By Any Other Nerd

How to Say Thank You

noreply@blogger.com (Lance Eaton) — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 15:00:00 +0000

Estimated Reading Time: 10 minutes

This has been cross-posted on my Substack.

Awards are strange things.

I’ve thought a lot about what it means to be in this spot at this time in my career. From the moment I received the call about receiving this award, it’s been surreal; much like what the last few years of my career have felt like. On the one hand, I get it and can see why these opportunities and moments have come about. I have fifteen years of accumulative practice, involvement, and relationship-building which creates a lot of compound interest of opportunities.

There’s immense appreciation in being acknowledged for your work; there’s deep joy in celebrating with family, friends, and colleagues; and there’s real humility in being seen in ways you (or at least, I), don’t always expect to be seen.

For me, there’s also ambiguity with these feelings because they are also tempered by: a sense of randomness that in another year with a different pool (of nominations and judges) would wield a different result; a recognition that while I do work hard and care deeply about the field I’m in, so do countless others who do as much or more and may never get the recognition they deserve; that awards are too often a product of cumulative advantage (the Matthew effect) rather than a gateway for those without the accumulated capital.

So, awards are strange things. Important but ~~sometimes~~ often a culmination of things that don’t always reflect the thing itself—even when it does.

This is all preamble to sharing the announcement that I have been the recipient of the 2026 EDUCAUSE Leadership Award and will be receiving today, Wednesday, September 30, 2026 at the annual EDUCAUSE conference. I will have about 1 minute to give remarks (which I will share below) and well, one minute is good enough for a live crowd but not enough for what I want to say.

The Speech

“I’m standing up here receiving this award, but I need everyone to know that I’m not up here alone. I’m surrounded by so many people up here.

This isn’t a “I see dead people” situation. But nothing I do is a solo act. It is all deeply informed, supported, and guided by so many people. Leadership is a not a single-player sport.

So if I may, please close their eyes. I know–it’s getting weird, but just bear with me.

Close your eyes and imagine this stage filled with the most amazing people you could ever know.

Immediately surrounding me are my friends and family.

My parents, Paula and Tod Eaton.

My spouse: Christine.

My family: Trevor, Allison, Gail, Steve, Mike,

My dearest friends: Kara, Rhoan, Deborah, Angela, Liz, Mandy

To my right, more friends and colleagues: AJ, Alex, Anna, Antonia, Autumm, Aubrey, Becca, Carol, Danae, Danielle, Debbie, Hanna, Hannah, Joy, Gail, Klaudja, JT, Julia, Lauren, Maha, Mike, Michael, Peter, Rachel, Rachel (the one who nominated me, Woden, yusef

To my left, folks I mentor but who really teach me so much: Ashley, Blair, Beau, Jaz, Josh, Loren, Nikos, Norah, Oressa, Xiaorui

My mentors as well: Mr. Metropolis, Pat, Avi, Rod, Larry, Andrea, Jay, Gerlese

And in the background, the organizations I’ve been a part of: EDUCAUSE, NEFDC, NEPCA, NERCOMP, and POD

All of those people are what makes this possible. Thank you.”

Photo by Baibhav Kumar on Unsplash

The Speech As I’d Like to Say It

I get the “math” of it, if you will and so what I’m about to say is not a version of impostor syndrome. On the other hand is the fact that so much of what I do is exactly what I see so many other people doing and so many people I’m learning from and with. My life and career has been often surrounded by so many other good people. To receive this award feels like I’m a swirly colorful marble that’s been plucked out of a bag of other amazing swirly colorful marbles. There’s a part of me that says, “what about them?!?!?”.

I want to take this time to shine a light on some of them. I dare not try all of them, but want folks to know some of them because it’s from all of them that I carry pieces of me to today.

But before I do, I want to acknowledge one part about the award that for me felt quite important. I do believe the work that I do is a kind of leadership work and I see it as important work. Despite my reservations about being the recipient, what I am excited and appreciative about is that the committee chose someone whose leadership is not as traditional. When I look at the recipients for much of the history of this award, most are in institutional leadership positions and that makes sense. I am not. I’m not part of the C-suite and my place in my own institution is quite distanced from it. Still, my collective work (like so many others) sits in the space of leadership.

That is what I am most grateful about in receiving this. The committee chose a form of leadership that isn’t traditional and to which, I hope others can see that this type of work is important and seen. Maybe it’s a small thing and I certainly know it’s not that clean cut. Yet, choosing someone with out “Vice” or “C” in their title (not even full “Director” or “Executive Director”) does mean something for many of us.

And now, I would like to to say a few more words of thanks to the people who I wish could join me up on this stage:

Family

Paula Eaton: For showing me how care, dedication, and determining my own path.

Tod Eaton: For helping me to see my life in lines that can intersect, for fostering curiosity and exploration, and for the trips to the library.

Christine Eaton: You deserve a post unto yourself. But let’s try. Thank you for sharing your life with me, for opening my mind and helping me to be more thoughtful in what I take on (and what I say no to). Thank you also for challenging my views in ways that help me see bigger and different pictures. Thank you for finding ways for us to do cool things and work together.

Trevor & Allison: For supporting your quirky, eccentric, and nerdy brother/brother-in-law, even when he was too busy in his books to hang out.

Gail, Steve, & Mike: For supporting and celebrating the many changes and updates while also bring a good dose of humor and fun.

My Dearest Friends

Kara: For being a friend through my professional, personal, and intellectual development for more than 15 years.

Rhoan: For the space to be in deep community, even when there’s 700+ miles between us.

Deborah: For bringing enthusiasm, care, and goofiness and keeping me from sending dumb emails.

Angela: For being there since the beginning, and staying through the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Liz: For keeping things fun and getting me outside my head, house, take your pick.

Mandy: For celebrating the milestones through both our lives and, well, peanut butter pie.

Friends and colleagues

AJ: For continuing to be someone I learn with about the world.

Alex: For working together and finding an opportunity to do it again.

Anna: For being a fellow traveler and explorer of AI over these last few years.

Antonia: For doing a bit of “yes and” as we find our way through our projects.

Autumm: For starting down the AI path together with care and thoughtfulness.

Aubrey: For helping me see the ways one can envision their work.

Becca: For following up on an idea that we’ve gotten to talk about for years now.

Carol: For office conversations and sustained friendships across continents.

Danae: For being a force of good and curiosity in the world.

Danielle: For so many Wednesdays of sharing, community, and creation.

Debbie: For parking lot conversations (in the cold) and warm thoughts throughout the years.

Gail: For looking for the fun and thinking aloud to see where it leads us.

Hanna: For showing what it means to ask hard questions of us.

Hannah: For sharing your insights and growth with the only POD Connects group that I’ve been in that actually developed and sustained itself.

Joy: For being a collaborative force-multiplier when we were new to the work and the world felt upside down.

Klaudja: For centering the periphery and flipping the script on how we look at “problems”.

JT: For joy and creativity in our engagement with AI.

Julia: For doing the hard work that not enough appreciate but carrying the knowledge that it is important.

Lauren: For keeping it (and me), grounded in the remarkably mediocre.

Maha: For being a person who bring care, joy, and criticality to every conversation in ways that teach myself and others without feeling like we’re being taught.

Mike: For showing what it looks like to turn the mirror on one’s self and gain deeper wisdom.

Michael: For collaboration and trust in figuring out work in the gray spaces.

Peter: For creating, maintaining, and sustaining many communities in this work over the years.

Rachel S: For being the kind of human who seeks to have her thinking challenged and is open to thinking differently.

Rachel T: Obviously for nominating, but also for being a cheerleader in the truest sense of the word: celebrating and encouraging others to be their best selves.

Woden: For sharing enthusiasm, poetry, and the things we navigate when our lives are nontraditional

yusef: For speaking encouragement when others saw problems and for showing what differently lived lives can be.

Folks I have the honor to mentor

Ashley, Blair, & Loren: For co-creating a space for all of us to learn, share, and figure out what is “the work.”

Jaz: For jumping into and being willing to explore and map the terrain that we, ourselves, are only starting to understand.

Josh: For your endless curiosity in the work and as importantly, in the world around you.

Nikos: For joining me in Denver after 5 years of early morning (for me) meetings that always produced new questions and ideas from where and how you have directed your work.

Norah: For finding your way through interesting times and sharing that growth with me.

Oressa: For knowing how to make the work better and pushing my own work.

Xiaorui: For being a fellow early-bird who I have the honor to walk with and reflect with about how we navigate our work, our connections, and sense make about our own growth.

Mentors

Mr. Metropolis: For given a punk kid numerous changes until he found his way to being less of a punk.

Pat: For hearing me ramble and seeing potential for doing interesting things with my life.

Avi: For being patient with someone still making sense of privilege, power, and complicity long enough that they start to understand it.

Rod: For encouragement and curiosity about where my education could go.

Larry: For guidance in undergrad, support when I first started teaching, and colleagueship when we started working together—all with a kindness and levity that made it welcoming and fun.

Andrea: For taking a chance and guiding me with patience into a field of work that has been truly amazing.

Jay: For guiding and encouraging my progress and also for being a critical thinker that breaks down ideas in ways that make sense.

Gerlese: For introducing me to a way of seeing the world that is beyond just methodology but as an individual who does things wonderfully differently.

Communities

EDUCAUSE: A vibrant, near-boundless, and rich community that has provided me with opportunities to know only meet so many fantastic people across the world trying to do this work of teaching, learning, and technology, but also an amazing staff of kind, caring, and delightful human beings.

New England Faculty Development Consortium (NEFDC): An amazing organization that serves a great many folks in New England through different opportunities and programming.

Northeast Popular Culture Association (NEPCA): The longest community I’ve been a part of; I’m grateful for it being the kind of community that took in a fresh-out-grad-school person and supported his journey for nearly 20 years.

NorthEast Regional Computing Program (NERCOMP): NERCOMP has become such a place of community and connect over the last 15 years; it was the first place I began to make professional friends in instructional design and continues to be a place I turn to for learning, community, and exploration.

POD Network: An organization that has made me ask new questions about my work, found other possibilities for growth, and has introduced me to so many wonderful colleagues.

And, of course, the challenge of this is that I could probably name another 100 people with another 100 reasons. There have been and continue to be a lot of people to whom my gratitude is endless for how they have helped me do this kind of work. So even if you aren’t here, just know that if we’re in community together, you still matter to the work that I do.

A photo at the EDUCAUSE President’s Reception with my mom.

Photo by Baibhav Kumar on Unsplash

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Review: Things in Nature Merely Grow? by Yiyun Li

noreply@blogger.com (Lance Eaton) — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 09:30:00 +0000

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

Yiyun Li’s boldness in Things in Nature Merely Grow sits with me long after reading, particularly her willingness to grapple with the suicide of her son James without giving in to deep emotional wailing. That kind of emotional outpouring would be entirely valid, and there should be books that approach grief that way. But Li does something different. She examines the loss with method and intention, trying to reach what she calls radical acceptance: there is nothing she can do to undo James’s death, so what can she do to accept and memorialize him?

That question feels even more powerful because James was Li’s second child to die by suicide. She had already lost her son Vincent and written about that loss (Where Reasons End). Now, she has to confront James’s death without pretending that Vincent isn’t already part of her experience as a parent. James and Vincent were part of the same family, and Li cannot write this second book without having written the first. It raises an interesting and one would imagine incredibly hard question for her to grapple with in trying this book: How much does she include Vincent before this stops being a book about James and becomes a book about the deaths of both sons?

Li navigates that balance well. She gives us glimpses of how James showed up in the world, particularly the way he thought. She distinguishes him from Vincent in part by describing James as a person of thinking rather than feeling. We see that in the philosophical conversations they had about meaning and purpose and in Li’s return to conversations that, in retrospect, could have gone differently. But she refuses to turn hindsight into certainty.

An emotional deluge, however understandable, could have made this primarily a book about Li’s grief: the absence of James rather than James himself. Instead, she creates space for us to know him in whatever glimpses we can. She respects him as a person who struggled with meaning and purpose and engages seriously with the person he was. The philosophical explorations therefore feel appropriate rather than abstract. In many ways, it feels like Li is trying to write the book James himself would want to read.

She can recognize moments when she could have asked another question without pretending that asking it would necessarily have changed anything. There is an impossibility to knowing what was coming down the road or what would be the right calculus to save James. Li ponders what questions might have opened up new avenues of keeping James connected but she does not linger or lament. That refusal is particularly powerful because it is incredibly hard to maintain, given the care and love the also comes through in Li's words.

I appreciate that Li refuses to publicly litigate questions of responsibility or guilt. She acknowledges the outside scrutiny surrounding her family, but she doesn’t spend the book defending herself as a parent. There’s no winning down that road. No amount of explaining could satisfy everyone, and doing so would take attention away from being present with the deaths of her children. Refusing it struck me as both an act of bravery and an act of self-care. More importantly, it keeps the focus on James.

Things in Nature Merely Grow is not salvation literature. Li isn’t writing as though this book could retrospectively save James, or even necessarily save another person who reads it. Writing cannot undo what happened. What it can do is preserve something of him.

The title, a comment from James that Li uses, captures the complexity of what Li is saying with this book. James’s contemplation that things in nature merely grow while people “grow up” raises questions about what growing up meant to him and whether he was ready to deal with it. But it also contrasts painfully with Li, who never gets to see either of her children grow up. Their deaths, instead, require more growth from her. She has to learn how to hold their presence forever in her life as a parent alongside their absence forever in her life as a parent.

Li cannot resolve that contradiction. What she can do (and what I found so compelling about this book) is sit with it, deliberately and without sensationalizing it.

Did you enjoy this read? Let me know your thoughts down below or feel free to browse around and check out some of my other posts!. You might also want to keep up to date with my blog by signing up for them via email.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Review: The King's Fifth by Scott O'Dell

noreply@blogger.com (Lance Eaton) — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 09:30:00 +0000

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

I came to The King’s Fifth in a roundabout way. As a kid, I watched this quirky animated show called The Mysterious Cities of Gold. Almost nobody else seemed to know it existed. I think I’ve met maybe two or three people in my entire life who watched it. But it stuck with me, and it probably had as much influence on me as Star Wars, for I remember watching it ceaselessly when I could.

Decades later, watching a YouTube video about the show, I discovered that it was very, very loosely based on Scott O’Dell’s The King’s Fifth, a children's historical novel from 1966.

The novel’s Esteban Sandoval is very different. He’s a fifteen-year-old mapmaker who gets pulled into an expedition by Captain Mendoza, a man obsessed with finding the legendary cities of gold. We already have some sense of where this is going as the story moves from the present to the past. In the present, Esteban is imprisoned in Veracruz, awaiting trial for failing to deliver the King’s Fifth—the portion of treasure owed to the Spanish crown.

A story delivered in media res is often appealing to me. Shifting between Esteban awaiting trial and his account of the expedition works well. We get to see through the past the ways Esteban has been forged into the person he is in the present: more skeptical, thoughtful, and critical of the people around him.

Esteban initially isn’t particularly interested in gold. He wants to make maps. Mendoza tempts him with the possibility of going somewhere no mapmaker has gone and having his name attached to those maps. There’s already pride and hubris in that desire, but there’s also something compelling about Esteban wanting to capture and make sense of the world around him. It's a clear passion of his at this young age.

The adventure starts in dubious moral territory and only gets more questionable from there. Esteban sees it and tries to, in many ways, be apolitical about it. But then, he finds his own gold nugget that he keeps from others.

His relationship with it reminded me a little of Sméagol finding his precious in The Lord of the Rings. Suddenly gold isn’t merely something he can watch other people destroy themselves over. It’s his. He hides the nugget among his mapmaking tools, which feels particularly fitting. Those tools represent his craft, his knowledge, and the way he understands the world, while hidden among them is this other thing that is slowly changing how he sees it.

By the time Esteban is literally carrying bags of gold and becoming determined to receive his share, the distance between the person he was and the person he is becoming is pretty stark. For a young adult book (fits more there than children's novel), the story offers an interesting exploration of professional success and fame, riches, and relationships in interesting ways, asking what Esteban actually values and what each of those things might cost him.

