year
note
Sep 20, 2023
It’s always a good day when the Paris Review arrives, because I’ll read their interviews with anyone. Here’s Robert Glück:
Sep 14, 2023
Steve Connor, in A Philosophy of Sport:
Aug 31, 2023
— 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...
Aug 24, 2023
Derek Parfit, with an unexpected near-short-story parked right at the top of his acknowledgements in Reasons and Persons:
Aug 15, 2023
Justin E. H. Smith:
Aug 3, 2023
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:
Jul 31, 2023
Useful to see Jarrett Fuller’s meditation on architect Frank Duffy’s “shearing layers” to understand what’s happening in architecture:
Jul 27, 2023
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...
Jul 19, 2023
Rachel Kushner in the new Harper’s:
Jul 17, 2023
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...
Jul 13, 2023
Christine Emba is a national treasure:
Jul 11, 2023
Amanda Ripley:
Jul 10, 2023
Dhananjay Jagannathan:
Jul 2, 2023
Ethan Strauss:
Jun 24, 2023
Adam Shatz, on his collected essay collection called Writers and Missionaries: Essays on the Radical Imagination:
Jun 13, 2023
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...
Jun 8, 2023
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...
Jun 6, 2023
Farr Curlin and Christopher Tollefsen:
May 30, 2023
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...
May 26, 2023
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...
May 16, 2023
— 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...
May 15, 2023
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...
Apr 12, 2023
Ted Hazdi-Antich with good news:
Mar 16, 2023
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...
Mar 14, 2023
Becca Rothfeld, on her hiatus from academic philosophy while she joins WaPo as book critic:
Mar 6, 2023
from the almost-sent files:
Mar 2, 2023
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...
Feb 15, 2023
Leah Libresco Sargeant points to this passage on birthing in Kristin Lavransdatter:
Feb 12, 2023
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...
Feb 10, 2023
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...
Feb 8, 2023
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...
Jan 23, 2023
Cal Newport:
Jan 16, 2023
Zena Hitz:
Dec 23, 2022
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...
Dec 19, 2022
Yesterday Alan saw my post about making art, not arguments and had this to say:
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...
Dec 8, 2022
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...
Dec 3, 2022
“He teaches without teaching, by simply enjoying his life,” Roberto Conlazo said.
Dec 2, 2022
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...
Nov 30, 2022
From the BBC:
Nov 29, 2022
My friend John Summers in the Boston Globe:
Nov 27, 2022
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:
Nov 16, 2022
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...
Nov 11, 2022
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...
Nov 9, 2022
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....
Nov 6, 2022
I thought this piece by David Frum was thoroughly reported and patiently considered:
Oct 31, 2022
James Baldwin, with the stone-cold perennial observation in The Fire Next Time:
Oct 15, 2022
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...
Oct 14, 2022
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...
Oct 7, 2022
[In thinking about advising a young professional woman on the verge of motherhood]:
Aug 31, 2022
Clare Coffey:
Aug 25, 2022
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.
Aug 24, 2022
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...
Aug 22, 2022
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...
Aug 20, 2022
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:
Aug 10, 2022
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??)....
Aug 9, 2022
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...
Aug 8, 2022
Olga Tokarczuk, in her Nobel lecture:
Aug 4, 2022
Reinhold Niebuhr, “Humor and Faith”:
Aug 1, 2022
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,...
Jul 28, 2022
Agnes Callard:
Jul 18, 2022
Phil Christman:
Jul 9, 2022
Stephen Budiansky, in Journey to the End of Reason: A Life of Kurt Gödel:
Jul 6, 2022
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...
Jul 5, 2022
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...
Jun 28, 2022
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...
Jun 25, 2022
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...
Jun 14, 2022
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...
May 23, 2022
Two things that are easy to overlook in Christianity and that I have so many questions about:
May 16, 2022
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,...
Apr 26, 2022
Robin Sloan, folks, in this arresting prediction-slash-invitation:
Apr 15, 2022
Alan Jacobs, being his usual polymathic, incisive self:
Apr 10, 2022
James Mumford, on the therapeutic as a metaphysical paradigm:
Apr 5, 2022
Venkatesh Rao:
Mar 13, 2022
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,...
