Fungible Convictions

I’ve only been at MIT since late August, but I’m just as bummed as everyone else about Comparative Media Studies co-Director Henry Jenkins’ leaving for USC.

He made the announcement in person, to a group of students and separately to a group of staff. It was an object lesson how to break tough news: expectations were set some time back that this might happen; he gave the news in person but had his assistant email all details during the meetings so the facts were in front of us when we got back to our offices; he left lots of time for questions; and once everyone had time to process why it had to happen, he made it public knowledge himself: http://henryjenkins.org/2008/11/professor_jenkins_goes_to_holl.html

Because Henry was a co-founder of the program, once he leaves, it will essentially be up to MIT to decide how to move it forward.

A week from tonight, Lindsay and I will be drunk. And also married. The last month—which included the start of my MIT job—has therefore left hardly a breath to be had. So I think it prudent to run through some highlights:

• We booked our hotel and a bunch of activities for the honeymoon in Juneau. Had John McCain chosen Sarah Palin before we chose Alaska, honestly we might not have gone. Which would have been a shame. But such is the election season: I could easily imagine this conversation having taken place if the timing was different . . . “What about Alaska for the honeymoon? Actually, nevermind. Not with all the hubbub about Palin.” That said, as relaxing as the honeymoon will be, I’ll still be the one asking people at the next table what they think about their governor.
• MIT gave me a digital SLR, a Canon. Because I didn’t yet have a safe place to keep it in my office, I kept it at home for a while and got a chance to play with it. The quality of its photos are pretty stunning:

  

• Lindsay and I have had to make about half a dozen trips to Paper Source, as we’re designing and printing our own wedding menus, donation announcements (we’re giving money to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society rather than distribute favors to the guests), and the program:
Wedding Program – Upload a Document to Scribd

But one of these trips to Paper Source led to the awesome impulse buy of adhesive, re-placeable 8.5″x11″ pieces of chalkboard. We stuck one on our freezer door:



• I’m falling behind (again) on Identity Theory work. Typically I sit down for a couple hours on a weekend and read through all the fiction submissions and then distribute the better ones to assistant editors for their thoughts. But wedding planning has pretty much spoken for every recent weekend. That and home improvement—receiving wedding gifts has necessarily forced us to throw some old things out, pass along nice things to Lindsay’s sister, or generally reorganize
• MIT work has given me a really good opportunity (among other good opportunities there) to make good use of a ton of tools. Since I shuttle between different offices throughout the day, I use Brightkite so people know where they can find me. My colleagues and the grad students love to network, so that ramps up my use of LinkedIn. Evernote is becoming key to keeping track of links and documents, and now that it syncs with del.icio.us, I’m bailing on del.icio.us. And people have pointed me to some ridiculous design resources: CSS Beauty, Best Web Gallery, Most Inspired, Creattica Daily, PSVibes, Fuel Your Creativity, Tutorial9, Web Designer Wall, PSDTUTS, Online-Photoshop Tutorials, I Love Typography, Fontfeed, and Digital Photography School.
• Lindsay had her bachelorette party last weekend. The various husbands and boyfriends got together to play Rock Band all night while the wives and girlfriends took Lindsay out. It was far and away the worst hangover I’ve ever seen in someone. I shouldn’t have laughed so much.
• The Red Sox are in the playoffs again. And I’m sad to say I barely noticed. That fact is probably the best illustration of how I’ve lost track of time during the wedding planning and job change: I’ve always measured out the year with the rhythms of the baseball season—April through October is the meaty part of life, while November through March is just Christmas and cold—but this year it’s been about countdowns. The countdown to August 25th (my first day at MIT), the countdown to October 4th (the wedding), and of course the countdown to November 4th (the election).
• Speaking of the latter, another reason I’ve missed the baseball season is Countdown. At either 8pm or 10pm each night, we take a break and watch MSNBC, and now that Rachel Maddow has her show at 9pm, that’s two hours Lindsay and I are spending on politics. We may very well stop watching after the election—we’re very aware that Countdown, for us at least, is there for cathartic reasons, to watch Keith Olbermann call people out on lies because we’re so tired of being lied to by people in government. Being lied to isn’t new, and Olbermann very much plays favorites and distorts the truth himself, but the stakes are so much bigger this time of year and the lies come so much more naturally, disturbingly so, and are in some cases so petty, that at the end of the day just before bed we need to watch someone fluent in the language of indignation.

My guess is I won’t post again until after the honeymoon. So if anybody has questions you want me to take to Alaska, let me know. And when I post again, my left hand will be a few ounces heavier.

That’s right, I said awesomer.

Among the basic good things about my new job–decent pay, very good health care, challenging work–I keep having totally random connections to people around me. Today’s is that it turns out the woman who works in the office across the hall from mine lives in the same building as me (she teaches in the writing program, so she really only comes in when she has to meet with students). My neighborhood isn’t as tight-knit as my friend Nancy’s in the Bronx–you know, how she shares DNA with everyone on her block–so it’s really great to have a social connection to someone else in the building that I’d see in another context.

It’s been an awesomely hectic first four days at MIT. I’ve spent a total of maybe two hours at my desk, while the rest has been spent with the new Comparative Media Studies students at their orientation and getting a walk-through about CMS’s and the C4 (Center for Future Civic Media) communications efforts.

CMS’s co-director Henry Jenkins had everyone over for dinner last night, and I even got a chance to bring my fiancee along to meet folks. Turns out that, like, half of everyone there had a public television connection, so she had as much a blast as I did.

At the moment I’m hanging out in the Singapore-GAMBIT Game Lab waiting to pick back up with my meeting with Geoff Long.

And now I have to go plug Boston Organics to staff . . .

While my family has been in the loop all along, most of you probably don’t know that I’ve accepted a new position, this one at MIT. I’ll be the new Communications Manager for the Comparative Media Studies program and the Center for Future Civic Media.

It’s a big step in the right direction—lots more web and design work with a larger group of people, including undergrad and graduate students—but it’s about as easy leaving Tufts as it was leaving Houghton Mifflin, i.e., not very. Both set me up for seizing really good opportunities, and that is, after all, why I’m leaving for MIT now.

My last day at Tufts is August 22nd, so I’m keeping myself under the gun to finish a revamped website for the Feinstein Center before then. I start right back up at MIT on Monday the 25th.

And while I’m really excited to focus on web-based work, I will miss getting to edit and design lovely reports like this:

I can’t really think of any web advertising—except perhaps the Million Dollar Homepage—that really plays tropic jokes like this set of print ads collected by the MIT Advertising Lab. Anything come to mind? All web advertising that abuts content is pretty boxed in—not like this example from the MIT post:

A magazine (newspaper) usually has pages that come in a certain sequence.

(Thanks, Alan)