The poem: https://poets.org/poem/singularity
Tag: AI
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One of my very realest things: my 1964 Hermes Rocket, acquired from the granddaughter of a mechanical engineer in Asheville. In my experience, engineers take very good care of their typewriters. -
Here are three reality-adjacent (and typewriter-enabled!) flashes of hope: two from this week, and one from way back that’s finally finished its lesson.
- An error in the New York Times.
September 23rd’s web page featured this headline for a story in The Athletic:
Tragic news, marred by what we still call a “typo.” (You might need to look for it again, unless you are a former English teacher proofreader-type too.)
Frequent and discerning readers of The Gray Lady know that repeated words, misspellings, and false start sentences are not uncommon, even in 2026. They are invariably corrected the next time you think to refresh the page–but they still happen (and some make a cottage industry of noting them).
Whenever I encounter one I treasure it. Because it means there is a real person on the other side of my screen, in Times Square or L.A. or Paris or Baghdad, going hell-for-leather to make deadline. Not an A.I. agent. (Well, not until AI starts putting the right titration of typos into its prose to meet its ends.)
I have held for a few years now that soon actual “typos” will be precious, almost-boutique experiences, like face-to-face schooling. Because they will mean a real person is passing through an experience alongside you, sharing your time and space and making sense of the world too. I think that time is already now.
(And as a waggish friend noted: “I also love that the NYT could misspell ‘analyst’ but spell ‘Krzyzewski’ correctly.”)
2. The Kids Are Alright, and Angry.
I brought Stanford’s AI howler to both my undergrad sections of preservice teachers this week.
We use my collection of manual typewriters for reflective writing, to find the contemporary themes of historical reading and make connections to experience that transform ideas into learning. Inevitably, work with these beautiful hands-on machines invites excursions into what technology does, can’t do, and might do to and for the yet-hypothetical classroom of their subject and level.
As I never tire of reminding them: my phone distraction / using AI “for brainstorming”/ reality bending teaching problem today is their problem in @ 3 years. What are they going to do about it?
I have to screenshot the image from the NYT story, in case you have somehow missed it. You need to have the same chance to react that they did.
The first photo was snapped of three undergrads at a “Lunar New Year Party in 2024.” I imagine this was a late night dining promotion, like midnight breakfast during exams. The second appeared in online university promotional materials last week.
The student on the right in the original photo, Billy Ramirez, seems remarkably good-humored about the revision, though also unsparing. After all, university students, staff, and faculty of color are used to having their images centered, altered, or removed, as suits the branding need of the moment.
“To see me erased like that so easily was kind of very upsetting,” Mr. Ramirez, who is Hispanic, said in an interview on Tuesday.
Mr. Ramirez, a senior who is majoring in human biology, said there was “a comedic element” to the matter. Nevertheless, he said that he was frustrated by Stanford’s move, which he learned about from a friend.
The other students in the original photo “did not respond to emails on Tuesday.” The student on the right in the altered photo could not be reached for comment, obviously, because she does not exist. (Her AI sister Tilly might be game to offer some word salad, in a language or two, maybe.)
My own undergrads’ response didn’t start with racial / ethnic erasure, though. Instead they zeroed in on the revisions to make the other two students more conventionally attractive.
“They made them hotter,” was the first, dismayed comment in one class. “It’s the dining hall late at night. No one is camera-ready. People are just wearing whatever and trying to get something to eat.”
We went on to talk about that mix of aspiration and self-loathing that powerful advertising sparks inside us. Obvs, they agreed.
But then a student said, “If I see the second photo in an ad, it makes me not want to go to Stanford. No one really looks like that. Where would I fit in?”
In one acid take that student undid a century of marketing campaigns, and decided to let be be finale of seem.
I tried the counterpunch: “But what if you are the UComm employee who has to finish this web page and two more before midnight. You do not have the actual image you think you need! Can you see why maybe, just this once, you could fudge it with AI, and make up people who don’t exist?”
Absolutely not, both groups roared back at me. Not even worthy of response. Authenticity above all. Reality above all, said the room.
“Besides,” came the coup-de-grace: “This same university will bust you for using AI to write a paper.
“How can they turn around and use it themselves?”
3. The Canoe
Twenty years ago I helped start a microschool in the North Carolina piedmont. It did not survive past its first year. The experience taught me gratitude for institutions, for existing infrastructure that doesn’t need to invent a way to get attendance to the front office by 9 AM every day, etc.
But in class this week, another lesson from that time came back to me. One of our organizing team was tech-savvy, and used PhotoShop (oh innocence) to place the name of the school in many becoming photographs that supported its vibe. Our building backed on a lovely river; one photo depicted a Coleman canoe nosing into a sun-dappled autumn stream, with the school name now proudly lettered in gold on the transom.