Unsurprisingly for a book from the 1960s, it is less successful in its depiction of the Indigenous characters. It repeats the disregard and poor representation familiar from a lot of Westerns and colonial literature of the 20th century.

Zia is the clearest example. Her relationship with Esteban works insofar as she helps him think and feel differently about what the expedition is doing. But we only get glimpses of her own interiority. She feels less like a person with a life of her own and more like a character being used for Esteban’s development. Even when his perception of her shifts from child and friend toward potential romantic interest, it feels more like the novel using Zia than allowing Zia to become her own person.

Father Francisco offers a different alternative to Mendoza, but he is problematic in his own way. He sees Indigenous people primarily through his desire to convert them. His goals may be different from Mendoza’s, but he still sees the people they encounter through the lens of what he wants from them.

Yet, the novel still contains some criticism of colonialism showing that it is not just individual greed that drives characters but uphold the entire system of justice to which Esteban must later navigate with everyone interest in their profit than justice being served. Still, for a broader cultural critique to really stick, the Indigenous people would need to be presented as more human than props in someone else’s story.

For Esteban’s story, it was mostly an effective progress. O'Dell gives us a narrative has some parallels with Huck Finn, including some attempts to reject it all in the end. By the time we meet Esteban in prison, those experiences have left their mark. He hasn’t simply learned that greed is bad. He has become more skeptical and thoughtful because he has experienced firsthand how easily the things we think we value can start determining who we are and how the system reinforces that thinking.

This Is 47

noreply@blogger.com (Lance Eaton) — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 10:38:44 +0000

Estimated Reading Time: 15 minutes

So it's that time again. For those tuning in, each year on my birthday, I do a bit of account and reflecting on the year. This is year #10. You can check out previous years below:

As always, the details:

Home: Cranston, RI
Relationship status: Married (12+ years)
Cats Owned: 3 (Bear, Imani, & Buster)
Other Pets: 0
Degrees earned: 6 (1 PhD, 3 masters, 1 bachelor, 1 associate)
Reading since September 13, 2025: 265 (Latest reads can always be found on Goodreads)
Work:

Senior Associate Director of AI in Teaching & Learning at Northeastern University (full-time)
Consultant Facilitator, Speaker

Weight: 235.1 pounds
Longest Distance Run This Year: 12 miles
Fastest Pace This Year: 9:13 minutes (for 3.36 miles)
Runs in the last year: 219
Miles run in the last year: 1085 miles
Miles on the bicycle in the last year: 332 miles
Blog Posts on Blogger in the last year: 21
Blog Posts on my Substack: 56
Blog Pageviews: 1,252,000 (est between this blog and the Substack)
Blog Subscribers: 171 here; 20,040 on the Substack
Facebook Friends: 843
LinkedIn Connections: 3259
Twitter Followers: 1172
BlueSky Followers: 1849
YouTube Channel Subscribers: 5876
Website Domains owned: 9

Favorite Blog Posts of the Year

I have not been as consistent with posting on the By Any Other Nerd blog in the past year and went months (almost 6) without a new post I'm back in a regular habit of posting a weekly book review. That said, The Tapestry and the Hustle (an updated essay on sense-making and life-work) stands out as the favorite post.

And, of course, I definitely have some posts on the Substack that I would highlight:

These were three talks from October to July that were focused on the Liberal Arts and for me, was an interesting challenge to bring thread a conversation I had been thinking about over the last few years. I also found it a compelling challenge to keep growing and evolving my thoughts across these three talks in a way that acknowledged what had been said and still needed to be said to audiences who might not have heard or read the previous ones.

These three essays were created as a way of both expressing my concern and at times, frustration, with where things are in higher education with AI, a genuine desire to (kindly) provoke people in higher education to really think through this moment, and a collection of emerging insights from the last year about what's next.

Looking Back

While the larger world has felt increasingly unstable, harmful, and difficult to make sense of over the past year, year 46 for me was filled with a great deal of joy, connection, possibility, and reflection. There are so many things happening in the world that I find horrifying and frustrating, particularly in seeing the actions of the current administration and the fact that so many people see those actions as good. At the same time, there are real, beautiful, funny, loving, and meaningful things happening in my own life.

I do not know that I have resolved that tension. I suspect I am not supposed to. But I have been thinking a lot about how to hold both things: the bad things happening in this particular timeline and the fact that there are still people I love, work I find meaningful, gardens that grow, cats that want attention, friends with whom I can laugh for hours, and new possibilities that I did not see even a year ago.

This was also the year that a lot of my life’s work came into clearer focus. It is not that I had not been thinking about it before. In some ways, these annual reflections are one long effort to understand the work I am doing, the life I am building, and the person I am trying to become. But this year felt different.

I have worked from the premise that my work should be influential or useful. This year, I saw more clearly that it may have more staying power than a blog post, a post, a talk, or even an individual project. There is a totality to the work I do and to the ways I try to show up in the world. It is still changing and evolving, and it seems to be doing something bigger.

Some of that came into focus because of receiving the EDUCAUSE Leadership Award. I am still somewhat in awe of that recognition and will get to receive it later this month at the EDUCAUSE conference in Denver. But the award is not the whole story. It is more of a signal of something I had already started to see: the compound interest of caring and working with people while putting things into the world that I hope others will benefit from.

There are things I have been doing for twenty years, fifteen years, ten years, and five years that suddenly feel more connected. There are practices, relationships, ideas, habits, and choices that seemed separate at the time but now feel like they have been building toward something. What I have to offer is uniquely derived from me, but it is also deeply interwoven with the people, communities, institutions, and ideas with which I have engaged over my personal and professional life. To learn more about my thinking on this, you can check out The Tapestry and the Hustle.

So, yeah. A lot has happened this year. Some of it has been professional recognition and growth. Some of it has been creativity emerging in new ways. Some of it has been community, gardening, cats, wrestling, and the ordinary things that make a life feel like a life. Let’s get into it.

Professional Changes

Professionally, this year felt different from the banner-year energy of last year (defending dissertation, starting at Northeastern, Mark Berman Community Outreach award). I continued to deliver talks and workshops, locally, nationally, and even a few internationally (virtually, mind you). I still love this part of the work to visit, meet, and engage with different campuses, audiences, and populations. This year, I had a bit more travel with this and appreciated the different campuses, their layout, their aesthetics, their classrooms, and such.

I have also been more intentional about doing some of that work collaboratively. I got to present with my dear friend, Rhoan Garnett and not only co-present but also write with Klaudja Caushi. I co-authored with Larry Davis as well as Carol Damm and Adam Nemerfoff and Xiaorui Sun. There's also about five other collaborations that are in the process of submission and waiting. I've really leaned into collaborations because they change the experience. They create a space to learn from other people, see different ways of framing an idea, and make something together that none of us would have made alone.

All of my publications this year were co-authored, and I am really proud of that. I like my own writing, obviously (says the person who keeps writing blog posts and Substack posts and is working on two books), but there is something different about writing with people. It means conversation, revision, learning through another person’s thinking, and trying to build something is stronger because it is shared.

More broadly, I am increasingly understanding relationships, mentorship, collaboration, and sharing as a central part of the actual work.They are not just things that happen beside the work. Some of the moments when I felt most aligned this year were at conferences, on Zoom calls, walking with friends and colleagues, or just having a conversation where there was laughter, reflection, and a sense of how fortunate we are to get to do this work. Being in relation and community has long been something I value, but this year it felt more clearly like an organizing principle.

That is also part of why the leadership award feels meaningful. I do not sit in a conventional executive leadership role, but I do think I have been doing leadership work for a long time: connecting people, helping people make sense of complicated things, mentoring, facilitating, sharing, and showing alternative paths or adjacent possibilities. If that work helps other people see that leadership can look different, then that feels especially good.

I have also gotten more settled in my role at Northeastern. The first year was less about struggling and more about trying to understand what parts of me showed up there, how they could show up, and what the language and rhythms of the team and institution were. I understand that better now (I think). I have found ways to contribute that make sense for me, and I continue to appreciate being on a thoughtful, collaborative team where learning is happening all the time. Equally meaningful is that I have thoughtful colleagues who are kind, helpfully challenge my thoughts, and make me work differently (to the betterment of all). They each have deep wells of knowledge and skills that I inevitably learn in every meeting and project I am with them.

The consulting work Chris and I are doing has also continued to grow. The combination of my background in teaching, instructional design, faculty development, and higher education, alongside Chris’s experience with mindfulness, operations and change management, has created some new and interesting opportunities. We were able to take on a few larger projects with some others on the horizon.

Working with your spouse is something a good deal of folks are surprised and intrigued by--often wanting to know more. Is there a learning curve? Absolutely. Does it require each to be more thoughtful about what stays with the work and what we bring into other time together? For sure. Does it create a need to find the balance between work and play? Obviously. Does it create fantastic opportunities for growth and learning to see your partner's abilities and skills in new light, thereby making it more rewarding to see your partner anew? Helllllllls yes!

I am also still very much still doing a lot of learning. I do not think I am ever fully cooked, if you will. I hope that is part of what I bring to the work: a willingness to keep learning, to keep asking questions, and to keep revising my own understanding. This next year, a lot of that learning will involve agentic AI and trying to understand, with other people, how it fits into the higher education puzzle.

Home life

Home life was full this year: some grief, some growth, some really great gardening, and one delightfully ridiculous new hobby.

The Little Library has a life of its own. It is regularly visited, and it currently has more books donated by people who have stopped by than books that we have added ourselves. I love that. It has become something beyond an object in front of our house. There is something really satisfying about seeing books circulate, catching folks--a true cavalcade of different people--exploring, knowing that someone took something, left something, or simply stopped for a moment to look.

The garden was much more successful this year, too. After last year’s groundhog-led decimation of much of the garden, we built raised beds and added chicken wire. It worked! We had cucumbers again for the first time in a couple of years, as well as tomatoes, eggplants, beans, chard, kale, potatoes, and beets. It was a vibrant year in the garden. For a good part of July and August, I bought very few veggies from the market (and that's usually much of my purchase).

Gardening keeps challenging me in good ways. There is always a mixture of planning, chaos, weather, pests, surprise, failure, and eventually figuring something out. I am already looking ahead to what I can do differently next year. I want to get the garden basement organized, take stock of what worked, and build on this year’s success with a little more planning and clarity.

Chris and I also found ourselves deeply enjoying wrestling this year. We went to an event last December and somehow it became a regular part of our lives. We now go two or three times a month to Beyond Wrestling in Cranston, often with a small group of people, and it is just a blast.

There is something wonderful about the performance, the athleticism, the spectacle, the crowds, the chants, the signs, and the props. People are so deeply invested in loving the experience. It is silly and ridiculous in the best possible way, and it has become this regular, communal, fun thing that we did not know we needed.

We also welcomed two new cats into the household: Buster, a young kitten, and her mama, Imani. They have become part of our home, though Bear has some mixed feelings about the arrangement. She mostly tolerates them and is not always particularly excited about sharing her space.

This year also brought the loss of MJ, our mud turtle. I caught MJ when I was seven or eight years old. My father took care of him for around thirty years, and we took care of him for the last eight or nine. For a mud turtle that was supposed to live ten to fifteen years in captivity, he made it almost forty years. That is pretty remarkable. It was sad to lose a creature that had been connected to my childhood and to my father for so long. Yet, it did not hit me in the same way as losing Pumpkin, but it was still a named transition wherein there is one less thing in the world connecting to not only my childhood, but my father.

We have continued to think about what community looks like in Rhode Island and to build our own local network slowly. Some of that has happened through wrestling. Some of it has happened through neighbors, gardening, friends, and work. Some of it is simply the continued practice of making room for people and trying to build deeper connections close to home.

I still have more community-service hours to complete for the Master Gardener program. The class was useful, though it did not feel quite as substantial as I had hoped. That happens. I am hoping the volunteering piece will become another way to meet people locally and continue building relationships.

Travel this year was mostly work-related, but I am grateful to get out into the world and see new places. I got to go to San Diego twice, once for the POD Conference and once for consulting work, as well as New York, Virginia, Maine, and Long Island.

Health

Health remains a mixed bag in familiar ways. My weight has crept up more than I would like, and that continues to be a challenge. If you look across these annual posts, or really across my whole life, weight has always been something I have negotiated. I wish I were probably twenty pounds lighter, and I suspect that may always be somewhat true.

At the same time, I feel like I have a rhythm and routine that keeps me generally healthy. Daily exercise is deeply habituated. Running and cycling largely take care of themselves now because they are a meaningful part of my life.

I have also been introducing more weights and other kinds of movement now that my home office is set up for that. I want to keep paying attention to strength, mobility, and the things that help me stay capable over time.

Running was a little harder this year if I was looking to (pun intended) make strides rather than just sustaining I did not seem to find the same speed coming out of winter, and a tight hamstring over the last month and a half made it hard to build capacity. But I have still kept a pretty steady rhythm of longer runs in the eight- to ten-mile range on weekends and three to six miles most mornings during the week.

I feel comfortable in my body and grateful for what it can do. I am also more mindful about how I push it. Injuries can become a significant disruption to daily life, and I am less interested in proving what I can make my body endure than in protecting my ability to move, run, cycle, garden, and generally feel like myself.

The double marathon remains an idea I am still holding. I did not run 52.4 miles this year, and I am more realistic now about the amount of planning and energy it would require. I may get there in the next two or three years. I may not. I still like the idea, but I do not need to force it into being at the expense of the other important things in my life.

Finally, the journal that I have been using for over three years is almost finished. My general practice has been pretty sustained and simple to do. Each day I try to write what I accomplished, what I'm anxious about, and what am I appreciating. It's a simple format that allows me to capture the gist of the day. Now that the journal is coming to an end and I am wondering what does journaling look like next?

Obviously, I can buy another journal and do the same thing, but I've played around with journaling in different ways over the years. There's an entire year where I wrote probably 200 or so words to capture my day. And I did that for a year. So in this moment, I'm in the mode of what could it look like? What might be different this time around?

Looking ahead

With the PhD done, I have more room to think about what I want to create and where I want to put my attention.

The memoir is still very much in early progress. I have had important conversations and some breakthroughs about what it should be and what it should not be. I want to give it more deliberate time this year. There is something about the distance I now have from my youth that makes this feel like the right time to take it on.

At the same time, a novel (or series of interconnected stories) has come into clearer focus. It is an exploration of AI that feels connected to my work but also very different from most of the writing, talks, and workshops I do. The memoir and novel feel like two sides of the same coin. Both are works of storytelling. Both need patience and attention. Both may move slowly, and I think that is okay.

I am looking forward to continuing the leadership and consulting work Chris and I are doing. I think there are new spaces opening up for that work, and I am interested in seeing where it can go.

I am also hoping to get more actively back into classrooms. It has been about a year since I have been in one, and teaching continues to be one of the places where I learn the most. I want to keep studying agentic AI, keep thinking about how it changes or does not change higher education, and keep having those conversations with people who are trying to figure it out too.

Mostly, I want this next year to involve continual growth: more creativity, more learning, more connection, more community, more garden hijinks, more laughter, and more opportunities to be useful...and probably more wrestling (attending; not participating--ha!)

That feels like a good direction for 47.

See you next year!

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Review: Education and the Cult of Efficiency by Raymond E. Callahan

noreply@blogger.com (Lance Eaton) — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 09:30:00 +0000

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

Raymond E. Callahan’s Education and the Cult of Efficiency was written in the mid-20th century about the early 20th century and yet, still feels so relevant and palpable today. Callahan is focused on K–12 education, but its relevance to higher ed feels just as potent.

Callahan traces a rich history of efficiency springing out of Taylorism and making its way into public education, particularly through administrators and the professionalization of administration. Superintendents increasingly became a distinct class of professional administrators rather than teachers who happened to become administrators. And that class was deeply informed by the discourse of efficiency. The result is efficiency deeply entrenched at the administrative level of public education for generations (over 100 years now).

Callahan is capable of empathizing with their situation. These were public positions, accountable to communities increasingly asking schools to demonstrate that they were using public money efficiently. But some administrators also leaned into this with real enthusiasm. They celebrated supposed wins that don't really feel like wins. They found increasingly elaborate ways to produce reports and numbers that demonstrated efficiency without necessarily demonstrating actual learning.

