Shadow Stabbing#10: Craft

Yes, spring has come to Copenhagen. In this week's video, you can catch me undwinding in my office after work. I've been able to get a lot of my own writing done this week and I'm quite happy with the results. I should be sending it off to review early next month after some of the people here at the department have had a chance to read it and comment on it (just as the editors of ASQ suggest).

I don't know about the aesthetics of eating pizza and drinking wine during a vlog post. Let me know whether I pull this off with my dignity in tact. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

The brief notice in the New Yorker about Richard Sennett's book can be read here. I really do think we should hold a seminar on this book, along with the important "critical" companion, which was published a few years ago, The Corrosion of Character. Sennett is rightly worried about what globalisation is doing to "the skill of doing things well". I have an almost religious respect for such skill—I think it may be the most practical sense we can give to the notion of "soul". In any case, I think we should stop trying to keep up with everything, everywhere, every second of the day, and spend, you know, 10,000 hours becoming good at something. It's just common sense, really.

As a vlogger, I have many influences. See if you can make out how my Shadow Stabbing persona is a "hidden transformation" of Russell Davies and Glenn Gould (needs RealMedia player).