We are all dazzled, excited by how our nascent website would be zhuzhed up by these gorgeous images. We will have so many prospective students applying!
But one of the teachers contemplated the pictures silently for several moments. Then she asked,
“What do we tell the student who shows up on the first day and says, ‘I want to see the canoe’?”
She was right.
The trust of a young person in the intentions and credibility of a new school comes down to whether or not it is what it says it is.
How can a student know they are safe–know they can relax and trust–know they are free to do the work they are here to do–without that rock-solid confidence?
The photos were forgotten.
The young people are done with appearances and promises.
They just want to see the canoe.
Lead image borrowed from The Happy Adventure, with thanks.
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Today marks thirty years since the publication of David Foster Wallace’s failed entertainment, Infinite Jest. Click away if you must–but I hope you will stay.
The anniversary snuck up on me. In my defense, I have also been consumed with the publication of my own personal big book (more about that in a minute), and managing both a few winter storms and the world’s first four-thousand day-long January. There’s been a lot going on.
But since the book had such an impact on my own personal life and work, I have got to have something to say about it. So, provoked by Hermione Hoby’s excellent reassessment this week at The New Yorker, I’ll try.
This book landed smack in my sweet spot: right at the end of that part of my life when my sweet spot was still accepting applications, wide-eyed and willing.
I have read it multiple times, alone and with others (especially with others). I have read it in hardback first edition, in trade paperback, upon a Kindle, once in its entirety upon the tiny screen of an iPhone (!). I have taught it to two Honors College seminars, and would do still if the English dept hadn’t gotten wind of my efforts and wondered mildly if I had the bona fides to do so (no, but try me).
I own an autographed first edition, which he signed in the middle of the tour when I saw him read at Politics & Prose just a few days before he met David Lipsky. He read about Lyle, and the woman who said she’d come, I think.
I have even read much of the the terrific scholarship emerging around it, and made some small CV bones of it.
I have not pressed the book on many people. (Except my ninth grade English students in 1996, whom I subjected to period-long readings from the book that spring. Apologies?) Recommending a book is always a big risk, and even bigger when the book is massively long (it is) and infamously difficult (not really) and a bit of a cultural taser (ymmv).
But I have lived with it myself for thirty years, through many of my own changes and shifts. It was present at my creation as an adult as surely I was present at its. So it is my ur-text: the book against which I measure the ambition, the impact, and the faults of nearly anything else I read. Respect must be paid.
Hoby does the honors, so well. Born in 1985, she is sixteen years younger than me (and three years younger than those ninth graders). Her take is well-programmed. We suppose we can know what this book meant to folks like me who hoovered it up in our twenties, and what it means now in our fifties, if anyone cares. But what does it mean now, to the youngs?
Well, she writes directly to the heart of IJ’s maintenance in the cultural consciousness (mostly by those who have not read it) as a red flag for self-involvement, for “performative reading,” for male toxicity. And plaintively wonders:
The occasion is a moment to ask how a novel that mourns addiction and venerates humility and patience became a glib cultural punch line…At a thousand and seventy-nine pages, Infinite Jest has become a one-liner.
Amen, sister. It’s not right that a book that works so hard to make a case for simple connection between people, and depicts so vividly the horrorshows that nonetheless keep us apart, would be reduced thus.
Part of it is conflation of book and flawed author, who of course is not around to speak to our evolving takes on the work for good or ill–or evolve himself, like so many fathers, Shakespearean and other. He is gone and the book remains. If we still want to read it, we are on our own to explore why.
I bought my first edition of Infinite Jest at a chain book store in Dupont Circle, selecting my copy carefully from a teetering ziggurat of blue-sky-with-white-clouds covers that dominated the entrance. It was expensive–thirty bucks, on a beginning teacher’s salary!—but I dropped the coin.
I did so at the urging and in the company of my best friend at the time, a fellow teacher at my first school. He was nine years older than me (still is, strangely), and had already become a sort of pace horse for me in the three years I had known him.
He showed me a way of being an adult that I had never seen up close, and didn’t really know was possible. He was deadly serious about the things I was beginning to care about more than air and water: music, stories, teaching, beauty where you found it. He had taught at this place right out of college, like me, then left to go to a really good law school and become a big deal lawyer.
And then he had dramatically quit the law and come back to teaching—because he had come to realize that some ways of spending your life deadened your soul, and some ways expanded it. This made an abiding impression on me. When you figure out what matters, perhaps you should immediately begin devoting all your energy to it, hang the cost.
This relationship matters most here because it points to a type of experience that IJ catalyzed for me. It could have NOT been a big hard smartypants book that my friend and I had in common. It could have been working on our cars on the weekend, or playing in a band together (actually, we did that too), or playing D&D or rock climbing or building houses. Youngish people have lots of salubrious things they find to get into together.
