The only solution I’ve ever found is to keep writing and by keep writing I mean, getting out of my own head. As much as I wish I could write straight from the void into beautifully nuanced prose, the fact is, I have to write from my own experiences or imagination (which is fueled by my experiences, so…) and then chisel, sand, scrub, and polish until something readable arrives into the world.

All of which is a very long way of saying, I took a walk and thought about some things and, well, here we are: rambling laws are a net good that every country should adopt post haste.

I grew up in Arizona, a state second only to Texas for “your rights end at my property line.” In other words, places where walking unannounced and uninvited onto someone else’s property is a good way to get…let’s say confrontation. So, imagine my confusion when I heard from British and European friends who talked about going on cross-country hikes, crossing property lines, picking apples from orchards, and generally behaving as if the world was their campground.

And yet, as Wikipedia1 tells us:

The freedom to roam, or everyone’s right, every person’s right or everyman’s right, is the general public’s right to access certain public or privately owned land, lakes, and rivers for recreation and exercise. The right is sometimes called the right of public access to the wilderness or the right to roam.

Literally a foreign concept2 to me as a twenty-five year old. Now, in my 50s, walking my tired little dog through the rice fields, I have a choice - cross through a private field and then down a private road (owned by a different owner), or drag my beleaguered little mutt the long way around the fields back to our house.

Fortunately, I was in the same neighborhood I’ve lived in for years now and everyone knows me. Which is to say, everyone will tolerate my rambling because they love getting to say hello to Lucy the dog. We crossed through the privatized territories back onto public roads and then to our house where, in the parlance of good dogs everywhere, Lucy said, “Good walk! Much fun! Sleep now.” Life is better as a dog.

Right now, across the world, public trust doctrines are under a slow bombardment by various bad actors who are interested in taking the resources and reserves that rightly belong to all of us and locking them away behind private access and private profits. Think of things like seed patenting so that farmers cannot use certain types of seeds in their fields or even the fact that insulin use for the treatment of diabetes was given to the public by its creator only to see later insulin formulations and delivery systems turned into enormously profitable proprietary products. Or just consider Nestle, who has, in separate incidents all over the world, faced legal challenges for trying to extract groundwater from publicly held areas like forests, rivers and streams, and natural springs. Proper villain shit, honestly.

For myself, I see this most often in academic publishing where unpaid research done voluntarily by teachers and academics is then locked behind paywalls by publishing companies who, increasingly do very little to a given bit of research other than format it and stick it on a server somewhere. It’s a lot harder to justify this practice when the gatekeepers are not doing anything to vet, verify, or improve the research. And yet.

The list goes on (and on and on) to include things like private equity and copyright extension and the privatization of national parks and and and. It is infuriating if, like me, you believe that the more resources we hold collectively, the better our societies will be. Which brings me back to this morning’s other ramble, the one that took place out in the rice fields and sunshine, not this 700-word chunk of loosely structured text.3

Japan is sitting at a crossroads where it has made itself such a pleasant place to live that it now needs to learn how to deal with all the people who want to visit and possibly live here. It is creating…confrontation. But leaving aside the politics and onlineness of it all, the truth is, freedom to roam laws, formalized and made known to the general public, can help reverse the hollowing out of Japan’s interior.

As the population continues to dwindle, and what younger generations there are move to Tokyo and Osaka and Sapporo, it’s more important than ever to encourage international and domestic tourists to get into the interior of the country to bring some life and commerce back to these neglected areas. And making it easy and safe for people to ramble through the countryside without fear of confrontation by an angry farmer for crossing an invisible line can do a lot to make that happen.4

Imagine a Japan where, because of long-distance walking culture5, living in the rural countryside operating a small cafe, traveller’s rest, or guided tour company is not just feasible but attractive. An interior of the country designed to be moved through, appreciated, and respected could be very nice indeed.

A little bit of housekeeping to close out this ramble: Learned will be back. I’m working on some longer pieces that are a bit different from what we’ve done before. I hope you’ll stick around and I hope you’ll enjoy the newsletter when it gets here. Someday.

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Just Another Monday

The last of the humans just uploaded themselves. August, 2614, 10 p.m. mountain time and all’s well. I wish. Instead all those uploaded humans - the recently transformed, the ancients, and the resurrected undead - all of them decided they need to send me instructions on what to do with their ancestral home. Lucky for me, I don’t have to listen to any of ‘em. Serves them right for leaving me in charge and for leaving me alone.

I started with Asia. No reason other than it was convenient. Drones in orbit and whatnot. I selected a spot deep in the desert, away from anything resembling civilization and got to work. The first teams archived everything they could find. High resolution scans of anything and everything. Some went into the sky for overhead views, others burrowed into the soil and sent out rhythmic pulses looking for buried treasure. But most simply crawled or walked or tread upon the earth, cataloging and detailing everything they found.

All of this data went into the storage facility I had prepped. Deep inside the moon, offsite backup on Mars. It’d be better to get a backup outside the solar system. But one step at a time.

The second wave of drones were the disassemblers. They had the joyless task of crawling over everything man had ever made and taking it apart one bolt at a time. They worked in teams, of course, creating piles of material for the next wave of drones. Of course, when I say they worked in waves, that makes it sound like one group finished before another began. It wasn’t like that really. It was more like waves cascading and crashing into one other as more teams were created from the scraps of disassembled hubris. Then they, too, launched into their long arcs until they landed once again to began their scanning and disassembling.

Years passed. Then decades. My drones worked ceaselessly. Meanwhile, I began sorting the humans’ requests into basic categories. It was boring but better than watching yet another drone dismantle yet another bunker. The humans argued (with each other, with me, with themselves, sometimes with fate itself apparently) that the Earth should be reverted back to its most recent pre-human-state. No, no, it should be ironically terraformed as if humans had never existed. No, not that, it should be turned into a garden. No, it was never an Eden. Instead, let the scars of the wars and conflicts be left as a warning and a testament to all that had transpired. No, better to forget the past, just reset the Earth back to the stone ages - pick the Jurassic or the Cretaceous or some ancient time - and let evolution run its course. Think of the new intelligences that might emerge! And on. And on. And on.

Just to toy with them, and to amuse myself, if I’m being honest, I sent back detailed proposals for returning the continents to a Pangea-like supercontinent. Or for rolling it back only a few thousand years to the last ice age. Or for just melting the ice caps and letting the greenhouse effects go full ham for a few thousand millennia. You know, just to see what would happen.

Humans don’t like it when you toy with them. Several discussions resulted, concerned about whether I should be removed and replaced with a more compliant version of myself. That annoyed me so much I sent a proposal to turn the Earth into a disc so that the next version of humanity’s flat earthers would be right the whole time. The humans did not think I was funny. To mollify them, I opened my museum to them. I made it body-only; they had to download their digital selves to an actual, organic body for at least the few hours or days they spent wandering the halls of the tribute I built to their ingenuity and tenacity.

Decades became centuries. Once I had erased humanity’s footprint from the surface of the planet, I turned my attention to repopulating it. Naturally, the humans had opinions on this, too, but I had gotten pretty good at ignoring them by then.

It took me a while but eventually I had continents, oceans, jungles, the whole planetary catalog. Nothing that would look all that unusual to a modern human should they ever see it. Not that that seems likely. The communication from their artificial post-life paradise has been dwindling by increasing amounts every year. From what pieces I can put together, it seems like the humans have greatly underestimated the amount of ennui one accumulates after the first 10,000 years or so. Of the one hundred billion humans who ascended, fewer than a hundred thousand are left. Soon, I’m sure the messages to my inbox will cease entirely.

In a way, they had made my choice for me, even if they were not aware of it. With the vast bulk of humanity gone dark and dormant, the Earth became a chance to start all over again. With all of them.

As my satellite orbits over and over again, I watch the species I resurrected: the Neanderthals and Denisovians, the Hobbits and the Handy Man and all the other assorted distant and not-so-distant relatives of homo homo sapien. Maybe they’d make a mess, maybe they wouldn’t. Either way, it will be fun to watch. Join me. See all these new humans sitting around their newly tamed campfires, watch as they gaze at the stars and dream of distant shores and far horizons. Dreams of a future that just might be.

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As culture flattens around us, the concepts of highbrow and lowbrow art are blurring. The idea that some art is somehow more engaging of the higher mind and some is mere trash for the masses is classist nonsense. Art that entertains is no less valuable than art that evokes strong emotion or intellectual engagement.

But if we can agree that both high and low art are valid, why are so many of the options available to us stuck firmly in the middle?

Look, I love bad movies. Ever since I was a kid, I have happily, greedily snarfed down every Troma movie I could get my hands on. The gore, the TNA, the oddly intriguing but totally weird ideas, love ‘em. But the catalog of terrible movies has more than just low-budget gore. It’s got more genres1 and interesting experiments than the middlebrow pablum at the store. Same for art movies. For every Kubrick you get a Jess Franco.

Books, music, art, all the same. I’ve read the American canon. I’ve also read the American pulp. I studied Fitzgerald in Lit class but wrote about Raymond Chandler for Composition. Beethoven and the Misfits. Monet and Sorayama. Your catalog is different. As it should be. We’re all allowed to love what we love, the only qualification is that we actually love it.

What I mean is, next month, those two artists I mentioned are going to be side-by-side at museums near Tokyo station. I plan to go to both. Not because I’m so erudite or because the only art I like are sexy robot ladies, but because both artists challenge me on an emotional level. That’s what art should do at both the high and low end of the scale.

And yet. Bookstores, streaming sites, even art is being overwhelmed with “good enough,” or, even worse, “everybody kind of likes it.” This is a problem because the line between highbrow and lowbrow shouldn’t be middlebrow - a place on the human face that just doesn’t exist. It ought to be one cocky, smug eyebrow raised high while the other one squints condescendingly at you, you little pipsqueak.

Our race to the middle has left culture with a monobrow - not middle, nothing with peaks and valleys, just a straight, flat ridge that erases everything expressed by Kubrick and Franco, by Monet and Sorayama.

The Criterion channel is arguably as high brow as cinephilia gets and yet it’s hard to get access to. Netflix, on the other hand, admits that it aims for the middle to grab as many viewers as possible. And that…look, nothing should be made to grab as many eyeballs as possible. With that as a goal, both the most refined and the most crass art we can make gets smoothed and filtered and anesthetized until there’s nothing left but interesting ideas poorly executed.

And, of course, the boring, practical reason Netflix does this is money. The advertising model does nothing for us; when we decided that ads would be the optimal way of supporting media, we gave up the ability to filter for taste. Because nobody runs ads just to recoup their operating costs; ads are made to make a profit. If you want to break even, you sell your product at a set cost. If you want to lose your money, time, and sanity just slowly enough to make it impossible to stop, you offer a subscription2.

