Here Are Three Things.

1.
Current Rotation

• Iron & Wine, Beast Epic
• Hiss Golden Messenger, Hallelujah Anyhow
• Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit, The Nashville Sound
• Beck, Colors
• Sylvan Esso, Echo Mountain Sessions EP

2.
Henry wrote:

The twelve labors of Hercules were trifling in comparison with those which my neighbors have undertaken; for they were only twelve, and had an end; but I could never see that these men slew or captured any monster or finished any labor.

And also, somewhat more famously:

I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail. In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify.

His sometimes friend, perhaps mentor, perhaps benefactor, later critic, wrote this about schools:

We exercise their understandings to the apprehension and: comparison of some facts, to a skill in numbers, in words; we aim to make accountants, attorneys, engineers; but not to make able, earnest, great-hearted men. The great object of Education should be commensurate with the object of life. It should be a moral one; to teach self-trust; to inspire the youthful man with an interest in himself; with a curiosity touching his own nature; to acquaint him with the resources of his mind, and to teach him that there is all his strength, and to inflame him with a piety towards the Grand Mind in which he lives.

And of course, Emerson's words ring true today, as we consider the changes that technology has brought and will bring, and as we work to understand what education today might look like, if it were an education with a clear view of the future, or even one with absolute clarity of the present technological moment. In his day, Henry fretted about the post office, and the railroad, and the newspaper, and the speed with which people encountered new information, and Emerson exhorted those in his day to "Leave this military hurry and adopt the pace of Nature." As I've said before, I am not a Luddite, but I'd advocate for increased awareness of the sometimes frantic pace of life, for more mindfulness in the ways we spend our time and invest our attention--for a shared commitment not to be used by technology, but to use the tremendous platform we all have at our fingertips as a tool to do good and kind things in the world.

3.