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?

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.

Beach

 

Water + sand

 

Footprints last just a spell