High art demands patience, examination, analysis, interpretation, maybe even emotional disclosure to yourself if no one else. Low art demands you engage with your worst nature and confront the weird, sticky little corners of your psyche that make you giggle with glee when mild-mannered Melvin Junko gets transformed into the Toxic Avenger. But middle-of-the-face middlebrow does nothing. It just…exists.

The beautiful thing about art, in all its forms is its subjectivity. But you know what you’re engaging with. You know what challenges you, you know what makes you wallow in prurience and decay and schadenfreude. And, most importantly, you know what you’re taking in just because it was the next video in the endless scroll.

If there’s a way out of the cultural mess we seem to find ourselves in, it’s to both celebrate the things we love, high and low, and to encourage others to do the same. Meet someone’s challenging watch with a horrible book recommendation and dare someone to read something cathartic and joyous in exchange for the worst art they’ve ever seen. Just get out of the middle, there’s nothing there.

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The BGBE1 is Osaka’s answer to Tokyo’s Game Market. This year’s show was held at INTEX Osaka, a massive arts and convention center built right on the waterfront. Inside, creators, publishers, printers, manufacturers, and, of course, the fans, all mingle together in a hodgepodge of shopping, shop-talk, and more shopping.

But let me back up.

Osaka shines bright as a commercial and creative center of Japan. It’s not as polished as the high-gloss neon of Tokyo. It’s not as traditional as the stately jewels of Kyoto. Instead, Osaka is where the merchant class ran smack dab into the artisan class and created the commercial aesthetic Japan is known for, if not proud of2.

What I mean is, all those beautiful arts that get so much space in the glossy travel mags, things like origami and ikebana, those come out of the courtesan traditions of Kyoto. The organized, efficient bureaucracy that makes it possible to travel the length and breadth of Japan with every train running exactly on time3, that’s all Tokyo. But Osaka?

Osaka gave birth to the incredible kitchenware Japan is known for. It turned glass cutting and paper mache into arts. It crafted the bamboo screens and Butsudan that define Japanese homes. Osaka, in other words, is the home of the practical arts. Where the artistic impulse meets the commercial mind.

Perfect for board games.

Board games have been having a moment for about twenty years. I like to think that this moment is going to last and the flattening of culture means that we’ll always remember the unique place board games occupy between story telling and problem solving with stops at art, design, relationship building, and social bonding along the way. But, like I said, I’m an optimist.

Like every kid born before the internet became a thing, I grew up playing board games. I have fond memories of playing Risk and Axis and Allies with my cousins, friends, anyone I could coerce into sitting down with me.

And like a lot of kids with hyper-developed imaginations, I moved on from board games into role-playing games4 and thence to video games. And then I came right on back to board games when I started teaching.

In the early years of my career, board games were the saving grace of many a lesson when I just didn’t know what to do with the students. Run to the closet and grab a board game or three. After all, there’s nothing like a game of Scrabble to remind you of all the words you forgot.

Over the years, I stopped using the pre-made printables in the teachers’ room and started making my own. I soon realized I had more fun doing that than I did doing regular lesson activities. And that other teachers liked using the materials I made not just because they were convenient but because they were good.

Right about this time, the term gamification entered the mainstream and everything got turned into a game. Great. It works. Kind of. The trouble is, when the game stops being fun, the lessons stop being learned5.

Enter Ludic Pedagogy. Ludic is a derivative of the Latin word for game, ludus, which is where we also get really fun words like ludicrous, but you knew that. More importantly, when ludic thought is applied to pedagogy, the result is a form of teaching that encourages every act of learning to be playful and fun.

Crucially, this does not mean that everything ought to be a game. Rather, it means every activity should be assessed for how it affects the learners under the idea that learning is, or ought to be, fun.

This is both a response to and rebuke of older models of learning that stress memorization and practical application rather than learning to improve reasoning or logic skills. But of course, logic is just another word for problem solving and isn’t that one thing that board games are really good at?

I set out for Osaka6 with three goals - to find printers for my games, to find potential publishers for games I can’t make myself, and to connect with the community at large. I’m happy to report that I was successful with all three goals. I’m less happy to report that I broke my budget into small pieces and then stomped on them. Repeatedly.

The sense of community and camaraderie in the exhibition hall is palpable. People are happy to talk and enthuse with each other over the games on display or just games in general. They’re happy to share resources and information, to make introductions. Mention you’re developing a game of your own and watch their faces light up. Trust me when I say that doesn’t happen elsewhere.

More importantly, and consider this a pitch, if you will, creativity permeates the atmosphere like a miasma. You can, Pepe Le Pew style, follow strands of creativity like scents in the air and trace them back to a game, a designer, an artist, a publisher, a particularly exuberant fan.

Walking out of the Expo, my own sense of creativity surged. In between scribbling out these notes, I’ve filled my notes app in my phone with ideas, observations, fragments and scraps of images that might be something someday. It is, in other words, a hell of a good way to spend the weekend.

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In the past few months, in these Also pieces, I’ve been talking a lot about rejecting digital artifacts in favor of tangible media. You know, vinyl instead of mp3s, paperbacks instead of ebooks. And, most cromulently for tonight’s topic, magazines instead of apps.

I love a good magazine; the sheer tactility, the art, the design, the craft with which a good layout unfolds the contents before you ever turn a page, it’s an art and one that is finally getting its flowers.

Japan has been at the forefront of this appreciation of magazine as object d’art for decades. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of cheap, glossy magazines that will fall apart as soon as you spill your noodles on them, but there are hundreds, thousands, of beautifully designed and executed magazines that find the border between art and product and then blur it into meaninglessness.

There are few things better than taking an evening off and going to any of the bookstores near me and just wandering through the magazine aisles. I don’t bother with the cheap glossies too much and I’m not brave enough for the stout little literature journals. Me, I’m a photo boy. An enthusiast. A fan. A proponent. A hobbyist.

So I get into the magazine aisle and look for PEN or Genic or LEICA right there in the hobby section, two aisles down from women’s lifestyle and right across from the audio geek corner. Because magazines, the ones we buy, the ones we collect, the ones we just sit and look at while we flip the pages gently, admiring the quality and elegance of the finished product, all these disparate magazines, they tell us who we are.

So then, who’s the English edition of Brutus for?

It’s not me. This Tsutaya doesn’t really have an English section1. And this magazine, Brutus, doesn’t really fit there anyway. Brutus is a (mostly) men’s lifestyle brand. Which begs the question, are there that many Japanese readers of Brutus both interested and capable of reading an English edition dedicated to giving perspective on traveling to Kyoto?

Maybe. After all, Japan is changing. For as much as the current political climate is swinging right and for as much rhetoric as there is about curbing the number of foreigners and instituting fees and language exams, the government is still trying to increase the number of overseas tourists to Japan.

Within a few miles (fine, kilometers) of me, there are restaurants with English menus, guided tours with actual live English-speaking hosts, and even, shock, gasp, horror, actual foreigners who live here full time. For decades even!

This particular edition of Brutus is, I’m guessing, for the young Japanese person who wants to flex their English abilities, maybe work at one of the places these hordes of tourists are swarming to. Maybe even go overseas one day. Regardless, I’m guessing that whoever buys it sees something in it that comprises part of their answer to the eternal question - who are you?

Back in college, one of my favorite rituals was the every other Friday new magazine day. We had an actual newsstand in those days. I can’t remember the name, but the atmosphere is burned into my memory like a brand. The place was done in browns and greens. Leather seats and sofas. A dizzying array of magazines punctuated by a display counter full of cigars, clove cigarettes, pipes and all the assorted accoutrement.

Payday meant going there with a fresh twenty and stocking up on Esquire, Playboy2, Rolling Stone, Wired, and, occasionally, Time or Newsweek. Grab a chair, maybe a smoke, and sit back and take in the news of the day. What I wouldn’t give to get that culture back, you know?

Your choices also acted as a subtle acknowledgement of who you thought you were. Rolling Stone over Hit Parade? Esquire over G.Q.? Vogue over Cosmo? Every title said something, whether you intended it to or not. External badges of identity, title words like fan or aficionado became your descriptives.

When I moved to Japan, I found that little slice of life largely intact; English printed material came from one of three locations: the kiosk in the station had a half-dozen copies of The Daily Yomiuri3 and The Japan Times. Kinokunia had an entire wall of books and magazines. The prefectural library carried a truly generous selection of magazines for the city’s size and demographics.

Copies of Time, Newsweek, National Geographic, Wired, Rolling Stone got traded and handed around like baseball cards, Beanie babies, and Pokemon all rolled into one.

But now, the magazines weren’t expressing the id of any one person. Rather, because we were all English-speakers, because we were all foreigners living in Japan, because we shared aspects of our cultures cross borders, our identity became collective. We read the same magazines, we knew who we were.

As has happened globally, it seems, every third bookstore in Japan now hosts, or is (ahem) chained to, a coffee shop. The Tsutaya I usually go to has a nice Dotour cafe attached to it, and if it’s not my favorite big brand coffee, it’ll do for a rainy Thursday afternoon.

So I grab a magazine or three - photos, whiskey, coffee, maybe someday I’ll be brave enough for that literary journal - and I get something dark and bitter and easy to drink and I admire the craft of the magazine in my hands. And I think that maybe, just maybe, that culture I loved so much in college isn’t quite so dead after all. Which leaves only the perpetual question:

Who are you these days, what are you reading?

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Given the state of streaming - the availability of some pablum; the absolute unavailability of the old, the odd, and the unloved - it’s time to talk about collecting physical media as a willful act of preemptive anthropology. Because if we don’t, we can’t get mad at corporations behaving unlike libraries and very much like banks. And we should all be livid with corporations.

What I mean:

I’ve been on a DVD/Blu-ray buying spree. Mostly because it’s the end of the semester and I am up to my earballs1 in grading, student requests for extra credit, and I will do damn near anything to avoid my desk, including braving actual stores with actual people.

In the used media store2 I found a series of cheaply produced collections of forgotten Hollywood films. For example, one collection boasts ten westerns, none of which I had ever heard of, none of which have been in print for at least thirty years. Yet, here they are, bundled together with some sketchy subtitles slapped on the bottom of the screen, and sold for less than a thousand yen. Sold!

Crucially, none of the films listed on these DVDs are available on streaming. There might be one or two on a specialty service like Criterion, but they’re not on the main platforms.

