By Any Other Nerd

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes Selfless: The Social Creation of “You” begins with an idea that could easily become too philosophical or abstract: the self is not something sealed inside us. It is real, but it is also continually constructed and informed by things we can see and things we do not even realize are impacting us. I had some hesitation at the start about whether Brian Lowery’s argument would remain too theoretical. Fairly quickly, though, he grounds it in universal and easily accessible examples. He makes the argument clear, useful, and connected to day-to-day life. His writing helped me further articulate something that has become part of my operating system. Lowery’s ideas reminded me of Sam Sommers’s Situations Matter , Annie Murphy Paul’s The Extended Mind , and especially Nicholas Christakis’s Connected . All of these books, in different ways, challenge the idea that we are self-contained individuals. Selfless did not necessarily give me something those books did n...

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes One of my first responses to rereading Enchanter after decades away from it was: wow, Axis is a dick. I don’t think that’s necessarily a failure on Sara Douglass’s part. In fact, I think she does it on purpose. But reading this as an adult rather than as a teenager or even in my early twenties, I was much less impressed by the way Axis deals with both Azhure and Faraday. He feels compelled by both of them, knows his own mind but refuses to own up to it, and can’t simply be honest with the two women in his life. For a character who has to fight his brother to the death and somehow unite three races that have been at odds with one another, it’s strange that emotional honesty is apparently beyond him. That contrast is on the more interesting parts of Enchanter , the middle novel in Douglass's Axis trilogy .  The first book is largely about Axis discovering who he is and finding his parents. Enchanter is about him building on that discovery, for go...

Estimated Reading Time: 10 minutes This has been cross-posted on my Substack . Awards are strange things. I’ve thought a lot about what it means to be in this spot at this time in my career . From the moment I received the call about receiving this award, it’s been surreal; much like what the last few years of my career have felt like. On the one hand, I get it and can see why these opportunities and moments have come about. I have fifteen years of accumulative practice, involvement, and relationship-building which creates a lot of compound interest of opportunities.   There’s immense appreciation in being acknowledged for your work; there’s deep joy in celebrating with family, friends, and colleagues; and there’s real humility in being seen in ways you (or at least, I), don’t always expect to be seen. For me, there’s also ambiguity with these feelings because they are also tempered by: a sense of randomness that in another year with a different pool (of nominations and judges) wou...

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...