But it wasn’t: it was reading a hard book that was heady and inane, hilarious and heartbreaking, in turns—sometimes on the same page. Reading alone to ourselves (like we all do, if elementary school works), and then talking about what we had read.
That spring, we mostly kept in step with each other, not spoiling events coming up if one of us pulled ahead by a few pages. We tried out theories about whether this character or plot point contributed to the whole huggermugger or would be a red herring; we reminded each other of what someone who sounded suspiciously like this character actually said in a group conversation a hundred pages back.
Put another way: we made an asynchronous individual experience into a time-wedded shared one. If the way to make friends is in fact going through stuff with people—well, we went through it together, for months. We remain close friends despite distance and decades, with the book remaining a touchstone of our shared formative time even as other experiences have followed for each of us.
(Do the youngs still have these experiences? Do the young men? That’s another post. The double bind especially young men find themselves in when they run the risk of being tarred “LitBros” for caring inordinately about something that speaks to them.)
I think that the best of these relationships happen around actual made-by-human texts, not engine blocks or soccer pitches. Texts that are too big to be held in your own head alone. Texts that insist on stopping time for you until you find someone else to help you make it real. Those texts can be films, too, I know–or videogames, I hear. (My son chats “on the phone” online with a friend while they build and explore Minecraft realms together. That sure sounds like kind of the same thing.)
But caveat: the shared text has to be too much to be managed alone.
And that is why it has to be human-made.
Because tech can give you too much, too–but why would you care to spend time with its excesses, when there is no too-much human behind the scenes to try to know?
My strongest memory of meeting Wallace in DC was looking at his head and wondering: this all came out of that? What structured it and contained it? What, even after 1079 pp, has not yet been said? How unfathomably broad the backfields inside each of our skulls* really are, bandanna-wrapped or not.
Making sense of that landscape is usually beyond us. As I read the early critical responses to IJ, I notice again and again how Wallace is taken to task for his “excess”. Again, Wikipedia:
Some early reviews, such as Michiko Kakutani‘s in The New York Times, were mixed, recognizing the inventiveness of the writing but criticizing the length and plot. She called the novel “a vast, encyclopedic compendium of whatever seems to have crossed Wallace’s mind.” In the London Review of Books, Dale Peck wrote of the novel, “… it is, in a word, terrible. Other words I might use include bloated, boring, gratuitous, and—perhaps especially—uncontrolled.”[ Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University, called it “just awful” and written with “no discernible talent” (in the novel, Bloom’s own work is called “turgid”). In a review of Wallace’s work up to the year 2000, A. O. Scott wrote of Infinite Jest, “[T]he novel’s Pynchonesque elements…feel rather willed and secondhand. They are impressive in the manner of a precocious child’s performance at a dinner party, and, in the same way, ultimately irritating: they seem motivated, mostly, by a desire to show off.”
A.O., my man! Simmer down!
Many of these opinions became revised with time. Criticism of course usually happens on deadline, when even an advance copy only comes a couple of weeks before an assessment is due. A big work, one that overflows convention and expectation, must be resented on some level–must be punished for overflowing, maybe. As Joe Jackson says, on a near-perfect and almost-entirely-forgotten album:
And when I die and go to pure pop heaven
The angels will gather around
And ask me for my whole life story
And for that fabulous sound
But I know they’re gonna stop me
As I start going through every line
And say please–not the whole damn album
Nobody has that much time.
Just the hit single.I needed every month of the last thirty years to make sense of this book, deeply and gratefully. Its excess is its economy: messy, overbearing, too much. Human, at our very best.
My own book could only happen once I gave myself two permissions:
To say exactly what I meant, for exactly the reader I wanted to hear it, however it came out on the page.
And to feel and speak the anger I felt–and still feel–toward every mechanistic, logical, algorithmic attempt to rationalize and make more manageable our real human experiences in the name of efficiency, economy, and “accountability” that rarely brings us any returns.
To be against such things is inevitably to be for excess, for mess, for reality exactly as it is.
And I can see that, at this point, IJ’s lasting legacy for me has been permission to do my own thing as fulsomely as Wallace did his.
I’m not Wallace, and neither are you…but my words can find the reader who needs them, too, as surely as his did. And as surely as yours can.
I don’t remember if I thanked him in the acknowledgments, but if not I thank him here.**
And I hope you find your own DFW too. Your own permission; your own cage that liberates and sustains both.
*Permit me but one footnote, ’tis but a wafer thin: skulls are structures that contain what is precious so that it can thrive. What happens to us without the right structures–and what can happen, if we find and commit to them– is one of my favorite concatenating themes in the Sierpiński Triangle of the book. Without skulls, without frameworks, without principles, without cages, we are lost, or at least seriously compromised. Do not draw to yourself weight that exceeds your own weight. Find your cage.
