Good question, Tyler

I'm a Professor. A.I. Has Changed My Classroom, but Not for the Worse.

At the end of a class in mid-September, as everyone was gathering their things, a student named Tyler approached me. "Can we talk sometime about how we can ask the questions on our own?" he said. "We always have you to ask the questions and set up how we're going to discuss and analyze, but I'd like to know how to do that for myself, for when we don't have someone else to do it for us."

…

nyt

Happy Thanksgiving

 Try to enjoy it. 

(And in case you happen to be secular and are called on to bless the feast, here are some Thanksgiving Non-Prayers...)

Burkeman on transforming the mundane

 Happy Thanksgiving!

Heard the start of this on the radio in the car, en route to a mundane walk in the Warner Park woods that became personally meaningful...

NSE Thanksgiving Special: Conversation and Gratitude
No Small Endeavor with Lee C. Camp

Happy Thanksgiving! How can one be grateful during difficult times? And how do we talk to one another in a polarized world? In this episode, we bring you four conversations to tee you up for a successful and meaningful time with family and friends. First, we hear from six-time Grammy-winner Amy Grant on her newfound gratitude in the wake of a traumatic bike accident. Then, Heather Holleman gives us all practical tips on having great bonding conversations that make people feel seen and heard, transcending the things that divide us. Third, community organizer and activist Diane Latiker shares how she opened up her home and changed the trajectory of a neighborhood through hospitality. Lastly, author Oliver Burkeman reveals the key to living in the moment and transforming the mundane into something meaningful. Altogether, it's the perfect toolkit for getting in the right frame of mind and heading into the holidays with gratitude and conversation.

Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/no-small-endeavor-with-lee-c-camp/id1513178238?i=1000635785163

“Time isn’t yours… nothing to lose”

Actually, our relation to time is more intimate than possession. It's identity. You are it, it is you. But shouldn't we say, per Neil deGrasse Tyson, that we are space-time? Neither space nor time (nor us) exists in a vacuum. So we've got plenty to lose, and plenty to be thankful for. Have (be?) a happy Thanksgiving.

"Cosmic Joke"

Looking forward to learning more about the "cosmic joke," May.

The joke's closely related, I think, to what Burkeman calls "Cosmic Insignificance"...

...To be reminded of your cosmic insignificance therefore isn't just relaxing, but actively empowering. Because once you remember the stakes aren't anywhere near that high, you're free to take meaningful risks, to let unimportant things slide, and to let other people deal with how they might feel about your failing to live up to their expectations.

It's not that nothing matters from your perspective, obviously: it doesn't stop being important to feed a newborn baby, or keep up your rent payments, just because nobody in a million years will care whether you did so or not. What cosmic insignificance therapy™ does, though, is to recalibrate the yardstick with which you measure what's important from your perspective.

This results, if you're anything like me, in the realisation that 99% of what you worry about isn't worth the worry. The universe will trundle on its way regardless of what you do or don't do. So you might as well focus your time and attention on what you care about most deeply yourself – and let everything else join the infinite list of things that people have been fretting about since the dawn of humanity, but that never really mattered to begin with.

In other words: plenty matters. But we've only got so many weeks, so we've got to prioritize what matters most to us. That's not selfish, it's sane and sensible. It's inseparable from our happiness. 

Rutger Bregman's Reith Lectures

Our recommended author (Moral Ambition) is this year's distinguished Reith Lecturer in Britain. 

Lecture 1: A Time of Monsters

BBC Reith Lectures 2025 – Moral Revolution

This year's BBC Radio 4 Reith lecturer has been announced as historian and best-selling author Rutger Bregman.

Titled Moral Revolution, the lectures will delve into the current 'age of immorality', explore a growing trend for unseriousness among elites, and ask how we can follow history’s example and assemble small, committed groups to spark positive change.
The four lectures will span:
• A Time of Monsters
• How To Start a Moral Revolution
• A Realist’s Utopia
• Zoom Out



Bregman's 2025 Reith Lectures will reflect on moments in history, including the likes of the suffragette and abolitionist movements, which have sparked transformative moral revolutions, offering hope for a new wave of progressive change. Across four lectures, he will also consider the explosive technological progress of recent years - placing us at a moment of immense risk and possibility, and will look ahead to how we might shape the future.