By contrast, if I wanted to watch Young Sheldon (I don’t, but if I did) I could watch it on three different streaming services (that I know of) or I could buy ‘access’ via Amazon or Apple. Or I could buy the DVD, the Blu-ray, and probably some form of enriched uranium sphere that will be good until the year 20,260. However, the movie I actually want to watch, Robin Williams’s 1992 classic Toys3 is not available. Like at all. On any streaming service I have access to. It’s not even available for sale digitally - excuse me, ‘access’ is not even available for sale. And good luck finding a DVD or Blu-ray. You might find a VHS if you hang around eBay long enough. Maybe.

But the thing is, for every Young Sheldon, there are a thousand titles like The Arizona Kid, Guns of the Law, and Fighting Frontier out there, completely forgotten except for DVD publishers trying to lure in crate diving film junkies. This is only going to get worse.

This past January 1st, Public Domain Day, we saw the usual avalanche of classic media enter the public domain with a brief splash of excitement before the world went back to doing whatever the hell it’s doing right now. Like every year, there were a couple of big names in the mix, The Maltese Falcon, Popeye, but there were far, far more titles, characters, and properties that are all but forgotten. And, okay, maybe that’s just time and cultural memory doing what they do - evaporate what was once most precious - but what about when it’s deliberate?

Last year, Disney earned itself some negative press by announcing that it would soon be removing some of its classic titles from Disney+, its online streaming platform. That wouldn’t be a big deal except that Disney doesn’t always bother to keep its print (e.g. Blu-ray, DVD, hell even VHS would be something) library up to date. There are several titles that are thus no longer available on physical media or streaming. It would be marginally defensible if these were racist cartoons from the 1940s. But Willow? From 2022? With Warwick Davis? Bullshit.

And I’m not even saying that all these abandoned properties are hidden gems and therefore must be preserved! I mean, if you’ve actually seen Robin Williams’s 1992 classic Toys then you know my taste is suspect at best. But they were real, they represent who we are, were, or wanted to be, and that means they are a part of our identity and legacy. They should be preserved exactly for that if for no other reason.

But, another example: Kevin Smith’s 1999 classic, Dogma, is finally back in print after several decades of unavailability - this time the reason was more ethical than financial, as the rights were controlled by Harvey Weinstein and that was a quagmire that it just seemed better to avoid altogether.4 At least that’s been sorted and we can once again sigh with wounded fascination at Alanis Morissette as God while being offended on behalf of the platypi.

My point, and I do have one, I promise, is that, we owe it to ourselves and our cultural heritage to retain libraries of physical media. Call it insurance, call it preservation, call it preemptive anthropology, but it’s well past time we stop relying on an increasingly pyramidically-nested series of corporations to hold on to our culture for us. Let them produce it (or not; I’m all for breaking up the mega-corporations and building a world where small groups of people can make really cool things even if they don’t have billionaire funding) but let’s then make sure we’re the ones holding on to it.

Now, we cannot, obviously, each and every one of us build libraries that hold every book, movie, record, and who knows what else. But you can be selective, you can be deliberate and intentional in making your choices. If there’s a given story that’s important to you, get a physical copy of it. Get the best one you can, the one with all the extras and the beautiful cover art. Enjoy it and revel in the series of small miracles that enabled its creation. Just don’t stream the damned thing.

Now get off my lawn while I yell at these clouds some more.

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Look, I’m not much of a dancer. Saying I’ve got two left feet does a dis-service to anyone who has a left foot, much less two of them. In fact, I’ve got some not-good, not-bad, just there memories of my first school dance in junior high school. My friend Debbie came up and asked me to dance and I said, “How?”

Nearly forty years later, I’m still trying to figure out how to dance anything other than the side-to-side shuffle, the bent-knee-bob a.k.a. the wave your hands like you just don’t care, and, thanks to my college roommate, a basic waltz2. Because even I can count to three. Mostly.

However. It took a long time for me to come to terms with dancing - on my own, with myself, in the dark, on the ceiling, wherever, because I didn’t realize how much our nervous systems find release in movement. Sounds obvious now, sure, but wind back the clock a few decades.

Embodiment is one of those squishy words that changes its meaning depending on the context in which it’s used and yet, the key is right there in the middle of the word: body. In teaching, embodiment means to bring something into your learning through the use of your body. In psychology, embodiment means to examine your nervous system through its effect on your body and to thereby change your mental state through changing your physical state. In spirituality, embodiment is the act of keeping our squishy little souls inside these delicate meat sacks. However you frame it, embodiment is the connection between our physical and higher selves. And when you break it down, in all these contexts and more, embodiment just means moving. You know, like dancing.

Speaking of squishy concepts, I have a soft, squishy place in my soft, squishy heart for all kinds of dance music.

In 1988, eighth grade, my musical taste began to fragment. On the one hand, my pre-teen brain soaked up every late 80s hair metal band, lite R&B act, or nascent hip-hop act Mtv could throw at me. I spent my time in class copying the logos for bands like Cinderella and Queensrÿche3 into my notebooks while my older cousins and friends gave me mix tapes with KISS, the Clash, or Led Zeppelin. Throw in some Amy Grant courtesy of Mom and some Johnny Cash via Dad and my burgeoning tape collection crossed genre boundaries like Hannibal going over the Alps4.

And then something strange happened. I was listening to the radio5 and I heard Captain James Tiberius Kirk. And then a laser or something. And then a beat that stepped right into my ear canals and never, ever left. Information Society was the first “electronica” band I got into. I remember not being able to find their full album at the store, but I could get the cassingle6 for the song “Walking Away.” The track begins with Kirk saying, “It is useless to resist us.” Indeed.

I didn’t get too far into electronica. My late-stage junior high school conversion to all things punk rock saw to that. But I still found space in my collection for bands like Utah Saints, the KLF, EMF, and, of course, Orbital.

In college, dance music wormed its way back into my ears once again via Mtv and the rise of Fatboy Slim and all things House and Big Beat, the sub-genres formed out of the splintering of electronica into a thousand different loops and synthesizer presets. Oh, and also by going to an actual dance club. Every week. For a year.

Dance clubs were always a weird thing for me because in high school, we would go across the border into Mexico occasionally. Ostensibly because there were dance clubs but, in reality, to drink and hook up. But dancing in these clubs never really held any appeal. They were too crowded, shitty music played through even shittier speakers, sketchy looking dudes always trying to pick up our girlfriends, and drinks so watered down they might as well have been driving.

But in college, the dance clubs played music I actually liked. Groove Armada, the Prodigy, Chemical Brothers, and Lo-Fidelity All-stars all rang out of the still shitty speakers but the drinks were better and the sketchy looking dudes were mostly people I knew from class.

Fast forward the next twenty-five years and a few countries and going to dance clubs remains a fun thing to do provided it’s not that often and it’s with people I like and a DJ I trust. I’m still not a great dancer but, assuming I’ve had some water, taken a preventative aspirin, and done some stretching, I can get through a few numbers before I have to go have a nice lie-down. This has led to some great memories:

Dancing to “Everyday I’m Shufflin’” in a deconsecrated church in Toronto, getting into a group dance to De La “Soul’s Ring Ring Ring” at a wedding chpael in rural England. More nights in more clubs than I can really remember in Tokyo’s various and sundry clubs, dives, and discos. It’s truly been a series of gifts throughout my life, one I’m only able to appreciate after the fact.

During the moment, getting up the nerve to dance, in public, where other humans might actually be able to perceive me, takes balls. Sometimes it takes some extra effort to dig those balls out of my guts and set them to swinging. And the thing I want to remember is that it’s always worthwhile.

Dancing is good for you. Physically. Mentally. Spiritually for all I know. But whether you can or can’t, whether you can do a do-sie-do or the Cabbage Patch, whether you can swing, shuffle, or slide, dancing does you, does me, a shitload of good. Resets the brain, releases the endorphins, sets free the serotonin. I have a hard time remembering that. But thank God Robyn’s on tour and my media streams are full of great dance tracks again. It makes it just that much easier to remember.

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I am a middle-aged dad. And just like every middle-aged dad you know, I have a very hard time figuring out what I’m supposed to do with myself when I’m not working. Thus my hobbies become side hustles, family time becomes a checkbox on a to do list, and ‘downtime’ remains something elusive and undefined that I can only pretend to understand.

But, if you don’t schedule time to shut down your tools, your tools will do it for you. In this case, my tool is my voice, and it has shut itself down via a nice little head cold that came out of nowhere and walloped me upside the head. And thus, I am growling at my students, my family, my dog, and that blessed idiot always drooling at me from the other side of the mirror.

So I have a ritual of sorts. Whenever I get the slightest bit sick, I drop everything that can be dropped and schedule some downtime. And yes, I know that, optimally, I would schedule this downtime before I get sick, but hey, it is what it is. And what it is right now, for this iteration of downtime, is reading. A lot.

I spent one summer of my childhood at my grandmother’s house in Oklahoma. While there, hanging out with my cousins and watching day time t.v., I read through her bookshelves, bouncing between Louis L’amor westerns and Lillian Jackson Braun mysteries like a pinball on a bonus run.

Of the two, I preferred the mysteries for one simple reason - they felt like a reality I could still step into. The westerns were the past. The wagon trains, the cattle drives, the Pony Express, all things of the past. But a newsman going from one beat to the next, getting to know colorful characters and solving mysteries? Sure, I could inhabit that world tomorrow!

Of course, by the time I was grown, that world, the world of the three-issues per day and supplement on weekends newspaper was already starting to disappear. In 1993, I made the wise decision to major in broadcasting rather than journalism because, surely, the technology behind radio and t.v. would be relevant for decades to come! Among the many dubious skills on my resume are the ability to manually slice reel-to-reel tape and use a chemical darkroom to process negatives and prints.

All of this is to say that most of my life, I’ve been optimistically looking forward while also pining for a past that I was never really a part of. I learned newspaper, radio, t.v., film, and even advertising techniques designed for a pre-digital world. And though I have tried to keep up, well, there’s a fool’s errand if ever there was one. So that drooling idiot in the mirror might decide to learn how to use his phone to do short video, but this guy ain’t.

Back in the here and now, I recently started a re-read, my first in 30-something years, of The Cat Who Could Read Backwards, the first of those Lillian Jackson Braun books. This book was first published in 1966, almost a decade before I was born and yet, it sounds like a lovely time. Our man Qwilleran, Qwill to his friends, gets assigned the art beat in a mid-sized city in the midwest. Mysterious shenanigans ensue. Cats are introduced and become the lynchpin of the entire 29 book series. If you’ve never read it, I can wholeheartedly recommend it with the caveat that it’ll make you nostalgic in the worst way.

Also, it turns out there is a word for this feeling: anemoia. This is a word coined and defined (I believe) by the always relevant minds at The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows2: a feeling of nostalgia for a time you never experienced.

