Conveniently I wrote about graduation speeches this week. You can easily avoid getting booed by also doing what you should do anyway, which is not talking about yourself or your interests too much. A commencement speech, it turns out, isn’t about you.

My first story for @theatlantic.com is about how ed tech slop is taking over American classrooms. Gift link: www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

This is me alighting from the basement walkout after the St. Louis tornado a year ago today. The EF-3 storm was recently revised to have been bigger (1.8 miles wide) ands stronger (152mph winds) than previously thought. We are still finishing repairs. It has been a part of every single day.

Welcome to Churntown

I wrote about commencement speeches, which are weird. I had thought that the lasting and memorable ones—JFK at American, DFW at Kenyon, etc.—were ideal. But you sort of want a boring graduation speech, one that does the arguably harder work of taking a back seat to the people and the day.

If you use Workday for your job, ponder that many of us professors now have to use it for college courses, too. This helpful Workday Student message from this morning explains that 27 grades have been approved for my class of 27 students, and 27 students still do not have an approved grade.

Reminder that you gotta follow me on Instagram for gelatobogost: www.instagram.com/ibogost

Just wait til the reveal for this one.

A ransomware attack on the course-management system Canvas threw college classes into chaos—and showed the fragility of a digital campus, @ibogost.com argues.

I wrote about the Canvas outage, and the sorrow of living inside a world made of software.

I used to be firmly "videogames," especially during my early-career, hard-core-game-studies period. Now I'm staunchly "video games," either because I'm a style-guide zealot now, or because the matter was decided in the direction of "nobody cares."

University IT policy emails this morning: "I know, I'm terrible—making you use a courseware SaaS."

Canvas, the courseware service, is down everywhere due to a ransomware attack. My students are supposed to submit their final projects on Canvas by midnight. I can't even email them to let them know what's going on because course management of that nature is handled through… Canvas.

Bet you $1,000 this kid‘s name is Danny.

I had to run to make an airplane connection for the first time in years, and I made it just barely, and after catching my breath I felt a strange nostalgia for carrying out thr act, as if doing so signaled presence or romance instead of airline consolidation having made the connection necessary.

Things that used to be true but have not been for so long you probably forgot: An electronic device that plays music and/or provisions telephony came with earbuds Selecting text from computer interfaces selected the text you intended to select instead of arbitrary other elements near the interface

Wait havent I been doing this since 2018 but without the explicit trademark infringement? buns.life

Okay fine maybe sociology is good.

Oh this was the end result. It’s Aperol creamsicle. (You should follow me on Instagram for gelato content: www.instagram.com/ibogost)

"That's what the reservation is for!"

Great day here.

I hate this.

Good morning.

Periodic note that TIAA is very, very bad and I would urge you not to get involved with them if any other options are possible. If not, you should REALLY talk to an actual, non-TIAA financial planner to understand how to defend yourself against their terribleness.

I wrote about John Apple.

For fuck’s sake

While more watchable than anything else on television, I don’t think The Pitt was successful this season. It’s fine to lean into ER soap opera, but the show did so by pathologizing every character in a way that was not social realist but really just kind of pat and incredible.

Can someone teach airline app programmers how to manage memory so the session doesn’t dump when you background to look at your calendar or whatever?

I tried and do not recommend these.

Dear friends, today is a great day to preorder my new book, and I've made a webpage that makes that easy for you, so why not just do it? gratifying.life

Remember when you could mail things?

Marketing emails, even solicited ones, should be subject to a per-send tax paid by senders and used to fund the postal service.

Gas-station signs have long reflected the mood of the consumer economy—but as the role of gasoline in Americans’ lives shifts, these placards may begin to represent something else, @ibogost.com argues:

Everyday

Finally, they made them crunchy.

I wrote about the strangely romantic, improbably shared experience of the American gas-station sign—and why it might be ending.

Good morning my darlings.

Tires for a movin’ van.

If you’ve been following this story about the firing of the President of the Universities of Wisconsin, one detail you may not have expected is that my cousin Amy is the president of the UW Board of Regents.

Oh hey I did the @chronicle.com College Matters podcast this week. You can listen to my mellifluous voice here: pod.link/1766357400/e...

I can't stop thinking about these photos. Six decades of massive technological improvement separates them, and yet the Artemis photographs are not better, as images. They are arguably much worse. They feel fake, uninspired, somehow eviscerated of the awe of Earthrise and its cousins.

I invite you to reflect upon the insane universe we have built in which people need to undergo training to learn how to give their employees raises. Not how to do so fairly or motivationally, but in the mechanical sense of how to enter numbers into an ERP system.

Whew

Weirdly affecting to be reminded of the time when "tape" meant what "content" means today.

I was in Palo Alto last week, and as a former Angeleno, reminded that Bay Area humans drive like midwesterners, not Californians.

My friend, the philosopher Iain Thomson, did this little intro to Derrida video, and it’s a fun listen—but also made me feel like the Derrida Age, which I very much remember, was such a long time ago. I suppose it was.

Apparently you can pay someone to hide plastic eggs in your yard.

I got to thinking about the -maxxing online verbal tic—the thing "Looksmaxxing" made widespread. The truth is: online life is intrinsically extremist in every way, and Maxxxing is finally honest about that perversion.

I don’t understand Bluesky. Look at my feed. I get zero engagement. This random post has tons of it. Why?

I just opened a new non-fiction book about a topic of interest outside my personal expertise and professional orbits. The preface was so self-indulgent and off-putting I may not continue. Can’t remember this ever happening before.