** Yeah, I did.
Image approximating cover of first printing borrowed from Mental Floss, with thanks.
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Today is the day! My book is published!
Human Teaching: How Recentering What’s Real Sustains Your Practice is now available, in paperback only (no digital download!) at this link.
I am pricing it at near-cost through the end of February–because I am so excited to get these ideas out into the world, and continue the conversation that started in these pages. I hope you’ll order yours today!
In Human Teaching, I use a combination of word-processed, typewritten, and hybrid pages to explore the relationship between seeking out unmediated reality and thriving in your teaching practice.
As our lives become more and more virtual–more and more invaded by screens and algorithms, and the billion-dollar efforts behind them that compete to extract our attention–I am more and more convinced that the way forward has always been beneath our feet, before our eyes, and right under our fingertips.
Maybe this moment, despite it all, is the first moment in which we can truly see reality for the endless source of sustaining power that it has always been. If we choose to stop fleeing from it in the name of speed, convenience, and ease, we may find that friction is our friend.
We may regain our living, breathing teaching selves by losing the stories we’ve been told we have to believe.
The core of the book is the “Five Spot”: a scheme for understanding the research-based principles of sustainable teaching practice that have infused my burnout prevention work with preservice and practicing educators for years.
What’s the “Five Spot”? Here’s an excerpt from the introduction:
- While the themes that underlie educator burnout are complex and interwoven, I think we can engage the most urgent ones in five moves. Five is a manageable number! It is counting on your fingers; it is the days in a school week. It is how many periods I taught each day, when I was a middle and high school teacher from 1993 to 1999. It’s a handful—and it’s just enough.
- At the school where I began my career, a “five spot” was what they paid you to sub for an absent colleague’s class. If someone called out sick, and you had planning period during one of their classes, you could volunteer in morning meeting to cover for them. Sometimes they would leave a plan; usually it was study hall. But when you were done, you would go to student accounts, and the woman who ran the shop would hand you a five-dollar bill out of the cash box. And now you had money for an extra value meal at McDonald’s up the road (at 90s prices), which you could just make in a lunch period if you really boogied. Maybe these moves are like that “five spot”: do a little extra, extend yourself a bit—and immediately start to see something better in your day, something sustaining and lovely, that wasn’t there when you got up that morning.
- Jazz fans will have thought of the third thing first. The Five Spot Café was a storied club in Greenwich Village from 1956-1967, where some of the most innovative musicians of the period played residencies, sat in, and cut records. Thelonious Monk had two long stands there; Ornette Coleman made his east coast debut there with his avant-garde improvisations. It was an unpretentious, inclusive, and adventurous place, where food and drinks were cheap and all were welcome. Being part of the new thing was everybody’s business, not just a select few. I hope the same sense of freedom, openness, and possibility comes through in these pages.
I will blog a bit about each of the elements of the “Five Spot” in the coming weeks, so keep reading to find out more!
My sincere thanks to Dr Richard Polt, curator of The Classic Typewriter Page and editor of Loose Dog Press, for his unflagging enthusiasm for this project since I proposed it to him eleven months ago.
When I began this journey with real-world words in the depths of covid-dark December 2021, his was the first page of the “Typosphere” I found. His terrific book The Typewriter Revolution is required reading for anyone who wants to make manual typewriters part of their lives in a digital world.
I wanted so badly to publish this work with someone for whom the typewritten bits were a feature, not a bug. And boy howdy: did I ever choose wisely!
So get the book, and let me know what you think! And thanks so much for reading.
Here we go!
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Being some half-baked thoughts on Dana Goldstein’s December 12th article, “Kids Rarely Read Whole Books Anymore. Even in English Class.”
Excited to try a new scanning process to make my typed human words more legible and accessible! I am still with the charming ’63 Hermes 3000. We’re developing a serious long-term relationship. It really gets me…
I have no rights to the B&B image, which is the cover of an out-of-print anthology, but hope Mike Judge would consider it fair use. FWIW, you can buy it here.
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First I have to share a note the great jazz pianist Bill Evans wrote to his composition teacher, Gretchen Magee, at Southeastern Louisiana University.
I have always admired your teaching as that rare and amazing combination – exceptional knowledge combined with the ability to bring that same knowledge, that lies deep within the student, to life. You were certainly my biggest inspiration in college, and the seeds of the insights that you have sown, have in practice borne fruit many times over.
Teachers change the world!
Now, on to the fresh typed content you crave. The article referenced is I’m a Professor. A.I. Has Changed My Classroom, but Not For the Worst. New York Times Magazine, November 25, 2025.