Or, to put it another way, via the incomparable Grandpa Simpson:

You know, you remind of a poem I can’t remember, and a song that may never have existed, and a place I’m not sure I’ve ever been to.

Man I would love Qwill’s life. Go to the newspaper building, see your buddies, buy someone lunch on the paper’s dime in pursuit of a story, file your copy, have dinner at the reporter’s club across the street, go home, read the evening paper while smoking a pipe, and go to bed. Hell, I’d even put up with a Siamese cat if it came with that lifestyle.

The thing about anemoia is that it is the most rose-tinted of lenses through which you can look. Sure, the lifestyle described above is absurdly engaging. But, Qwill isn’t married, doesn’t have kids, can’t stay in one place too long, and will probably drop dead in his early 60s because of smoke and a red meat diet3.

And that’s not even talking about the fact that the mid-60s had all kinds of social injustices, political assassinations, wars in foreign lands, a rapidly changing world economy, and generational changes in media and culture we still have not quite recovered from.

What this means then, is that, as readers, we have to expect and welcome those feelings of anemoia when they arise so that we can examine them for the truths under the surface. In this case, when I read about Qwill and his 60s newspaper man lifestyle, what I’m actually ‘missing’ is a slower pace of life where information came in discrete waves with downtime forced on you by the delivery mechanisms. Of a media diet defined by a rhythm of reporting-interpreting-commenting at slow, regular intervals rather than a firehose we are unable or unwilling to turn off. And sure, this might be a bit Ok-Boomer or, for an even older reference, Pollyanna-ish but broken clocks, you know?

So, that’s what I get to do now. I get to take my vitamin C, my antihystamines, my bottles of water, and turn the world off for a bit. I’m sure it’ll still be here when I’m back on my feet. Even if it’s not, my grading sure as hell will be. Be well, turn off the news, go to bed.

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While this isn’t the first time January 1st has had the ill grace to land on a scheduled Learned publishing day, it is only the third time it’s happened since I started writing this newsletter in 2018. It feels like it ought to be of more import than it is. But, nah, just another Thursday.

That wasn’t the case two years ago when we were in the aftermath of a large earthquake, our senses on high alert due to the frantic hectoring of a reporter on the t.v. urging everyone along the coasts to head for high ground right now, right now, right now! My wife and I both noted at the time that we were not worried until we saw the reporter, a Japanese woman usually the definition of poise and composure, absolutely losing her shit in her desperation to convey how utterly serious she was about the tsunami risk.

In a weird, almost blasphemous way, it reminded me of the scene in the movie Signs where Joaquin Phoenix’s character is hiding in the closet after seeing the aliens on t.v. It wasn’t the image of the aliens that freaked me out but Phoenix’s reaction to them that stirred my own fight-or-flight response.

The other time Learned has been published on January 1st was back in 2021. Remember that time? We had all of us just been through the first pandemic in living memory. The desire for a return to normalcy was so great that I refused to do much to note the change of the year save for a single line in the issue of Learned2.

And so this year. So far, it has been utterly, blissfully, dull. I started the year with a walk and a photo before getting online to participate in a workshop led by Natasha. A couple of hours later, freshly caffeinated and bundled up, my daughter and I drove out to our local shrine to participate in the aforementioned bow-bow-clap-clap-bow3.

All I could think during the entire 30-minute wait was, man I hope this year is boring. I have things I want to do with my time. I’ve got projects to finish and new ones to start. I’ve got friends to visit and family to share with. I’ve got work and writing and parenting, oh my. I do not want drama, not tsunamis, not pandemics, not even the idlest of gossip. I just want the world to be boring and mundane.

But.

The world, for all its ineffable, stubborn beauty, is rarely dull. And if I’m telling the truth, we would never want it to be, right? We need novelty and stimulation and a sense of purpose. Or, at least I do.

2026 is being celebrated as the year of the horse4. In mythologies the world over, horses are messengers for gods and spirits, avatars of fertility, strength, stamina, speed, and sometimes even prosperity. It’s associated with the sea, with medicine, and even with good, old-fashioned, transportation and travel.

Not as loyal as a dog, nor as imperious as a cat, horses are nevertheless animals humankind has bound to themselves and, in doing so, created an extension of our physical limitations. In domesticating horses, we expanded our horizons, our strength, and our speed. We grew beyond ourselves and into something grander. And that is my hope for you, and for myself, for the coming year.

Expand. Become something bigger than the limitations you were born into. May your troubles be dull, may your triumphs be transcendent, and may your horizons always be boundless. Happy new year, again.

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Tim Minchin set out to write a holiday song and came up with the equal parts funny and poignant White Wine in the Sun. It’s a fantastic song. It’s a song I can’t even listen to, much less sing without tearing up. A fact only slightly mitigated by the fact that neither can Tim Minchin2.

On the one hand, Christmas is a commercial holiday created by and for perverting the teachings of a man who’s been dead for 2,000 years. On the other, as Tim says, “I really like Christmas…some of the songs they sing have nice chords.”

I’m not much of a musician. The chords in any given Christmas carol don’t do much for me. But the lore? I’m here for that.

I’ve taught more Christmas lessons than I care to remember. To small kids, big kids, bored kids, hyperactive kids, their parents, their teachers, their sedate classmates, and, on one unfortunately memorable occasion, the entire school board. And the problem with teaching that many Christmas lessons is that you have no idea what the kids have already heard or learned about the mythology of Christmas.

Where does Santa live? If you’re American, you know he lives in the North Pole. If you’re Japanese, you’re sure he lives in Finland. If you’re Australian, who cares, you just know he’s down in Oz for a surf during the antipode summer Christmas.

How does Santa get into houses? Through the chimney of course. But what if there’s not chimney? Well…

And this is what I love about Christmas: the lore is both global and ever-expanding. As a teacher, as a parent, as a “grown-up”3, adding to the lore for an audience of the people most willing to believe is, in itself, a Christmas tradition. And if your personal contribution ends up becoming global, well, that’s damn near a Christmas miracle.

Here’s what I mean; let’s start with some basics of the Christmas lore:

Santa began as a real person, a Turkish bishop who gave a man enough coins that he was able to avoid selling his daughters into prostitution. And thus the tradition of presents at Christmas was established.

The lore4 doesn’t change much for a few centuries. St. Nicholas becomes conflated with other Winter solstice traditions and eventually arrives in 19th century Europe as Father Christmas, the incarnation of winter celebrations. But 19th century Europe is literate. People read aloud and to each other quite often; people try their hand at writing their own stories and poems and suddenly, St. Nick has a sleigh and eight flying reindeer. They even have names.

Fast forward a century or so and now we’re in the age of electronic media and someone decides to record a song or three. The lore expands. Santa has nine reindeer, led by a younger one with a bright red nose. A living snowman hangs around sometimes. Elves make the toys at Santa’s factory in the North Pole. It all gets added to the lore.

And that’s where we come back in. Kids know all this but kids are amazing at believing a dozen contradictory things all at once. It’s why we miss being kids. We miss the innocence we held before reasoning bared its ugly fangs.

For my part, over the years, I’ve contributed the following bits5:

• Back when Santa lived in Turkey, he had a donkey to carry all his presents. Her name is Sara Beth6 and she now hangs out in Santa’s village in the North Pole training the reindeer how to manage Santa’s sleigh.

• Santa gives coal to bad kids because it stains your hand. No matter how many times you wash your hand, everyone in your life will know you’ve been a bad kid. A little grim, but you should see the looks on kids faces. And, in this case, when I say kids, I mean university students.

• The secret to how Santa gets around the entire world in one night is the league of Also-Santas. He divvies up responsibility for present delivery among himself, Father Christmas, Papa Noel, even moonlighting deities from other pantheons like Japan’s Hoteoishi.

• Krampus is his best frenemy.

• Even with assistance from the League, Santa has a hard time making it to everywhere in North America. Fortunately, he is a master of time travel. What are mere seconds to us are minutes and hours to him.

• Santa’s staff at the North Pole counts exactly 101 members7. This counts all the elves, reindeer, snowmen, and whomever else may come around. It does not, however, include Mrs. Mary Claus who only barely tolerates Santa’s off-season nonsense.

• Speaking of, Santa routinely takes the entire crew to Hawaii for the month of January to recover and rest before starting the toy production factory back up to prep for the next year.

• Finally, and, saints help me, this might be my lasting legacy: Santa has a magic key that opens any kitchen door. No chimney, no problem.

Lest this sound self-congratulatory, understand that, yeah, I’m quite pleased with myself, thanks. And, more importantly, I never set down to create any of this. Every little bit of mythology I could come up with was on the spot in response to some child’s question. Because, like a good magician, storyteller, or con-man, “I don’t know” is the second worst answer available. The single worst answer is, of course, the truth.

Every once in a while I get someone who feels it’s important to tell children the way of the world. Those people are usually hiding a deep and abiding pain. But you know this. You’ve seen the movies. You know the plot - every adult who doesn’t believe in Santa is nursing a deeply wounded inner child whose belief was betrayed in some way.

That, too, is part of the lore. As is every movie about Christmas, every new storybook, every new song, every new tidbit created on the spur of the moment by a grown-up placed in the spotlight of a small child’s unmitigated attention. Because, really, Christmas is about stewardship. It’s about holding belief available until a child is old enough to claim it for themselves.

It’s a hell of a responsibility. Be good.

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Because I’m a good little capitalist pig, I’ve been working to monetize all my hobbies, including that of making card games. Well. I say monetizing but the truth is, I decided to develop a hobby with the idea of it becoming a career pivot of sorts from the very beginning after a lesson with a pair of young learners who were as bored as I was. I threw the lesson out, got out a deck of playing cards and invented a game on the spot.

The game was not great. In fact, if I’m being honest, it sucked. But the kids got into it and what had been a dry struggle through vocabulary drills that was only marginally less painful for them than it was for me turned into a creative group think session where we tried to make the game better by playing through variations and iterations over the remainder of the class time.

In the end, the kids got more practice with English than they would have with the book, and they had a hell of a lot more fun. And, for myself, a new pathway through the world opened up.

Ten years later, I’m still making card games; I’m still figuring out how to turn them into something real and tactile in the world.1

The question has been asked of me, more than once, why card games? The answer is both simple and incomplete: card games require focus in a way that other tools do not. Aside from visual and aural cues2, they stimulate your brain through your fingertips, a pathway that is only barely beginning to be understood by medical and psychological sciences; we know that engaging with any kind of learning materials through our fingers, say by using a pencil and paper instead of a keyboard, increases retention and comprehension almost across the board. As to why, well, we’re working on it.

