My mother's given me an awful lot over these 23-odd years, but here are three gifts from her I'm particularly thankful for:

1) An instinct to not assign to malice that which is explained by ignorance -- to seek first to teach, rather than fight. It's easy to assume that the person causing you harm thinks the same way you do, and so is doing it on purpose -- but surprisingly often, that's not the case. And when the culprit really is malice or active apathy, I learned from Mom just how strong relentless politeness can be at clearing problems.

2) A thorough appreciation for the power of good visual design. Mom's a computer scientist with research interests in visualizing data, and to this day, I'll call her when a problem at work seems to call for some special technique. Some of the best tricks I know (and regularly use!), she taught me.

3) Open eyes to problems of gender bias in the field of computer science. It's easy to see the obvious statistics and cases of blatant discrimination; it's harder to realize the ways that implicit bias creep into the behaviors of well-intentioned people. But they're easier to see after years of deep and thoughtful dinner-table conversation about exactly that topic.

Not a week goes by that these lessons and instincts don't serve me well in some way. And for that, and for them, and for so much more, I'm enormously grateful.

(In which the author, through timely blogging, attempts to rekindle a fading feeling of connection to his alma mater.)

On a Thursday morning four years ago, upperclassmen pounded on the door of my friends' suite where I had slept over (again), and when we let them in, they popped a (well-shaken) bottle of champagne to welcome us to Eliot House. Over the next three years, I'd spend some of the best afternoons (and the most miserable all-nighters) in Eliot, and though I'd be stretching the truth to say that I became close with everyone in the house, I had a place that was home to come bck to, year after year. Of course, I had the best friends I could possibly have asked for, but for that I owe more thanks to the Freshman Dean's Office for throwing us all into Canaday than the housing lottery for giving us the best of all houses.

(My dad puts his arm around my shoulders and gestures at the courtyard, where the commencement canopies have already been taken away. He repeats words that his father spoke to him thirty years before, a few blocks from here. "This is Eliot House, that has been your home. Look, and fix it in your memory. Remember the time you've spent here.")

Because yes, with a lucky roll of the metaphorical (but quite literally random) dice, we landed in the house that was near (if not at) the top of almost every freshman's list. The house with the largest endowment (grandfathered from the days when houses still had endowments!). The house with the best formals (in both quality and quantity!). A plurality of three

including a review of The Idealist, by Justin Peters

You haven't seen a roomful of students' eyebrows shoot up simultaneously until you begin your CS50 section with a content warning for suicide.

(1)

It was the week we were covering web development and walking through a project that had students scraping an RSS feed to extract news stories geotagged as local. It was also Aaron Swartz's birthday.

And so it seemed wrong not to include, in that lesson, some words for the young visionary who was no older than some of my students when he invented the protocol we'd be using that week. It seemed wrong not to take the occasion to remind my students that the things they were learning could be used to literally change the world. And it seemed wrong not to tell the story about how federal prosecutors enforcing unjust laws hounded that young man until he took his own life.

And so I took a few minutes to talk about the activist, hacker, and visionary who invented Rich Site Summary as a way of allowing websites to share their content with the world. I talked a bit about how Aaron's projects -- RSS, Markdown, Creative Commons, Reddit, the anti-SOPA movement -- each drove forward in their own way his vision of an Internet, and a world, built for the creation and exchange of ideas. I talked about how the tools they were learning to use could be used to change the world, given passion and a willingness to bounce back from failure. And I talked about how Aaron's pursuit of a better world led

I've finally left the environs of Cambridge to do...whatever comes next...in New York City. I really enjoyed my time at Harvard and was truly sad to see the community of friends that I'd come to love go their assorted and separate ways, but on a personal level, it was time. So I'm glad to be moving on to the next thing.

One piece of "the next thing" is that I'm beginning work as an trader at Jane Street. It's an amazing company that I'm incredibly excited to be returning to full-time -- one of the most intellectually stimulating environments I've found anywhere, with a double helping of diverse and varied day-to-day projects and a culture of social trust, intellectual humility, and collaborative truth-seeking.

