Reading list
Shortform reading
This is an incomplete list of the shortform reading (and listening and watching) I’ve been doing lately.
Replacing freshman comp with dozens of small groups run like graduate seminars is expensive and hard to imagine. But it would create a generation of students who wouldn't use an AI to write their essays any more than they'd ask an AI to eat a delicious pizza for them. We should aspire to assign the kinds of essays that change the lives of the students who write them, and to teach students to write that kind of essay.
Craig Mod on the Creative Power of Walking
When I’m not talking, just walking (which is most of the time), I try to cultivate the most bored state of mind imaginable. A total void of stimulation beyond the immediate environment. My rules: No news, no social media, no podcasts, no music. No “teleporting,” you could say. The phone, the great teleportation device, the great murderer of boredom. And yet, boredom: the great engine of creativity. I now believe with all my heart that it’s only in the crushing silences of boredom—without all that black-mirror dopamine — that you can access your deepest creative wells. And for so many people these days, they’ve never so much as attempted to dip in a ladle, let alone dive down into those uncomfortable waters made accessible through boredom.
For me, from this boredom—this blankness of mind as I walk past sometimes fields and sometimes giant gambling pachinko parlors—words flow. I can’t stop them. My mind begins writing about what we see and refuses to shut up.
15 rules for blogging, and my current streak
This blog has been going since February 2000. I’m writing more now, two decades on, than I have for YEARS. That’s not just because of lockdown – it’s because, about six months ago, I set myself some rules. The rules, which are specific to me, are intended to bump me out of certain mental traps that I know will otherwise stop my words. And since these rules have been working for, well, 24 weeks now, I figured I’d write them down.
So here they are, my personal rules for blogging.