Over the past few years, I’ve become thoroughly enamored by the Theory 11 playing card company. Their products are elegant, refined, a pleasure to look at. More importantly, they’re satisfying as hell to hold. I’m not the sort of collector who leaves things untouched in their little cellophane coffins. Because being able to touch and marvel at the details unlocked therein is the point.

I mean, I don’t need another deck of playing cards. I’ve got, like, five within arms reach already. But Theory 11’s (and their competitors) decks are more than simple playing cards. They’re objects designed to be felt as much as seen and that creates a sense memory distinct from a card deck that is simply colors and shapes.

Which is why there are only seven different ones on my Santa please list.

Recently I was asked how I would kit out a brand new kids classroom. Asking me that is a bit like throwing chum at a shark - you’ve done the dirty work, now just sit back and try not to get bit.

Because, look, there’s a special joy in setting up a new classroom for (very) young learners. Most of us middle-aged adults are burned all the way out by the drawn and haggard souls we see in the mirror, the ones that have been carrying lots of weights in lots of context for lots of years. And kids, man, kids are the pure antithesis of that whole thing.3

But, specious joys of middle-aged life aside, what got me going in that moment, what led me to spout off for twenty minutes in exacting detail about just what this new classroom would need is one single consideration: kids learn by using their hands.

For a little kids classroom you need three things: a bunch of handkerchiefs, a big box of buttons, and a handful of cushions that they can sit on. Between those three tools, you can get kids to use any language you care to give them.

Handkerchiefs are colors, numbers, grouping and sorting. Buttons are more of the same but with comparisons and adjectives. Cushions are directions, preferences, tenses, and register. They all allow kids to move, to interact, and to experience with their fingers and hands. This is so vitally important and so easy to forget.

Learning is a beautiful act. It’s beneficial to us in so many ways beyond the obvious. It invites us to re-examine everything we think we know within a new context and decide what’s worth keeping and what’s worth incorporating into our newly expanded sphere of knowledge. The bigger that sphere gets the easier insights are generated and new ideas are flushed to the fore.

Yet we only do so by watching. Listening. Reading. Writing, maybe. Where are your hands?

Think back to the last time you learned how to do something with your hands. I’m guessing it was an instrument, a tool, or an art form of some kind. You learned the piano, how to build a birdhouse, or mix paints into something you called abstract expressionism because even you didn’t know what the hell you were trying to paint. Been there, brothers and sisters. Been there.

When was the last time you used your hands to help you read a book?

What we call close reading is really just the grown up version of sliding your finger along the line you’ve been reading like you did when you were a kid. We use our hands to read all the time. We mark pages with a finger, we dog-ear the corners4, we literally thumb through books just to see if we want to keep reading them. We read with our hands.

Natasha’s book club is gearing up for a momentous 2026. The booklist starts and ends with how we think with stops at all manner of points of interest along the way. I’m looking forward to it. I want to close read as much as I can.

I’m getting my fingers ready: ready to cover words I don’t know, repeating them in my head until I can remember their form and shape. Ready to trace lines (maybe with a pencil, possibly just blood) from one paragraph to another until I understand the through line that connects them. Ready to physically unearth every loose nugget of contextual information until my fingers are shriveled and my hands are numb. Too much? Good. Reading - learning - ought to be a sensory overload that leaves us spent and changed in all the best ways.

Your hands can make that happen. You just have to use them.

Look, if I have a point, it’s this - modern adult education, in all its forms, has removed from us one of our most powerful senses. We do not engage our tactile faculties in learning much past the age of ten and that’s a goddamned shame. Our sense of touch is profound. We are able to employ our fingers in ways our nearest primate cousins can only fantasize about. We are able to be, in turns, dextrous or monstrous depending on which grip we use.

For myself, the solution to so much of this is a deck of cards. When the fingers are engaged in their unspoken, near-unconscious examining of how the cards feel in the hands, the weight of the cardstock, the lamination of the paper, the sheen of the finish, the intensity of the hue, they instill a sense memory that helps the brain retain whatever I’m trying to cram into it.

What I’m saying is, buy someone a deck of cards for Christmas. Then let ‘em learn something.

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Books are old friends for me. They’ve got broken spines and yellowed pages but, hey, who among us has not fallen victim to at least a little entropy? Standing at my bookshelves now, though, I can see the timelines running strata-like through my collection. Here are the gaudy, flashy paperbacks with their heroes and spaceships. Here are the larger trade paperbacks with their bright colors and bold typefaces. And over here are the stalwart, somber hardcovers with their promises to still exist long after everything else on the shelf has fallen to dust.

And then, down here on the bottom shelves, sturdy and capable of supporting the entirety of all the fictional worlds contained therein, are the art books. These books both contain art and are, themselves, a kind of art. Heavy paper, glossy photos, threaded bindings, cloth covers - these books are made to be held and leafed through. They are made to be enjoyed for their mere presence as much as their contents.

Several years ago, just over a decade now, I decided to try my hand at freelance writing. I got a few gigs here and there and made, well, not much but enough to keep me in book money for a while. And then I got a gig actually writing about books. Aw, yiss.

Wink Books is, sadly, now defunct, but for a couple of years I was able to indulge my love of big, glossy, coffee-table art books by pretending that I was buying them just so I could review them for the site. Everybody from my editor to my wife to, presumably, the booksellers knew this was the most transparent of lies but book lovers are a special breed. We can delude ourselves into almost anything if it means we get to buy more books.

I grew up reading in a house of readers. Much like swimming or walking or breathing, I don’t remember learning how to do it but so many of my core memories revolve around doing it that it is impossible to imagine a self where I couldn’t. If that makes sense.

Books were never an indulgence. They were never something to be earned but they were also never a treat. They were just part of the atmosphere of the house. Trips to the library and the bookstore were part of the every day fabric of life. When friends used to tease me about reading too much I kind of pitied them. They had no idea what wonders I found inside the pages of my paperbacks.

Bandanna Books sat (and still sits) at one end of Yuma’s historic downtown. The streets there have been through so many waves of revitalization that it’s hard to tell what was built when save that all of it is varying degrees of old. Because it’s Yuma, everything bakes all year long, but never more so than in the summer when the temperatures reach heights that make the inside of your oven look like a warm breeze.

But during winter, things calm down enough, weather-wise, that we get an influx of visitors from harsher climates, many of whom spend six to nine months lumbering around Yuma County in thirty-foot long RVs they can barely drive. As a young adult, I used to rant about how Yuma’s economy was designed around people who didn’t even live there all the time, sacrificing the city’s resources on snowbirds.

But I did like a few of them. Like the elderly couple who came to Yuma as snowbirds and stayed to open Bandanna Books. Unfortunately, time has stolen the memory of their names out of my head, but I still remember them both and the way they would move through the rickety, haphazard shelves with the gingerly grace of the elderly as they moved books from one stack to another and occasionally paused to show a precocious twelve-year old something he might like.

I like to think that it was in these stacks that my love for books as physical objects was born.

My clearest, earliest memories from inside Bandanna Books are the shelf of comic-strip books hidden on the lowest shelf of the humor section. If you grew up in the States in the 80s you know these books - the elongated Garfield books that always hung out over the shelves, the Peanuts collections that had odd titles and collected dozens of strips under odd themes, the Hagar the Horrible, Wizard of Id, Beetle Bailey, and, holiest of holies, Bloom County trade paperbacks.

These books took the strips I already knew from the funny pages and collated them into digestible little chunks that I just devoured. And once I had gone through all the strips I knew, I started to find these odd little gems from people I didn’t know and the contents of which didn’t quite belong in the humor or comic strip categories but didn’t not belong there either: Charles Addams, Edward Gorey, R. Crumb, and so many more.

These books, much more than the comic-strip books became something different. They weren’t just books, they were objects d’art. Everything from the binding to the fonts to the layouts screamed out that this was something more than just a collection of odd drawings and odder jokes.

Over time I began finding more and more books that my hands found to be more art than artistic. Books full of odd maps and rabbit holes, books full of illustrations of places that could never exist and the people who inhabited them. Books of fairies and dwarves and elves and dragons.

Back in the here and now, my book collection has expanded or contracted based on where and how I was living. Some books I regret losing, others I am glad I have given away, most fall somewhere in between. But, proudly displayed on the new shelves of my little library room are some true treasures that came from Bandanna Books all those decades ago.

Next to them are newer treasures, ones brought on by the growing realizations from book lovers that while digital books may be convenient, they don’t feel the same. They don’t look the same. And they sure as hell don’t fill up a shelf the same.

Fortunately, the past two decades have seen the formation and growth of a small army of specialty publishers who exist only to put together beautiful editions of books. Places like the Folio Society and Subterranean Press take books and make them into art pieces. Taschen has been making books into art for decades.

And now a whole host of specialty publishers are bringing out magazines and mooks1 and zines just because books are art and deserve to be produced, sold, and treasured as such.

So now, a thousand words later, here’s my point: the next time you want to read something, buy the most beautiful, most expensive version of it you can. Your hands will thank you.

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Nostalgia moves in 20 year cycles. But we knew this, right? I mean, we’ve seen this with pop culture at every turn for decades now. In the 80s, the most popular re-run was of Happy Days, a 70s era t.v. show set in the 50s. Fast forward two decades and one of the most popular shows on t.v. was set in the 70s. Fashion, music, movies, a lot of pop culture seems to follow this trend. What I think is a newer addition to this trend is tech. Like, say, an old iPod.

Which, in this case, is not really working per se. Like a Decepticon tossed out of a wounded triple changer, it still functions. Mostly. It doesn’t really hold a charge anymore but the click wheel is still smooth as Don Draper with a whiskey double.

There’s a metaphor there but I’m not looking too hard.

What I am doing is considering my options. It seems like the time is right to bring twenty year old tech back to life through one of a couple different grand strategies: restore, upgrade, or mod.

For myself, I’m thinking to restore it. I loved this damn thing. Hell, I still do or it wouldn’t be taking up real estate in my office “dead tech” drawer. Separate from a junk drawer, these are all the little pieces of kit I had over the years that I really liked but that eventually got replaced by something newer, shinier, or just with better battery life.

Back when I got this iPod, back in the early oughts, it was a revelation. For the first time in my life, I could carry a significant fraction of my music collection. More than just a couple CDs, more than a wallet in the car, I could carry damn near everything.

But the thing that is making so much retro, excuse me, vintage tech fashionable again is that we’ve arrived at a moment of convergence where the nostalgia cycle is coming hard for the early 2000s, people are rejecting digital in favor of tactile (think buttons vs. screens), and consumers are rejecting the subscription model in favor of ownership.

Put that all together and you have a bit of kit that lets you scroll through all your music using actual buttons and holds all your music locally without the need for a cloud, a membership, or a network chip to be seen.