That tension might feel quite familiar. We still talk about education through budgets, assessments, compensation, inputs and outputs, administrative “bloat,” and especially return on investment. And there are legitimate reasons for some of that. Education costs people a lot of money. Public institutions should be accountable for public dollars. I don't know that there is some simple alternative where we just stop thinking about costs.

But education is not clear. It is not straightforward. It is messy.

Callahan shows what can happen when efficiency becomes the easiest and therefore most important metric. One solution is increasing class sizes. Another is asking more of educators who often aren't compensated particularly well (that good ole vocational awe). Resources disappear while more gets thrown onto teachers' plates. The pursuit of efficiency becomes a continual approach to de-skilling, making mentally laborious work harder and more tedious.

It also changes what education can offer. Callahan discusses languages such as Latin and Greek disappearing because classes didn't fill and therefore were not effecient. The important thing becomes full classes rather than full opportunity for intellectual pursuit. That's its own kind of harm because it quietly changes what we think education is supposed to be. Again, something we see time and again in higher education as small departments are much more likely to be closed.

Reading Callahan made me more suspicious of measurement in education, particularly because he shows that these tendencies have been with us for well over a century. It brought to mind C. Thi Nguyen’s The Score and Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. There is a similar problem of value capture: we measure something that represents another thing, a proxy for what we're actually trying to get at, and eventually the measurement becomes a trap that determines how we go about doing things.

There is also a larger political problem here. Public education is necessary for maintaining a democratic society, and democracy requires people to support things from which they may not individually or immediately benefit. Taxes supporting somebody else's education are part of maintaining the society we all participate in. That sits uneasily beside the rugged individualism that developed alongside the efficiency movement Callahan documents: the Horatio Alger books, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, education understood primarily in terms of individual advancement and return.

None of this left me particularly inspired. Education and the Cult of Efficiency (1964) is older than I am by 15 years, and Callahan himself is writing about events that were already decades old. Reading it now feels like standing at another point along the same timeline and realizing that many of these problems haven't changed. In some ways, they've gotten worse.

And that makes the book feel especially relevant to AI. Reading Callahan now, I can't help wondering what would have happened if AI had been available to these efficiency-minded administrators in the early 1900s. Would they have tried to bypass teachers altogether?

That question connects Callahan for me to Audrey Watters’ Teaching Machines. I worry about AI being offered as an opportunity to replace or undermine teachers because doing so requires us to pretend that content, discipline, relationship, and learning can all be parceled out into distinct things. Let AI handle the content. Hire somebody else to be relational. But that misses the way disciplinary expertise shapes the relationship and the learning itself: the ways of thinking within a discipline rather than simply possessing its content.

Meanwhile, higher education is creating undergraduate and graduate programs around AI, producing people who will presumably step into professional roles tasked with making institutions more “efficient” through these tools. Pair that with an already strong discourse against public education and its costs, and the possibilities get dangerous. Callahan's work begins to look less like history and more like a playbook.

Not because today's administrators are necessarily reading him, but because the logic he describes is still here: identify expensive skilled labor, break it into measurable pieces, find efficiencies, and demonstrate success through numbers. AI gives us an extraordinarily powerful new tool for doing exactly that.

More than a century after the story Callahan tells begins, I'm not convinced we've figured out how to escape the cult of efficiency. I'm not even sure we fully recognize how deeply embedded in education it already is.

The Tapestry and The Hustle

noreply@blogger.com (Lance Eaton) — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 09:30:00 +0000

Learn more about The Unicorn Tapestries

Estimated Reading Time: 13 minutes

The Tapestry, Six Years Later

Six years ago, I used the tapestry to explain why all the apparently disconnected things I did actually fit together (“The Hustle and the Tapestry”). I think I had a pretty good sense then of the tension between building a tapestry and pursuing the hustle, but I understand the metaphor differently now. The tapestry gives me a center of gravity. It helps me decide what to pursue, what to connect, what to let develop slowly, what to pass along to somebody else, and when the old hustle is trying to disguise itself as opportunity.

It has been a busy six years, to say the least. I finally completed my dissertation, though it took ten years total. I have changed jobs a few more times—first from Brandeis to Harvard, then College Unbound, and now Northeastern. I have continued to blog here, albeit erratically, and I started a second blog in the form of a Substack. That one has been a little more consistent and has gained a much larger audience in three years than this blog has in fifteen. I still love this blog, though. This has been a space to play around with ideas, write about the different things I am trying to make sense of, and share work in ways that have mattered to me for a long time.

Some things in life have stayed the same. Six years ago, I was always looking for ways to work with other people, connect people, and present with colleagues. I still enjoy creating and fostering community. But the scale has changed. My work has become more widely known and sought after, and a whole new part of my professional life has grown around doing two or three talks or workshops each month with colleges and universities around the world. I am also regularly writing and publishing with friends and colleagues on different subjects, as well as consulting and providing insight and support to institutional leaders.

So, as I look back at that original essay, the tapestry and hustle metaphor has continued to guide me. But I have a clearer sense now of what the work of the tapestry looks like. What does it mean to weave it? What are the practices that help it come together? What I’m finding is that the tapestry is the evolving pattern of a life and body of work organized around particular values. Weaving is the practice of discerning, connecting, cultivating, and sometimes relinquishing the threads in that pattern.

Compound Interest: Why the Tapestry Get Stronger

I have been thinking a lot about the compound interest of practice—the habits and ways of showing up that become part of who you are. The more you do it, the more natural the movement becomes. You get into a flow. Early practice makes later practice more effective, not because you have figured everything out, but because you have built enough muscle memory to recognize what might be possible.

This blog is probably the clearest example for me. I started blogging here more than fifteen years ago, and while I have waxed and waned in how frequently I post, I have kept coming back to it. There are now more than 2,000 posts here. That is a lot of thoughts, insights, experiments, presentations, resources, and probably a fair amount of stuff that I would phrase differently now. But that is also the point. This has become a practice. It is something I do because it is important to how I show up in the world.

I have long been in the habit of sharing things I have published and presentations I have given. When ChatGPT was released, I did what I normally do: I started writing about it here. Those posts led to requests, in part because many folks in education were also trying to figure it out and not that many people were writing about generative AI in higher education in December 2022. The talks and workshops created more opportunities to share back what I was learning, and then, after about 10 months, I started the Substack.

The contrast is interesting to me. I have been doing this blog for fifteen years, and I do not expect I will ever give it up because it has been so important to me. But when I started the Substack, I took what I had learned here and applied it differently. The Substack focuses on AI, but the practices of writing, sharing resources, making sense of emerging questions, and turning presentations back into artifacts had already been developed here over the prior 12 years. The newer space became much more attended and engaged with than this one, but it did not come from nowhere.

That is what I mean by compound interest. I could not have predicted that AI and higher education would become the work that took off for me. There was every chance that it could have gone by the wayside. But I had the practices ready when the opportunity came along. Practice is working those muscles so that you are ready for an opportunity: not necessarily to take every opportunity, but to recognize what you might do with it.

Over time, the threads increasingly reinforce one another. A framework I develop for a workshop can become a blog post. That post can become a conversation with a colleague. The conversation can evolve into a course, and the course can turn into an article. Each piece can build upon another piece, sometimes in directions I could not have anticipated at the beginning. With each repetition, I get better at seeing how the threads fit together and how different threads might be blended for different effects. The metaphor starts to have its own internal rules.

A Tapestry Made With Other People

While I am talking here about my personal tapestry, it is deeply connected to and made more meaningful through other people’s tapestries. Much of what makes up my work is relational: the interviews I do through the Substack to better understand the field; the mentoring programs I participate in, not simply to share but to learn; and the different ways I try to co-present or co-created with folks who are doing fascinating and powerful things. This connective work is meaningful unto itself because I believe it can be mutually enriching, but it also helps guide the tapestry work.

Over the last six years, I have continually looked for opportunities to connect. For me, that is always powerful because other people help me learn how to show up differently and how they make sense of their own work and the world around them. I increasingly see mentorship as a collaborative experience that enriches both people in different ways. The same is true of collaboration more broadly. The work is not only about what I can make or accomplish; it is also about who I can learn alongside, who I can amplify, and how all of that changes what becomes possible.

Following the Adjacent Possible

I am incredibly grateful for Steven Johnson’s work, particularly his explanation and exploration of the adjacent possible. It has helped me understand my work and much of my life as a series of decisions that were not necessarily made with a big-picture plan in mind. Instead, I have often understood enough about the next step to know that it was the right step—and trusted that getting there would reveal opportunities I could not yet see.

The adjacent possible is, in the most watered-down version of it, the idea that you cannot see beyond the horizon. But when you move toward what looks like the horizon, you are met with a new landscape of what is possible. That has been a hallmark of my professional life.

For somebody who has spent the last fifteen years deeply involved in instructional design, where backwards design is one of the central practices, I have not really done that with my career. In backwards design, you start with the outcomes you want and work back toward the assignments, activities, and learning content that will get you there. I have rarely had that kind of certainty about where I was going.

My first job out of college was meaningful and interesting, and I enjoyed the work, but I did not enjoy the culture. Eventually, that culture started to gnaw at me. It became harder to be myself there. So I left for a position that was not necessarily seen as professional and paid about 50% of what I had been making. But I knew it was the right choice, and what I did not know was that, because it was an overnight job, it would make it possible for me to teach in college during the day—the time when there was the widest range of adjunct courses available. Making that move to overnight counselor opened a pathway that eventually leads to where I am today.

The same was true when I left Harvard for College Unbound. Harvard is obviously a prestigious institution, and I was in a role that many people would have seen as significant. I took a substantial pay cut (five digits) to go to an institution few people had heard of or understood. But at College Unbound, first as Director of Digital Pedagogy and then as Director of Faculty Development and Innovation, I had far more possibility. It was a young college that was growing and trying to become more established, and I had the opportunity to help create some of the central pieces it needed.

It also meant that, when AI came around, I could engage with it, think about it, and participate in the conversation in ways that would not have been possible for me at Harvard (for a variety of good and less-good reasons). There is something not always appreciated about leaving a place with more prestige, more pay, and more obvious forms of capital for a place that might be seen as having less of all of those things. Yet that new space gave me room to explore, grow, and do things I would not have been able to do before.

That is what feels so powerful to me about the adjacent possible. It is not necessarily about knowing the whole pattern. It is about recognizing that a transition might be right, and then being open to seeing what the new terrain makes possible. That is why the tapestry works better for me than a map or a plan. It only becomes fully legible in hindsight, but there can still be intention and thoughtfulness in every weave. You can have some vision, but you may also need to see how it gets developed thread by thread.

When the Hustle Takes the Wheel

One of the things I explored in the original essay was the move from hustle to tapestry building. That still matters, but I still recognize it is not something everybody gets to choose or work toward in the same way. There are a lot of complicated, nuanced, frustrating, and unfair reasons for that. Scarcity is not imaginary, and neither are the pressures that push people to keep saying yes.

And even when I feel like I no longer need the hustle, the hustle does not necessarily go away just because things are going well. In fact, it can become louder. Over the last three years, I have done more than 120 talks, keynotes, and workshops around AI, teaching and learning, higher education, leadership, and related topics. Those opportunities often come with pay, and it can be incredibly hard to say no because it feels like saying no to money that I may not get again.

It is a very similar feeling to adjuncting, when you say yes to all the courses you can because you do not know how many will run or whether the institution will bring you back the following semester. I do not know whether the requests for talks will keep coming. I do not know whether the money will stay on the table. I still do not know. That unknowing has made it easy for the scarcity mindset to reappear and make me say yes more often than I probably should.

So I have had to pay more attention and develop more discernment. I have to ask: Does this belong to the work? Do I actually have time for it? Do I have care for it? Am I doing it because I am excited and interested, or because I want the paycheck? The answers are never perfect or clean, but I have to ask the questions and see what the answers bring.

Some advice Robin DeRosa gave me about a year into this work has been especially helpful. She is somebody whose work in open education, equity, justice, and learning I have admired—and, yes, fanboyed over—for years. In a conversation, she reminded me that my “no” can be somebody else’s yes. Saying no to an opportunity can create the possibility of recommending somebody else: somebody earlier in their career, somebody doing really good work who has not yet gotten the attention, or somebody whose voice needs to be in that room.

I am incredibly grateful for that insight. Discernment is part of why the tapestry remains a practice rather than an achievement. It is about building a life that can hold the work, too.

AI Can Flood the Loom

It would be strange to write this reflection at this point in my career without talking about AI. AI, or at least much of the discourse around it, is deeply shaped by hustle culture. It is so focused on productivity and the promise of doing more, faster. And that is highly seductive to a great many people. Myself included. As somebody who comes from and is still lured by hustle culture, it can be hard to resist the siren song of AI.

Where I have tried to lean in differently is by asking how I might use AI as a tool of discernment and not simply a tool of acceleration. There are places where I use it to accelerate things. I might vibe code and play around with something I am curious to create. But I also need to be mindful of creating just to create more. For me, there are ways AI can make the work slower, more deliberate, and more deliberative.

This essay is one example. I used AI to interview me, help me think through the major ideas and outline, and then provide feedback as I wrote. I probably could have made this shorter and breezier, but AI also helped me tease out key elements I might otherwise have overlooked. That, for me, is a more useful role. I want it to support the work of thinking, not replace the work of thinking.

Sensemaking is part of how I show up in the world. Could AI help me present that sensemaking more quickly and more widely? Sure. But I do not think that is necessarily the point. To me, that is often the hustle speaking—the fear that I cannot produce enough or that I am not enough. I continue to (try to) reject that way at this juncture in my life.

I do worry for folks at other points in their careers about how seductive AI can be and how easily it can lead people toward producing work that is not sustainable or even wanted. My hope is that we can come to AI differently and ask not simply, “How much more can I do?” but “What else can AI help us notice, imagine, practice, question, or make newly possible?”

That is where I think AI can fit within tapestry building. Not to make me build the tapestry faster, crank out more yarn, or make it look prettier. I am okay with blemishes in the tapestry. There should be blemishes. It is the work of a person who only gets to make that tapestry once. What I want from AI is not help making it perfect, but help making it distinct: not how much it depicts, but what it depicts.

Finding the Central Focus

If you are still here, you can probably tell that I have thought a lot about this. I started working on this piece four months ago. I promise I am not turning it into a book or seminar series—though I suppose the trilogy: Envision Your Tapestry, Seize the Threads of Life, and Weave Your Best Life might be coming to a hotel conference room near you someday.

More or less, this is about making sense of work I have been doing not only over the last six years, but throughout much of my career and maybe my life. Like much of my writing, I share it because I think it may find somebody who sees some of their own experiences or ways of thinking reflected here. The tapestry metaphor was a useful contrast to hustle when I first stumbled upon it. Years later, it has become a stronger tool for bringing values into my thinking, especially when scarcity has driven so much of my life.

In the end, I am still weaving. What the tapestry resembles is the person I am practicing becoming. I look forward to seeing what that looks like.
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Review: The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game by C. Thi Nguyen

noreply@blogger.com (Lance Eaton) — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 09:30:00 +0000

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

C. Thi Nguyen's The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game is one of those books that can change the way you look at the world. Since finishing it, I find myself asking a simple question: What game is being played here, and what score is everyone trying to maximize? Once you start seeing those games, they're almost impossible to unsee.

The Score helps us see a world where scoring, tracking, and quantifying our experiences run through nearly every aspect of modern life. He doesn't dismiss or argue against scoring systems on their own. In fact, a strength of the book is acknowledging how useful they can be. Scores help us learn, grow, explore, create, and make sense of complicated systems. Games themselves are wonderful examples of this. Constraints and scoring often make games meaningful.

Yet, the danger comes when those measures of success stop serving our values and begin replacing them. This is where the issue of value capture arises and stays with the reader well after the book. Metrics begin as proxies for what we care about, but over time they become the thing we care about.

