Greetings from the University of New Hampshire! Less than a month left to the spring semester. I still have two students left to place for their internships - one opportunity fell through. But we’ll get there! I’m excited for all the cool places they will go this summer - including one to Mount Desert Island in Bar Harbor, Maine! It’s a shame I have to go visit… I might bring TLW with me. Speaking of TLW, she just finished tax season yesterday. Poor lady is exhausted. She worked 68 hours last week, making the world safer for democracy and all that. We all get to pay those interest payments I mentioned last Sunday.
This past Saturday was admitted students day for the College of Health and Human Services, where my department is housed. Image at the top is all the kids who want to be nurses, social workers, occupational therapists, and even a few healthcare administrators! The team and I were there to welcome our prospective students. It was a nice morning getting to chat with the future Wildcats and their parents about how great our program is.
I’ve talked about my weekly goal tracker a few times in past posts. Perhaps because I feel like that might have come off a bit braggy, I feel obligated to tell you I have been doing poorly in accomplishing most of my goals on a recurring basis for the last few months. I did much better the first two years I was working on this. I’ve been reflecting on why that seems to be the case. I’m not especially more busy than I have been before. I don’t have an answer, so I will continue to examine my routines and consider it. I’ve got a good video from Conor Neill in Watch about keys for achieving goals that I’m thinking about. I did make this door bookmark, which made me happy this week as part of my visual art goals:
On to the links! As usual, willing good for all of you!
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Read
What: The MIT Press Reader, How We Sort the World: Gregory Murphy on the Psychology of Categories
Why: A fun meditation on categories and language.
The problem, I argue, is not in science or in our human institutions, but in the world, which is extraordinarily complex. There are many different valid ways of dividing up the entities in the world, and we have to figure out which ones are useful to us. That’s why understanding how and why we make categories is itself an important goal. The world doesn’t give us categories for free — we have to make them ourselves.
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What: Free Press, I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust.
Why: I was an NPR listener for several decades. Then they changed and became much more ideologically Progressive. The problem with becoming infused with an ideology is you don’t even realize your own biases. You’re just speaking Truth. Here is an essay from a current editor at NPR (at least for now). Here’s what he says:
There’s an unspoken consensus about the stories we should pursue and how they should be framed. It’s frictionless—one story after another about instances of supposed racism, transphobia, signs of the climate apocalypse, Israel doing something bad, and the dire threat of Republican policies. It’s almost like an assembly line.
There is a link to an interview with him talking about this essay here. Also very good. I’d like the old NPR back, especially since I (and you) subsidize it with my tax money that the TLW helps to gather.
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Watch
What: Connor Neill, 3 Necessary Keys to Achieve your Goals (State, Strategy, Story) (8 min)
Why: Mentioned above. The goose in the bottle is a great metaphor.
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Listen
What: WSJ Your Money Briefing, Ever Dream of Taking a Sabbatical? Here’s How Our Columnist Did It (9 min)
Why: I’m due a sabbatical (we get to take one semester off every 7 years), but I suspect I will be waiting a while before I get to take it. This was a fun interview discussing what one reporter did when she took a self-funded sabbatical.
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What: EconTalk, Rituals Without Religion (with Michael Norton) (60 min)
Why: TLW jokes with me that I call everything I do a ritual. I do have a fair number of rituals. This pod is interesting because Norton tries to differentiate between ritual and habit, amongst other things.