was struck again by the so-much-with-so-little that's packed into this paragraph...

adaptive hacks: a cane meets a bike

Liz Jackson writes about her experience as a cane user, among other things, on her blog: The Girl With the Purple Cane. She pointed me to this particularly strong post about...

studio : lab : workshop

I'm happy to be joining Olin College next year, as a professor of design. Olin is an engineering school, all undergraduate, only 12 years old, with an enrollment of 350...

speaking exchange

I'm at a conference on aging and design, hosted by the Institute For the Future's Health Horizons research group. It's just beginning, but I already have a favorite project I...

empathy and education

Via the new Harper's, I picked up Leslie Jamison's The Empathy Exams—a series of essays including the opening piece of the same name, which is partly about Jamison's job experience...

knitting bones with fact and fiction: a conversation with design culture lab's anne galloway

The Design Culture Lab at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand is run by Dr. Anne Galloway, an academic researcher whose inquiry takes the form of texts and photographic documentation,...

power of ideas and some updates

I'm happy to be included in the May issue of Boston Magazine, themed around the Power of Ideas. I've also had some great talks with various assistive tech journalists for stories and...

supporting publics

I've been reading Shannon Jackson's Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics, a much needed discussion of social arts practice, new genre public arts, or whatever you want to call such hybrid forms of...

play, criticality, access

I'll be at the University of Toronto next Monday night, speaking on The Edited City: Criticality, Access, Play. The history of science, skateboarding culture, the politics of amateurship, and the...

walking social

The Firefly Upsee is a walking baby carrier, designed to give the experience of ambulation to children who have motor delays or mobility restrictions. It brings the child upright, anchored closely to...

wearable workarounds for "defensive architecture"

Artist and researcher Sarah Ross's Archisuits are a hilarious and pointed look at soft bodies in hard spaces—all the ways the built environment is a mismatch for human needs. At times, the...

against re-branding; against placebo politics

The Accessible Icon Project was the subject of the most recent episode of 99% Invisible, a podcast about overlooked design and architecture. I spoke at length to the super smart...

craft and code and point-of-view

I'm teaching Next Generation Wearables at RISD this spring; it's being formed as we go, so it's harder to share here than Investigating Normal. I'll report as I can. But...

the collection

  The Accessible Icon Project really is part of the permanent collection at MOMA! I'm still stunned. I'll be heading down to New York to see it in an upcoming...

getting up

Tomorrow night, I'll be a panelist for a screening and discussion of Getting Up, one of the films being shown at the ReelAbilities festival here in Boston. The film covers...

backless, bicycles

I love how the Sartorialist just presents this without comment—tags are "backless" and "bicycles." A gorgeous prosthetic limb is just part of the integrated whole.

inclined planes at nerd nite

I'll be speaking at Nerd Nite on Monday, January 27, all about the inclined plane—in utopian architecture, interstate freeways, for skateboarders and on Mars—as well as my ongoing project, Slope...

get your personal space: spike away

Industrial designer Siew Ming Cheng's "Spike Away" is your commuter-dream-come-true: a wearable way to guarantee you won't be up close and personal with the next person's breath and music and...

a suit of armor for your internal organs

German CGI design firm Viaframe imagined these sets of armature for a body's fleshy inner parts. A solid casement for your heart, lungs, or brain. They're an interesting thought-experiment around what's happening, research-wise, at...

sequencing and synecdoche

My latest piece for The Atlantic Tech is up, exploring the FDA's suspension of personal genomics company 23andMe, the death of Adrienne Asch, and understanding the promises and risks of...

pretty ramp machine

I talked to Tim Maly about my work, and especially my ongoing project about Galileo's inclined plane, Slope : Intercept. Here's an excerpt from the full article: Spend some time...

page one

No one is more surprised than me that this follow-up story made it to the very first page of the Boston Globe last Saturday. Here's the full story. The Accessible...

a video game with nothing to see

BlindSide is a video game with an entirely aural environment—nothing to see, only sound cues to navigate through space. The story is framed as a horror fantasy: a player wakes up...

more than "better technologies"

Rebecca Rosen, of the Atlantic Tech team, asked me to talk about Abler and my broader ideas about assistive technology, historical ideas about "normalcy," my new gig at Gizmodo, and...

no one wins? basketball from every height

Artist team Llobet-Pons Jasmina Llobet and Luis Fernandez Pons created this installation they call No One Wins: a basketball board with hoops at multiple heights. This is one of those charmingly...

taste map: synaesthesia and the tube

James Wannerton, head of the UK Synaesthesia Association, has completed his nearly 50 year project to map the London Tube: by its tastes. Wannerton has experienced lifelong synaesthesia—an involuntary union of...

introducing abler at gizmodo

I'm happy to report that Abler will now be syndicated as a channel at Gizmodo: abler.gizmodo.com. Below is the first post I wrote to introduce myself to the readership there....

the white cane as technology

My conversation with Georgina Kleege is up at the Atlantic. I loved doing this interview, and our subjects went satisfyingly wide in their range. Sara Hendren: Whenever I see someone...

jae rhim lee: furniture

Jae Rhim Lee is most well known for her Infinity Burial Project—a brilliant mix of mycology, environmental sustainability, and economic critique of the US funeral industry. It's one of my...

azra aksamija's nomadic mosque

Azra Aksamija's wearable mosque brings the condition of the sacred to the mobile city. Her nomadic design contains all the elements needed for proper worship, including a head covering and...

perkins school for the blind (investigating normal, week 3)

Investigating Normal spent its third week visiting the Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown, Massachusetts. Perkins is a famous and storied institution, with vast historical archives and a truly...