Mar 10, 2022
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...
Oct 12, 2021
Leah Libresco Sargeant at Other Feminisms, referring to Stephanie Murray’s recent piece on Social Security in the Atlantic:
Oct 5, 2021
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?...
Aug 30, 2021
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...
Aug 29, 2021
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...
Apr 28, 2021
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...
Apr 7, 2021
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...
Apr 6, 2021
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,...
Feb 13, 2021
— 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.
Feb 12, 2021
— “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...
Feb 5, 2021
— 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:
Feb 1, 2021
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...
Jan 30, 2021
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...
Jan 29, 2021
— “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...
Jan 26, 2021
Some software changes I’ve made in the last few months:
Jan 15, 2021
—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...
Jan 8, 2021
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...
Nov 19, 2020
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...
Nov 16, 2020
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...
Sep 12, 2020
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...
Aug 6, 2020
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.
Jul 20, 2020
[Part 1 is an opening set of thoughts about the affordances of critique and repair. Probably best to start there.]
Jun 30, 2020
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...
Jan 3, 2020
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...
Jan 2, 2020
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...
Jan 1, 2020
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...
Oct 14, 2019
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...
Sep 28, 2019
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...
Sep 23, 2019
Digging through Astra Taylor’s new book and thinking a lot about the iterative process of living democracy:
Sep 8, 2019
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...
Aug 7, 2019
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...
Aug 5, 2019
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...
Jun 13, 2019
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...
Jun 11, 2019
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...
Jun 10, 2019
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...
Jun 5, 2019
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...
May 24, 2019
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...
May 21, 2019
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...
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...
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...
May 15, 2019
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...
May 14, 2019
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:...
Mar 16, 2019
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...
Mar 8, 2019
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...
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...
Mar 7, 2019
Without a politically guaranteed public realm, freedom lacks the worldly space to make its appearance.
Mar 4, 2019
I read this profile of Paul Chan ten years ago and I still think about it often:
Jan 16, 2019
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...
Dec 4, 2018
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...
Nov 24, 2018
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...
Nov 23, 2018
“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...
Nov 13, 2018
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....
Nov 1, 2018
From this series of questions to Zadie Smith comes Teju Cole’s question:
Oct 13, 2018
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:
Oct 12, 2018
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...
Oct 2, 2018
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...
Sep 20, 2018
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:
Sep 14, 2018
Speaking of the unmarked default, this new profile of Rei Kawakubo has some interesting complexities to consider:
[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...
Sep 7, 2018
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...
Sep 4, 2018
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...
Sep 3, 2018
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...
Aug 15, 2018
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...
Aug 14, 2018
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...
Jul 17, 2018
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...
Jul 16, 2018
“In thought as in life, the only surpassings we know are concrete, partial, encumbered with survivals, saddled with deficits.”
Jun 29, 2018
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...
Jun 26, 2018
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...
Jun 22, 2018
From a new collection of interviews between Ursula LeGuin and David Naimon called Conversations on Writing:
From the Kansas City Star:
May 31, 2018
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...
May 27, 2018
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...
May 11, 2018
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...
May 8, 2018
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:
May 7, 2018
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...
Apr 27, 2018
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...
Apr 26, 2018
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...
Apr 22, 2018
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...
Apr 12, 2018
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...
Apr 6, 2018
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...
Apr 5, 2018
I think a lot about this passage from an old Paris Review interview with John Updike:
Apr 3, 2018
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...
Apr 2, 2018
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...
Mar 21, 2018
Jill Lepore on the writing of Rachel Carson, in the new New Yorker:
Mar 6, 2018
Some things the young people in your life might need to hear:
Feb 23, 2018
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...
Feb 8, 2018
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...
Feb 1, 2018
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...
Jan 17, 2018
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...
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...
Jan 16, 2018
From Ellen Samuels, “Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time,”:
Dec 19, 2017
Dec 12, 2017
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...
