Tag: notes
This morning I am sitting in Bonnie, our …
This morning I am sitting in Bonnie, our caravan, with a cup of coffee and Dorothy Wordsworth’s The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals open in front of me. We are in a field near Ashbourne on our first trip away in her. Dorothy is writing about walks, weather, meals, visitors, William, and the small movements of...
TIDEL Conference: Racial Justice in the Digital Public Square Presentation
Meet me in NYC — the TIDEL Symposium, October 1
The 11th Annual Haudenosaunee Wooden Stick Festival Weekend: A Dinner, a Run, and the Creator's Game at Onondaga Lake
September 11–13, 2026: the Alfie Jacques Ambassador Award Dinner, the Restore Our Sacred Lake 5K, and the 11th Annual Haudenosaunee Wooden Stick Festival return to Onondaga Lake. Here's what to know.
Reading Tools for Thought, I keep coming back …
Reading Tools for Thought, I keep coming back to Alan Kay’s idea of the computer as a fantasy amplifier. It’s such a different way of answering the question: what are computers for? Not productivity machines. Not devices for writing more emails, managing calendars, filling in spreadsheets or shaving another twenty minutes off the working day....
We talk about consuming books, as though reading …
We talk about consuming books, as though reading were a kind of nutritional exercise: pages in, knowledge out. But the best reading has never felt like consumption to me. It feels more like entering into correspondence with another consciousness across space and time. A conversation where one voice has the strange advantage of having thought...
Usage and Actors Acting
Discussing how public sector systems and platforms possess educative tendencies. Exploring diagnostic tools to express structural actors and usage to identify pedagogical paths forward in rescuing faulty systems. Blending global Indigenous frameworks of what it means to be living and examining the moral implications of creating sentience within modern technology.
The air has changed. I almost don’t want …
The air has changed. I almost don't want to say it out loud, as if naming it might hurry things along, but there was a trace of winter under the morning. It wasn't cold. The air had acquired an edge, just enough to remind me that the year is already leaning towards another season. Where...
There is a will inside us that is …
There is a will inside us that is older than thought. It moves beneath the surface of the personality, beneath preference, fear and habit, carrying an intention we may only dimly perceive. We feel it as a pull, a recurring image, a quiet insistence that returns even after we have ignored it. Something in us...
There is no universal right way to live, …
There is no universal right way to live, but the platforms keep presenting life as if there were. Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram turn existence into a hall of mirrors. Someone is travelling more, earning more, healing faster, raising better children, building a cleaner morning routine, finding their purpose, buying the van, leaving the city, moving...
I picked up an old book this morning: …
I picked up an old book this morning: Perceiving Ordinary Magic: Science and Intuitive Wisdom by Jeremy Hayward. The cover is a blue corridor of repeating geometry, the kind of image that used to promise either a difficult physics lecture or a trip through somebody else’s consciousness. Somewhere in its opening territory, Hayward pointed me...
I keep seeing headlines about the new rules …
I keep seeing headlines about the new rules of attention, usually written by somebody who wants to sell a better way of getting hold of it. The old rules were blunt enough. Interrupt people. Startle them. Keep them scrolling. Learn which colours, fears, desires and half-conscious wounds make a thumb hesitate for a second longer....
Yesterday, on a Wisdom Walk, I realised I …
Yesterday, on a Wisdom Walk, I realised I had been spending my attention in three directions at once. Part of me had gone backwards, picking over old choices and wishing I had chosen differently. Part had gone forwards, trying to get ahead of outcomes I cannot know. The rest kept looking for a side door...
Rheingold’s Tools for Thought has me asking an …
Rheingold's Tools for Thought has me asking an old question again:: what are computers for? For a long time the answer seemed settled. Computers were calculators, then office machines, then portals into a giant shopping centre with a comment section. We learned to treat them as appliances that happened to demand more and more of...
Kimchi fried rice eggs
For me this is the ultimate comfort food. Frying up some home-made kimchi with rice and eggs. So good!
I’ve got the new Masters of the Universe …
I've got the new Masters of the Universe queued up on Prime for viewing tonight. I suspect I'll be viewing it through two lenses. The kid, waiting to hear "I have the power!" and the storyteller who's curious to know if they can make the mythology of Eternia something more than a marketing reboot. One...
This morning I picked up How to Practice …
This morning I picked up How to Practice Self-Inquiry by Ramana Maharshi. I expected a quick survey read, a reconnaissance mission into the territory of the question Who am I? Instead, before I had travelled very far into the book, another question appeared: Is this your game? Is this your true mission? I could almost...
“Same shit, different day” is one of those …
“Same shit, different day” is one of those phrases I hate because it usually arrives wearing a smirk. It reduces a life to a conveyor belt: wake up, coffee, work, scroll, eat, sleep, repeat. A little verbal shrug before another day gets fed into the machine. And yet, some mornings, it’s mostly true. Routine isn’t...
Writing Support Resources
Free supports for academic writing: weekly writing communities, the Academic Phrasebank, citation alerts, and tools your university library already provides.
In Praise of Zotero
Why Zotero is the one tool every doctoral writer should adopt: free citation capture, automatic bibliographies, and no vendor lock-in for your research library.
The Kanban Method for Dissertation and Journal Article Writing
How the kanban method turns a dissertation or journal article into small, visible units of work you can actually finish, one card and one column at a time.
Apps and Tools for Research and Writing
A guided tour of free and low-cost apps for reference management, distraction-free writing, note-taking, and time management for doctoral and academic writers.
I’ve been carrying a small psychogeographic instruction around …
I’ve been carrying a small psychogeographic instruction around with me: unfold a map, put a glass down anywhere, draw round its rim, then go out and walk the circle as closely as the streets allow. This is a low tech version of the deríve app I made last week. It’s a lovely bit of mischief...
Rebecca Solnit’s sentences are archipelagos of thought. You …
Rebecca Solnit’s sentences are archipelagos of thought. You step onto one clause and find another small island appearing just beyond it: a memory, a road, an old map, a story someone told her, a political fact that refuses to stay merely political. The sentence does not hurry you to its conclusion. It gives you somewhere...
It feels to me as though this is …
It feels to me as though this is the only true choice we have. You did not ask to be born. You did not choose your parents. You did not choose the circumstances into which you arrived. The only real choice, I think, lies in deciding how we will play the hand we have been...
What Is Critical Theory, and Why Do We Need It in the Age of AI?
Critical theory is a method for asking how a technology is made, whose interests it serves, and whose labor it depends on. AI makes those questions a basic literacy for democratic life.