Education is an obvious example. Grades are meant to represent learning, yet it's easy for learning to become secondary to earning the grade. The same thing happens in research. Publishing, citation counts, impact factors, and the endless pressures of "publish or perish" gradually replace the underlying purpose of scholarship: creating and sharing knowledge. As someone who spent years in higher education and wrote a dissertation in a system shaped by those incentives, Nguyen gave me a vocabulary for something I'd long experienced but hadn't articulated as clearly.

That insight extends well beyond academia. Throughout the book, Nguyen demonstrates how these systems become captured—sometimes intentionally, often indirectly—by larger structures of competition and capital accumulation. The commodification of everyday life makes it increasingly difficult to simply enjoy something, to pursue mastery, or to create for its own sake without those activities being absorbed into another accounting system.

Nguyen does try to emphasize agency and awareness over solving the system itself. His argument isn't that we should reject scores altogether, but that we should remember they are tools in service of some larger purpose. That's a distinction I've had to hold onto throughout my own career. Teaching has metrics. Publishing has metrics. Degrees, evaluations, productivity, and impact all have metrics. Those measures aren't meaningless, but they become dangerous when they quietly replace the reasons we entered those professions in the first place.

At the same time, I wasn't enthralled with the awareness and agency argument. Nguyen argues that agency comes from consciously choosing which games to play, and I largely agree. But that choice is unevenly distributed and is packed with privilege. Many people find themselves trapped in games they never chose and cannot easily leave. The criminal justice system, for example, often resembles a game of Chutes and Ladders played without a clear rulebook or adequate resources or maybe more like starting a Monopoly game already in debt and with most of the properties already owned. Naming the game is empowering, but awareness alone doesn't guarantee the freedom to disengage from the game.

Nguyen's chapter on transparency challenged me. He's right that making everything measurable and visible changes behavior and invites gaming. We see that everywhere. But transparency also creates accountability. Whether in government or public institutions, the ability to question decisions has real democratic value, even if it comes with significant costs. I don't know that tension is solvable, and I appreciated that Nguyen doesn't pretend otherwise. This is where his work was more challenging in an intriguing way as he talked about experts in public arenas. We want accountability of experts and therefore, often use transparency (of the resources they use), and yet, as experts they understand systems (in which they're experts) that we can't. So it can be challenging in the public arena (a different set of metrics and games) to call them to account without undermining their expertise. Again, it's not that they shouldn't be held accountable or be open to challenge, but there is a way in which the politicalization of expertise can undermine the goals of why we have the experts in the first place.

As a lifelong gamer, I also loved how the book deepened my appreciation for play itself. It sent me back to thinking about games not simply as entertainment but as carefully constructed systems of constraints. Why is this scoring system designed this way? What experience is it trying to produce? Those questions extend beyond board or video games. And it calls back to improv comedy, where a scene becomes its own game of continually raising the stakes, or about everyday interactions where people unconsciously invent games together.

That perspective connected me strongly to Jane McGonigal's Reality Is Broken, SuperBetter and Imaginable. McGonigal explores how we might intentionally use game thinking to change or augment our lives. By contrast, Nguyen asks what happens when game structures begin shaping our lives whether we notice them or not.

I also couldn't help wondering what higher education would look like if more people read The Score. I don't imagine we'd eliminate grades or assessments overnight. But perhaps we'd become more reflective about what they're actually for. Grades are artificial scores that contribute to larger artificial scores (college rankings), and somewhere along the way we risk losing the plot of education itself. Administrators, too, are trapped within systems demanding ever more metrics to justify decisions, budgets, and institutional success. Nguyen helped me see that they are often playing games they didn't design either.

Nguyen doesn't offer an escape hatch, and I do appreciate that. His two endings acknowledge his ambivalence about his work and where it leads the reader. We're still living inside these systems. Naming them doesn't free us from them. But perhaps it allows us to participate in them more consciously.

I don't think we're anywhere close to dismantling systems built around capital accumulation and optimization. Those structures are deeply woven into modern life. But I do think I'm better for having read this book. It has given me a richer language for recognizing the games around me, understanding the scores that are being kept, and occasionally asking whether I want to keep playing.

Review: Whistler by Ann Patchett

noreply@blogger.com (Lance Eaton) — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 11:27:00 +0000

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

Whistler presents and understands family less as a collection of heroes and villains, and more as overlapping, often contradictory stories that everyone tells themselves. You're never actually in the same family as your other family members. Everyone is in a different family together.

Ann Patchett tells a tender, amusing, and deeply caring story about memory, regret, and the ways our lives change over time. At its center is Daphne's unexpected reconnection with Eddie, the stepfather who disappeared from her life decades earlier. On paper, that reunion could have become melodrama or nostalgia. Instead, Patchett turns it into something quieter and far more meaningful: a second chance at a deep human connection that isn't romantic but is every bit as profound.

Eddie became one of the richest parts of the novel. He never presents himself as perfect, nor does he spend his time trying to justify the mistakes he's made. He knows he's imperfect. He accepts that those imperfections have hurt people, and while he wishes they hadn't, he doesn't try to rewrite the past. There's something valuable about that acceptance, and it's something Daphne slowly comes to recognize as well.

The book lacks "villains" in the best way possible. Patchett initially encourages us to see Abigail, Daphne's mother, and Buddy, her biological father, through Daphne's understanding of them. Yet as the story unfolds, though, those easy judgments become much harder to hold. The novel doesn't excuse anyone's choices, but it insists that every character is more complicated than the role they've been assigned in someone else's story. That larger idea (that we're often trapped inside our own narratives and can't always see even our own family members for the individuals they are) felt like the novel's emotional center.

Daphne herself is an easy character to connect with because in most people's lives they have help someone in great esteem who through circumstance of one sort or another, disappeared. There can feel a bit of wish fulfillment in Whistler of the hope of being given another opportunity to know someone who once mattered deeply and to acknowledge what that relationship meant. But the more compelling part--at least for me--was watching Daphne rewrite her own understanding of many of her relationships throughout the novel in ways that recognized nuance and agency in others.

Patchett's prose is understated and quietly observant. I was always present in the story, being shown the canvas she was painting. At no point was I pulled out to admire the beauty of the language for its own sake. Instead, the writing kept my attention exactly where it belonged: on the people, their relationships, and the slow reshaping of what they thought they knew about one another.

The scene that captures the novel's spirit for me is when Daphne and Eddie crash a wedding. There's something magical about it—a sense of play, whimsy, and possibility for two people well into the second half of their lives. It solidified the novel's emotional undercurrent. Life does not need to be consumed by regret. Patchett shows us what can still be found.

The novel reminded me of John Irving's A Widow for One Year, though Whistler felt like the healthier version of that kind of story. Both trace lives over decades and explore unconventional families, but Patchett's gift is allowing relationships to remain within healthy boundaries while still making you wonder where they might go.

In the end, Whistler is a compelling family novel about perception, memory, regret, and the possibility of grace. It's about how we remember and misremember, how our past remains deep in our bones even when we've forgotten the details, and how accepting another person's humanity often requires letting go of the story we've been telling about them for years.

Review: Cat Love by Tomás Q. Morín

noreply@blogger.com (Lance Eaton) — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 09:30:00 +0000

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

Cat Love is enjoyable and playful, and uses that playfulness to explore the bleak realities of labor, care, capitalism, and exploitation. Morín explores the question of Schrödinger’s cat from the perspective of the cat. The novel then uses that setup to hold a mirror up to the systems we already live inside and remind us of their perversity.

In this funhouse world of desperation and fleeting opportunity, people train to become support animals to other humans and must fully play the part. It is absurd, but it also feels very present and very prescient to the moment we are in. Their training, the ridiculous quizing of right choices to random questions to become support animals, the performance of care, and the degrading expectations all feel like recognizable extensions of the world of work now.

That is where the novel connects strongly to the last-mile automation problem. So much of the frictionless service of self-driving cars, perfect AI outputs, and the like typically come from an exploitation of human labor and the need for that human labor while being disugised as originating from the machine. We are often promised magic—automation, artificial intelligence, frictionless service—but somewhere behind it there are still humans doing the dehumnazing and exploited work. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is the obvious example, but it is part of a much larger pattern in which human labor gets hidden so that something can be presented as automated or robotic.

Cat Love makes those costs much more visible. The people applying for these jobs are forced into their own dehumanization even though it is often presented as a "choice". Part of that process is to participate in the needless death of a cat through a pseudo-Schrodinger's cat experiment. This particular tale follows one of those cats to see and learn the layers of exploitation in the system and the different ways that people are victims of the system at different levels while they all perpetuate the harms. Something likely to resonate with anyone who finds themselves stuck in this space of feeling obligated to participate in practices or technologies that feel like they put us at odds with our values or ways we want to show up in the world.

Seeing this through the eyes of a cat makes seeing the perversity easier to approach without making it less serious. All portrayals of cats are anthropomorphizing, so that comes with the territory, but the cat is a useful vehicle for alienating the reader from the normal way things are. Seeing the world through her is part of what makes the story successful.

There is also something particularly effective about using a beloved domesticated animal in a story about exploitation and consumer capitalism. The pet industry itself has balloned to nearly $200 billion per year. People deeply love their pets, but we often express that love through products and services brought to us by recommendation systems, surveillance capitalism, Amazon, and larger systems of exploited labor. The point is not that cats do not deserve this, but that it is that care and affection itself is turned into systems of capital, captured, and then redirected through the same systems of economics and exploitation that the novel is critiquing.

In the story on its own, anyone who lives with a cat (or any pet) will latch onto the unnamed cat's relationship with her previous human (named "Mustache). There's a bit of wish fulfillment in seeing the cat try to find her way back to Mustache, despite being in the box. It also doesn't hinder us from entering the story's critique of capitalism and even pet ownership. At a certain point in the novel, she transforms and when she does, that connect to her human is still important but by that point, one is also invested in what she was becoming and whether she should pursue revenge. Once the novel moves into the revenge plot, it becomes more surreal. What interested me more was how the attempt to get revenge pulled us deeper into the world: into the relationships, choices, and larger social, political, and economic structures that put the cat in the box in the first place.

The near-future setting works and doesn't feel too far from the present's reality. The novel blends together satire, grief, and weird fiction surprisingly well. It also connects strongly with nonfiction and speculative fiction about automation, hidden labor, and the commodification of care. It reminded me of Cory Doctorow’s The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI, Annalee Newitz’s Automatic Noodle, Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Karen Hao’s Empire of AI, Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna’s The AI Con, and Allison Pugh’s The Last Human Job. Across all of them is a similar question: what happens to connection or connective labor when it is increasingly captured by hyper-capitalism?

Cat Love approaches that question through a cat, a box, and humor. That playfulness gives the novel an easier lens through which to explore exploitation, but it does not soften the critique. It makes the machinery of the present easier to see.

Review: Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture by Kyle Chayka

noreply@blogger.com (Lance Eaton) — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 09:30:00 +0000

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

Filterworld is one of those books that I appreciated as much for the questions it reinforced as for the arguments it made. Kyle Chayka offers a rich account of how algorithms shape the culture we consume and, in turn, the culture that gets made as a result of that process. I found myself nodding along with much of his analysis, though less engaged with some of his biggest conclusions.

One of the book's greatest strengths is that it doesn't pretend algorithms emerged from nowhere. Chayka traces a longer history of recommendation and filtering before arriving at today's digital platforms, and that historical context gives the book a depth that many critiques of social media and algorithmic culture lack when they frame it as entirely new (that is the concerns that a media-ecosystem create). At the same time, I wanted him to push that history even further.

Where I most disagreed with the book was its framing of what feels genuinely new. Chayka often presents Filterworld as a significant break from the past, but I kept asking myself how different these dynamics really are. We have always lived with gatekeepers. Editors, publishers, critics, television executives, newspaper owners, and cultural institutions have long determined what gets elevated, what gets ignored, and what is considered worthy of attention. Those decisions have never been neutral. They have reflected the biases of their time and place, especially within Western culture. They declared what is and isn't appropriate and often, dismissed huge amounts of meaningful work by those that did not fit the "type."

That's also why I was less persuaded by Chayka's faith in tastemakers and human curators as the legitimate honest brokers. I appreciate thoughtful curators, and there are plenty whose recommendations I value. But history gives me reason to be cautious about treating human gatekeepers as the obvious solution. My mind goes to Fredric Wertham and the damage his cultural authority did to comics in the U.S., narrowing what an entire medium was allowed to become for decades. Human curation can flatten culture just as effectively as algorithms can; we see that now with the Trump administrations attempts to destroy civil rights and the cultural ideas that helped to make the world more inclusive.

I question Chayka's distinction between passive algorithmic consumption and earlier forms of media. Newspapers, radio, and television all presented streams of information that demanded discernment from their audiences. Passive consumption has always been a temptation. Cultivated judgment has always been necessary. Algorithms amplify those challenges, but they didn't invent them.

The same was true of his discussion of globalization and cultural sameness. I don't disagree that recommendation systems encourage homogenization, but I also think we've been standardizing aesthetics, representations, and ideals for a very long time. Whether it's what kitchens should look like, what cities should aspire to, or even whose skin was properly represented on film, these patterns long predate recommendation engines.

Instead, I longed for a more pluralistic approach. Rather than replacing algorithms with a privileged class of tastemakers, I'd rather see many different forms of curation alongside a renewed commitment for each of us to cultivate our own judgment. That's where the book resonated most with me. It made me more conscious of my own media habits, where I'm relying on algorithmic recommendations, where I'm choosing differently, and what practices I can adopt to be more intentional with my attention. I also realize that's an individualistic response to a systematic problem, but I'm not sure there was much better responses about addressing this from Chayka.

Chayka does try to move beyond diagnosis and imagine regulation, but I remained skeptical that the proposed solutions feel workable for ordinary people. Greater control often comes with greater friction. GDPR is a good example: it promises agency but frequently amounts to clicking through yet another consent banner without providing a tangible sense of empowerment.

The book reminds me of works like Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, C. Thi Nguyen's The Games We Play, Cory Doctorow's Enshittification, and Alison Pugh's The Last Human Job. Together, they point toward a broader conversation about systems, incentives, and the ways our choices are shaped and therein, relationships are made, not made, or unmade.

Beneath all the discussion of algorithms, Chayka is really writing about connection. He wants art to be something that helps people encounter one another rather than simply another item in an endless feed of optimized recommendations. That's an impulse I share, even if I remain unconvinced that our current moment is as historically distinct as he argues.

Review: Stories, Dice, and Rocks That Think by Byron Reese

noreply@blogger.com (Lance Eaton) — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 09:30:00 +0000

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

Stories, Dice, and Rocks That Think is at its strongest when Byron Reese is showing that the ways we think about the world came from somewhere. Storytelling, mathematics, probability, and (less so) artificial intelligence can feel so normal to us that it is difficult to imagine a world without them. Reese’s book helped make those habits of thought feel strange again.

The book traces a progression from humans using language and telling stories, to using abstract concepts like mathematics, to developing ways of predicting the future, and eventually to creating “rocks that think” (computers). I found that movement through the history of thought a useful means of sensemaking, albeit one that still feels a bit arrived at in hindsight. Regardless, it's still compelling. It offers an accessible way to consider thinking devices (conceptual or physical) as most distinctly human: our ability to communicate, externalize ideas, imagine what has not happened, and anticipate what might happen next.

To do this, Reese pushes on the distinction between humans and other animals far. His argument about the uniqueness of language and communication sometimes felt forced, as though acknowledging greater continuity with other animals would weaken the story he wanted to tell. Human communication has clearly played an extraordinary role in our development, but the book occasionally seemed too eager to make it wholly different from anything else in the evolutionary record and claiming that no other animal has developed more advances technologically speaking as evidence. I might make an argument that some of that might be a result of human interference, but that's more a side point.

It does hint at the larger limitation. This feels like a history written by a generalist rather than a specialist. Reese is moving across vast areas of knowledge, and I suspect specialists in human evolution, animal communication, mathematics, or intellectual history would find plenty of nuance being glossed over. At the same time, that generalist perspective is part of what makes the book useful. It creates a structure that is easy to grapple with and offers a valuable interpretation of how we got here, even when that interpretation may not be true in some absolute sense.

