By Any Other Nerd

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes Yiyun Li’s boldness in Things in Nature Merely Grow sits with me long after reading, p articularly her willingness to grapple with the suicide of her son James without giving in to deep emotional wailing. That kind of emotional outpouring would be entirely valid, and there should be books that approach grief that way. But Li does something different. She examines the loss with method and intention, trying to reach what she calls radical acceptance: there is nothing she can do to undo James’s death, so what can she do to accept and memorialize him? That question feels even more powerful because James was Li’s second child to die by suicide. She had already lost her son Vincent and written about that loss ( Where Reasons End ). Now, she has to confront James’s death without pretending that Vincent isn’t already part of her experience as a parent. James and Vincent were part of the same family, and Li cannot write this second book without having written ...

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes I came to The King’s Fifth in a roundabout way. As a kid, I watched this quirky animated show called The Mysterious Cities of Gold . Almost nobody else seemed to know it existed. I think I’ve met maybe two or three people in my entire life who watched it. But it stuck with me, and it probably had as much influence on me as Star Wars, for I remember watching it ceaselessly when I could. Decades later, watching a YouTube video about the show , I discovered that it was very, very loosely based on Scott O’Dell’s The King’s Fifth , a children's historical novel from 1966. The novel’s Esteban Sandoval is very different. He’s a fifteen-year-old mapmaker who gets pulled into an expedition by Captain Mendoza, a man obsessed with finding the legendary cities of gold. We already have some sense of where this is going as the story moves from the present to the past.  In the present, Esteban is imprisoned in Veracruz, awaiting trial for failing to deliver...

Estimated Reading Time: 15 minutes So it's that time again. For those tuning in, each year on my birthday, I do a bit of account and reflecting on the year. This is year #10. You can check out previous years below: 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 As always, the details: Home : Cranston, RI Relationship status : Married (12+ years) Cats Owned : 3 (Bear, Imani, & Buster) Other Pets : 0 Degrees earned : 6 (1 PhD, 3 masters, 1 bachelor, 1 associate) Reading since September 13, 2025 : 265 (Latest reads can always be found on Goodreads ) Work : Senior Associate Director of AI in Teaching & Learning at Northeastern University (full-time) Consultant Facilitator, Speaker Weight : 235.1 pounds Longest Distance Run This Year : 12 miles Fastest Pace This Year : 9:13 minutes (for 3.36 miles) Runs in the last year : 219 Miles run in the last year : 1085 miles Miles on the bicycle in the last year : 332 miles Blog Posts on Blogger in the last year: 21 Blog Posts on my Substack : 56 ...

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...