I am enjoying a couple of weeks away from paid writing gigs. My main focus is on family issues. I’ve been filling in the gaps of time with the book selling side hustle. We also took a long weekend in Philadelphia with the kids. I’m in between big ideas, so no big blog posts today. Just some links and quick observations.

Two of my son’s college classes this semester consist of professors reading powerpoint slides on YouTube. So I called the chancellor’s office to complain. Not sure if it will make a difference, but it was satisfying. After that, I had some long conversations with other higher ed folks. One person told me that “Remote is here to stay! This is great. We never have to go to campus again!” Not great. Not awesome. Some faculty plan to never enter a lecture hall again.

Dark Academic fashion.

Two tweets got a lot of attention last week:

• If we close public schools for over a year, don’t offer a clear plan for opening even after teacher vaccinations, belittle parents who can’t manage, then we shouldn’t be surprised that folks are ready to talk about charter schools and vouchers.
• “We should just be pro-excellent school, and [stop] saying that this entire category of school is somehow problematic,” Yang also lays blame on teachers union for sluggish pace of school reopenings

There’s been lots of gossip on Harry and Meghan lately. More signs and gossip about Meghan Markle running for political office; maybe she’ll try to replace Feinstein. I guess Harry got a gig at a Silicon Valley start up, where he’ll be monetizing mental illness. One of gossip blogs made a snarky comment about the only reason that he got a job there was because there’s way too much money out there right now. I think that’s true. Investors have been sitting on their cash for a year and are itching to spend it. This is going to be a great time to graduate with a computer science major. Or any major. The economy is going to boom in September.

Did you gain weight or lose weight this year? I gave up wine and am running again. I lost a couple, but I feel like I should have lost more.

Picture: “Lillies” in Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia. As the boys slept in, Steve and I roamed around the city, so I could play with my camera. We did 18,000 steps that day.