The section on probability was particularly strong. We now think, speak, and make decisions through probability constantly, whether we are looking at a weather forecast or trying to judge the risks of a decision. Reese’s account helped me see how normalized that way of thinking has become and left me curious about what the world feels like when you do not think in probabilities.

I imagine moving from a world organized around prophecy, divinity, or certainty into one organized around probability as a movement toward agency. Probability does not necessarily give us control, but it gives us multiple possible outcomes to work towards. If more than one future can happen, then perhaps our actions can help determine which one does. That control may be real or imagined, and my own response is undoubtedly shaped by living in a 21st-century United States discourse saturated with ideas about agency and personal ability. Even so, Reese helped me understand how working in probabilities changes our relationship to the future.

The move from dice to “rocks that think” also felt natural. Throughout the book, humans externalize thought into tools: the voice box, writing, ledgers, mathematical proofs, dice, fiction, and eventually computers. These tools do not merely preserve thought after it happens. They allow us to do forms of thinking that would otherwise be impossible, whether by transferring knowledge across generations, calculating more than we can hold in our minds, or imagining things that have not happened yet.

Fiction belongs in that progression too. It gives us somewhere to hold the unreal and to postulate what could be. Cervantes’s Don Quixote, with all of its metatextual play, feels like an especially good example: a story being used to think about stories, reality, authorship, and what fiction does to people.

Reese’s final destination may be a little too neat. “Rocks that think” is a clever phrase, and it can feel as though the whole history has been arranged retroactively to arrive at artificial intelligence. I found myself wondering whether the argument would have moved so strongly in that direction if AI were not so present in the moment when Reese was writing. Still, there is something valuable in seeing AI as another stage in our long history of using artifice to hold, extend, and act upon human thought. These systems may simulate a form of thinking, but they are also, at their foundation, human thought gathered and operated at scale.

Reese’s writing is clear and functional rather than stylistically remarkable. I did not pause over sentences because they were amazing or moving. The prose served the argument, which matters given the complexity and scope of what he is trying to communicate.

Ultimately, Stories, Dice, and Rocks That Think gave me a useful way to make sense of the relationship between human thought and the tools that carry it. I don't accept every distinction Reese makes, and I remain wary of how much nuance gets compressed in such a sweeping history. But the book enhanced the way I think about thinking itself: how we store it, extend it, transfer it, and use it to imagine futures that do not yet exist.

Review: The Last Picture Show by Larry McMurtry

noreply@blogger.com (Lance Eaton) — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 12:49:00 +0000

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

What stayed with me most about The Last Picture Show was how much was going on beneath the usual image of small-town life in the early 1950s. For a novel published in 1966, it is remarkably open about sexual tension, infidelity, prostitution, loneliness, cruelty, and even bestiality. So much of it is presented matter-of-factly, as simply part of life in this rural Texas town. There was more meat there than the sanitized version of the period or of rural America that people often imagine.

The novel is a coming-of-age story, and in that way it reminded me of books like The Outsiders and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. The contexts are different, but they all involve young people grappling with the dirty realities of the world and trying to make sense of lives in which there is not always much to grab onto.

That is especially true in Thalia. High school sports become a form of meaning-making, even though they are often bad at it. People gather at the pool hall because there are so few other places to go. Sonny Crawford and Duane Jackson look for sex, entertainment, status, or escape wherever they can find it. The town feels limited without ever feeling simple. McMurtry has a strong sense of the world these characters inhabit, and I enjoyed the way he moves them into different relationships and confrontations.

Even though he is the protagonist, Sonny isn't especially compelling on his own. The power of the novel came less from its central character than from the grittiness of the world around him and the desperation for connection that runs through almost everyone in it.

McMurtry’s openness feels both honest and exploitative. Billy is the clearest example of the latter. Billy has an unspecified intellectual disability. Often, he is both taken care of and the but of jokes by Sonny and his friends. In McMurtry's writing, he is never treated as a full person but rather a prop through which everyone else can enact their morality. Sam the Lion’s protection of Billy helps establish Sam’s decency, while other characters’ neglect or cruelty helps establish something about them. Billy is stripped of agency so that the people around him can be understood as good or bad. His death has an almost sacrificial quality, but the novel never gives him an interior life equal to the symbolic weight placed on him.

Ruth Popper is more complicated. The neglected wife of an indecent high school coach, she begins an affair with Sonny (also in high school). Their romance occurs as Ruth recovers from having a tumor removed from her breast. Her complexity of seeking relationship, finding her own sense of worth, and trying to find the loneliness of her world makes her sitaution feels intriguing for a novel from 1966. Of course, this is just a few years after the novel, The Graduate by Charles Webb came out (The film adaptation of The Graduate; and this novel's film adaptation would come out in 1971). Her attempt to feel something in a life that has become hard and empty is one of the most interesting parts of the book.

Her final confrontation with Sonny is especially ambiguous. It is not a clean reconciliation. Ruth pushes Sonny toward a deeper realization of what he has done, but the more important change may be in Ruth herself. Whether Sonny changes or not, Ruth has. She seems to have gained a stronger sense of her own individuality, freedom, and self-worth.

She can still be empathetic toward Sonny as a teenager who is trying to figure himself out. She can acknowledge his pain without becoming fully subjected to his whims again. She can care about him while also controlling more of her own narrative.

That connects to what I think may be the novel’s clearest sense of value: the act of being seen, and of recognizing the pain that other people carry. Sam the Lion sees something in Billy that others refuse to see. Ruth eventually has some part of her pain acknowledged. The world of the novel is hard, and people are navigating complexities that those around them may never fully understand. Innocence is repeatedly destroyed, whether in Billy’s fate or in the treatment of the teacher who is accused of being homosexual and attacked.

At the same time, the novel is not only about Sonny and Duane growing up. It is about Thalia ending. The picture show is closing, the town’s way of life is disappearing, and it is unclear what will take its place. In that sense, the book connects for me with Gretel Ehrlich’s The Solace of Open Spaces and with the closing-frontier impulse associated with Westerns: the end of life as people know it in a particular place, a life that is simultaneously celebrated, fetishized, and mourned.

But McMurtry doesn't fully embrace the mourning. He does not make Thalia into an innocent world that deserves uncomplicated nostalgia. This is a place filled with boredom, cruelty, exploitation, and limited opportunity. The novel seems less interested in romanticizing what is disappearing than in asking the reader to consider where the value was.

I have never been a big Western fan, and I am not sure I have read anything else by McMurtry, but this felt like an interesting way into his work. I enjoyed the prose, the relationships and confrontations, and the strength of the world he creates, even when I found some of its characterizations troubling.

Review: Battleaxe by Sara Douglass

noreply@blogger.com (Lance Eaton) — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 09:30:00 +0000

Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes

I didn't expect BattleAxe to hit this hard again.

This was my third or fourth time through Sara Douglass's BattleAxe. I first read it in the summer of 1995, when it came out in Australia, and while it wasn't the book that turned me on to reading, it was absolutely the book that turned me on to fantasy. I'd always been into fantasy on film, but fantasy fiction had didn't really grabbed me as much. I remember slogging through The Lord of the Rings and finding it kind of dull or at least not something that pulled me in.

And then here was this 600-plus-page book that I flew through in two weeks. I'd never read a book that big before, never mind a book that big in two weeks. I got pulled along in this really lovely way. I became deeply interested in this new world of characters, and just plain fascinated by what Sara Douglass was doing.

This is not the first time that I've mentioned Sara Douglass and her work here. Years ag, I reviewed The Serpent Bride which is the first book in the third trilogy that she writes about this fantasy world. I've also mentioned BattleAxe as one of the books that made me a reader.

Reading it almost thirty years later, I'm struck by how much it still pulls me in. I found myself reading 50 pages at a sitting when normally, at night, I might do 20. I kept coming back to it, thinking about it, wanting to return to it. And even though I remembered the broad shape of the story (it had been twenty years since my last reread), scenes felt new again. I kept having that "I didn't remember that" experience, or "oh, I forgot that."

What stood out most this time wasn't only Axis, even though the novel is named for him as the BattleAxe. In fact, rereading it now, I realize how much of the book belongs equally to Faraday and Azhure. Maybe half of it, if not more, is theirs.

Douglass was writing epic fantasy in the early-to-mid '90s. The world she crafts is still very heteronormative. The humans are patriarchal, the Icarii are patriarchal, and it's less clear with the Avar. But there's still something different going on here. Women can be leaders. Women can be fighters. Faraday and Azhure aren't side notes to the epic; they become central to the whole thing.

Faraday interested me more this time, though I was less convinced of her transformation from naive girl at court into this mother-figure of nature, this icon of the mother goddess. Yet there's a strength in her after that shift that shows up much earlier than I remembered.

The most compelling character for me this time, though, was Belial. His support and care for Axis, his willingness to trust him and stand with him felt like one of those forms of positive masculinity that's genuinely meaningful to see on the page. Belial could so easily undermine Axis, or do him harm. Instead there's this gentle dedication between the two of them. Their friendship endures real and significant challenges, and it becomes one of the emotional cores of the book. When Axis reunites with the Icarii and discovers he has a family, that moment lands--not only because of the reunion, but because Belial is right there too; Axis's de facto family. The person who's cared for him and stayed by his side all along. If there was fan-fic for this series, those two would definitely need to be shipped.

I also appreciated Douglass's worldbuilding more this time around. She doesn't dump everything on you at once, but she doesn't withhold forever either. It's less "need to know" and more "soon you may need to know". That makes a huge difference. She gives you enough for the world to keep opening up: around Axis and Faraday, then around Azhure, the Icarii, the Avar. The book never gets lost trying to hand you every last detail. Things happen. Characters talk. The story moves.

That pacing is probably one of the strongest things about BattleAxe. The prose still feels clean and propulsive. At the end of a chapter or a section, something has actually happened: meaning has deepened, characters have moved. There's travel, but we don't need every day of the travel. We get the sense of it, the challenge of it, the key moments of it. The book has peak moments all the way through: tension, discovery, self-realization, emotional arrival. It doesn't rush, but it also doesn't stuff too much at you.

That doesn't mean everything works perfectly for me now. The story's prophecy felt a little too clean this time; not too straightforward exactly, but too efficient. It lines the world up, gets everyone on board, and slots characters into place very quickly. The viral way the prophecy spreads among the humans felt less believable to me now. People hear it and fall into belief a bit too easily. I found myself wondering what it might've been like if only certain people held pieces of the prophecy, or if its meaning had stayed fragmented for longer. The book does some of that. Just not as much as it probably could have.

Borneheld felt a little too one-dimensional at times, too. There's some nuance there, and the book hints that he's still trying to figure things out. But because we don't really get his point of view until the final third through and by then, his disposition can feel a bit caricatured. I think there was more to play with there.

From a nostalgia point of view, none of that really hurts the story for me. So much of rereading BattleAxe was just being reimmersed in the tale. But I can see how someone coming to it new in a modern context might find some of it more clichéd, given how much fantasy has changed in thirty years.

It's hard for me not to connect BattleAxe with the rest of what I was reading around that time--Melanie Rawn's Dragon Prince books, Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time, Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth. And for me, BattleAxe still shines above all of them. Not because it's the most amazing of those series in some grand ranking, but because it's the easiest and most enjoyable to read. It's accessible, it's compelling, and it's full of the right hallmarks of epic fantasy: worldbuilding, character development, myth, tension, emotional stakes, and that sense that the world just keeps getting bigger.

I'm still disappointed Sara Douglass never took off in the United States the way she did in Australia. Because reading her now, thirty years on, I think her work holds up beautifully. BattleAxe is still a strong book, with really good characters and really good writing. It still pulls me in.

Review: Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought by Barbara Tversky

noreply@blogger.com (Lance Eaton) — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 18:26:00 +0000

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

I went into Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought thinking it was The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds by Michael Lewis.

That is, I thought it was a biography about Barbara Tversky’s husband and his work. And then, I realized it was her work--her phenomenal breadth of work-- and that made the book more exciting to me. It also did make me aware of the ignorance of my own ignorance. I knew there was a world of cognition research around Tversky, but I had not really understood this Tversky, this body of work, this way of thinking about how action shapes thought.

The book is just incredibly rich. What I’m still sitting with most is this idea of how much our spatial reasoning shapes our mental reasoning, which then shapes the way we build the world around us. Tversky makes it feel obvious in the best way: of course our sense of physical awareness, our sense of spatial awareness, plays into our minds. Of course the physical world gets mapped into thought. But then once she lays it out, the implications start unfolding everywhere.

Tversky’s nine laws of cognition gave the book a coherent structure. It unified a range of research and studies that she had conducted and helped the reader see how the dots were connected. The book becomes a framework for thinking about the feedback loop between body, mind, and world: the physical world shapes the mind, the mind uses that spatial understanding to think, and then the mind rebuilds those patterns back into the world at large.

That train of thought has me chewing on online learning, AI tutors, virtual meetings, and all the strange ways we are spatially located and delocated at the same time. If spatial cognition is foundational for thought itself, then what does that mean for an online class? What does it mean to “navigate” an LMS instead of navigating from your house to a classroom? There are parallels, obviously. You move from not being in the course to being in the course. You find your way around. But the comparison starts to fray pretty quickly.

In an LMS, time is compressed. You can navigate to the past through previous modules, to the present through the current module, and maybe even to the future through upcoming assignments. That is a very different kind of spatial experience than walking into a room, sitting down, making eye contact, and listening live. And if action molds perception, then what kind of perception is shaped by looking at a screen, watching one-directional content, or interacting through carefully arranged digital chunks?

Online learning gives us convenience, access, flexibility. But what are the costs? What kinds of spatial engagement are missing, altered, or transformed? What do we need to compensate for? What kinds of feelings are we actually generating in these online spaces?

That is where Mind in Motion felt immediately applicable or expansive. It gave me a vocabulary and a framework for thinking about things I already care about, especially learning, virtual interaction, and how technology shapes experience. It also connects strongly for me with Annie Murphy Paul’s The Extended Mind, another book that asks where the mind ends and the external world begins. Both books push against the idea that cognition is simply sealed inside the head. They make the boundaries feel much less clean, much more intertwined. I also found myself thinking about My Grandmother’s Hands, because that book also circles around the ways the body carries experience and shapes how we move through the world.

Tversky’s work was both a little familiar and a little new. I found myself intrigued and wanting to sit longer about her of her tenants to think about where I see it and where can I anticipate it. It made me wonder if spatial cognition works differently across people, then what does it mean to map spatial cognition across two people? How do we create spaces, live in spaces, and build spaces that bridge those differences?

Mind in Motion is accessible in a coherent ways that doesn't feel reductive. It is a book that helps us understand how our minds work, but also how we operate in the world individually and collectively.

Review: The Solace of Open Spaces by Gretel Ehrlich

noreply@blogger.com (Lance Eaton) — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 09:30:00 +0000

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

The Solace of Open Spaces is a reflective, contemplative book, one that tries to be earnest about hard but beautiful and deeply felt lives in the Wyoming in the 1970s, particularly what we tend to think of as cowboy or ranch life. Ehrlich paints vivid pictures of that world, and most of the time I think she succeeds in giving the readers true glimpses into those worlds. But there are also moments where that vividness tips into something a little romantic or nostalgic. There are hints of mourning in the book, as if she is not only describing this world but grieving the possibility that it is slipping away.

That tension made the book interesting for me. Ehrlich is at her best when she is sitting deeply with the place she has entered (moving from urban surroundings to the big wide open environments of Wyoming) and, in many ways, become part of. She notices the everyday challenges and rituals: the rituals of people, the rituals of animals, the rituals of the land itself. She pays homage to this place that has become her home.

The book, if read minfully, inspires the reader to be observer of the deep lines of life that populate their surroundings; to put one's own life under the warm-tinted magnifying glass. How would I capture the big and small of everyday life in the world I live in? How might any of us help collectively paint a rich tapestry of meaningful lived lives, with all their nuance, depth, relationships, and connections with other humans, animals and the natural or unnatural world around us?