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This week I am listening to one song on repeat in the car, every day: “Way Back Home,” featuring Ronnie Cuber on baritone saxophone, from Steve Gadd and Friends’ 2010 album Live at Voce.
Saxophone is, I guess, a hard thing to love now? Two NYT pieces in the last week say sax is suss: a hot take on the current preponderance of the instrument at weddings, and “5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Alto Saxophone” (because if it can’t be done in 5 minutes, it can’t be worth doing). It is certainly the instrument that never sounds like anything else. You can mute a trumpet, you can prepare a piano, and if you amplify anything you can run it through yards of effects—but sax is sax.
I have been on a guided saxophone tour for the last few weeks, led by my youngest son. I was spinning Getz / Giberto in the car at pickup one afternoon, and he had questions. So I explained the three primary sax variants one finds in the wild. The alto: the intellectual’s horn, that of our first alchemist Charlie Parker and later technicians like Paul Desmond. The tenor: the alto’s soulful uncle, who can’t hold down a job but is out wailing on the bridge every night. Sonny Rollins, Wayne Shorter, Coltrane and of course Mt. Getz. (The fraught history of the soprano is excused for another day.)
And the baritone…well, no bari player came to mind. So I asked Spotify for one, and it coughed up this record. Thanks, algorithm! What a gem! (Also a favorite of Donald Fagen, according to the YouTube link above: my excellent taste is affirmed.)
Against its better-pedigreed colleagues, the bari sax always sounds like your sketchy friend leaning across the table to tell a dirty joke. The bari knows it is here for its personality, and leans into it. Perhaps the bari is the trombone of the woodwinds: it eludes its reputation only by occasionally embracing it.
I do not know anything about Ronnie Cuber other than his long long resume on Wikipedia, and the fact that he played in the SNL band. I think I recognize his tone from bumper music in the years when you had to be up at midnight to hear it. He would probably be considered a very accessible player. “Way Back Home” has no arch bebop changes, is not “out” in the slightest. It is boogie music, feel-good music. A two-chord vamp that only goes to the third when you cannot take the pressure anymore; puts me in mind of Joe Zawinul’s “Mercy Mercy Mercy”, which despite Cannonball Adderley’s intro about persevering through adversity has always been a joyous song to me. Here to move your booty, not push you through the doorways of perception.
And that tone! The growl and the hum and the whine. I have seen one photo of this hulking man and am put in mind of Mingus with his double bass: parity between player and instrument, clash of the heavyweights. I am pretending I know everything I need to know about him from that Wikipedia page, and I like every single bit of it. I am not looking up any more: I do not want to know if he treated his collaborators like garbage or sold his horn for smack. I want to just climb inside that tone and spend a long, lazy weekend sliding down the surface. He enjoys the lowest honks of the horn and is not afraid to let you love them too. He knows his instrument is ridiculous on the way to being sublime: that the two are inseparable.
And he knows he can do anything he wants on it, and a big part of the joy of listening to him is the physical feat he is pulling off. Because that is the other thing about bari sax that can’t be ignored: its size. Its weight. I am finding curiously variable numbers online, and do not have one handy to check. Does it weigh twenty pounds? The neck strap introduces a whole new problem in the long term I bet. Posture implications. More than the weight, though, is the distance your air column has to traverse. All the way down to those lower notes, with the big clanging pads, is four feet at least. Bari is a physical commitment.
I played bari for a couple of years in my high school jazz band. I was a competent clarinetist, and my indulgent band director told me I was welcome to audition if I could learn the bari. If I could hang, maybe there would be a clarinet feature in the future. Jazz band practiced at 7:15 in the morning twice a week, is my memory: you had to want to be there. I had to muscle that metal into submission almost before I was awake.
I learned it well enough to honk along with the real saxophonists. Sax is nominally simpler than clarinet, thanks to Adolphe’s ingenious design that makes the same fingerings work for the same notes all up and down its range, vs. the clarinet, which puts you off a fifth in between octaves. And I did hang! True to his word, we did “Woodchopper’s Ball” passably, and I made an absolute wreck of Jobim’s “Wave” at a festival once.
But the real long-term benefit for me was getting to spend hours up close and personal with a horn that big. Cuber does not seem to notice the heft of the thing. His dexterity and speed is improbable, unimaginable. Especially when you have also tried to wrestle with it and been bested. I love his playing because I know how much work it is.
I got out my alto* this week, inspired by Cuber’s deftness and tone, and was immediately reminded how you either are married to your instrument or struggle with it.
