John Fleck may be the only law school professor with a favorite ditch. And he’s on a mission to convince the rest of us to care about them too. — If we care about the water we drink, the food we eat, and how democracies can make decisions about scarce resources, then John and his love of ditches are a pretty good place to start. …

When local politician Alyssa Cisneros took her daughter to Foothills Nature Preserve in Palo Alto on July 4th 2020, she was hoping to celebrate Independence Day from one of the region’s most beautiful overlooks. Instead, she was turned away by park officials for coming from the wrong town. …

Social feeds are engines for distorting social understanding. Here’s how to push back against the algorithm. — Why are so many people staying on Twitter, even after the company gutted its child safety team, struggled with information security problems, violated user privacy for political ends, and brought nazis back to the platform? To outside observers, it can seem like Twitter users are continuing as before, seemingly unaware…

Reflections on home and place as I depart for a year at Stanford — Last Saturday, I cycled from Ithaca to Chittenango and back, my last ride before moving to California for a year-long fellowship at CASBS. Three years into my time at Cornell, I reflected on what it means to be a guest, a newcomer, and eventually a local. As I climbed, the…

Marking what we have lost and what might be next — Last Month, Ed Yong asked in The Atlantic why American society and government could not or would not acknowledge the magnitude & urgency of nearly a million lives lost to COVID. How many parents, siblings, children, are no longer with us? …

How can artists contribute to technology policy, and how can artists engage the public in shared knowledge-making about science and technology? Speaking today at the Cornell Department of Communication is Chris Csikszentmihalyi (@csik), Associate Professor in the Faculty of Computing and Information Science at Cornell University. Chris was the European…

How can we reach for excellence and the common good when we stand on the shoulders of enduring sin? — How can Christians reach for excellence and the common good in a broken world whose brokenness we are also part of? I often asked myself this question as a postdoc at Princeton University, whose third president was the influential Protestant leader Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758). By all counts, Edwards achieved a…

How can junior faculty advance a public mission when it’s not always part of the job? — Many researchers want to do work that makes a difference in the world. That’s sometimes tricky in communities that aren’t sure if engaged research is legitimate work for academics. I saw that first-hand as a PhD student when three of my mentors were denied tenure. Each did life-changing research, published…

What do stories do in the world, and can they move us to behave in pro-social ways? — Speaking today at the Cornell Department of Communication is, Melanie C. Green (@narrprof), a Professor in Communication at the University at Buffalo. Her work has focused on persuasion and belief change. …