On this site, I document my use of a collection of splendid vintage typewriters to deepen the experience of the real world, on its terms, with myself, my students, and my fellow educators.

So many forces suddenly separate us from the experience of the real world, on its terms.

In the short years since COVID, online platforms have been universally welcomed as easier, faster, and less expensive ways to do the work of teaching and learning.

Generative artificial intelligence is now part of the curriculum: we must embrace it, we are told, because the world our students are preparing to enter will expect them to use it.

Those who are convinced that these shifts lose us more than they gain us have the burden of making our case before a commonsense consensus that, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, we need to evolve…or die.

I say, no we don’t.

Yes, let’s accept innovations that allow us to offload the burdensome aspects of work worth doing–unless those burdens are precisely the experiences we most need to undergo in order to grow and change.

Of course, let’s use new technologies to accomplish our work faster–unless that speed fragments our attention and separates us from the exact qualities of mind that let us do work worth doing and sharing in the first place.

My world tells me–more confidently each day–that I do not have a choice. That a life of screens and notifications, feeds and scrolls, autocompletes and virtual assistants, is the best life I could ever imagine.

I do not accept this. I know this is not true.

And so I struggle every day to discern which charms of a virtual life are good to embrace, and which are pernicious. This is the daily agony of our moment: the contest for our attention, for our minds, and ultimately for our souls, that we all can choose to join. Sometimes it is joyous–and sometimes it is not. But it is always worth the struggle.

I promise never to use generative AI, stock photos, or any premade or augmented content on this site. All photos are of things that actually exist; all words are created by humans in real space and time, with a verifiable chain of custody.

As Wendell Berry wrote,

Speak to your fellow humans as your place
Has taught you to speak, as it has spoken to you.
Speak its dialect as your old compatriots spoke it
Before they had heard a radio. Speak
Publicly what cannot be taught or learned in public...

No place at last is better than the world. The world
Is no better than its places. Its places at last
Are no better than their people while their people
Continue in them. When the people make
Dark the light within them, the world darkens.