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There Will Be Ink (2)

I can bemoan the erosion of the analog library that I grew up loving as a quasi-sacral space, a physical site that embodied our cultural commitment to preserving our accumulated knowledge as imbedded in words on paper. And, at the same time, watching the children of my community surfing the net in our new postmodern branch library, I can also say, “Just look how beautiful it is. […]

14 Years On: R.I.P., J.F.K., Jr.

If you want to locate the exact time and place at which, by example, the right to privacy of the children of the rich and powerful was surrendered willingly by the trend-setting leader of the free world and his fashionable spouse, you need look no further than “the first hundred days” of the Kennedy Administration. […]

Say Goodbye to Lake Wobegon U. (2)

It reassures me to read spontaneous, underivative variations on vintage jeremiads of mine in a major journal of post-secondary education and a prominent mainstream multi-subject website. Perhaps I wasn’t as crazy as people thought when I had the temerity to offer such cautions in the midst of the photo boom of the ’70s and ’80s. […]

Say Goodbye to Lake Wobegon U. (1)

Having witnessed this “northward drift” of grades as a teacher in both undergraduate and graduate liberal-arts programs over the past four decades, I can testify that it’s very real. And I’m willing to wager that, if social promotion ever get traced to its origins in higher education, we will learn that it began in college-level studio art programs, and, even more specifically, in college-level photo programs, circa 1965. […]

Return of the Prodigal

I’ve begun to consider the possibility that my brain does manage to wrap itself around these evolutionary shifts in digital technology without extreme difficulty. Which in turn suggests that perhaps this recurrent process helps to keep my brain active and young (or, more precisely, youth-like) by pushing me to learn new skills, to replace old habits with new or revised ones, and in one way or another to get some exercise for the mind. In short, I’ve begun to weigh the mental-health benefits of living la vida digital, with its steady reconfiguring of my neural pathways. […]