Snap!

Tree damage in Riverside Park, perhaps from Thursday night's squall.

If you can make it out, imagine that opening of sky was once filled with a tree canopy, and look down to where the trunk of that tree was and, in part, still is. Then look left, to see where the snapped-off tree fell, and up and down to see the damage done to the tree on which it fell.

Hither and yon

(Hit the triangle to play this time lapse of this evening's splendiferous sunset. Remember, you can enlarge the video by clicking the open square, second from right on the bottom)

In stitches

More machine-stitched Gnarls, this time gracing a hoodie, on one many racks of collegiate merch on sale outside the University Center. I don't think we had quite this much in years past, our liberal arts students being too cool for collegiate gear, and the designers all in self-curated couture and vintage.

Fidgety

At the Parsons Teaching and Learning Days 2026 (part of which I attended in my faculty senate capacity), participants were encouraged to check out the university's various making centers, and explore 

possibilities for collaboration. I happened into the 3D Print Lab, where a batch of fidget toy narwhals were being made. Amazingly, the seven hinged parts are all printed together! Maybe one could do something with the cute tangles of discarded "filament" disposed of on the side?

DIY seminar

Not a moment too soon, I've started tightening the bolts on this year's iteration of "DIY Religion." Though we won't get into the syllabus until next Wednesday, I'll be meeting the students a week from today!

What do I have planned for them? Alum voices will again play a significant part in the class, but we haven't the budget for six guest lecturers this time. This gives us time for some field trips, including to the newly redesigned "Contemplation Room" in the University Center (whence the above image of a chill Gnarls) and to the exhibit on Renaissance and contemporary Tarot at the Morgan Library.

The broader argument of the course has changed a bit, too. If last year's point was "gosh, religion has always been DIY!" this year's will also explore the resources and limitations of DIY in religion and more widely. These issues came up in our discussions last time, as we noted the bias "DIY" seems to have against established communities and institutions and even relationships - but can an individual really know what they need? The questions are made more urgent yet by the inroads AI agents have made in young people's lives even in the last year, threatening all those relationships and communities (and institutions like universities!).

A familiar refrain from all my classes: what we do in a seminar is special, something none of us could do on our own. 

Wave crochet

I'm in love with this photo by Brazilian-Australian photographer Daniella Tommasi, a finalist in the "Adventure" category of the Ocean Photographer of the Year competition at oceanographic magazine. Everything's in motion, rippling and circling both towards shore and sea.

Retainers

Attended most of our school's "Retention Summit" today, which was kicked off with a presentation including these framing slides. 

Retention is the unbeautiful term higher ed uses for students' staying at a school they've come to, rather than transferring or dropping out. I remember learning this argot when directing the first year program ages ago, where "persistence" (on students' side) and "retention" (on the institution's side) did battle against the amorphous forces of "attrition." 

 

For tuition-driven schools like ours, "retention is everyone's job."

Eclipse

Horrifying beyond words. Though those who design and sell them have plenty of words, all deniable. Every word here is an assault on meaning. 

According to the manufacturer, “the discomfort associated with the stimulation is usually effective in bringing individuals into compliance in less than three seconds and leaves no burns, marks or scars”. The company has advertised the device as a “humane, low-optics, de-escalation solution for many situations facing our men and women in uniform”.

Cloudscapes

Four minutes' difference!

 

Graphs about religion

I don't know what sources Ryan Burge used to construct this chart, but it's definitely a conversation-starter for religious studies at The New School, whose student body is almost entirely committed to the majors at the far upper right corner!

What is being shown here, though? Different majors might shape religious proclivities/aversions (one reason Evangelicals think "the university" is the enemy), but it's at least as likely that student sensibilities shape major choice. And not just "religious" ones, however defined. Burge shared the graph above on his facebook feed but kept for the truly inquiring some other related charts. 

Now, I do feel like I am only showing you one side of the coin here. It’s been all religion to this point—belonging and behavior. But we all know that those two factors are intimately related to political viewpoints. I write about this ad nauseam now, but to be Republican/conservative is to be religious. And the opposite is true for the left side of the political spectrum: there are a whole lot more nones among the ranks of liberals.

So Burge next offers the graph below taken from the same data set. Sure looks like the flip side of the same coin! But, as Burge helps us appreciate, there are a lot of things going on here...! Any claim like "XYZ major makes students more/less religious" is simplistic.

UPDATE 13/8:

And then there's this, not included in Burge's initial write-up, but shared today. 

Even if this weren't from a data set from a source worth being careful about, I'd want to know what the other options were, and, of course, the sample size. If these numbers are to be trusted, at least a fourth of the students in three-fourths of the listed majors identify as some kind of non-heterosexual, becoming a majority in many arts and humanities fields. Tell us more! And then add the data on politics and religion... maybe something on class background, too? 

What incentives/exclusions shape major choice for different kinds of students, regardless of their individual inclinations or vocation?

Misery map

After having our flight cancelled on the way over I thought we'd burned off our bad travel karma... and perhaps we had. Our return flight today was delayed 30 minutes, then 60, eventually arriving in New York two and a half hours late, but along the way I had time to learn that we were fortunate to be flying at all. The JetBlue terminal at JFK was full of long lines of marooned travelers. Indeed almost a thousand flights within, into or out of the US were cancelled today. 

 

The same flight we were on was one of almost two thousand flights cancelled yesterday (and it was cancelled twice more in the ten days before that), among countless flights cancelled across the country because of combinations of bad weather and an air traffic controller shortage. Today's "FAA ground stops" were in response to almost half of the exhausted air traffic controllers around the New York area calling in sick. You can watch the disruptions on FlightAware's "Misery Map."

 

I don't remember flight cancellations being a thing. Perhaps that's because I've been lucky enough not to experience a cancellation before, but it's surely also connected to the more extreme weather brought on by climate change and the regime's attack on government services. 

 

Meditation garden

For our last California day we checked out the Self-Realization Fellow-ship Meditation Garden in Encinitas, surprised I've not been before.