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F*ck E-Learning. Snow Days Teach Us Something More Important.

January 4, 2023 by Museum Fatigue

Two hours ago I woke up to that special kind of muffled winter silence, pulled the shade, and looked out the window. While we slept, the weather remade our average neighborhood into a fantastic land. We got the kind of snow that makes Minnesota a special place to live. I couldn’t wait for our 4th grader to wake up and see the outside prepared this way for him. An unexpected forest beyond the wardrobe! Then a message arrived from the […]

Categories: Anthropocene, Education, Uncategorized • Tags: public education, snow day

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College Was Already Remote Education

October 17, 2020 by Museum Fatigue

I’ve been trying to tack down this education-related pandemic frustration that has been bugging me. This fall colleges have been trying to figure out how to approximate a normal educational experience for students (and normal tuition-dollar revenue) despite the drastic difference of online/remote learning or limited physically-displaced and masked in-person engagements. College management and educators—sometimes working together or other times working at cross-purposes—both agree they want education to continue and universities to survive the unknowns of a pandemic economy. So […]

Categories: Debt, Higher Education, Uncategorized • Tags: Debt, higher education, pandemic, student debt, student loans

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This School’s COVID-19 Video Has Filled Me With Dread

July 22, 2020 by Museum Fatigue

After watching this video I feel even worse about the upcoming semester. I am overcome with dread. I’m sure this school designed this video to make their students feel confident about the fall, but it’s a joke. It could have been made by The Onion or SNL. What is left behind in the quest to deal technically with the problem of a poorly managed pandemic is pretty much everything that makes teaching and learning in person valuable at all. No […]

Categories: Higher Education, Mythologies, pandemic, Uncategorized • Tags: COVID-19, pandemic

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Happy Birthday, Johnathan

July 3, 2020 by Museum Fatigue

Johnathan the tortoise turned 188 yesterday. The oldest living land animal—his life has spanned the deaths of every animal on the planet. The world into which he was born is unimaginable to us except as fiction. To put this in perspective, when he was born there were only 24 United States and the Civil War was still thirty years in the future. The last ship bringing enslaved people to the US wouldn’t set sail for another 28 years and the […]

Categories: Uncategorized • Tags: Anthropocene, tortoise

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Things to Remember From The COVID Spring #7: People on the Streets

March 28, 2020 by Museum Fatigue

One thing I definitely will remember about this strange period is seeing so many people out walking in the neighborhood and in the parks. It seems counter intuitive that “social distancing” and “sheltering in place” would result in so many people about in public spaces. With many people at home and few options for other things, it seems everyone wants to get outside. It doesn’t hurt, of course, that it’s springtime. Streets with so many people on them must be […]

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Experiences All The Way Down

February 24, 2020 by Museum Fatigue

Just before nine o’clock last evening, I received an email notification that I book I ordered from Amazon had been delivered to a shipment locker not so far from my home. In what I hope was a self-referential joke on the nature of capital, its name was “Vlad” no less! Since I had just finished my most recent book and was looking forward to adding the new arrival to the pile next to my favorite chair, I decided to head […]

Categories: Consumption, Uncategorized • Tags: Amazon, experiences

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Mystery Object #25: Chinese Rockery Fountain

February 23, 2019 by Museum Fatigue

While visiting the Nanjing Confucius Temple area a few months ago with some visitors, I happened cross an incredible object. It was a water fountain for sale in a tourist shop at a dramatic discount. I was immediately captivated by its motion and drawn in by its fascinating and unconventional details. My companions initially thought that I was joking when I stopped to watch the fountain, and then after I inquired about its price, they realized I was serious. Look […]

Categories: China, Culture, Mystery Objects, Objects of Power, Uncategorized • Tags: water fountain

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Crowd Control at the Beijing Station Ticket Window

December 26, 2018 by Museum Fatigue

One of my earliest memories of life in China was fighting for tickets at railway stations and movie theaters where the idea of lines was a culturally alien one. Decades later while it is common to see folks in urban China line up for everything in a way that is familiar, some spaces are still being negotiated. As interfaces between the urban and rural, train stations remain just such a potential space. Urban China, however, has numerous examples of design […]

Categories: Bodies, China, Discipline, Uncategorized • Tags: Beijing Railway Station, design, queue

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Time to Get Back to Blogging?

March 29, 2018 by Museum Fatigue

There is something that I have always liked about blogging. I like the feeling of having my own space on the Internet, my own URL and my own ability to format and post and share things. I like that blogging is public because it commits me to a measure of seriousness, but at the same time it is a style and format that lends itself to a certain informality. Screens always feel like they involve less commitment than the printed […]

Categories: Uncategorized • Tags: blogging

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Chinese Restaurant Menu, Chengdu Spring 1990

August 17, 2016 by Museum Fatigue

This morning while cleaning my office I happened upon a menu that I collected over twenty-five years ago in the spring of 1990 while studying in Chengdu, Sichuan. I don’t remember what restaurant it is from, but the fact that the first page lists Green Leaves Beer (绿叶啤酒) and that page two lists “guo kui” (锅魁) is a dead giveaway that it was from that time. The menu is an interesting look back, not only at the kinds of foods […]

Categories: China, Food, Uncategorized • Tags: 1990, Chengdu, menu, Sichuan

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Recent Posts

  • F*ck E-Learning. Snow Days Teach Us Something More Important.
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  • Student Feedback on Digital Anthropology Class in Three Modalities: Zoom, Minecraft and (Pandemic) In-person
  • A Different Sense of Space in Mineclass

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