Drawing out

Another week of "Religion of Trees" class drawings. Above are efforts to convey one of the "13 ways of observing a tree" we read about in an essay by David Macauley, drawn in the courtyard. Below are drawings of a human and a tree inspired by Sumana Roy's How I became a tree.

God help them

Thousands of people repeated these words, hand raised. "I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States, that loves us so much he can’t even breathe, that I will go out with my family, my friends. I don’t care if I’m registered or not. I’m going to try and cheat like hell, like they do. So help me God." Is it worse if they think words mean something or if they don't? How is this whole scene not demonic?

Mayday

The President of the United States is a mad menace to the whole world.

Isometric NYC

When I learned that someone had used AI to generate an "isometric" representation of NYC to look like something from animation or a video game, I had to check out the neighborhoods I've lived in and live in.

A fun feature is that you can click a button and it's suddenly winter! (Try it for yourself - the snow blows by in gusts and flurries.)

The real world

Just one UN member state voted against today's General Assembly motion to switch from using the Mercator world map to the Equal Earth map. Mercator exaggerates the size of the global north; it makes Greenland and Africa look about the same size, when Africa is in fact 14 times bigger! Equal Earth is one of several alternative mappings which offer a more accurate representation of the true relative size of continents and seas, though still imperfect. Who could object? 

9/11: This map - not sure its provenance - shows northern northern hemisphere countries cut down to size from Mercator inflation.

Ringing in a new year

Have I told you "Religion of Trees" drawing is back? Tree rings, boababs!

The war on universities

The New School has, perhaps, made it out of the fiscal woods, painfully reducing a structural deficit. But new threats keep coming. 

Last week I was sure that the government's ever more aggressive limits on visas and especially on being able to work a year after getting a degree (the F1 OPT) would decimate our international student body, coming on top of the outrageous $103,000 fee for hiring someone on an H1-B visa. 

In the last few days, it was that health insurance costs are going up next year, the steepest increase in decades, challenging for any organization but especially for non-profits who do labor-intensive work like teaching and research. 

Now comes this. I think this is what's called a "hostile work environment."

Comfort/Consume (Me)

Reprise, in a new year in a new room, of the first alum visit to "DIY Religion," complete with their fabulous room-filling artwork. A new crop of students asked new questions, but the artist and artwork have changed in the last year too (including the work's title). And a surprise: when we suspended it from the ceiling in a nearby room, parallel to the window rather than perpendicular to it, the two sides looked completely different, the blurred edges, loopy shapes and gentle Disney colors replaced by jagged silhouettes, bold colors and what looked like abstract expressionist brush strokes. Even more beguiling/disturbing than last year ... I was happily upstaged!

Liberal arts and virtues

After a whirlwind tour of New School history in "DIY Religion" today, we have a session on liberal arts on Wednesday. Nominally it's about our particular college's understanding and practice of the liberal arts, but the momentum of doing 100+ years in 100 minutes today tempts me to be more ambitious. Liberal arts really matter in an illiberal time! 

I'm also looking for an excuse to share some images I've recently enjoyed in exhibitions, and some of which the class will have a chance to enjoy too. Here's the first:  

These are two panels by Francesco Pesellino, c. 1450, painted for a cassone, a kind of trousseau for Florentine brides. Currently in the collection of a museum in Alabama, they are part of the Morgan Library's exhibition on the Tarot - which we'll be visiting in a few weeks. The seven liberal arts (above) and seven virtues are represented as women; at their feet are associated historical or biblical figures, all male. 

Who do we have here? 

In the representation of the seven liberal arts, above we find, at right, the Trivium: Logic (with Aristotle), Rhetoric (with Cicero) and Grammar (with Priscian). At left, the Quadrivium: Arithmetic (Pythagoras), Geometry (Euclid), Music (Tubalcain) and Astrology (Ptolemy). This array allows the artist to place astrology/astronomy at the center! 

The panel of the virtues places the theological virtues at center: Faith (with St. Peter), Charity (with St. John the Evangelist) and Hope (with St. James the Greater). Flanking them are the four cardinal virtues: Prudence (Solon), Justice (Solomon), Fortitude (Samson) and Temperance (Scipio Africanus). I get all this from a website which informs me also that these panels were once in the collection of one Ludwig Wittgenstein!  

These might be a fun invitation to think about what the liberal arts are today, and who exemplifies them... and if there's a connection between the liberal arts and virtue! 

Maybe I'll have an excuse to share a contemporary work I just encountered at the Wassaic Project's summer exhibition, Tim Olson's "The Seven Heavenly Virtues at the Seventh Heaven Academy of Beauty" (2025). Painted on glass in fabulous detail (and with the same emplematic objects as Pesellino, if sometimes wittily updated) you'll find again Prudence, Faith, Hope and Charity (above), Fortitude, Justice and (below). The work is a pendant not to liberal arts but to "The Seven Deadly Sins at the Super Seven Motel" (2024).