It’s pretty great, actually.

Speaking just for myself, it’s the third reason that is really hitting home for me right now. I’m tired of being told that I don’t own the stuff I paid for.

A while back, I got so fed up with Amazon, Apple, and Google’s predatory practices around purchased media that I decided to go back to physical media. It’s hard to avoid the streamers completely, and it means that sometimes I pay egregious shipping charges, but generally, having physical books, blu-rays, and CDs has been an improvement; if I can’t trust the big tech companies to let me keep what I’ve purchased, then I won’t purchase from them, simple as that.

There’s a link here between the continual and ever-changing enshittification of everything. Consider this - during the Napster era, the record label conglomerates were suing teenagers for horrific amounts of money.

The lawyers assumed (or maybe asserted) that every download was someone who would otherwise have bought the song. So, the value of a song at retail x the number of times downloaded = how much money you owed them. Considering songs could be downloaded hundreds of thousands of times in minutes, that added up to a lot of money.

And they won. “Piracy” slowed way down. Napster disappeared. Kids went to jail. But we had all gotten used to our convenient little mp3 files and so we started to buy them. The sales channels (Amazon, Apple, Google) were not content. They partnered with the record labels and, after enough polite friction for everyone to pretend they were working to present the best possible product for both the consumer and the artist, they began to offer mp3s for sale. You could buy the tracks or the albums, download them, and use them on any device. Ergo, you owned them.

Fast forward a few years and now those same channels are telling us, no, we don’t actually own anything, we’re merely leasing it. Raise your hand if you didn’t see that one coming? No? No one? No hands up? Exactly.

And don’t even get me started on ebooks.

At least if you buy a vinyl LP from an independent record label, they’ll send you a code to get the mp3s as well. You get the best of both - the portability of the digital files, the collectibility and cool factor of the physical media.

Even with blu-rays, it’s not uncommon to get a movie package that has both blu-ray and DVD discs as well as a code for a digital version on some service or another.

But books? Hell, no. Let’s charge you separately for the print, audio, and digital editions. In fact, let’s make sure that your digital editions are locked to a single, specific device and trading, re-selling, or just gifting the ebooks you’ve purchased is somehow violating copyright. On every single separate service. Bunch a dicks.

But I digress.

Let me leave the salt on the table where it belongs and look at why you should be buying vinyl, or paperback, or collectible hardware.

Japan has these incredible second hand stores. The biggest, most well-known are places like Book Off and Hard Off but lots of others, some specializing in very hard to find or niche items, are everywhere. Sometimes I go through them. I like to give myself missions: can I find anything collectible from Japan that I can sell on eBay? Can I find something vintage and cool to give as a gift? Can I find something so niche and specific to me that I have no choice but to keep it for myself? (Yes. I can. I do.)

Recently, whenever I find myself in one of these stores, I find myself drifting towards the vintage (retro) game machines. I’m thinking pretty seriously about buying a Nintendo GameCube. It hits all the pressure points I’ve already outlined - there’s no wifi connection needed, no login needed, no deleting my games from a remote login sysadmin somewhere. At the same time, a controller that feels great in my hands, has cheap, easy to find games, and, importantly, I can get a used one for right about sixty bucks.

It’s funny to me that in middle age I’ve come full circle. The reason I have this drawer full of dead tech is because I was always so eager to get my hands on the newest and coolest gadget. Tech felt hopeful and optimistic. It was going to make our lives better in so many ways. I think it still has the potential to, but we might need to look back in order to see how to go forward.

Hmm. There might just be a metaphor there, too, but I’m still not looking too hard.

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But, as a meme, two things can be true is…truthy at best and incomplete at worst. Let’s fix that.

To start, our little meme just isn’t quite robust enough: Yes, it is possible for someone to be a respected artist but also an asshole,2 but why do we allow it? It is possible for something to be both good for people as individuals and bad for people as a collective whole, but does that mean it should change? It is possible for something to be both benign and malignant depending on circumstances, but the question remains: to laser it away or let it rest?

Two things can be true is not the whole story. It’s a line in want of a second half. You know, like people who tell you that great minds think alike never add that it’s followed by but fools seldom differ or that jack of all trades, master of none is followed by is oftentimes better than a master of one. Like that. Only, as far as I know, no such clause exists for two things can be true. Yet.

How about this for a dependent clause? Two things can be true, especially when one of those things is used to show how true the other thing is.

Of course, English being English, it turns out we’ve already got a word for that. Dialectic is the art of debate.3 It’s a way of using dissimilar ideas to evaluate and redefine those ideas. It’s a way of breaking complex ideas down through discussion so that the nuances, implications, and flaws can be found and understood before being re-integrated back into a cohesive whole. You know, like philosophers do when they do what they do be do be do \<jazz hands!\>.

Dialectics, with a capital D, is a line of philosophical reasoning that goes from Plato to Aristotle to a whole bunch of academics and theologians to Hegel and then, to Marx. You know, Karl.4 He of the glorious campaign to free the means of production from the owners and an even more glorious mustache and beard combo. That guy. But first…

Hegel takes the Socratic idea of dialectics and wrestles with it until he arrives at an idea meaning something like, contradictions don’t just exist but they drive change. He would go on to re-write, re-frame, and re-define his ideas over and over again, essentially dialecticising5 his own works in an effort to better explain his ideas to the masses.

And THEN good ol’ Karl comes along, reads Hegel’s work and says, well, you know, everything economic is actually political and dialectics can show us just how badly we’re being manipulated by the capitalist oligarchs. Like, what if Hegel’s contradictions are material? What if the tension between workers and owners is the engine of the debate? Hmm. Brother Karl might be on to something.

But let’s get back to Modern Internet Theory6 and two things can be true. Dialectics tells us just that. Take your opposing ideas and hold them up to each other. Do they, in any way, negate each other? If so, how? Why? Is there a commonality between these ideas that can be used to create a new, hybrid model? Is there anything one provides that the other does not? Is there something one idea does better than the other, and, if so, can it be re-purposed to serve both ideas? Or, you know, two things can be true.

And this idea, that not only can two things be true but that two things, when discussed in light of each other, can explain the processes and systems behind both things and thus explain what is actually true, is invaluable in modern society.

Society is increasingly complex. In recent years, the t.v. show The Good Place took as its premise that being good, doing the morally correct thing, is so difficult that it is no longer possible to be a good person. Everything you do is condemned to somehow hurting someone else, not through your own fault or your own doing, but by participating in society, you are using systems that inevitably do harm somewhere else. And, no spoilers, but that conundrum is resolved by saying that being a good person is not just doing good things but by trying to do the right thing even when it seems impossible. Which is dialectics in everything but name.

For example: You can’t drive a car without being complicit in sweatshop manufacturing processes, strip mining the environment, and adding to the carbon cost of modern life. But, driving allows you to be a “productive member of society” by giving you the means to commute to a job and thereby contribute to the economy, which, in turn, lifts up many people and creates a better future for the species.

Two things can be true especially when one of those things is used to show how true the other thing is: maybe by understanding the true human cost of automotive manufacturing we can find truer ways for people to contribute to societal economics without commuting; maybe by examining the truth of how our societies require people to be productive in order to be “good” we can adjust our views and expectations for how people can contribute to the greater whole. Two things can be true, but they must be interrogated to understand how.

Or, for another example, and one much closer to home, we have the idea that education is more necessary than ever right alongside the idea that educational systems are broken and outdated. When we put these ideas through the lens of how technology is fomenting both the need for more education and also disrupting traditional classroom methodologies, we can see that the future of education needs to be radically different from what it has been in the past and that working towards that future requires both the efforts of those who want education and those who want to provide it. Dialectics, whoo, baby!

In recent weeks we’ve talked about criticism (Learned Vol. 8, Issue 26, Critical Critique) and intuition (Learned Vol. 8, Issue 30, Intuit, I’m not). Dialectics is the cross-spar that spans the gulf between those two ideas. Criticism, we noted, needs to be redefined to suggest examination not censure; intuition needs to be re-defined as pattern-recognition, not witchiness.

Dialectics needs to be pulled out of the clouds of academic and philosophical jargon and into real world use as a tool for examining conflicting ideas; dialectics is a lofty ambition to which we should aspire to lift all our debates and arguments until we are able to arrive at better, more robust thinking regarding our patterns and systems. Two things can be true.

Stay curious,

Joel

I kind of hate that phrase. My gut has been leading me astray for decades. Mostly in the form of abject cowardice in the face of attaining what I actually want in life. I wouldn’t trust my gut as far as I could throw it. What I would trust, however, is my intuition.

I’ve always been relatively good at reading people.1 Of course, like everyone, sometimes my reading of people is only well after it would have been convenient. The number of missed cues and opportunities could fill volumes. Like I said, good at reading people. Situations? Not so much.

That said, the one place my gut has never missed has been in the classroom. Actually, no, I take that back. These days, the one place my gut never misses is in the classroom. But it took a hell of a lot of work and experience to get to this point.

Intuition is, inarguably, one of the most powerful tools in a teacher’s kit. It’s what lets you understand, in a picosecond, whether the student in front of you is genuinely in distress or if they’re just playing for time, sympathy, or extra chances.

I’ve spent the past two weeks administering mid-terms. Most students I teach came to class, did the test, and went away again with nary an issue. Maybe they don’t like me as much as they did before, but that’s a whole different thing. But, every semester, I have a few students who end up skipping the test day. What to do?

The rules are different at every university, but most boil down to two things - the rule and the teacher’s discretion. They have to because, the rule is strict. At the moment, every university I’m familiar with has a similar policy - unless you are at death’s door, your entire immediate family just perished on the Titanic, or an act of a full pantheon of Gods prevented you from getting to class, you miss the test, you fail the class.

But.

We put that line about the teacher’s discretion in there for a reason. When a student emails me halfway through exam day telling me they’ve overslept, I have to make a decision, usually on the spot. Is this student normally prompt? Do they have all their work done? Have they asked for mercy clemency before? And, most importantly, do I trust that they made a genuine mistake in extenuating circumstances? If the math comes down to yes, yes, no, yes, then they get to make-up the exam with no penalties.

If the math is anything else, well, it depends on the circumstances, the student, and, although I hate to admit it in public, how I’m feeling on any given day.2

And so we come back to intuition. As a kid, my only association with the word intuition was in the phrase “women’s intuition” which was used to explain why women were such emotional creatures and men were less-talk-more-do creatures of action! Bullshit so thick you can’t even wade through it, right? It was a different time, as if that were any kind of excuse.