And I struggle on sax! Twenty years ago, I joined a band in Chapel Hill for a few months on that alto. They were named, gloriously, “The Guns of Navarone.” A serious montunos-for-miles cubop piano player, an upright bassist, a traps drummer, and a conga player. And somehow me. I knew by the second rehearsal that I was way outclassed by this project, but they kept me on, so I stayed. We worked up two sets–“Caravan,” some Horace Silver maybe?–and I played one gig in a dim weeknight room on Rosemary Street. I remember the piano player glaring at my honking, keening tone all night, waiting for my to materialize into the player of his dreams but remaining the same mess I had been in rehearsal. I quit the next day, and went back to being a well-satisfied drummer ever since.
But I am going to keep up my honking and keening regardless. My saxophone-remembering has every place on this blog, because music-making will always be a physical act. Most of the music I love comes from real people and objects working at each other and finding harmony, or at least detente.
And computers can now emulate nearly any sound with alarming fidelity. In my last DC band we would haul an actual Rhodes stage piano up and down stairs into second-floor clubs, cursing its weight and size all the way. Now my friend who played that Rhodes gets all its sounds and more (Hammond organ!) out of a tiny Nord that weighs less than my cymbal bag, and I am sure his back thanks him for it.
The music I most love lets you hear a person and an instrument working it out together. I love John Bonham’s drumming because I can hear his right foot on that (squeaky) Ludwig Speed-King, can hear the lightness and the thunder exactly where he put it before you could quantize a tempo. I love Wynton Marsalis on “Jig’s Jig” because I can hear his breath easing over the top of his figures, his conservatory nimbleness trying to ooze into something looser. I love Steve Williams’ (oops, Billy Hart’s) quarter-note ride behind Shirley Horn because his swing is implied, is in the air around the notes. I love music that is people with things in the world.
And I love Ronnie Cuber’s peace with his horn and the world he makes in it. Check it out–and then go play some yourself today, how about? Go ahead: get out your horn from high school, if it has survived the moves and yard sales, and see what you got today. I bet you’ll care less about getting it right, about being “good,” than you once did—because those are the concerns of children, aren’t they? Whether you sound “good enough”?
Well, the concerns of children and pros like Cuber, and thank god for them. But the rest of us just get to play today, if we want. Go play in the world; go be part of it. It is still there–both the music, and the world–and it is yours for the making.
*My alto sax was a gift from my band director, a saxophonist himself. It was his marching horn when he was a student at the University of Georgia. A splendid Noblet “Serie Maville,” it is in great shape, no leaky pads. If I could just get my embouchure in step with my horn, I would be flying high! So grateful to have his horn here, and so grateful to that man—and his co-director, and their extraordinary public school band program–that made my musical life so satisfying and durable. Go Dawgs, B.C.!
Photo from Wikipedia, above.
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I am just back from the annual professional meeting of folks around the country who run programs like mine.
Like nearly all academic meetings, it took place in a big city, in a hotel that is also a conference center. The action went down in one big ballroom and an assortment of smaller meeting rooms spread around wide central spaces, where coffee and food intermittently appeared and then was cleared away.
It was furnished to be “nice” twenty years ago but, like all such spaces, showed the constant wear and tear of hosting one such event after another. A spot of ripped upholstery here, a missing light switch fixture there, the scuffs on the walls that inscribe a story of people constantly coming and going, presenters moving chairs and tables in an effort to make their session more collaborative, or less.
I brought a typewriter with me, as above: my bulletproof 1965 Hermes Rocket, which has traveled with me to Hawaii and Ireland and many places in-between. My session was on manual typewriters in 2025 as an interpretive lens to understand the nature of educator burnout and find new ways through it. (Also the topic of the book I have coming out very soon with Loose Dog Press: watch this space!)
So I got to bring the Rocket with me, and invite participants to take it for a spin. Maybe one of the latent powers of a manual typewriter in 2025 is that it is always exactly what it is, where it is. After all, it is the only object in this photo of my session that is really its own, singular thing: the tables and chairs are anonymous, and even the “slides” aren’t real.
In every session we found ourselves sitting with strangers at a round wedding-reception-type table covered by two massive industrial tablecloths and were asked to interact, to break ice, to discuss, to synthesize, to report out, above all to network. The incongruity of the importance of the work we are striving to do at these meetings, juxtaposed with its trade show surroundings, always jars me and creates an anomie in my soul so consistent I have learned to brace for it.
I remember attending my industry’s biggest meeting twenty years ago in San Francisco and standing on one of those terrible banquet chairs to see one of my mentors receive the organization’s highest honor, a lifetime achievement award. A deeply moving moment, thousands of lives changed for the better, world-shifting impact on education—taking place in a corner of the Moscone Center that would probably feature a refrigerator display in two days.
My local district in opening a new elementary school on Monday, years after accepting the fact that the historic WPA-constructed building was too close to a flood-prone river to possibly be reclaimed, Hurricane Helene displaced the kids from it anyway; they have been meeting for a year in donated halls, and so having a home at last is a major achievement. But of course, as one of my sons (a former student of the school) commented upon viewing an online video tour, it looks like a Hampton Inn inside.