Dec 11, 2017
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,...
—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...
Dec 1, 2017
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...
Nov 30, 2017
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...
I have a longer post in me about this, but for now, adapted from my sent folder:
Nov 28, 2017
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...
Nov 23, 2017
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...
Nov 21, 2017
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:
Nov 4, 2017
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...
Oct 31, 2017
“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...
Oct 27, 2017
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...
Oct 18, 2017
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...
Oct 17, 2017
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...
Oct 6, 2017
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...
Oct 4, 2017
Sep 30, 2017
I loved this interview with Rory Hyde:
Sep 28, 2017
“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,...
Sep 23, 2017
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...
Aug 11, 2017
“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...
Jul 24, 2017
“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...
Jul 21, 2017
From Bill McKibben’s introduction to the 2010 reissue of E. F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered:
Jul 20, 2017
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,...
Jul 13, 2017
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...
Jul 11, 2017
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....
Jun 28, 2017
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...
Jun 5, 2017
Lawrence Weschler in the edited collection called The New New Journalism:
May 31, 2017
“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...
May 9, 2017
Jill Lepore talks about translating academic work for wider audiences, and more over at Public Books.
Apr 20, 2017
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...
Feb 20, 2017
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...
Jan 4, 2017
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...
Nov 1, 2016
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...
Oct 28, 2016
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...
Oct 1, 2016
Lots to think about in this piece by Henry Farrell over at Crooked Timber:
Sep 28, 2016
“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...
Jul 21, 2016
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...
May 16, 2016
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...
Sep 16, 2015
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...
Sep 15, 2015
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...
Jun 25, 2015
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...
May 26, 2015
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...
Feb 11, 2015
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....
Jan 6, 2015
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...
Jan 5, 2015
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...
Sep 30, 2014
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...
Sep 16, 2014
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,...
Aug 28, 2014
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...
Aug 25, 2014
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...
Aug 22, 2014
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,...
Aug 20, 2014
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,...
Aug 6, 2014
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...
Aug 5, 2014
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...
Aug 1, 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...
Jun 30, 2014
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...
Jun 24, 2014
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...
Jun 16, 2014
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...
Jun 5, 2014
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...
May 19, 2014
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...
May 15, 2014
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,...
Apr 30, 2014
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...
Apr 1, 2014
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...
Mar 31, 2014
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...
Mar 26, 2014
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...
Mar 20, 2014
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...
Mar 5, 2014
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...
Feb 22, 2014
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...
Feb 7, 2014
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...
Feb 3, 2014
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...
Jan 31, 2014
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.
Jan 21, 2014
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...
Jan 15, 2014
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...
Jan 9, 2014
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...
Jan 6, 2014
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...
Dec 29, 2013
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...
Dec 20, 2013
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...
Dec 9, 2013
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...
Dec 5, 2013
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...
Nov 27, 2013
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...
Nov 26, 2013
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...
Nov 25, 2013
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....
Nov 6, 2013
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...
Nov 4, 2013
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...
Nov 1, 2013
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...
Oct 31, 2013
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...
Oct 29, 2013
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...
Oct 23, 2013
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...
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...
Sep 27, 2013
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...
Sep 24, 2013
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...
Sep 17, 2013
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...
Aug 27, 2013
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,...
Aug 15, 2013
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...
Jul 26, 2013
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...
Jul 12, 2013
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....
Jul 5, 2013
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,...
Jun 9, 2013
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...
Jun 8, 2013
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....
Jun 4, 2013
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...
May 21, 2013
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...
May 11, 2013
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.
May 1, 2013
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...
Apr 22, 2013
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...
Apr 4, 2013
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...
Apr 3, 2013
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...
Mar 28, 2013
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...
Mar 25, 2013
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...
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...
Mar 19, 2013
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:...
Feb 26, 2013
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...
Feb 22, 2013
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...
Feb 21, 2013
Feb 15, 2013
At donghits, via Broken Hill.
Feb 4, 2013
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...
Jan 18, 2013
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...
Jan 16, 2013
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...