Hello everyone! For those keeping score at home, this "weekly-ish" newsletter has been dormant the past ~4 weeks. The reason for that is that after weighing it the past 2 years, this year I decided to throw my hat in the ring and run for one of two seats on our local Board of Education. Since making that decision in mid-April, it's been a 4-week sprint of a campaign where I've had to learn a lot, stretch myself, create signs, flyers and a simple webpage, and all that has taken up almost all of my time outside of work.

The good news is... 🗳️ Election Day is this Tuesday so the sprint is almost over. Almost. Today I'm planning to canvas our neighborhood, hand out flyers and hopefully meet some folks as the weather's looking up.

For today's newsletter, I wanted to share a bit about what led me to decide to run for this volunteer position:

  1. As our country is getting increasingly polarized and chaotic at the national level, I wanted to invest my own time and energy in a way where I believe I can avoid the noise and have a positive impact on something that matters to me in a way that would more deeply connect me to our community (as we all as starting to learn - deeper social + community connections are a critical ingredient to a healthy and hopefully longer life)
  2. There are multiple challenges our schools are wrestling with that are related to technology in one way or another - cell phones in schools, social media and social-emotional wellbeing, the role of AI in education - and I felt my background working in tech the past 25 years could be a useful voice on the Board as we navigate these questions as a district.
  3. I've never been part of any kind of campaign for office and it demands things that are not only not in my wheelhouse but as someone with many introverted tendencies, they are things I often instinctively try to avoid. In the interest demonstrating to myself that you're never to old to learn and evolve, I wanted to put myself in a situation where I was going to be uncomfortable so I could see how I show up (and hopefully grow). This involved a lot of "putting myself out there" through hosting meet and greets, distributing signs, recruiting volunteers, actively engaging individuals in the broader community and preparing for a candidate forum where all three candidates had to be ready to answer 10 different questions live in front of an audience. The forum was by far the most stressful part of this whole process. Through it I learned that with the right preparation (color coded index card system 🤓, multiple practice sessions and a beta blocker) I was able to do it and I think I did ok! Maybe someday I'll be able to watch the whole video all the way through 🙈
  4. I think it's important both for my own mental wellbeing, and to demonstrate to our kids, that while work is important it shouldn't be the only thing you invest yourself in. I've definitely had periods of my life where my work and my identity were more deeply intertwined than I think was healthy (for me, but ymmv) so I got excited about this opportunity because it was something I could pour some of myself into that wasn't work-related.

The whole process has been stressful but also satisfying and kinda fun. I've got a few Get Out the Vote activities planned for the next 3 days and then it'll be over. I'm proud of the campaign I've run, grateful to all my friends and family who've supported and encouraged me through the whole process and excited to see the results on Tuesday 🤞!

It was weird to design (and distribute) so many things about you with your face on them, like this flyer 😬

Things I've been into this month

(Not intentional, but I realize there's a slight education-related angle to these recommendations.)

Here’s where I actually am: I think we’ve just been going through a catastrophic experiment with screens and children.

And right now, we are starting to figure out that this was a bad idea. Schools are banning phones. My sense is that they are not relying very much on laptops and iPads. There was a big vogue for a while that every kid gets their own laptop or tablet. I think that’s beginning to go away, if I’m reading the tea leaves of this right. So I feel a bit better about that as a parent of young kids.

I really feel badly for the parents whose kids have been navigating this over the past 10 years or so. And right now I see A.I. coming, and I don’t think we understand it at all. I don’t think we understand how to teach with it. I don’t think the studies we’re doing right now are good yet — there are too many other effects we’re not going to be measuring.

There’s the narrow thing that a program does, and then there’s what it does for a kid to be staring at a screen all the time in a deeper way. I believe human beings are embodied. And if you made me choose between sending my kids to a school that has no screens at all and one that is trying the latest in A.I. technology, I would send them to the school with no screens at all in a second.

But we’re going to be working through this somehow. And what scares me, putting aside what world my kids graduate into, is their moving into schools at the exact time that educators don’t know what the hell to do with this technology. And they’re about to try a lot of things that don’t work and probably try it badly.

🎧 📖 This is an excerpt from a recent episode of Ezra Klein's podcast, ‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’, and it deeply deeply resonates with me.

If you have even a passing interest in the topic, if you have children (or are planning to), it's worth a listen. It's a conversation Jessica Winthrop, author of The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better, a book I'm now planning to check out.

🎧 📺 I learned about a documentary on Hulu called Social Studies on a recent episode of Search Engine called 'What are teenagers actually seeing on their phones?' The podcast is a great conversation with the filmmaker, Lauren Greenfield, about how she made a documentary where a bunch of kids gave her access to what shows up on their phones for a year and it sounds fascinating:

A group of teenagers agrees to allow a filmmaker to record the things they do on their phones for a year-long experiment. To see the world they see through their phones, to encounter their algorithms. The results are honest, at times pretty upsetting, and tell us a lot about the internet that Gen-Z finds itself on. In the middle of our big, confusing, national argument about teenagers and their phones, a few answers.

We're planning to watch with our tween/teens.

In a previous issue of this newsletter I shared a podcast from Derek Thompson about the incredibly interesting life of James Garfield (if you haven't listened yet, I highly recommend). Now that I've been totally Garfield-pilled I was excited to discover that Netflix is working on a series produced by D.B. Weiss and David Benioff (Game of Thrones, The 3 Body Problem) about the former president starring Matthew Macfayden, Michael Shannon, and many more amazing actors and actresses. You can read about it here.

🎶 Here's a neat little interactive experience from The Pudding where you can move through music and see how influences get passed down along the way. Really fun to play with and listen to. (h/t kottke)

Finally, I came across this lovely little limited-edition product being hand built in New York by a small team called Poetry Camera. It's a custom-built camera that takes "pictures" but the pictures are generated as poems using AI and large language models. Don't worry - of course there are settings for "haiku" or "sonnet". Each camera costs $699. You can read more about it here and you can follow their progress by subscribing to their newsletter.

To me this is as much of an art piece as it is a "product." It's the kind of whimsical take on tech meets art project that made my graduate program at NYU, ITP, so special.

That's all for this week. Thank you for reading. If you want each new edition in your inbox, you can subscribe below or follow right from your favorite RSS reader.