I have not seen the video but do not need to. I know what educational “nice” looks like. I know exactly what he means. Indestructible carpet with fierce patterns overlaying neutral texture that will hide stains and wear for two decades. Ranks of plastic tables and chairs that can be rolled around and reconfigured, but never really fit together. Indirect lighting that will still make everything cold and sallow.
(I also read that the university building where I was so splendidly taught by that grad school mentor just re-opened after a comprehensive refresh. In the photos, I see the Hampton Inn aesthetic, filtered through a lot more money.)
I am grateful to the designers and the builders and everyone for a new building, don’t get me wrong. I just want to note that any public institutional space has to meet its contemporary demands to look “nice,” to accommodate hundreds, and to last for fifty years.
Spaces that tick all those boxes will never be humane spaces. They will never build in the evidence of human existence that so many of us find comforting in older, lived-in educational spaces. Worn spots on terrazzo floors where three generations of chairs have been scraped. Formica tabletops with the edges worn from students leaning over books, then laptops, late into the night. Chalkboards from the 60s peeking out around the edges of whiteboards from the 90s that were mounted right on top of them, to not leave divots in the drywall.
My favorite educational meeting has always happened in the same physical place, and has since the late 70s. It’s a Catholic retreat center near Dayton. I am not Catholic, but I read in its low-slung brick and monastic rooms and stained-glass chapel a strong presence of the liberation theology of fifty years ago. Ecumenical, peacenik, a little woozy, earth-tone woodcuts of venerated elders and saints painted on burlap. The rooms redolent of thousands of urns of coffee and the adequate but unpretentious on-site dining service. Brick and coffee and just a little warm damp: a terrarium, nearly, for people who seek to care for other people.
Overwhelmingly human and cozy, Feels like home to me, anyway, who is old enough to remember Air Force Base chapels built in the same vibe. Feels like room to sit and rest, room to hole up and read, room to make a new friend. The meeting itself the historic home of the last educational moment, IMHO, when we took seriously the interpersonal, the autobiographical, the human becoming of our work. The last moments before Reagan and measure-to-manage became commonsensical, before the ground opened and swallowed it all up in a conflagration of accountability that now feels like the only way to do school. (But isn’t.)
Of course, the real kicker is that every educational space that feels humane now was just “nice” when it opened, according to whatever “nice” meant at the time. The modernist / Brutalist cement and chrome piles I remember fondly from undergrad were built in the 60s as interruptions of the previous century’s brownstones. They only feel human to me because I was a human in them. (Oh look, one of those just got torn down and replaced too.)
Maybe the real point of this reverie on human living in inhumane spaces is that only by living in them do cold spaces warm up. Places where we do sacred work become sanctified. Churches and schools. Why does an empty classroom feel different than an empty hospital ward, than an empty prison cell? Exactly.
Maybe one of my deepest disquiets about online Zoom classes is that Zoom will never feel lived-in. A Zoom meeting is always the same, because a Zoom meeting is not a place. Evening class in Zoom can never feel different than every other meeting you have had in Zoom that day. It is the same not-space, and unless we who teach there make a real effort to make it otherwise, what is conveyed therein will just be more content to be consumed and optimized and turned into deliverables and accountabilities.
(And easily 1/3 of the sessions at my meeting were about incorporating AI into the teaching, writing, and mentoring work we do: another irreality that is changing the scope of what we can imagine doing with our students. For another day.)
We need real places to feel ourselves as real people undertaking real experiences. A sentence even John Dewey, that Lorax of experience, could not have imagined uttering in his day.
Don’t know how to end this. Maybe with the suggestion that we all notice and value what the real spaces we live in do for us. Whether welcoming and accommodating or brutal and indifferent, we make ourselves and each other as we share those spaces and work toward our shared intentions.
What do we want them to feel like? What can we do to make them more so?
Whatever they start out as, they end up…ours.
This whole blog SHOULD be about my amazing encounter this week with Bryan Kravitz of Philly Typewriter. What a shop, what a project! Typewriter Valhalla! More to come!
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I really have no time for blogging today, but I have to share Wikipedia’s “Signs of AI Writing” advice page that I stumbled across while not sleeping last night. It is sort of an internal white paper for those who edit that remarkable resource: not definitive, but trying really hard to be helpful.
I had no idea this existed. But it turns out to be the most explicit list of tells, bugaboos, and quirks of LLM output in fall 2025 I that have ever seen.
Last week I taught my doc seminar on scholarly writing, and was informed by my doc students that “em dashes mean AI wrote it.” A quick web search shows I am a few months behind this supposed wisdom, and it is included.
