The New Math is My Father’s Math
My father is an engineer. For a time, in the 1960s, he worked on the heat shield for the Apollo modules that took us to…
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Prompts are the New Assignment
My family loves Harry Potter. Our oldest borrowed more books from her school library last year than anyone else in the building, but Hogwarts is…
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The Most Precise Word in the Dictionary
One of the ideas behind my writing course is that for every classic writing form—the sentence, the citation, the argument, the resume—there is a counterpart…
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The Art is Invisible
Coco is great. Pixar’s latest is everything you want. It’s gorgeous. It’s respectful. It’s human. Like all Pixar films, it touches the heart with these…
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The Big Picture is in Our Heads
We bought one of the girls a train for Christmas and it brought together a lot of ideas for me. First, it was no surprise…
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Nothing is Normal
In mathematics and computer science, “algorithm” and “effective method” have precise definitions, but for most of us, effective means whatever works. From brushing our teeth…
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A LinkedIn Profile is Not a Resume
I want to tell you about two conversations I had, one over coffee and one over lunch. When I lived in New Haven, Connecticut, I…