At the same time, the book kept reminding me of subjectivity. I never felt that Ehrlich was untrustworthy as a narrator, and the pauses I had were not big enough to stop the book for me. But there were moments where I wondered beyond her perspective. Her vantage point is valuable, and I do not doubt the trueness of her experience, but I sometimes wondered whether the people she describes would have experienced those moments the same way. That especially came up for me in her depictions of Indigenous peoples and ceremonies, and also in the way she writes about someone who seems to be grappling with mental illness. These moments did not undo the book, but they did make wonder what was not fully fleshed out.

What works best for me is Ehrlich’s attention to the movement of nature: cows, sheep, dogs, horses, weather, seasons, and landscape. She shows the landscape and seasons as a palpable presence in everyday life. That grounds the essays and where she is strongest with her writing. She captures the way human and animal lives can be shaped by conditions they did not choose. Creatures survive or do not survive because of the harsh conditions around them, and there are tender moments where love and harsh cruelty sit close together in our relationships with animals. She refuses to make nature just look pretty.

Ehrlich is a gifted writer. She deploys smart turns of phrase, and she makes the simple movements of life feel more majestic. She decorates the earthly life of people in Wyoming with literary references and meaning. Her style gives readers a kind of safe way to enter and see this world, especially readers who may be more literary, or who may never have gone to these places or may never find themselves doing this kind of challenging manual and earthly labor. She makes that life legible without reducing it to only physical effort. There is deep insight, endurance, and survival here too.

The outsider-turned-insider position mostly worked for me, but it is also where some of my questions live. Ehrlich gives us parts of her interior life, but doubt, angst, concern, and worry often feel held at bay. There is fondness, admiration, adoration, and curiosity, but the book is more about showing the world than about exploring her reaction to it. That may have been an intentional choice, and it may have made sense for her as a woman writing and publishing a text like this out of the 1970s and 1980s.

The book also reminded me of Elizabeth Gilbert’s The Last American Man. Ehrlich’s book feels like an earlier version of that kind of project: a love letter to a way of life that may no longer be viable, an attempt to honor what feels noble and meaningful and powerful before it slips away through our fingers. Both books seem drawn to people and places that challenge modern assumptions about comfort, labor, survival, and meaning.

The Solace of Open Spaces is strongest when it observes rather than argues. I am less convinced when it edges toward “this is the real way of life,” but I am very moved by its attempt to see meaning in lives that are difficult, ordinary, harsh, beautiful, and deeply embedded in the world around them.

Review: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI by Cory Doctorow

noreply@blogger.com (Lance Eaton) — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 09:30:00 +0000

Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes

I supported Doctorow’s Kickstarter for the audiobook, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI , because I believe deeply in Doctorow’s work and ethic around publishing but also I regularly his work because feels like an inoculation against the tech bro BS that surrounds so many conversations about technology. The book continues his work and connects directly to Enshittification, Chokepoint Capitalism, The Internet Con, and How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism. In many ways, it feels like the AI-specific version of the same larger project: look past the gadget, look past the hype, and look at the larger techno-social capitalist system that decides who benefits and who gets used up.

That is Doctorow at his best. He does not treat AI as magic, or as an inevitable apocalypse, or as a neutral tool that just happens to exist outside power. He keeps asking the better question: who does this technology do things for, and who does it do things to? That centaur/reverse centaur distinction is the book’s frame. There is a real difference between a person choosing a tool that helps them do their work and a person being forced to become the human assistant to a machine that is ultimately being used to de-skill, discipline, or replace them.

That nuance is appreciated given that the AI discourse feels stuck between two unhelpful poles: AI is the future and we should all worship it, or any use of AI is automatically horrible, limiting, and meaningless. To my delight and appreciation, Doctorow is much more interesting than that. He is deeply skeptical of the AI bubble, of the promises by tech bro trillionaires, of the sales pitch that AI will become the next employer revolution. And he leaves space for smaller, useful tools: voice-to-text, transcription, image manipulation, local models, things that are as he tells us boring in the best way. I was using voice-to-text to gather my own thoughts for this review, so that point felt especially relevant. There is something here. It just is not necessarily the thing being sold to us.

In this book, he does go into copyright, which some of you may know, I have lots of thoughts about (from my dissertation, to this piece in the LSE Blog, to this previous post). Given how much of my own work has been in and around copyright, knowledge production, and AI, I found Doctorow’s argument both clarifying and affirming. He reinforces what I have thought for a while: AI itself does not challenge copyright in the way many people want it to. If we think it does, we may be misunderstanding copyright and misunderstanding who copyright usually serves. It generally does not serve creative artists. It often serves corporations.

Doctorow’s takedown of “copyright will save us from AI” is one of the strongest parts of the book because it moves the conversation away from a tempting yet inadequate answer and toward labor, bargaining power, ownership, and control. That is a harder conversation, and it is also the more honest one. A new copyright framework around AI training sounds appealing until you remember who usually owns, controls, and exploits copyright. If the solution is one more right that creators can be forced to sign away, then it may not be a solution at all. Ultimately, there’s not a clear pathway that will actually be successful to trying to end or dismiss AI on copyright claims. In many ways, that makes sense. It is not copying and as soon as you get into the claim that works “inspired’ by copyrighted artists, you largely collapse a whole bunch of possibilities about how we as humans learn (hint: we copy a lot until we can build from our insights).

Doctorow’s chapter on AI’s role in art does not just throw all of AI away. He is skeptical, rightly, of someone entering a prompt, accepting whatever the machine gives them, and putting it into the world without much thought or meaning-making. But he also recognizes that art has always been entangled with technology. To say this new technology can have no role in art feels too heavy-handed and historically shortsighted. We have had versions of this conversation before, and we are usually wrong when we insist that a new technology cannot possibly matter to art.

An interesting idea can be found and named in Doctorow’s work. The more we get sucked into the fetishizing, demonizing, or aggrandizing the narrative (even in from a critical lens), the more power we actually give over to it. It’s like it’s Pennywise, feeding and growing bigger on our fears. Every time we get sucked into that coversation, we’re feeding the beast. It’s not explicit but does emanate from the text.

Where the book gets harder for me is the “guide” part. Doctorow diagnoses the problem really well, yet he doesn’t really guide us through it beyond “thinking”. He points toward unions, worker control, co-ops, better social arrangements, and creative workers resisting becoming reverse centaurs. It does signal possibilities. He discusses the Writers Guild successful rejection of AI, but they are a class of workers with unusual leverage compared to the vast majority of people being pushed into reverse-centaur conditions. A lot of people do not have the agency, solidarity, money, time, or infrastructure to resist.

And even beyond the workplace, a lot of consumers will choose what is cheaper or faster because the system is designed that way. We see it in self-checkout. We see it in online ordering and delivery. We see it in the way convenience gets framed as individual choice. He doesn’t go so far to label those seeking convenience as villains, rather explains as how they may be creating pathways that lead to their own exploitation.

Knowing that these issues permeate AI as many of our other digital systems does not quite empower us.

I felt something similar with his discussion of agentic AI. Doctorow is right that agentic AI, especially as a commerce fantasy, is probably a dead end. The idea that we will all have bots comparison-shopping, negotiating, and improving outcomes for us runs straight into the reality that companies will use their own systems to counter ours, block transparency, and prevent real enrichment. In a country with no meaningful federal data protection laws around consumer data, that seems incredibly likely.

Still, I am not entirely convinced that means agentic AI has no value. When I use these tools, I am often approaching them less through the lens of capital and commerce and more through tinkering, exploring, and trying to do things I could not easily do before. That may not be the domain of this book, and maybe it is not Doctorow’s purpose here, but it just feels like a limitation. The critique of the investment pitch is strong while the sense of what individuals might do with these tools outside that pitch feels thinner. Of course, that does make sense of the book and its focus; it’s just his handling of agentic AI doesn’t have the same nuance that generative AI does (which makes me wonder if he has actually played with it).

Doctorow makes a persuasive case that the AI bubble is built on several houses of cards: financially, technically, and rhetorically. He is also right to push back against the glamorous superintelligence conversation when the real harms are predictive policing, wage theft, surveillance pricing, deepfakes, misinformation, and the redistribution of money and power upward. The obsession with whether AI is sentient or whether it will overpower us is such a distraction. The small, nimble, insidious uses are the ones most likely to creep in while everyone is looking elsewhere.

I finished the book asking, okay, what am I to do with this? If I am in a workplace where AI is being forced down my throat and I do not have meaningful ways to resist, what are my realistic options? How do we address these systems in ways that are thoughtful and not exhausting? Doctorow warns about the damage that could happen before the bubble bursts, and about the economic disaster that may follow, but the book does not really guide us through that. It gives me a better map of the trap without a better toolkit for living inside it.

That is not entirely fair to put on this book, and I know it is not fully Doctorow’s project. I deeply appreciate his analysis, his open access commitments, his Creative Commons practice, and the consistency of his work. I keep listening to his books and funding his audiobook Kickstarters because his voice is invaluable. After Enshittification, The Internet Con, and now this, there is also a slightly repetitive quality. Repetitive, informative that is not always breaking new ground. Some examples and arguments recur because they are central to his framework, but in this book, that repetition sometimes makes the limits of the “how” more visible.

Regardless, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI is valuable. For Doctorow fans, it is another strong dose of clarity. For people who have not thought much about AI, it may be genuinely useful. And for people who are hypercritical of AI, it gives permission to have a more nuanced view: reject the bubble, reject the exploitation, reject the bosses trying to turn workers into reverse centaurs, but do not pretend every tool is meaningless just because the industry around it is rotten.

Doctorow is at his best when he is slicing through the capitalist approach to technology while still recognizing the individual or collective value (but not “Value”) of these tools. That is the strength of this book, even when it falls short as a guide. It helps clarify what AI is, what it is not, what is being sold to us, and who is likely to pay the cost. I just wish it left me with a clearer sense of what comes next.

Recent Publication: Does Listening Count as Reading?

noreply@blogger.com (Lance Eaton) — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 09:30:00 +0000

Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes

From the New York Times, 1877

Sharing a recent piece that my colleague, JT Torres, and I wrote about multimodal reading with a particular focus on audiobooks (you're all shocked, I know!). The piece, Does Listening Count as Reading?: Multimodal Reading Matters, was a fun piece to author because I get to nerd out about audiobooks and got to co-write with my friend, JT, whom I first collaborated on this article last year for Inside Higher Ed.

Here's an excerpt; read the rest here:

"Imagine if you were told that a technology could order up a sermon for a congregation or immediately summon a long-dead historical figure to charm your dinner guests. Maybe you want a mechanical voice to dispense medical advice? Such a technology might even render libraries irrelevant!"

Certainly, the above references AI. After all, many headlines warn that AI threatens to make books obsolete. Other articles lament students' shortened attention spans and noticeable loss of focus and that fact that students no longer read entire books.

But actually, the above comes from an article published in the New York Times in 1877. "

In the wake of finishing the Ph.D., I definitely am drawn back to do more writing (reflecting but also academic) on the topic of audiobooks. Now, if I can just find the time (and stop writing about AI--ha!).

In the meanwhile, here are some of my favorite posts I've done on Audiobooks over the years:

Review: The Great Gatsby at 100 by Sheila Liming

noreply@blogger.com (Lance Eaton) — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 09:30:00 +0000

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

What I like about The Great Gatsby at 100 is what I often like about The Great Courses in general: it gives you a deep dive into a particular topic in a way that feels accessible, but not shallow. Sheila Liming takes The Great Gatsby and looks at it through economic, class, gender, race, and cultural lenses, and the result is the exact thing I want from a book—or course—about a book: it made me want to go back and read The Great Gatsby again.

Does this give me new insights into the thing? In this case, it certainly did.

I have read The Great Gatsby a few times, and I have taught it at different points in the past, so this was not a first encounter with the novel. But Liming’s course felt like a refresher and a set of newer insights into the text. I especially appreciated the way she moves between specific details in the novel, details from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s life, and the larger cultural world around the book. There are moments where she draws out a connection between something in the story and something in Fitzgerald’s actual life, like the relationship between a magazine named in the novel and a rag that was writing about him in the real world.

But what worked best for me was not just the biographical context. It was how Liming explored what is hinted at but not always explicitly said: Gatsby’s real background, the influence of Harlem and the war, sexuality, gender performance, and the way all of that intersects with how the characters act, relate, and present themselves. Some of this I remembered or already knew was in the novel, but this course made the layers feel richer and more interconnected. It reminded me why Gatsby is the novel that it is, and why there is still so much to mine within it.

Liming’s style helps a lot. The Great Courses very clearly has a template; after listening to probably well over 100 in my life, I clearly enjoy them. With some, that template can feel mechanical and a rush to the end. Liming's approach offers something more relatable. Her tone is welcoming and exploratory, and she comes across as someone genuinely trying to share her joy and passion around exploring this text. She digs into passages and presents compelling meaning or sometimes, draws a line to the current world without making it feel forced.

The course also helped me think again about Gatsby and the "canon". I think there are still a lot of questions about what books, texts, stories, and poems belong in the canon, whether we are talking about American literature or literature as a whole. I also wonder if canons are even the best way to think about literature or storytelling.

Still, the book makes clear why The Great Gatsby has been seen as one of those essential texts. The richness we continue to unearth in the book should not erase the meaningful books, novels, plays, and short stories that never got their due because they were not from the right people at the time, or because their voices were not acknowledged. Regardless of what other books we should celebrate, this book cements why The Great Gatsby has value to read.

Review: The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break by Steven Sherrill

noreply@blogger.com (Lance Eaton) — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 09:30:00 +0000

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

Mundanity is what makes The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break work.

Steven Sherrill drops the Minotaur, or "M" in the novel into the present, living in a trailer park in the South and working at a restaurant. We expect the Minotaur to come with violence, aggression, mythic grandeur, maybe even some kind of cult-leader or roadside-attraction weirdness. The novel does play with these expectations but often inverts them. Violence often happens to him, both accidentally and self-inflicted, as well as intentionally by others, but we don't see any real violence from him. He does become an attraction (cutting meat at customer tables), but only for that to not really be successful. We expect his body to somehow be the thing of legends, but descriptions give us anything but a very real body that has been worn for millennia. He has very physical needs and very physical experiences. He eats, works, smokes, desires, aches, remembers, forgets. He is immortal and ancient, but he is also just trying to get through the day.

That contrast is the most compelling thing in the novel: the depth of this being who has lived so long, stumbling through a (what could be argued but yet isn't) trivial and maybe even boring life, partly because he cannot communicate well, and partly because his passivity keeps shaping what happens to him. The novel's final arc is about where takes action and where fails to act.

The question is whether M has really escaped the labyrinth. Or maybe he escaped the literal labyrinth only to find himself in the much larger labyrinth of the world: social interactions, bodies, work, desire, expectations, loneliness, other people’s assumptions. In the labyrinth, at least, he understood the confines. He knew the expectations. The roles were clearly laid out. There’s almost something protective about it, something like comfort. Outside of it, he is free, technically, but freedom does not mean he knows how to move through the world.

M’s body tells a story of trauma, of harms experienced and harms enacted, often without needing to give the story to every mark. His body heavily sits on M. There is awkwardness in his relationship to his own body, but he is also settled in it. Other people see him as an oddity, not as the immortal being he knows himself to be. They see freakishness before myth.

That's what feels compelling about the novel. M obviously sticks out in the world, but the world also makes room for him as just another kind of oddity. There are so many people who feel their bodies are part of what alienates them from others, who feel disconnected because of what they think others see as normal or freakish or what have you. M is a mythological creature, but the alienation is recognizable. There are elements of what he goes through that most people can probably recognize, sometimes in themselves and sometimes in how they view others.

The novel separates being desired from being known. M can be physically wanted. There are characters who fetishize him, or who are drawn to what makes him different. But that is not the same thing as connection. The book is interested in who he allows in, and what it means to be seen as a body versus being seen more fully. His longing for love or validation does not always feel like some grand romantic quest. Sometimes it feels like trying to find fulfillment just like everybody else.