(Though sadly, the only essential thinkpiece on the issue is not.)
The first takeaways are pretty breathtaking. I will quote widely from the page (linked above) because no time to paraphrase.
[snip]
LLM writing often puffs up the importance of the subject matter by adding statements about how arbitrary aspects of the topic represent or contribute to a broader topic…Words to watch: stands as / serves as / is a testament/reminder, plays a vital/significant/crucial role, underscores/highlights its importance/significance, reflects broader, symbolizing its ongoing, contributing to, enduring/lasting impact, watershed moment, key turning point, deeply rooted, profound heritage, steadfast dedication, indelible mark, solidifies …
AI chatbots tend to insert superficial analysis of information, often in relation to its significance, recognition, or impact. This is often done by attaching a present participle (“-ing”) phrase at the end of sentences, sometimes with vague attributions to third parties…Words to watch: ensuring …, highlighting …, emphasizing …, reflecting …, underscoring …, showcasing …, aligns with…
LLMs have serious problems keeping a neutral tone, especially when writing about something that could be considered “cultural heritage”—in which case they will constantly remind the reader that it is cultural heritage…Words to watch: rich/vibrant cultural heritage/tapestry, boasts a, continues to captivate, groundbreaking, intricate, stunning natural beauty, enduring/lasting legacy, nestled, in the heart of …
LLMs often introduce their own interpretation, analysis, and opinions in their writing, even when they are asked to write neutrally, violating the policy No original research. Editorializing can appear through specific words or phrases or within broader sentence structures. This indicator often overlaps with other language and tone indicators in this list. Note that humans and especially new editors often make this mistake as well…Words to watch: it’s important to note/remember/consider, is worth mentioning …
[/snip]
It goes on and on; you should check it out.
We are of course beyond “gotcha” AI moments, at least in my institution. We are encouraged to “teach the controversy,” surely, and encourage students to begin to use these tools critically because job skills.
But if you are someone who cares about words, or was taught to, or make at least part of your life with words, I ask you: what do you notice about these “tells”?
That they are, and have always been, the hallmark of inexperienced writers trying to find their way into what they have to say.
When we who care about words say that AI output is “bad” I can begin to see now what we mean. It is vague; it pretends to perspective it does not have; it leans into gravity while being featherweight.
In other words: it is a lot like the papers many of our students would be writing on their own–if they were actually writing their papers.
So where’s the problem?
The problem is: until you write like this on your own, and get told you are writing like this and shown how to do better…you will continue to write like this.
Worse, you will be satisfied with this writing as “enough.” It looks “smart” and “authoritative,” so it must be.
And this is only the writing-skill part of the deeper issue, described in the lengthy quote from an associated page:
[snip]
LLMs are pattern completion programs: They generate text by outputting the words most likely to come after the previous ones. They learn these patterns from their training data, which includes a wide variety of content from the Internet and elsewhere, including works of fiction, low-effort forum posts, unstructured and low-quality content for search engine optimization (SEO), and so on. Because of this, LLMs will sometimes “draw conclusions” which, even if they seem superficially familiar, are not present in any single reliable source. They can also comply with prompts with absurd premises, like “The following is an article about the benefits of eating crushed glass”. Finally, LLMs can make things up, which is a statistically inevitable byproduct of their design, called “hallucination“…
As LLMs often output accurate statements, and since their outputs are typically plausible-sounding and given with an air of confidence, any time that they deliver a useful-seeming result, people may have difficulty detecting the above problems. An average user who believes that they are in possession of a useful tool, who maybe did a spot check for accuracy and “didn’t see any problems”, is biased to accept the output as provided; but it is highly likely that there are problems.
[/snip]
If you care about writing–or if you don’t care about writing, but do care about critical thinking, bias, or plausible-sounding and confidently-expressed things being accepted as true–well then, there is much to fear here.
Thoughts?
My typewriter sits in the corner and shakes its shaggy head at me…
Image borrowed from this Axios story on the apparent currency of the term “clanker” for undesired and ineffective AI. Image possibly AI generated, who can know anymore ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
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My view this morning. How’s yours? 
Works cited:
NYT—Open AI’s New Video App is Jaw-Dropping (For Better or Worse): https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/02/technology/openai-sora-video-app.html?unlocked_article_code=1.q08.UUYt.5QX7omLx3jYN&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
*I am not really a Pavement fan, though “Slanted and and Enchanted” was pressed upon me by the hippest guy I know. See? I have no strong feelings about Nickelback, but I wish them well.
**That whole last bit is Wendell Berry—sure ain’t me, but I love it. See the page “Typewriter Agonistes” for link.
***Elliot Eisner taught me the next, done, good stuff; can’t cite it on my little phone but you should read him, a lot. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliot_Eisner