I feel like sharing all of these, old and new, as an antidote to something I'd rather not share, a creepy selection of virtues included in a work showing as part of a Christian nationalist exhibition at the State Department, disingenuously called "Passport to Patriotism: 250 Years of Diplomacy." 

This is "Valor, Purity, Justice (Old Glory)" (2026). While these virtues are apparently associated with the colors of the American flag, they here look so like something from Fascist Italy it makes my skin crawl (especially the Christian resonances of "purity" - which is conspicuously not one of the classic seven virtues). It's the work of a satirical painter, but the show it's in seems to be as unironic as they come. No doubt they'd place scary white men in front of each of the three droopy white women. 

As it happens, the forces of darkness are claiming the liberal arts for their reactionary attack on democracy and learning. I call on all the traditional virtues and liberal arts to come to our rescue!

Access restored!

Last days of summer

Onboarded

My courses are both off to a good start, new versions of old courses but already, with the students' help, breaking new ground.

In "DIY Religion" yesterday we brainstormed "religion" and "DIY" on their own before imagining what "DIY religion" could be, discovering at least three kinds of DIY - and so three kinds of DIY religion - on the way: (1) learning by doing, (2) finding what you need, (3) making do with what's to hand. These are quite different, and lay the groundwork for richer conversations than we had last year.

And in "Religion of Trees" our regular starting encounter with an elder - the elm in nearby Washington Square Park fêted as Manhattan's oldest tree - was enriched by the brand new New York Tree Genus Map, and revelations about the tree itself from Harriet Rix's wonderful The Genius of Trees. We call it an English elm (a colonial tree!) but it's not originally English either, having been brought to the British Isles as a cutting during the Roman Empire - and originally from Spain!

I'm not sure students were quite ready to follow me in wondering if this makes it the same tree as the one it was cut from, almost four centuries ago, and the same as all the other cuttings before and after, but notice has been served. We'll follow up on the surpassing strangeness of trees (not just clonal ones like elms) in our next class, when we consider what pronouns to use when referring to - or addressing - them.

Glacial tsunami

I started the day with this. (US media were slow to pick it up.) You may have seen it, and the longer take posted later by Chinese authorities, which confirmed it's not AI, and including longer footage of the many people who fled the building, only to be engulfed by a torrent powerful enough to collapse a parking garage and send buses bouncing. Or the other videos of enormous surges of brown and black water tearing down valleys in Nepal, sweeping away bridges, pulling down buildings, washing away all in their path... 

The apparently glacier-triggered cascade tumbled at the edges of my consciousness all day. The border crossing to Tibet looked familiar. I remember my anxiety as guards looked through our things, leafing through some books I'd brought and tearing out a few pages, worried they might not let me through. And when I later learned that at least a hundred Indian Kailas pilgrims are among the missing, it seemed to confirm that this was the very place we'd passed through on the 2013 Kailas kora. The scenes of jumbly Nepali towns downriver (the flood barreled through mile after mile after mile of them) brought back memories of busy streets full of market stalls and children. All gone?

I've established now that this was not the place we were, which was one river valley farther to the east, Zhangmu-Kodari rather than Gyirong-Rasuwa. (Unsurprisingly, Chinese border buildings all look the same.) 

But this makes the reality of the horror even greater, washing away the self-pity of my having lost places of precious memory, as if this calamity were somehow about me - and somehow containing it as that kind of loss. 

No such thing. All gone.

Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom

Checked out the twin exhibitions on the Tarot at the Morgan Library today, Renaissance Symbols and Modern Visions. I'm planning to take the "DIY Religion" class there. Tarot is not really my thing but, judging from last year's cohort, it's likely to be of more than casual interest to at least a few of the students. I'm not sure the part about the original 15th century Italian tarocchi cards will wow them, but the modern adaptations have something for everyone. For me, it was the Six of Trees (they're flying!) from Rachel Pollack's Shining Tribe Tarot of 1994.

Rising tide

The timing of the record is particularly notable. Global ocean temperatures are typically highest in March and April, following the austral summer, yet this record has been reached in August. It also exceeds the previous highest August value, recorded in 2023 at 20.98°C. This latest daily record follows a succession of monthly sea surface temperature records and near-records observed throughout 2026 across the extra-polar ocean (60°S to 60°N), underscoring the persistent warmth seen across much of the global ocean. Copernicus

Window dressing

First day of orientation, The New School still a work in progress! These workers are involved in the restoration of the Orozco Room murals.

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?