In many (great) ways, I feel like I'm starting college again -- my days are long and full, all of my work is interesting and new, and once again I feel like I'm out of my depth and running flat-out to keep up. Coming from the place of comfort I had reached at the end of college, it's certainly a pleasant change.

Incidentally, we're already hiring summer interns for both trader and dev roles, so if you want to work with some of the most clever, intellectually curious, and deeply thoughtful people I know (plus me), do drop me a line, and I'll be happy to chat, answer questions, or just point you at the application.

(1)

However, my employer is emphatically not the reason that I've been negligent about writing in the last month. The only explanation for that is

From the top of the towers,
    you could see past the narrows,
        past our lady of the harbor,
      to the broad, open sea.
See the curve of the earth
    on the vast, blue horizon
        from the world’s greatest city,
      in the land of the free.

All the brave men and women
    that you never would notice,
        from the precincts and fire halls---
      the first on the scene.
Storming into the buildings
    on the side of the angels,
        they were gone in an instant,
      in the belly of the beast.

We are children of slavery,
   children of immigrants,
      remnants of tribes and their tired refugees.
As they tumbled down,
   we were stronger together—
      stronger than we ever knew we could be—
         as strong as that statue that stands for the promise
of liberty here in this city of dreams.

All the flags on front porches
    and banners of unity
        spanning the bridges
      from the top of the fence—
as we heal up the wounds
    and take care of each other,
        there’s more love in this nation
      than hate and revenge.

We are children of slavery,
   children of immigrants,
      remnants of tribes and their tired refugees.
As the walls tumble down,
   we are stronger together—
      stronger than we ever knew we could be—
         as strong as that statue that stands for the promise
of liberty here in this city of dreams.

(City of Dreams © David Wilcox; cover image © SOM)

If you hadn't heard: A group that was almost certainly Russian military intelligence stole almost 20,000 emails from the DNC and Wikileaks published them on Saturday. Personally, I doubt that there's anything in them, but---

---what's that?---

---they're literally the smoking gun of a plot to steal the nomination for Hillary Cl---

---no, no, I'm certain that they're not---

---um---

---okay, okay, I'll take a look and see what's there. Here we go.

(1a)

Before we do this, I want you to ask yourself what you expect to find in the emails. Obviously you clicked this link because you expected to say something bad. I expected them to show bad things happening. Some of the bad things that I expected were there, some weren't, and there were some bad things that I hadn't expected.

But, just as an exercise, write down a list of things that you expect to find in the very worst of those 20,000 emails. Hard evidence of primary-rigging? Wink-wink references to "Plan H"? Gleeful gloating at Bernie's downfall? PG-13 language? Plots about new ways to insult Donald Trump?

We'll check back in at the end to compare your predictions to reality.

In a conversation with an acquaintance about the political ethics of voting for Jill Stein, I realized that I had very little idea what the Green Party stood for. (Um...the environment?) So I spent a few hours today reading the Green Party platform. I can't say it was an exciting experience, but now at least I feel like I have some sense of what it means to be Green. I liked a good deal of what I read, but in the end, there were a few things that I just couldn't stomach.

(1)

1. There's actually a good deal to like about the Green platform. It's pro-UBI, (mostly) pro-immigration, pro-space, pro-Land Value Tax, and generally promotes its environmental agenda through disincentive taxes, rather than hard regulation. These are pretty incredible ideas, and I'd be overjoyed to see any of them move into the Overton Window of American politics in the near future. Good on the Greens for getting behind them.

Also in the list of good -- though less revelatory -- ideas are pro-LGBT, anti-prohibition, anti-incarceration, and pro-infrastructure planks.

2. There's a great deal more cloying utopianism that doesn't even mean anything on a policy level. There are pages upon pages that just read like "...and we will have better schools, and we will have stronger communities,