I'm always down for some mythology, especially if it is different or intriguing takes on old tales. This depiction of the Minotaur feels very different from others that came to mind while reading, like Victor Pelevin’s The Helmet of Horror or Sara Douglass’s The Troy Game series. Less so with Pelevin and more so with Douglass, Sherrill's novel plays with the idea of the Minotaur as a character seeking, if not redemption, then normality or an opportunity to not have to be the role or the creature in the labyrinth. It does not make M louder or more spectacular than he needs to be. It lets him be wounded, strange, passive, physical, lonely, and still open to something more. The novel is not always exciting in a conventional sense, but that almost feels like the point. Its power is in watching this mythic creature navigate a human world with a body that is not entirely human, and realizing how much of that navigation still feels familiar.

Review: A Short Stay in Hell by Steven Peck

noreply@blogger.com (Lance Eaton) — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 09:30:00 +0000

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

What I loved most about A Short Stay in Hell is the way Steven L. Peck builds on Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Library of Babel” without simply repeating it. I have always enjoyed Borges’ infinite library, and I love a story that builds off other fiction. Peck’s novella draws from that story, but also from afterlife literature like Dante’s Inferno, and even made me think of The Twilight Zone episode “Time Enough at Last.” I can deeply related to the nightmare of being surrounded by books and still being trapped because they are entirely inaccessible.

Given my propensity for literature and comics, intertextuality is part of the meaning-making. This short novella works because it lets us draw on a whole wealth of other stories about libraries, hells, quests, punishments, and revelation. The central idea is that somewhere in this infinity of books is the book of your life, perfectly displayed, you only have to find it to escape. It feels like a reflection of what reading itself can be. In some ways, that is what we as readers are often doing: searching for something that feels so true, maybe even truer than truth itself. And that search can be beautiful, but it can also drive us mad.

Peck uses religion and the afterlife to push the question of what happens if we are wrong, like wildly wrong. When the title character lands in the afterlife, Sorn, a devout Mormon, has to deal with an afterlife informed by Zoroastism. The Zoroastrian twist worked because it reaches so far back in religious beliefs and asks: what if this was the right way all along, and we overwhelmingly dismissed it? But the more interesting question is also about life itself. What if some of the most meaningful ways to understand our lives were things we missed, dismissed, or were never really presented with? What if they were drowned out by other forces, other systems, so that we did not know what we were missing until we had to face the reality of that loss?

Despite the bleak angle, I found a strange serenity in the story. The novella is less about finding answers in books, or believing you have found the right book, than it is about surviving a massive disruption to your meaning and purpose. It is not only about Faith. It is about the faith of everyday life: the faith of our own inner lives, our own experience, our own ability to keep being in the world after the world has stopped making sense. More timely now than ever.

Soren himself was not the most exciting part of the book. There were occasional lines I enjoyed, and his journey through the space was curious enough, but I was not deeply attached to him as a character. He felt more like a way into the world than the center of my investment. What mattered was following him into this impossible structure and seeing the questions it raised: about reading, eternity, belief, convention, and the limits of human understanding.

The brevity of the story was a strength. It does not linger too long, but gives us a taste of eternity: the eternity of time, the infinity of books, the expansiveness of the space itself. I liked the repeated attempts to explain just how infinite, unorthodox, strange, and weird this place is. It didn't feel rushed and it kept pushing our understanding of the boundaries. Every time I thought I understood the parameters of the space, Peck expanded them again.

That is what stayed with me most: the way A Short Stay in Hell turns an infinite library into a spiritual and existential pressure chamber. It is horrifying, somewhat, but not only bleak. It is also a story about what we keep searching for, what we miss, what we dismiss, and how we survive when our frameworks collapse. It left me thinking less about hell as punishment and more about the human hunger for the definitive life: the book, the answer, the meaning that would finally explain us.

Internet Archive Artifact - 0002

noreply@blogger.com (Lance Eaton) — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 10:00:00 +0000

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

Title: Dr. Neesen's book on wheeling by Victor Neesen, M.D.

From: New Amsterdam Book Company, 1899

What is it?

A book about riding bicycles that addresses the debate about whether bicycling is healthy, for whom, and under what conditions. The author, Victor Neesen, M. D., was a gynecologist who decided to step into the debate of the times about the health concerns regarding bicycles. He largely argues that there are great medical benefits from "wheeling" but it can cause problems if not done right. It may also aggravate other existing ailments. Still, he believes it is a virtue to "wheel" so long as a woman is of right moral character or as he puts it on page 90: "To sum up the morality of wheeling it may be tersely said that 'a lady is a lady wherever she is.'" Chapters cover essential topics like: Hygiene, Diseases and Ailments, The Bicycle for Women, Morality of the Bicycle, and an Appendix. It clocks in at about 130 pages and yes, includes photos of people on bicycles with an almost equal pairing.

Thoughts

I feel like I struck gold with this one. If you want a sense of what this book is writing against, take a look at the Pessimists Archive page on the bicycle. That it's written by a gynecologist means that I definitely had to look to see what was said about "hysteria." For those who want to learn about hysteria and technology in the 19th century, please check out Rachel Maine's The Technology of the Orgasm, and you may be as amused by the role of bikes in the hysteria "health" issue. Sure enough, bicycle riding can also benefit women diagnosed with hysteria (smirk). There are a good deal of "diseases peculiar to women" that wheeling can benefit, in fact. Neesen explains how here on page 75-76:

"Hysteria is this nerve manifestation accentuated. The name itself is derived from the Greek Hyster " meaning uterus, and applied by the ancients to that profound disturbance of the nervous equilibrium emanating from the uterus.

Wheeling helps these nervous disorders by relieving the nerve tension in much the same manner as a locomotive ''blows off " its accumulated steam, when it is at a standstill. If the steam was retained an explosion would result. Hysteria is an explosion of the nervous system and bicycling is a newly invented safety-valve."

There is, of course, this suggestive passage that I think would raise some eyebrows, maybe even today, about its subtext:

"The most grievous and lamentable charge that the anti-bicyclists make against the fair name of the female riders is unfortunately not advisable to take up for discussion in a book of this kind. It has been discussed and argued and refuted in the medical journals throughout the country, but in spite of the fact that it has been proven to be impossible, some people still think it a logical sequence to riding the wheel."

In exploring this text, my mind goes in two directions. The first is seeing this text as a prime example of how social norms and conventions were woven into the medicalization of bodies that were taking place in the 1800s. Neesen is tying together ailments, morality, and expertise, and through that, casting more control of women, even when he endorses the idea that women should ride bicycles. There's a particular context, and that context is not entirely medical as he says here on page 80:

"The moral side of bicycling has almost as much to do with the physician as the physical side, for morality is closely related to health. But aside from this, a physician, by reason of his learning and favorable opportunities for observation, has a vantage ground from which he is a powerful factor in molding public opinion."

Just by wading into the debate with his credentials to claim that it's medically and morally sound, there's still a paternalistic reasoning that permeates the text.

The second direction reminds me so much of the health fads of the last 50 years, including self-help. That also includes all the experts (some legit, some self-proclaimed) on Reels or TikTok that replicate these practices. Mark Twain, alive at the time of this book, said it best (assuming it was him) that history doesn't repeat but it sure does rhyme.

About This Series: I started this because I love the random oddities of the Internet Archive. Read more about how and why I did this here. To view all the posts in the collection, select this link. You can also download this program from my GitHub page.

Internet Archive Artifact - 0001

noreply@blogger.com (Lance Eaton) — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 10:30:00 +0000

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

Title: Adam Watters, importer of, & wholesale & retail dealer

From: microfiche, originally from 1800s.

What is it?

This is an advertisement for Adam Watters, an importer, wholesale, retail dealer in Upper Town, Quebec City. The brochure identifies a range of imported goods, including meats, soups, fish, and hams, and notes relationships with suppliers from Portland, Boston, and Guelph. This type of advertisement was typical in 19th-century newspapers, serving both as promotion and public notice of commercial credibility.

Thoughts

There's two layers of interesting elements to this artifact. The first is that it is microfiche that has been then added to the archive. This makes me wonder how much of the archive is microfiche which is something I hadn't considered before. Also, we know this because the first few pages are essentially meta-data related to the microfiche, which also tells us it is from Quebec, Canada with its use of both English and French. The work was done by the Canadian Institute for Historical Microreproductions which is now Canadiana.ca, a historical organization interested in preserving and making Canadian history accessible.

Then, there's the advertisement itself. What structure me first--and such things usually don't--is the number of fonts (at least 5 I think). I just find that curious as it is layered well enough to grab attention and organize information. It's interesting to consider that level of graphic design was deployed at the time. The variety of products and distinctions within products also catches my attention. Again, maybe because I live in the world where grocery stores are exercises in decision fatigue, it's still interesting to see that even Mustard has a number of choices. And that sauce list--just makes me hungry, if not curious (King of Oude Sauce?). They even have 8 versions of soap to offer.

Internet Archive Artifact #000

noreply@blogger.com (Lance Eaton) — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 10:30:00 +0000

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

Welcome to this new series where I explore random artifacts from one of my favorite places on the Internet, the Internet Archive. Its biggest claim to fame is the Wayback Machine, where you can look at what a website looked like at some point in the past. So you could go look at what the USA.gov website looked like in December, 1999 or see what this blog looked like in 2015! But the amount of artifacts deeply stored within the Internet Archive is endless!

Why do this?

Well, I'm a big fan of the public domain and open access. I wrote an entire dissertation about making things more widely available and I spend a good part of January the last few years putting up new public domain films on my YouTube channel, which includes having to submit appeals to YouTube because companies are still claiming copyright. I like the idea of reminding folks of what's already out there to play with.

I also needed a new challenge or focus for this blog. Something that keeps me coming back to share, think, and explore about things that aren't about AI!

Another thing that inspired this new series is that I like the Internet Archive but exploring it can be a challenge. There's a lot of content, and it's not easy to find thing or rather find things at random. I feel like I have to dig in and that feels a little less serendipitous for how I might like to engage with it. With the help of AI, I built a small web program that would send me to a random detail page on the Internet Archive.

Once I had a mechanism for random encounters, I realize that this would be a fun series for me to blog about. One thing I've missed about blogging that was hard to do with the dissertation was committing to some longer term project. Now, with that out of the way, I feel like I can pursue something like this more consistently. And thought I'd like to commit to it as a 365 project like I have done with short stories and photos (while having good starts and failing with others, such as my poem a day), I'm hoping that I can do this one on a weekly basis.

So what can you expect? Well, I think the format will be pretty straightforward. I'll share what I was sent to, what sense I could make out of it (sometimes with the help of AI, particularly if it's in another language), and what are my thoughts about encountering such an artifact. I hope it provides enough strange and curious things to keep readers interested and even if it doesn't, I'm sure I'll enjoy it.

Screenshot of the browser extension

You can do it too!

And, of course, I encourage folks at home to play along. If it's useful, here is the prompt that I used with Claude to get the app that I have:

My prompt:

"I want to build a browser extension that will randomly pull a resources from the depths of the internet archive. I would like some features to put parameters around it (e.g. image, sound, video, software, book, newspaper, etc and when the item is from and other tagged features)...interview me to get more details about how the extension should look and feel... also, I have no real coding skills so also help me build the best extension in the cleanest code possible"

Claude's response (Note: I have my Claude personalized so that it asks questions--see this post for more insight):

"How do you envision triggering and viewing random finds?

Popup window. Click the extension icon, see a random item preview in a small overlay, click through to the Archive if interested.
New tab experience. Each activation opens a full new tab with the random resource, more immersive and visual.
Browser sidebar. A persistent or toggleable panel that refreshes with new items, allowing browsing while you work.
New tab replacement. Every time you open a blank new tab, it shows a random Archive item instead of your default page.
Hybrid (1+3). Popup for quick discovery, with an option to pin it as a sidebar for longer exploration sessions.

Question 2: Filter Persistence and Complexity

How should the filtering system behave?

Set-and-forget profiles. Create named filter profiles (e.g., "1920s newspapers," "80s software") and switch between them.
Quick toggles. Simple on/off buttons for major categories visible in the interface, adjusted on the fly.
Advanced query builder. A more powerful interface letting you combine media type, date range, collection, language, and other Archive metadata fields.
Randomize the randomness. Minimal filtering. You want maximum surprise, with perhaps only a single broad category toggle.
Hybrid (6+8). Saved profiles for frequent use, but with access to an advanced mode when you want precision.

Question 3: Visual and Emotional Tone

What aesthetic should the extension convey?

Retro/archival. Sepia tones, typewriter fonts, aged paper textures. Feels like opening a dusty box in an attic.
Clean minimalist. White space, modern sans-serif, the content is the star. Think museum gallery.
Playful/whimsical. Bright colors, animations, a slot-machine or "spin the wheel" energy for the randomization.
Dark mode scholarly. Muted dark interface, subtle accents, feels like a research tool for late-night exploration.
Hybrid (11+14). Retro visual elements but in a dark, muted palette. Scholarly nostalgia."

My response was: "2 7, 8, 9 11"

It asked me a few more questions, and again, I chose selections. The whole interaction took less than 3 minutes back and forth. I did other tasks as it built the actual program. The result is a Chrome browser extension that executes whenever I open a new tab, it presents the Archive Roulette and shares something new.

If you want to see all the posts in the collection, check out this link. You can also download this program from my GitHub page.

The PhD Chronicles: Creating a Media Kit for Data Collection

noreply@blogger.com (Lance Eaton) — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 10:00:00 +0000

Estimated Reading Time: 12 minutes

"Sounds like you created a media kit." My partner said as I explained all the strategies that I had used to reach out and spread the word to get participants in my study. I hadn't thought of it that way, but yes, that's pretty much what I did. I had meant to write this post much earlier (my data collection as in Fall of 2022) but here where are. I think it's still a useful approach for folks who are recruiting participants in the online spaces.

For my study, it was tricky because I couldn't interview anyone I know and also, I was interviewing folks about their participation on academic pirate platforms. I had to find a way to connect with people I don't know about a thing that is illicit and hope they would be open to me recording our conversation. And I had to find a good amount of participants (ideally 20).

I approached it in several stages.

Gather

I had some time while I waited for approval from my dissertation committee and also my Institutional Review Board. I took this time to gather the places that I thought would be ideal places to find people who might be interested in participating in my study. I created a spreadsheet with several sheets:

Email contacts
Listservs
Online spaces (e.g. Facebook groups, LinkedIn Groups, Sub-Reddits, etc)

For each sheet, I had a column for the the name, the emails (or links) and three columns for "Contacted On".

I then did the tedious part. I collected emails, listserv emails, and sites. I scrolled through all of my email contacts and also, went onto my social media platforms to see who I was in regular enough contact with and see if I could get their email (if I didn't have it already). Given that I've had this email for more than 15 years and been on social media just as long, if not longer--it was a lot. But I looked for anyone I knew that was in academia or academia-adjacent. I also searched my email for .edu addresses. I Similarly, I looked for any academic-oriented list-servs and a range of online groups that felt relevant to my work. I did try to contact the operators and owners of academic pirate platforms but did not hear back from them (no surprise).

This process yielded over 350 emails of individuals and over 50 online spaces, listservs, etc. I felt that was a good haul and would get the results I was hoping for.

Craft

Next, I had to create the messaging for emails, my own social media, listservs and online groups. To do that, I needed different forms of messaging. To people I knew, I had to encourage them to share my message and make it as easy and clear as possible on how to help me. To people I didn't know, I had to capture interest and establish trust. For people I I needed to You can see much of that messaging in the space below contained in the two emails that I sent out to my contacts.

For my second round of communication on social media platforms, I realize I had forgotten to include a visual. I knew that such things get more attention on social media, so I used Google Slides to create an image communicated the essentials of who I was looking for. At this point, the second round of calls, I could also see where it was better to target certain populations that didn't have as much representation.

The image that I used to go along with social media post.

I also created a webpage on my own website that interested participants could go to for signing up for the study and finding out more. I'm linking to the Internet Archive version of this because the current page has been changed because, of course, I'm no longer looking for participants.

Additionally, I adapted my email that I planned to send into a blog post for this blog as well.

Deliver

After crafting my different messages, I proceeded to deliver the messages. I had to stack the deliveries so they maximized sharing possibilities. First, I posted to my social media platforms so that I could then include links to those posts in the emails I was sending out (see below).

