By Any Other Nerd

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes Raymond E. Callahan’s Education and the Cult of Efficiency was written in the mid-20th century about the early 20th century and yet, still feels so relevant and palpable today. Callahan is focused on K–12 education, but its relevance to higher ed feels just as potent. Callahan traces a rich history of efficiency springing out of Taylorism and making its way into public education, particularly through administrators and the professionalization of administration. Superintendents increasingly became a distinct class of professional administrators rather than teachers who happened to become administrators. And that class was deeply informed by the discourse of efficiency. The result is efficiency deeply entrenched at the administrative level of public education for generations (over 100 years now). Callahan is capable of empathizing with their situation. These were public positions, accountable to communities increasingly asking schools to demonstrate tha...

Learn more about The Unicorn Tapestries Estimated Reading Time: 13 minutes The Tapestry, Six Years Later Six years ago, I used the tapestry to explain why all the apparently disconnected things I did actually fit together (“ The Hustle and the Tapestry ”). I think I had a pretty good sense then of the tension between building a tapestry and pursuing the hustle, but I understand the metaphor differently now. The tapestry gives me a center of gravity. It helps me decide what to pursue, what to connect, what to let develop slowly, what to pass along to somebody else, and when the old hustle is trying to disguise itself as opportunity. It has been a busy six years, to say the least. I finally completed my dissertation, though it took ten years total. I have changed jobs a few more times—first from Brandeis to Harvard, then College Unbound, and now Northeastern. I have continued to blog here, albeit erratically, and I started a second blog in the form of a Substack. That one has been a litt...

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes C. Thi Nguyen's The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game is one of those books that can change the way you look at the world. Since finishing it, I find myself asking a simple question: What game is being played here, and what score is everyone trying to maximize? Once you start seeing those games, they're almost impossible to unsee. The Score  helps us see a world where scoring, tracking, and quantifying our experiences run through nearly every aspect of modern life. He doesn't dismiss or argue against scoring systems on their own. In fact, a strength of the book is acknowledging how useful they can be. Scores help us learn, grow, explore, create, and make sense of complicated systems. Games themselves are wonderful examples of this. Constraints and scoring often make games meaningful. Yet, the danger comes when those measures of success stop serving our values and begin replacing them. This is where the issue of value capt...

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes Whistler presents and understands family less as a collection of heroes and villains, and more as overlapping, often contradictory stories that everyone tells themselves. You're never actually in the same family as your other family members. Everyone is in a different family together. Ann Patchett tells a tender, amusing, and deeply caring story about memory, regret, and the ways our lives change over time. At its center is Daphne's unexpected reconnection with Eddie, the stepfather who disappeared from her life decades earlier. On paper, that reunion could have become melodrama or nostalgia. Instead, Patchett turns it into something quieter and far more meaningful: a second chance at a deep human connection that isn't romantic but is every bit as profound. Eddie became one of the richest parts of the novel. He never presents himself as perfect, nor does he spend his time trying to justify the mistakes he's made. He knows he's impe...

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes Cat Love is enjoyable and playful, and uses that playfulness to explore the bleak realities of labor, care, capitalism, and exploitation. Morín explores the question of Schrödinger’s cat from the perspective of the cat. The novel then uses that setup to hold a mirror up to the systems we already live inside and remind us of their perversity.  In this funhouse world of desperation and fleeting opportunity, people train to become support animals to other humans and must fully play the part. It is absurd, but it also feels very present and very prescient to the moment we are in. Their training, the ridiculous quizing of right choices to random questions to become support animals, the performance of care, and the degrading expectations all feel like recognizable extensions of the world of work now. That is where the novel connects strongly to the last-mile automation problem. So much of the frictionless service of self-driving cars, perfect AI outputs...

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes Filterworld is one of those books that I appreciated as much for the questions it reinforced as for the arguments it made. Kyle Chayka offers a rich account of how algorithms shape the culture we consume and, in turn, the culture that gets made as a result of that process. I found myself nodding along with much of his analysis, though less engaged with some of his biggest conclusions. One of the book's greatest strengths is that it doesn't pretend algorithms emerged from nowhere. Chayka traces a longer history of recommendation and filtering before arriving at today's digital platforms, and that historical context gives the book a depth that many critiques of social media and algorithmic culture lack when they frame it as entirely new (that is the concerns that a media-ecosystem create). At the same time, I wanted him to push that history even further. Where I most disagreed with the book was its framing of what feels genuinely new. Chayka...

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes Stories, Dice, and Rocks That Think is at its strongest when Byron Reese is showing that the ways we think about the world came from somewhere. Storytelling, mathematics, probability, and (less so) artificial intelligence can feel so normal to us that it is difficult to imagine a world without them. Reese’s book helped make those habits of thought feel strange again. The book traces a progression from humans using language and telling stories, to using abstract concepts like mathematics, to developing ways of predicting the future, and eventually to creating “rocks that think” (computers). I found that movement through the history of thought a useful means of sensemaking, albeit one that still feels a bit arrived at in hindsight. Regardless, it's still compelling. It offers an accessible way to consider thinking devices (conceptual or physical) as most distinctly human: our ability to communicate, externalize ideas, imagine what has not happened, ...

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes What stayed with me most about The Last Picture Show was how much was going on beneath the usual image of small-town life in the early 1950s. For a novel published in 1966, it is remarkably open about sexual tension, infidelity, prostitution, loneliness, cruelty, and even bestiality. So much of it is presented matter-of-factly, as simply part of life in this rural Texas town. There was more meat there than the sanitized version of the period or of rural America that people often imagine. The novel is a coming-of-age story, and in that way it reminded me of books like The Outsiders and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn . The contexts are different, but they all involve young people grappling with the dirty realities of the world and trying to make sense of lives in which there is not always much to grab onto. That is especially true in Thalia. High school sports become a form of meaning-making, even though they are often bad at it. People gather at the pool ha...

Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes I didn't expect BattleAxe to hit this hard again. This was my third or fourth time through Sara Douglass's BattleAxe . I first read it in the summer of 1995, when it came out in Australia, and while it wasn't the book that turned me on to reading, it was absolutely the book that turned me on to fantasy. I'd always been into fantasy on film, but fantasy fiction had didn't really grabbed me as much. I remember slogging through The Lord of the Rings and finding it kind of dull or at least not something that pulled me in. And then here was this 600-plus-page book that I flew through in two weeks. I'd never read a book that big before, never mind a book that big in two weeks. I got pulled along in this really lovely way. I became deeply interested in this new world of characters, and just plain fascinated by what Sara Douglass was doing. This is not the first time that I've mentioned Sara Douglass and her work here.  Years ...

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes I went into Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought thinking it was The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds by Michael Lewis. That is, I thought it was a biography about Barbara Tversky’s husband and his work. And then, I realized it was her work--her phenomenal breadth of work-- and that made the book more exciting to me. It also did make me aware of the ignorance of my own ignorance. I knew there was a world of cognition research around Tversky, but I had not really understood this Tversky, this body of work, this way of thinking about how action shapes thought. The book is just incredibly rich.  What I’m still sitting with most is this idea of how much our spatial reasoning shapes our mental reasoning, which then shapes the way we build the world around us. Tversky makes it feel obvious in the best way: of course our sense of physical awareness, our sense of spatial awareness, plays into our minds. Of course the physical w...