I like to visit the corner of our department where we keep office supplies, which I adore. Pencils, pens, highlighters; sticky notes in all sizes and colors; manila folders; printing paper in seven — seven — colors; four sizes of binder clips. I stand there mesmerized and imagine uses for them all.
A powerful and much-needed word from Sara Hendren, AKA @ablerism:
I think the clamor among young people to gather diagnostic names for imperfection — every imperfection, from the clinically serious and undertreated to the elaborate neologisms for capturing ordinary variability and performed eccentricity — begs for more sustained philosophical inquiry. If bodily or cognitive imperfection is not merely a mechanical glitch, what is it? How do we countenance it, make meaning alongside it, make our uneasy peace with its inevitable arrival? Young people need our patient accompaniment to ask these questions. They’ve already been abandoned once to the algorithms. I won’t abandon them again with scorn.
My friend and colleague David Corey told me that this is how he explains to his students how musical fugues work. What a cool animation.
Yeah, sure, y’all keep looking stuff up on the “internet,” I’ll just be over here with my REFERENCE BOOKS.
It seems, my dear friend, that the brains of the greatest men contract when they are gathered together, and that where there are more wise men, there you will also find less wisdom. The great assemblies are so preoccupied with minutiae, with formalities, and with empty orthodoxies, that essential issues are always relegated to the end.
— Montesquieu, The Persian Letters