To avoid people seeing large email lists of others, I knew I had to do BCC, but also, I had to chunk out how many BCCs I do because I would inevitably end up in people's spam. I used a MailMerge plugin in the Google tools that integrated my email list in the Google sheet I created with the email I had composed. However, the free version only allowed a certain amount (100?) a day. Therefore, the initial email was sent out over the course of a few days to the people I knew.

I also went ahead and posted to all the groups that I had, but again, to avoid being considered as SPAM, I posted to these different places over days. In fact, every time I set up a new mail-merge, I posted to a few more online groups and listservs.

In the second round on social media I also included an image to improve shareability (which also got me to share on Instagram)

I did 2 email rounds that went like this:

Here's the challenge
Here's how you can help
Here are materials to make it easier to help

That last part was essential. Maybe it's the educator or designer in me, but if I'm going to ask people to do things, I want to make the barrier as low as possible. In the second round, I further elaborated by explaining the amount of time each task would take and the different levels of engagement.

The result is that I had about 60 folks start the survey (and about 55 or so completed it). Out of that, there was 25 strong candidates that I interviewed.

Here is the templates that I used in case you want to borrow or adapt for your needs.

Templates

Initial Email to Colleagues

Greetings friends,

As many of you know, I've been in a doctoral program (maybe forever?!?!?!) and I'm finally at the point where I am starting to look for participants. No, no, I'm not going to ask you–in fact, if I know you, I can’t interview you for this study. But, I do need your help.

What I am hoping all of you will do (yes, even you!) is to reach out to your email, listservs, and social media networks to your friends and colleagues in academia in the US.

See, there is a real challenge with my study in that I'm trying to reach scholars who are making use of certain networks (namely, SciHub, LibGen, ICanHazPDF, and r/Scholar--no worries if that list doesn't make sense to you). Because engaging on these networks is often not discussed openly, it's really hard to find out who is using them and ask them to participate in this valuable study which explores their experience as scholars on such platforms. If you would like to know more about the study, please check out the study page or reach out and I am happy to share more!

So, the ask: Can you please help me spread the word by sharing the call for participants in at least one of the following ways on my behalf (and if so, let me know)?

I have included some copy that you are welcome to adapt/adjust to your own voice or just copy/paste in total. If those are too much, would you at least consider sharing these posts (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn) that I’ve already created?

**LinkedIn

Fellow scholars! Do you use #SciHub, #LibGen, #ICanHazPDF on Twitter or r/Scholar on Reddit? Would you be willing to help my friend (Lance Eaton) in his study? His dissertation focuses on how scholars understand their experiences on these platforms and their scholarly identities.

Find out more on the Research Study page

http://www.lanceeaton.com/research-study/

or complete the Intake Survey

https://umassboston.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_8dIzyfNte9HdsTY

**Twitter

Are you a #scholar who uses #SciHub, #LibGen, #ICanHazPDF, #rScholar on #Reddit? Please consider participating in (@leaton01) important research study?

Find out more about the Research Study: http://www.lanceeaton.com/research-study/

OR complete the Intake Survey: https://umassboston.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_8dIzyfNte9HdsTY

**Facebook

Find out more about the Research Study: http://www.lanceeaton.com/research-study/

OR complete the Intake Survey: https://umassboston.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_8dIzyfNte9HdsTY

**Email to Friends/Colleagues

Hi all,

I'm sharing this on behalf of my friend and colleague, Lance Eaton. He is working on his dissertation research which focuses on scholars who use SciHub, LibGen, #ICanHazPDF on Twitter or r/Scholar on Twitter. Do you use any of these platforms in pursuit of research literature for scholarly activities? If so, please consider visiting the link below, learning more about the study, and potentially participating in the study.

Find out more about the Research Study: http://www.lanceeaton.com/research-study/

Thank you for this assistance at this time!

Second Email to Friends & Colleagues

Greetings!

Many of you have been wonderfully kind in sharing out my call for participants for my doctoral study. I am so very grateful & appreciate your support; I know others may not have because they didn’t have time, my email ended up in spam, or they don’t think they know anyone that could be in my study (but, trust me, you do!).

So I still need help with getting the word out. My first outreach helped me to find half of my participants–this means, I’m halfway to collecting all my data–THIS IS HUGE and I am so grateful for those who have shared and reached out on my behalf.

I’m going to ask just a little bit more of folks but make it super easy for you and break it down by the amount of time you might commit to helping me out. This can range from 5 seconds of help to 10 minutes of help–all of it will be appreciated!

**5-15 Seconds to Help

GREAT! Thank you for doing this! In this situation, please re-share & Like/Favorite one (or more, if you have 15-20 seconds) of the following posts on your networks:

Upvote one or more of these Reddit posts about my call for participants (listed in order of preference)

How this helps: The more other people like/reshare, the more it shows up on people’s feeds–people that I’m not directly connected to. I can almost guarantee that if you are getting this email from me, it means someone (or more than one person) in your network use these platforms. I may not be connected to them but if you are, then this is a chance fro them to see it. Remember, you won’t necessarily know if they use these platforms because folks don’t often talk about them.

**1-5 Minutes to help

Not just reshare one of the posts above but provide some content about the study using your own words or the copy provided below:

Can you help out my friend here? He’s looking for folks who live in or work in US institutions that use #SciHub, #LibGen, or #ICanHazPDF for their work to interview for his dissertation.

Find out more & possible sign up at: http://www.lanceeaton.com/research-study/

How this helps: Similar to above, the more you share it and even add your own language, the more it will show up and be seen across the platform you are using. It adds further endorsement and gets it in front of more eyes.

**5-10 Minutes to Help

It would be great if you took this time to copy/paste the email below and sent it to as many folks as you think it might be relevant to. Additionally, consider sharing it out on any professional/academic listservs that you are a part of.

Who might those people be? Any folks that are doing research or teaching; affiliated with a higher education institution, research center/lab, hospital, law office, or anywhere that they might need regular access to research literature to do their work meaningfully.

One of the challenges with this study is that because folks do not often talk about using these platforms, it’s really hard to know if anyone in your network does (that is, they may not be sharing their usage openly). So sharing with anyone in those categories above could be really helpful.

**Email to Share (feel free to edit)

Hi all,

I'm sharing this on behalf of my friend and colleague, Lance Eaton. He is working on his dissertation research which focuses on how folks in the US or at a US institution may be using platforms like SciHub, LibGen, #ICanHazPDF on Twitter or r/Scholar to acquire research literature for their work.

Do you use any of these platforms in pursuit of research literature for your work researching, writing, teaching, or in professional settings where access to such research is essential? If so, please consider visiting the link below, learning more about the study, and potentially participating in the study.

Find out more about the Research Study: http://www.lanceeaton.com/research-study/

Thank you for this assistance at this time!

**Other Ways to Help

If you’re still here and considering ways to help, it’s mostly about getting out the word to folks. So if you know someone who does a blog, newsletter, podcast, youtube show, or other types of publication that you think would be interested in talking about my research, please let me know OR reach out to them and recommend me to them.

As this first half has shown me quick clearly, every little bit helps and I’m so very grateful for your support in all of this. Thank you so much!

This Is 46

noreply@blogger.com (Lance Eaton) — Sat, 13 Sep 2025 19:06:00 +0000

Estimated Reading Time: 10 minutes

So it's that time again. For those tuning in, each year on my birthday, I do a bit of account and reflecting on the year. This is year #8. You can check out previous years below:

As always, the details:

Home: Cranston, RI

Relationship status: Married (11+ years)

Cats Owned: 1 (Bear)

Other Pets: 1 mud turtle (MJ, 38'ish years old)

Degrees earned: 6 (1 PhD, 3 masters, 1 bachelor, 1 associate)

Reading since September 13, 2024: 253 (Latest reads can always be found on Goodreads)

Work:

Senior Associate Director or AI in Teaching & Learning at Northeastern University (full-time)
Teaching courses at College Unbound & North Shore Community College
Consultant Facilitator, Speaker

Weight: 218 pounds

Longest Distance Run This Year: 13.53 miles

Fastest Pace This Year: 9:14 minutes (for 5 miles)

Runs in the last year: 233

Miles run in the last year: 1058 miles

Miles on the bicycle in the last year: 737 miles

Blog Posts on Blogger in the last year: 16

Blog Posts on my Substack: 24

Blog Pageviews: 127,935 (est between this blog and the substack)

Blog Subscribers: 170 here; 8637 on the substack

Blog Visitors: 52,203

Facebook Friends: 821

LinkedIn Connections: 2703

Twitter Followers: 1180

BlueSky Followers: 1740

YouTube Channel Subscribers: 5391

Website Domains owned: 4

Favorite Blog Posts of the Year

Why Fugitive Pedagogy Is a Book All Educators Should Be Reading Right Now
Dialogs on Teaching (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3)
PhD Chronicles: The Defense Text

Looking Back

While the world has felt incredibly unstable and fragile in the past year, year 45 for me was an incredibly powerful year filled with transitions, adventures, new opportunities, and milestones. I'm still in awe of all the things that have happened and hesitate to share them. But this is where I capture how the year has been (now in its 9th year!).

The big accomplishment is that I have (finally) completed my dissertation. I can't describe how much this means to me. I've had a variety of posts about it and it's been a long time coming (10 years). But I accomplished it and feel the weight off the shoulders.

Professional Changes

A big change in the past year was leaving College Unbound and becoming the Senior Associate Director of AI in Teaching and Learning at Northeastern University. It was quite the transition. The role was right; the team has been great; and the time had come. There are so many wonderful things that happened to me as being part of College Unbound--and it was also time to move on. I'm still teaching there and who knows what the future holds.

Taking on this role at Northeastern has been a really great opportunity to learn more on lots of different levels. I work with a highly collaborative team, thoughtful leadership, and in a situation where I'm getting to do a whole lot of learning about AI in teaching and learning. It was a big shift--moving from a college of 500 students to a university with over 30,000. It has also been interesting to be at an institution that can just buy AI licenses for all students, faculty, and staff. Most importantly, I'm working with a team of faculty developers and it's been too long since I've been in a role where I've had other collaborators who knew the work that I did as deep (if not deeper). It's mean collaboration and learning have been happening all the time.

The talks and workshops continue to be an activity I'm doing regularly; I'm closing in on nearly 100 talks and workshops over the past 3 years around AI and education. The Substack has over 10,000 followers (8,600 subscribers), and continues to be a place for me to share my insights and learning as I go along.

And because of the work I've been doing around AI in higher ed and the experiences my partner has with operations and change management, we started a new venture in the spring and summer. We opened up a consultancy agency to work with middle and lower-resourced institutions to support their work as they navigate AI not just in the classroom but institutionally. You can find out more about us at Anchor Insights Consulting.

I've also had some things published. Obviously, there's the dissertation which you can read (or upload to an AI chatbot to get the gist of it): Elbow Patches To Eye Patches: A Phenomenographic Study Of Scholarly Practices, Research Literature Access, And Academic Piracy. I also co-authored another piece for EDUCAUSE Review (#4 for those counting): “In the Room Where It Happens: Generative AI Policy Creation in Higher Education” with Esther Brandon, Dana Gavin and Allison Papini. I got to share my own hot-take about AI and copyright on the LSE Impact Blog: “Does AI have a copyright problem?”. And last but not least, I got to work on this piece with two friends and colleagues, JT Torres & Deborah Kronenberg for Inside Higher Ed: “Growing Orchids Amid Dandelions”.

So, yeah. This past year was a banner year for me professionally. I know some of it is the compound interest of many different strands of work I've been weaving together for the past 5, 10, 15, or 20 years or so. In that way, it makes a certain sense why it has happened. But also, it continues to feel strange about the range of professional growth. It's that weird dynamic wherein I know that one part of this is a variety of intentional and thoughtful moves I've made over the years; another part is just luck; and yet another part is privilege. And it's not always clear which one is strongest at any given moment.

Home life

Personally, the year has been all right overall with some ups and some downs.

We lost Pumpkin, our beloved 14-year-old cat in May. That was heartbreaking. She was diagnosed with cancer in March but was largely functional until May. One night, her back leg stopped working and we found out it was either a blood clot or the tumor had grown so big it was blocking a nerve. There were no good options at that point and so we had to put her to rest. We had time to say all our goodbyes and tell her how amazing she was and will continue to be. She was my first cat and had been with me from before I started this whole career trajectory and was still doing the full-time adjunct shuffle. She was the epitome of sweetness and I still think about her daily.

My partner and I celebrated our 10-year wedding anniversary and got to do some traveling in the past year, including to Alaska as part of a family trip and Paris as our anniversary adventure. We did a Rick Steves Tour, which we found to be really helpful, both for learning to navigate the city and for having a community of folks to connect and talk with.

The garden this year was not too successful. I got produce, but there was a lot of failure. I started off with doing the square foot method and breaking up the garden into a grid. I then proceeded with what I called the "Order and Chaos" garden method; where I took a bunch of lingering seeds from the last 3-4 years and mixed them altogether into one container. Then, I took handfuls of those seeds and sprinkled them into the squares and covered with dirt. Lots of stuff grew but some things grew and dominated more than others. So I got plenty of radishes and turnips. Also, the squashes, cucumbers, and greens--they got destroyed by a groundhog that I was quite ready to go full Caddyshack on. But my partner did not find that acceptable, so next year, I will be doing raised beds, apparently, or building a trench and fence. I got a good share of tomatoes, herbs, potatoes, peppers, and the chard is finally coming in; I may also get a watermelon or two.

Another exciting thing (for me) was that we finally got a Little Library. I actually talked about this in a previous annual reflection (42). It's real now and stacked with books. I'm not sure how much traffic I'll get. Still, if anyone knows me, they know my love of libraries is strong and having one is definitely peak excitement for me.

Health

It's been a good year overall for my health. I've maintained the weight loss from last year and found new ways to care for my body (a bit more stretching, some weights and other anaerobic activities).

I did my first half-marathon in a while and came in at about 2 hours and two minutes, which was great given that I hadn't been pushing for speed. That was early in the season (May) and I worked on building up speed and better lung capacity. Then, I strained my calf in June, and it took till August to recover. So I spent the summer doing a lot more cycling. But I found for the first time in a long time, I was able to still do higher cardio on the bike than normal and maintain some of that speed as I returned to running. I'm back up to running 12-15 miles regularly and hoping to add more speed in the next month or so.

I don't know that I would say I'm in the best shape that I've ever been, but I'm definitely in that realm and appreciate what my body is capable of doing at this stage of my life.

Looking ahead

With the PhD done, there is definitely something to be said about coasting along for a while and relaxing a bit. And, for those who know me, know that probably isn't likely. I would say there are a few goals that I'm hoping to get started or make progress on in this next year.

The first is pretty straightforward, and I've already applied. I'm hoping to complete University of Rhode Island's Master Gardener program to learn and do more with my garden in the ensuing years. Chris may also take this, which means it will be even cooler to work together with her on gardening plans!

The other two goals I anticipate starting but not necessarily finishing in the next year are running a double-marathon (52.4 miles) and writing a memoir. I've been a runner for nearly 15 years--in fact, next summer will be 15 years of running. I'd love to commemorate it by doing a doube-marathon. To be clear, that's the longest distance I'd want to do before going back to my favorite distance, the half-marathon. There's something powerful for me in going from a person who couldn't run for 5 minutes to someone who can run for 50 miles in the last 15 years. But that's an intensive investment of time, energy, and planning. So, I have to figure out a way to fit it in with...well, everything else.

I have already started the other goal. It has been sitting with me nearly as long. In fact, I had a name for it well before I had a sense of what it was going to be. But yes, writing a memoir is something that feels important for me. If you've been reading long enough on this blog, you know that I navigated my teenage years grappling with bulemia, depression, self-harm, suicidal ideation, and several attempts. I'm also in a place so far on the other end of that spectrum. There's a lot that has happen to move from one end to the other and through lots of writing, reflecting, conversations, and learning, I think I can speak to something distinct and thoughtful about it. So, let's find out!

Beyond that, there are other projects, ideas, and small hopes for the year to come but think I'll hold off on a list for fear of overwhelming y'all.

See you next year!