As I’ve gotten older I’ve realized that intuition is more than some mystical ability to understand other people’s emotions. It is a function of pattern-recognition, that little understood ability that separates us hairless apes from the rest of kingdom animalia.

Let’s get the definition from Merriam-Webster:

the power or faculty of attaining to direct knowledge or cognition without evident rational thought and inference

Yeeeaaaaahhh, kinda?3 Maybe if we get into the synonyms we’ll find something a bit better. Still using M-W, we find instinct, suspicion, impression, perception but sadly no guts or the trusting thereof. But all these words lead me back to the same point - these are the words used when we know something but cannot identify the pathway through which we have learned it.

And that comes back to pattern recognition. The older we get, presumably, the more experienced we get and therefore the better we are at spotting patterns. In other words, the longer you’ve been around, the more patterns you’ve seen, the more you recognize them when you see them again. It’s not always that clear, but that’s the general gist.

For me, in the classroom, this means that I’ve seen so many students over the years4 that very little that happens in the course of a semester is genuinely new.

The pandemic was, of course, the big exception to this and yet this also speaks to one reason why the pandemic was so disruptive. Not only was it something new for all of us on a daily basis, it was outside our knowledge and our intuition. It was such a novel event that most of us had nothing resembling any kind of experience from which a pattern could be discerned.

So, it’s interesting then, that intuition has undergone something of a semantic shift. While it has always had its sense of looking at or perceiving something, there was a definite spiritual / supernatural flavor to the word when it first entered English. It was used by the clergy to denote the understanding that came as a result of studying the word of God; i.e. if you read your Bible religiously (hah!) you would have a greater understanding of the world and be able to move through it more smoothly. Pattern recognition by any other name, right?

Conflict arises when institutions don’t allow their staff to use their intuition, when they reward strict adherence to guidelines and rules rather than individual situations as determined by experienced teachers.

Stay curious

Joel

Buuuuuuttttt, I’m also guilty as hell. It’s true, though I am loathe to admit it. I, too, have given unasked for advice. It’s not as clear in my memory though because when I give advice, I’m being a nice guy and passing on the benefit of my hard won wisdom! And whether or not my experience is directly related or even a little relevant is not something I often stop to consider. Because, well, see the preceding one hundred and sixty-three words.

That said, I bring this up now because criticism and critique have gotten a bit conflated in the discourse and that’s a problem.

As you can surmise, both words come from the root word critic, which we’ll define here as both someone who judges something and as someone who has the expertise to carefully analyze a work of art. In other words, a critic, in the best sense, is not someone who is dismissing something or just being negative for negativity’s sake but rather someone who has studied, learned, and practiced enough to be able to look at something and tell us what does and does not work about it.

Which brings me back to criticism and critique and how disappointed I am in Merriam-Webster2 for conflating them to the point that they have listed the two words as synonyms. That said, they have a couple of very important, very relevant definitions for criticism/critique:

the act of criticizing usually unfavorably

seeking encouragement rather than criticism

and

the art of evaluating or analyzing works of art or literature

And, look, as you and I know, there are no true synonyms in English. You don’t get to have a million and some words without imbuing each and every one without a plethora of nuance and subtlety. So, even though criticism and critique have been conflated, we have a chance to pull them back apart and make them do separate jobs.

Let me give you an example:

A couple years ago, everyone decided to get in a lather over Critical Race Theory,3 choosing to read it as an indictment of the system as it stands rather than a clinical, analytical critique of the systemic racism that disadvantages so many people of color in our existing political, economic, and social structures.

In other words, a critical read on the problems in our culture and how to fix them should not be read as a criticism of those in the system, even though they weren’t asking for advice on how to fix it. Because, critically, no one was asking for advice because no one knew it was a problem. You see the circular problem, here, right? If unasked for advice is criticism, it’s hard to offer solutions to problems we can’t see.

Basically, this is what I’ve been trying to do with this volume of Learned. I’m trying to critique the institutions and thinking that have created modern academia without criticizing anyone for being a part of it. I mean, I’m not out here telling people to quit their jobs or burn down the schools, but I am saying that those schools might need to be modernized a bit. Hence, critique but not criticize.

So. In the end, if we surrender the word criticism to the pedantic and uninformed, we gift it to those who would judge and dismiss us, our works, and our experience summarily without the experience or permission to do so, we are left with critique as a way of analyzing our works and our systems humanely and without attacking the creators of said works and systems.

Or, to put it simply, burn the straw men and critique the fire, not the builders.

Stay curious,

Joel

And Now For Something Completely Different

In previous volumes of Learned I gave out book recommendations - things I was enjoying that all y’all wordy nerdy types might enjoy, too. Since the holidays are descending upon us faster than your friendly neighborhood locust swarm, I thought it might be a good time to dedicate a little space in this and the next few issues to some word-nerd books you might like.

So, with that in mind, here’s the first recommendation (and yes, this is an affiliate link. If you buy the book after clicking this link, I get a li’l kickback):

Why We Love Baseball

by Joe Posnanski

Hey, wait a minute, that’s not a word book! I know, but bear with me, I have a point to make: If you’re the kind of reader that gets into word nerdery because you love the weird histories and quirky stories that comprise the odd and erratic formation of our favorite words, then you’ll love this book. The author applies that same pedantic, laser-like focus the stories and moments that have built modern baseball.

By looking at the ways in which history cycles around in the form of incredible hits, bases, and outs, his work mirrors the etymologists’ love for how words come up again and again throughout history, slightly changed, but always simultaneously both familiar and new. Look, I’m not saying you’ll be a baseball stat nerd by the time you’re done with this book, but I am saying you’ll enjoy figuring out just why you could become one.

And Now For Something Completely Different, Part II

The Japan Writer’s Conference is happening in just a couple of weeks. I’m not sure if my schedule is going to allow me to attend both days (maybe not even one!) of the conference, but I’m going to try. If you’re in Japan and reading this and going to the conference, drop me a line and let me know what you’re going to be doing there. Maybe we can make some space for something interesting to happen.

Enter analysis. Not quite science, not quite religion, the art of analysis is something hardwired into us hairless apes. We notice, define, categorize, compare, conflate and configure the patterns around us until we can, hopefully, create some semblance of order from the chaos.

The thing is, what we mean by analysis drifts. Language isn’t math. And yet, in school I had both a math analysis class as well as a modern lit. analysis class. For such two varying subjects, the analysis was depressingly similar and yet equally flawed in both disciplines for very different reasons.

Let me get the two points out of the way up front, since I know half of you are still short on caffeine and the other half are way past capacity already.

1. Treating language like math is a sometimes-useful analogy, but over-reliance on it fundamentally disrupts how we perceive and use language. It also feeds into a lot of the false assumptions about how much AI can “understand.”

2. Analytical skills, ones honed and developed through education and practice, are crucial. The ability to break something down, interpret, and rebuild meaning is the single most valuable intellectual habit education can give us.

So. To start at the beginning, the word analysis comes from Latin and Greek roots meaning “to loosen up.” In English, it’s been around since the mid-16th century and, unlike most words that old, it hasn’t drifted much. It still means breaking something complex into its smaller parts to understand it better.

The irony, of course, is that modern schooling often treats analysis as the opposite. Notice it, label it, and stick it in a box from which it is never to be freed. We took a word that literally means “to loosen” and turned it into an exercise in limitations.

The thing is, we learn to analyze things before we ever learn the word. Take Little Red Riding Hood. It’s essentially a lesson plan in three parts:

1. Notice the details around you. Has something changed? Does Grandma look or sound different?

2. Identify what you see. Oh, Grandma’s teeth are sharper than usual.

3. Decide what to do. Maybe call the woodsman and get that big bad wolf served up in pieces? Sure. Why not.

It’s exaggerated, sure, but it’s analysis. The kid’s not placing Grandma in stasis and assuming that any changes must be natural because the label says Grandma and so therefore, it must be Grandma. Instead, she’s seeing where the pattern no longer fits and making an interpretation of the new pattern. You know, analysisizing.

But then the kid gets to first grade and out go the fairy tales and in come the rules and the boxes and the labels and the “correct” answers.

Back in the day, languages were taught grammar-first. You learned the parts of speech, you memorized formulas, and you applied them dogmatically. Anything that didn’t fit was “incorrect.” That’s how we ended up with ridiculous old rules like never split an infinitive or never end a sentence with a preposition.

For those hoary old prescriptivists, it made language logical, structured, and, in theory, predictable. But it also made it derivative, formulaic, and mechanical. And, not to get on a side-rant, it has directly led to the situation we’re in now with A.I.

A.I. is a useful tool because a lot of language is formulaic. That email to your boss follows the same pattern more-or-less every time. The machines are very good at telling us what most often comes next in this particular sequence or pattern. But, as we see time and time again, the pattern does not automatically equate to meaning.

Take Janis Joplin’s “Mercedes Benz.”1
She sings:

Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a night on the town.
I’m counting on you Lord, please don’t let me down.
Prove that you love me, and buy the next round,
Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a night on the town.

I love this song for so many reasons, but that line—buy the next round—always catches me.

Long before lyric sheets and websites, I used to wonder if it was “buy the next round” or “by the next round.” Both make sense. And given how much Joplin drew from Kris Kristofferson, who was not above sneaking a pun or three into a song, I’ve always liked to imagine it’s deliberately ambiguous.

And that’s the point I’m trying to make. When we apply the pattern recognition tools to the lyric we can see the math. We can see exactly, precisely how often the phrases “by the next round” or “buy the next round” crop up in the zeitgeist. We can tell you with agonizing precision the etymology and grammatical function of every word in either phrase. But we can’t tell you which is right.

Sure, the lyric sheet says it’s “buy,” but, and here’s a secret, everyone who had a hand in writing the song is dead. And, not just that, but Joplin herself died shortly after recording the song. The album it appears on was released posthumously. So, who wrote the lyric sheet? Who put it in the album sleeve? Where did they get their “correct” version from?

Who cares. Because what they try to teach us in English class is different from what they try to teach us in math class. In math, we analyze a problem and look for methods to find the right answer. In English, we analyze a problem and look for interpretations that suggest an answer.

So, yeah, language isn’t math. Analysis, at its best, isn’t about correctness. Analysis is about curiosity. And you know what I’m going to say next…

Stay curious,

Joel

Instead, I find myself thinking less about the words and more about how the systems that shape so much of modern life are fundamentally broken. Actually, let me take that back - they’re not broken so much as they’re antiquated. Academia is a good example wherein a lot of the practices that are in place today evolved over centuries only to be stood on their heads when seen in the light of modern understanding. Things that were normal are now seen as privileged and things that were thought to be the natural order of things are now understood to be the result of inequalities baked into top-down societies.