Bregman is an author whose works include Humankind (2020) and Utopia for Realists (2017), which were both Sunday Times and New York Times best sellers,as well as Moral Ambition which was released earlier this year and was also a Sunday Times bestseller. His work has been translated into 46 languages and has sold over two million copies. During a discussion at the Davos World Economic Forum in 2019, he also attracted international attention for holding his billionaire fellow panellists to account for not paying their taxes.

The 2025 lectures will be recorded in front of live audiences in London, Liverpool, Edinburgh and the United States. They will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and the BBC World Service later this year and will be available to listen to on BBC Sounds.

Rutger Bregman says, "I’m deeply honoured to give this year’s Reith Lectures. Across history, moments of decadence and decay have often been followed by movements of renewal, times when people redefined what it means to live with integrity and ambition. I believe we are at such a crossroads today. These lectures are my attempt to explore how moral ambition can help us face the challenges of our age."

...

BBC Radio 4

==

UPDATE, Nov.26: 

Bregman criticises BBC for removing Trump line from Radio 4 lecture

...says he is "genuinely dismayed" after a comment about Donald Trump was removed from a lecture he delivered on BBC Radio 4.

Rutger Bregman, who is presenting this year's Reith Lectures, said he included the line in a section discussing US politics, but that it was removed prior to its broadcast.

The Dutch historian wrote on social media that the decision had come "from the highest levels within the BBC".

A BBC spokesperson said the corporation had "made the decision to remove one sentence from the lecture on legal advice". BBC News is not repeating the line in question on the same legal advice... (continues)

How to Fix a Typewriter and Your Life

"…Lundy bought the business at the end of 2014. Soon, he quit his job and walked away from its stultifying steadiness, its salary and benefits. His colleagues were sure he had lost his mind. But Lundy knew he was trading security for meaning, predictability for possibility. "I was happy," he says simply…"

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/11/20/us/typewriter-repair-seattle-bremerton.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

Pabst, Pamphlets and a Petition: A Harvard-Yale Tailgate in the Trump Era

Students and alumni set aside rivalries at the 141st Harvard-Yale football game on Saturday to summon support against attacks on higher education under the Trump administration.

..“Do you want to stand up for academic freedom and the First Amendment?” Ms. Schwartz asked a group of students, shouting above a cacophony of portable sound systems, each playing songs with different beats. “How would you feel about doing that?”
... https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/23/us/politics/yale-harvard-football-trump.html?smid=em-share

Any comment on this professor’s rant?

Students these days, according to a colleague at another state school, can't or won't read, write atrociously, are addicted to their phones, and can't sit still.

Happiness students are in a different category, of course. 😉 But some of this seems spot-on, I have to say. For instance:

"They can't sit in a seat for 50 minutes. Students routinely get up during a 50 minute class, sometimes just 15 minutes in, and leave the classroom. I'm supposed to believe that they suddenly, urgently need the toilet, but the reality is that they are going to look at their phones. They know I'll call them out on it in class, so instead they walk out. I've even told them to plan ahead and pee before class, like you tell a small child before a road trip, but it has no effect. They can't make it an hour without getting their phone fix."

Any comment, on this point in particular or on the essay as a whole?

https://open.substack.com/pub/hilariusbookbinder/p/the-average-college-student-today?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

Fwd: Chapter 14 Presentation — Basil Lozano

(Basil, & all-

Better prepare an old-school version, in case the computer is still non-cooperative.)

Here's a link to the Canva I'll be using during class:

https://www.canva.com/design/DAG5QNHjrKE/ld_TARWtRrDZhCFNbrUofg/edit?utm_content=DAG5QNHjrKE&utm_campaign=designshare&utm_medium=link2&utm_source=sharebutton