Elliot Washor's TGIF 09.25.2026

Are You With Me Now? — AJ Ryder

“How can you be in two places at once when you are not anywhere at all?”— Firesign Theatre

Considering that we spent a lovely evening at the Fringe Circus, Firesign Theatre once again tickled my Wayback Machine nerve, reminding me that We’re All Bozos on This Bus.

Ahh! The joy of sharing perfect imperfection.

It was really nice being with everyone at the Weavers gathering in Rochester, New York. Jen Ghidu was a great host and showed us lots of love by sharing the history and beauty of her city.

Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony both lived in Rochester and worked together. They are both buried in Mount Hope Cemetery, which we passed on a boat ride that gave us a wonderful history of the city.

BPL Board member and former Cooper Union Dean of Integrated Studies David Gersten always points out something else: Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, and Red Cloud all had offices at Cooper Union during the same period.

Think about that. And think about this.

What happens when people share space for extended periods of time? What happens in the hallway, over a meal, walking somewhere together, or just sitting around when nothing is officially supposed to be happening?

Zoom just doesn’t quite make it.

Stop the World I Want to Get Off

I’ve never been one for group retreats because the world isn’t retreating with you. There is always so much going on, and these two days were no exception.

Was it more important to make some of the appointments I had that loomed large in our actual work? Was it more important to spend time on emerging work with deadlines that needed real attention to get to a good place? Or was it more important to be fully present with the people I was with?

Yes and…

There were real tradeoffs, and I’m always conflicted between doing the work and pausing long enough to think about the work.

Can the two be combined? I believe they can. But these few days brought home just how much I need to set priorities.

What I really love about being with a group are the one-on-one conversations, the off times, the walks, and the meals. That’s where a lot of my growth happens.

And that’s what happened in Rochester.

It Amazes Me — Coleman and Leigh

As we go through the newest AI revelations, I’m going to keep reminding myself just how unique we are as humans.

AI can’t do what we do—or what any living being does. Anyone telling us differently is selling something, and I’m not buying what they’re selling.

For what it’s worth, a lot of this stuff is digital puppetry and it is scarry. As Dee Hock points out way before this newest AI craze,

“The ultimate insanity is to so organize society that power, wealth, and information are concentrated in the hands of so few people that they have the power, for whatever reason, to put to death our species and the living earth as well. But so we have.”― Dee Hock, Autobiography of a Restless Mind: Reflections on the Human Condition

So here’s a quick reminder from a friend about his father. Mark Thomson is pretty amazing in his own right, and in this story, you can see where some of that comes from:

“My Dad makes miniature pumps for diesel injection machines without any plans. The whole thing is in his head and he is the only person in the world who knows how to make them.

He has never patented any of his ideas and products, and some items he has made have been classed by better qualified tradesmen and engineers as being impossible to build by hand—until they have seen him do it.”

Hmm?

It reminds me of the old thermos joke: It keeps my coffee hot and my lemonade cold.

How does it know?

This was also the week in the school season when the national news suddenly focuses on schools.

We got U.S. News & World Report’s annual college rankings. Then there was the story of Jamie Beaton—the guy collecting degrees and building Crimson Education, where some families pay enormous sums for help getting their children into highly selective colleges. And finally, there was Nikole Hannah-Jones’ story about her family’s journey negotiating the New York City public school system.

I’m not going into the details of any of these stories here. What interests me is their collective understory.

Running through all three is our continued reliance on narrowly constructed measures that telegraph to children, families, schools, and communities what—and who—we consider smart.

After all this time, we at BPL still haven’t cracked the surface of the national conversation with new ways, forms, and measures for recognizing what young people know, can do, care about, and contribute.

“There’s a lot of work out there and someone has to do it.” Mickey Spillane

And maybe that’s another lesson from Rochester. We can’t become so narrowly focused on our own work that we think it is the only work. We need the conversations in the hallways, on the walks, over meals, and in the spaces where agendas stop.

That’s where ideas mingle. That’s where people matter to one another. That’s where the work gets better.

And speaking of getting the work out there, Andrew and Sam’s Class of 2006 is now up on Apple Podcasts. That’s what I’m talking ‘bout.

‘Nuff said. Be well.