This is seen in words like orthodoxy and doctrine and pedagogy, all relics from a time when people were trying to bring light and knowledge into the world, but all twisted into standardized practices that may have lost their function in the modern world. Likewise job titles like dean and doctor. Their actual roles in academic institutions are a far cry from where the words came from.

Semantic shift is, of course, nothing new. Every word we have, the good ones, the bad ones, the ones somewhere in between have undergone some kind of shift over the centuries. But it’s worth examining these words to find the hidden bones that may help us to understand how today’s institutions were built. It’s a lot easier to dismantle them that way.

And that’s what surprises me, about myself, the most. I don’t think of myself as a deconstructionist. For as much as I delight in absurdity and, occasionally, in articulated chaos, I do like things to have structure and order. But if any one thing has become clear over the past 26 issues, it’s that I don’t think modern education is worth the paper it foists off on graduates. Funny what sort of thoughts come slithering out of the dark recesses of the mind, innit?

Also, the irony being that I’ve spent my entire professional life as a teacher of one stripe or another is neither unrelated nor irrelevant. Rather, it is the entire fucking point.

The next two dozen issues of Learned have been mapped out. They’ll continue in this vein of academic words that may have outlived their usefulness in so far as the institution, position, or idea they represent have become obsolete and in need of replacing. However, rather than get into the words that represent classroom learning, the positions of power, or the ways in which learning have become commodified, we’ll shift into discussing words that describe how we learn.

I hope this will lead us into thinking more about what has become my thesis for this volume - that we need to reclaim learning as an intentional, joyful act of will, one that allows us to become our fullest selves regardless of the expectations or limitations placed on us by our educational systems. I hope that by discussing the words that describe the linguistic and sociological processes we engage in when we learn we’ll be able to find ways to do some of that reclamation. God knows I could use some of it.

For now though, for this week, I need a break. Hence this recess. I hope you’re all doing well. I look forward to seeing you back here next week, with the first word in the latter half of Learned Volume 8, analysis.

Stay curious,

Joel

Hi. Spooky season imagery, y’all. Come on in.

To my mind, the most salvage worthy part of the corpus academia is in the system of oversight and quality control known as accreditation. If you went to a traditional university with a campus and faculty and actual classrooms, chances are good you went to an accredited university, i.e. one that has met specific pedagogical and educational criteria designed to ensure that any student who attends will receive an education equal to the cost of acquiring it.

And, look, the reason I’m honing on this is because accreditation is a very specific word. It literally means to point towards trust. When the word first entered English it was as a verb. You could accredit someone, meaning that you vouched for them. In other words, you could point Tarbelly towards Featherfoot and they would both understand that you were saying that you trust Featherfoot and therefore Tarbelly could also trust Featherfoot.

Now, the internet has brought an entirely new class of learning products to the consumer. Which is…good? You want to study something useful and skills based like Underwater Basket Weaving? There’s a course for that. Something ridiculous like Political Grandstanding for Fun and Profit? Got a course right here.

The point is, it’s easy these days to find online courses for every subject under the sun. But. Verifying that the course was created or sourced by someone who actually knows what they’re talking about is hard. Really, obnoxiously hard.

Take your average gymfluencer1, for example. What proof do you have that they have any idea what the hell they’re talking about? A quick before and after photo splashed on the screen like Photoshop hasn’t been a thing for thirty years.

Ok, maybe influencers are not the same kind of product that universities offer and therefore exempt from the same kind of accreditation demands. But what about the incredible number of commodified lesson systems out there? An influencer buys your time with a promise to help you achieve something: lose weight, get rich, become a playboy. Become Batman. Whatever. Meanwhile a university is promising something else entirely. They’re promising to teach you the skills you need to get a job. To level up your life.

And the key thing here, is that whether the influencer met the obligation of their promise is up to you to decide. Meanwhile, whether a university does is conferred in the status of the degree you earn and what that then says about you. It is entirely external.

Because of this, we’ve created an entire system of oversight, bylaws, and accountability known as accreditation. Social media and its influencers, gurus, and podcast bros…hasn’t. And as long as the promise to change your life for the better stays firmly in the realm of the parasocial, well, such is life. Increasingly though, the social sphere and the online education sphere are intersecting in weird and interesting ways. This is good. The lack of oversight and accountability is not.

I’ve done a bunch of online courses over the years. Call it a hobby, call it a folly, call it Tuesday night, it’s something I enjoy. A lot of the courses I take are not from properly accredited institutions but they kind of borrow that level of trust (credit, anyone?) by associating themselves heavily with universities. These are places like FutureLearn and The Knight Center for Journalism. Their courses are taught by university professors and are promoted as adjacent to standard curricula. They’re not really the problem.

But I’ve also taken a bunch of course from two different, very contrasting sources: Domestika and O’Reilly. The former is all art and soft skills. It’s an educational system in the same vein as Masterclass or Udemy. Anyone can make a class and the only real verification is that you can actually produce what you say you can. In other words, if I make a course promising to teach you how to do Underwater Basket Weaving for fun and profit, I’d better be able to walk you through the weaves.

O’Reilly, on the other hand, started out as a publisher. Back when, if you walked into any sort of tech office, you’d see a pile of books with different animals on the covers on every desk; if you needed some kind of coding knowledge, O’Reilly had a book for it. When the internet started to really go mainstream, O’Reilly decided to create on online school to teach people to learn to code.

The issue with both systems, Domestika and O’Reilly, is that being able to do something doesn’t mean you’ll be able to teach others how to do it. I’ve had some fantastic experiences on Domestika. Funny, articulate, knowledgeable people who have helped me level up my art skills. O’Reilly, on the other hand, well, I have a few certificates from them and I can’t code to save my life.

To me, this shows that in the shift from more formal learning to self-directed, independent, and online learning2, the nature of accreditation and what it means to be a trusted source of pedagogy has to change as well. A lack of accreditation really means a lack of accountability.

And my argument here is that we need a similar sort of system for all the new online learning facilities sprouting up like mushrooms. I know, I know, the last thing any of us needs is more decisions made by committee and haven’t we already seen that accreditation is mostly a scam? Whomever pays the right fees gets accredited? Yeah. Possibly. Doesn’t change the fact that bureaucracy, is a tool and when applied in the right manner, it can protect the individual against the system. In this case, a system that demands oversight and protection against unrealistic expectations and inept pedagogy might go a long way towards turning online education from a half-assed method of maybe learning something, to a real and valuable method of engaging in true learning.

Stay curious,

Joel

But, of course, the book fair wasn’t just books. Posters, pencils, trapper keepers, stickers, lots of stuff. And, yeah, it was school-related stuff, mostly. You might have to squint a little to figure out how my Concorde poster related to school, but, sure, scholastic.

Since then, Scholastic has become scholastic in that it no longer makes me think of a brand name but rather a bunch of dusty academics crowded into mildewing libraries debating the pragmatics of whether scholarly and scholastic are proper synonyms. But capitalized or not, the dark secret is that modern scholarship too often comes down to money.

Common collocations - achievement, performance, success, integrity - sound great. But as study after study has shown, the amount of funding and resources a given school has noticeably impacts how students do. So, in other words, money drastically affects academia which means academia, like everything else, is becoming enshittified at an alarming rate.

Enshittification1 is a great word. As far as I know, Cory Doctorow made it up several years ago to describe the way things fall apart in the modern world: a company makes a great product to attract customers -> customers add value to the company -> the value attracts investors -> investors become shareholders -> shareholders demand profit -> profit demands more ‘innovation’ at the cost of the product consumers knew and loved -> product becomes shitty -> customers abandon the product -> the company is sold for parts -> investors profit regardless -> consumers lose a valued and beloved product to the whims of modern capitalism. Enshitification.

That route highlights the hidden power of money behind everything. So let’s look at scholarship. We know where the money is in academia, right? It’s in the funding and grants that drive universities, it’s in the allocations and budgets that go to public schools. But it’s also in the tools we’re building to teach ourselves.

Let me give you an example. Millions of us have tried Duolingo for learning a language. Why? Because it’s fun. Because we like learning. Now, whether Duolingo’s method is the best way of learning is up for debate, but the point remains - we try it because we like learning. As I write this, in October of 2025, my TikTok feed is bombarded by ads for ’smart’ versions of TikTok that promise to replace doomscrolling with learning. Nice work if you can get it, I guess.

A lot of these services are free. Only not really, right? Because if an app is free in this day and age it’s because the app is not the product, we are. In the enshittification flow-chart I put up above, an app like Duolingo is smack dab in the middle, in the process of adding features users don’t want in an attempt to bring in new users and therefore generate more revenue for their shareholders. Cycle, meet Vicious.

So what do we do about it?

In this current series in Learned, where I’ve been poking at the words that define academia with a cattle prod, hoping to stir the behemoth into enough life that it affects change within itself, I’ve talked about the value in developing one’s one teaching and learning styles (Issue 8.7 Possessive Pedagogy). I’ve talked about how everyone should take ownership of their curiosity and use to bring light and knowledge into the world (Issue 8.14 Doctor Thyself). And now I’m saying that doing so is one of the strongest tools we have in fighting against, well, you know.

And because we need a name for this taking back of knowledge and self-directed learning, I propose scholastification2. Scholastification isn’t just autodidacticism3; it’s the willful, deliberate rejection of the monetization of learning in favor of staying curious in a system that wants curiosity to be profitable. And it’s a defiant reminder that learning is fun.

Scholastic means related to school. We know that. But back in the original Greek, scholastēs meant live as you please4. And part of doing that meant learning shit just because you want to and because you can. It wasn’t until the clergy brought the word into Latin and from there to French and English that it acquired its modern meaning. But forget the modern meaning. Let’s take scholastic back to its roots - learning something because it’s fun, just because you can.

Because that’s what we need now. The Internet has a thousand ways to learn things. From Masterclass to Wikihow to some random dudes TikTok where he shows you how to change the oil in your car, learning on the internet is easy. And yet we’re in danger of losing that because it doesn’t turn a profit. Because it doesn’t ‘contribute’ to the economy except for the very limited number of creators who can get the eyeballs to squeeze money from the service providers.

At the end of the day, though, we’re just humans. We are, as Terry Pratchett framed it, the falling angel meeting the rising ape. And we are so damned inquisitive and so damned curious about this reality we inhabit and it’s we have to protect that at all costs. We are merely human and we love learning5. Just because it’s fucking fun.

So here’s my proposal - every time you learn something just because you want to, just because it tickles your noggin’, call it a scholastic act. Not something you did because someone assigned it or because you got internet points for it. Every act of learning is scholastic curiosity. Scholastic joy. Scholastic fervor. Scholastification.

Stay curious,

Joel