We praise his poetry, essays and fiction, but Wendell Berry also excelled at a usually boring genre: the list

The so-called “humanities” name the subjects already on the losing end of technopolitical culture and its format of training-as-education. What we need are the liberal arts, philosophy, and theology that subject themselves to the truth.

A tiger shelf I made for my daughter's drawing table

This is a flat painting

While it is true that in math we reflect on what we first perform, this distinction and the practice of reflection are usually elided when teaching students to calculate—so they commonly think calculation gives deep understanding of the "why", or that "why" does not matter.

It's time to remove laptops from classrooms. 24 experiments: Students learn more and get better grades after taking notes by hand than typing. It's not just because they're less distracted—writing enables deeper processing and more images. The pen is mightier than the keyboard.

Blue books or bust.

Each year during finals I am reminded what a privilege it has been to reread and discuss the likes of Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Euclid and Boethius with students. Far from becoming stale, the works come to life anew in the minds of new learners, who in turn renew their teachers.

One might add to this list the many correspondences between the Iliad and the Epic of Gilgamesh, written a millennia earlier yet, like Troy, lost until the mid 19c. Consider e.g., Aphrodite/Ishtar petitioning their parents after an injury, the deaths of Patroclus/Enkidu

Your yearly reminder: thebulwark.com/p/there-is-no-…

Charlotte Sternberg (American, 1920–2003) The Last Chore, 1953

As Titania says to Oberon— And this same progeny of evils comes From our debate, from our dissension; We are their parents and original. (A Midsummer Night's Dream, II.i.118)

Very worthwhile. Particularly striking are Schnell's conviction in the necessity of friendship and initiation into the mystery of the truth in higher ed., the goal of creating church doctors, and the retrieval of medieval oral evaluations to complement AI use. Well done Jonathan Liedl

To truly get, say, The Iliad, you have to love it.

"The most striking fearure of contemporary moral utterance is that so much of it is used to express disagreements; and the most striking feature of the debates in which these disagreements are expressed is their interminable character." — Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, Ch. 2

Palm Sunday.