Parenting teens is hard. Rewarding, yet too often heartbreaking. And, sometimes, you are the one having to break their hearts and yours at the same time in order to teach valuable lessons.
Secret Internet Friends — Bethany Gladhill
My wife writes a wonderful ode to online forums and the lasting IRL friendships they spawned for her.
Looming Enrollment Cliff Poses Serious Threat to Colleges | BestColleges
If you’re not in the group of people currently in the college search process, you may not have heard about “The Cliff”:
Enrollments have been dropping for a decade and cratered during the COVID-19 pandemic.
To make matters even worse, a dangerous precipice looms on the near horizon, a demographic phenomenon known as the enrollment cliff. Many colleges won’t survive the fall.
This will have wide societal ripple effects for decades so important to pay some attention to.
My wife has thoughts…
George Michael – Freedom! ’90
A Blind Teacher Using Echolocation to Navigate the World
Echo is a fascinating and poignant short film about Daniel Kish, a blind man who uses echolocation to move about in the world and teaches others how to do the same. Using clicks, he and his students can go on hikes, ride bikes, and skateboard down the sidewalk.
Amazing. And, yep, I teared up at the end.
A unified theory of fucks | A Working Library
The theory goes like so: you are born with so many fucks to give. However many you’ve got is all there is; they are like eggs, that way. Some of us are born with quite a lot, some with less, but none of us knows how many we have.
This has been making the rounds and rightfully so, it’s wonderful. Pairs well with my own take on the subject from 2014: The Fucks and How We Give Them (A Manifesto)
49 Lessons from 37 Years of Newsletter Publishing
My friend CJ Chilvers has a new book out. He has 37 years of newsletter publishing experience under his belt — both personal and professional for companies you know. Well worth the $5.00 if you have any interest in this stuff at all.
a note on plagiarism – The Homebound Symphony
Which makes me wonder whether some of the plagiarism (or “duplicative language”) we’re now seeing so much of is a result of one small habit of digital writing: pasting wrongly.
Finally a reasoned take on the whole affair that is likely much closer to the truth but/and reveals something many of us writers outside of academia are guilty of.
(the “but/and” is duplicative language I’ve, um, adopted from Robin Sloan)