gianni renda's beer glass: drinking for the no longer young

Designer and researcher Gianni Renda has designed a beer glass that's age-friendly: it's got a grip-enhancing shape, eliminates condensation and features a no-slip base—a design that's subtly targeted for users with...

di mainstone's "human harp"

Di Mainstone made a human harp: prosthetic for playing the strands of a suspension bridge, structurally so like the strings on the instrument. The wearer dons the piece and attaches retractable...

the vayu vest (investigating normal, week 2)

In Week 2 of Investigating Normal, Brian Mullen, creator of the Vayu Vest, came to speak to students about his wearable deep pressure prosthetic.   The vest is designed to...

the lift ware spoon

A technology editor at The Atlantic asked me to comment for their story on the Lift Ware spoon, a piece of sensing cutlery that eliminates up to 70% of a user's...

investigating normal, week 1: thoughtless acts

Last week was Week One of my new course at RISD, Investigating Normal: Adaptive and Assistive Technologies. About half the students are Industrial Design students, grads and undergrads, and about...

all technology is assistive technology

From my post over at Medium: All Technology is Assistive Technology—6 dispositions for designers on disability: "Making a persistent, overt distinction about 'assistive tech' embodies the second-tier do-gooderism and banality that...

burton nitta's "algaculture symbiosis suit"

The remarkable design duo Michael Burton and Michiko Nitta have created this wearable for sustenance—the Algaculture Symbiosis Suit. As part of their "After Agri" project, the suit allows its wearer,...

suited for space

The traveling exhibition Suited for Space continues its tour around the country, now on view at the Smithsonian. Particularly striking are these x-ray photographs of space gear, exposing the inner workings...

two kinds of invisibility

George Estreich reports on his return from the recent National Down Syndrome Congress in Denver, where he notes "two kinds of invisibility" emerging in the news. The first has to...

on boundedness: faqs about the accessible icon

I'm interviewed in this NPR story on the Accessible Icon Project. It aired on All Things Considered on Sunday, and the response we've gotten has been, once again, overwhelmingly positive....

bodies at work

I just returned from back-to-back conferences, two wildly different from one another. Science FOO, in Silicon Valley, was first. It's a gathering of scientists from all fields, plus science journalists,...

cohen van balen's "phantom recorder"

Cohen Van Balen is a design partnership I've been admiring for some time. I'm only now posting one of their projects here—The Phantom Recorder : "The Phantom Recorder system projects...

life in the edited city: update

Update: This work now has a life of its own: the Accessible Icon Project, and we've been getting some super press coverage lately. See stories on FastCo, Print/Imprint, among others....

hiding in plain sight

Soon after I posted an image of my project Unknown Armature: Body Socks—that's another one, above—Duane McLemore pointed me to these "entoptic phenomena," William Hundley's photoset on Flickr: I have...

normal/abnormal in prague

  Along with a bunch of other artists, including several I already admire, my ongoing experimental work, Unknown Armature: Body Socks, and Slope: Intercept will be on view at DOX Centre for...

cane camera

  Anthony Ptak pointed me to this vintage cane camera—old school private-eye gear, from the 1920s, 30s, 40s. For covert spies of old, or for the collector.

3D printed fetuses: picturing the real?

After io9 posted this story about 3D printed sonogram technologies, allowing prospective parents who are blind or have low vision to experience their developing fetus, I got to talking with...

audiowear

Elasticbrand designers Arjen Noordeman and Christie Wright created this suite of sonic wearables. The series is inspired by idiophone instruments—those which make sound primarily through the instrument's vibration, without the...

user-adjustable, upcycled lower leg

Yoony Byun's prosthetic leg concept repurposes sneaker parts, making a user-adjustable, low-cost limb:   Byun had in mind the common injuries that happen in landmine encounters—lower leg amputations sustained in...

nyu lectures

I'll be at NYU next Thursday and Friday, April 11 and 12. Thursday's talk, "When Prosthetics Speak," is with the NYU Council for the Study of Disability—5:30 - 7 in...

an instrument for the sonification of everyday things

You might think of this project as a poetics of sensory substitution: swapping one capacity for another. There are a number of tools in development now that translate visual material...

strategies and tactics

I came across a succinct and probing summary of Michel de Certeau's ideas about strategies versus tactics in Tim Cresswell's On The Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World.  This comparison—and the...

3D printing inside the ear canal

From Wired Design: "Lantos Technologies, a small startup spun out of MIT, has created the first FDA-cleared digital ear-canal scanner. While that may seem wildly specific, and maybe a little gross, it could...

jennifer crupi's "unguarded gestures"

Jennifer Crupi is externalizing body language cues—some iconic, some more insidious—with wearable armature. Largely made with sleek aluminum parts, these tools recall a medical grammar of the early 20th century:...

mickael boulay: transitional cutlery

A while back I wrote about a set of china from the Design for Dementia project, made to maximize independent eating for older users whose hand coordination is declining. In this...

ignorance in science

Stuart Firestein narrates the origins and case studies of his course, offered in the Biology department at Columbia, called Ignorance. It started with his dissatisfaction in teaching a stock-in-trade course...

prosthetic imagination: brandeis lecture 2/28

emergency notification

At donghits, via Broken Hill.

liam's robohand

3D printing is a perfect match for lightweight prosthetics, it turns out. The material makes so much sense for children, whose parts will invariably need to be re-sized and whose...

forest for the trees

Megan Clarke's face-attachable forest. I'm not sure why this is so appealing; the pun on "forest for the trees," certainly, but what else? More from Megan Clarke. I neglected to...

tools for conviviality

Last year, Suzanne Fischer pointed to Ivan Illich's Tools for Conviviality as a worthy guiding set of principles for  critical making: With Tools for Conviviality (1973), Illich extended his analysis of education to a broader critique...