I’ve struggled with clinical anxiety and panic disorder for about fifteen years, though it was likely manifesting itself in various ways before then. It’s a common chronic condition. What I’ve learned is that anxiety is fundamentally a misfiring between your brain’s process of evaluating information and your body’s reaction to…
There’s a somewhat frustrating series of arguments going around right now about standardized testing, admissions, anti-racism, and a few other related topics. There’s Matthew Yglesias writing an op-ed in the Washington Post that Ibram X. Kendi’s anti-racist response to testing ignores real academic disparities that can’t all be attributed to…
The other day my kids were fighting with each other over a Frisbee. One wanted to play with it, and the other had created a “game” in which he tried to throw it at the other’s head. They came to me crying and screaming.
This is a pattern they fall…
There is a scene in the fourth and final season of Halt and Catch Fire that features a video game so fiendishly difficult that beta testers trek through its mid-90s 3-D graphics landscape for hours, trying in vain to solve puzzles that more often than not just return the player…
My youngest son has decided that, for now, he will be Bjork. He has imbued her with superpowers and makes strange loud noises in his bedroom. He portrays her as a cross between Elsa from Frozen and…well, Bjork. He kind of nailed it.
He imagines Bjork singing to enemies at…
Most of my work for the past year has been developing techniques, curriculum, and workflows for supporting low-digital-literacy adults with using a computer and navigating the internet. As schools have moved online, I think that the needs of adult learners help shine a light on some of the unique issues…
My son got his hands on a joke book a few weeks ago and read it from cover to cover. He read every joke aloud to me, then explained his reasoning about why it was supposed to be funny. He mispronounced lots of words, some because he’d never heard them…
I have felt somewhat numb to national politics in the past few months, so I was surprised to find myself moved to tears during Joe Biden’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. …
I have been spending some time during the pandemic relearning the piano. I am focusing on jazz piano because it lends itself better to the stray ten or fifteen minutes I get to play in a given day. At first I felt that the playing was wooden and awkward —…
