Jed Macosko Interview for Academic Influence

James Barham: Thank you for agreeing to do this interview, which will attempt to give a comprehensive overview of your academic career as well as to provide some context for it. We’ll close with your work on AcademicInfluence.com. But first, let’s begin with some personal background. Where were you born and raised? Were you brought up in an academic environment? What set you on the track toward a life of research, writing, and teaching?

Jed Macosko: I was born just outside of Minneapolis, Minnesota, and raised in Minneapolis. I spent a lot of time in chemical engineering labs at the University of Minnesota, so that got me started with research. For example, in 10th grade, we were studying Leonardo da Vinci in our history class and our teacher asked us to make an invention. My first thought was to head to the lab and make a web-slinger using the chemicals that mix to form nylon fibers. It actually shot out a blob of wet fibrous polymer when you flexed your wrist—but I didn’t catch any criminals!

JB: You are a Christian. In what religious tradition were you raised? Was there ever a time in your life when you doubted the existence of God? Describe your conversion to Christianity. In broad strokes, what difference does it make to your life that you are a Christian?

JM: I was raised in the religious tradition of Christianity, and, as you say, I am a Christian. My religious upbringing included the age-old tradition of voicing doubts about God’s existence—voicing them both to God and to other people. These prayers to God and discussions with others eventually made me comfortable with the idea that I didn’t have to get answers to all my questions and doubts before I could consider myself a follower of Jesus. By the time I was 15, I saw that the only thing that could stop me from becoming a follower of Christ would be the desire to be a follower of someone else. In my case, the choice was clearly between following Jesus and following myself. The decision point in my life came after I had attended a Christian discussion group for a few months and our group leader convinced me by the way he lived his life that following Jesus would be a better way to live than following myself. In the 36 years since that decision point, there are external things I’ve done with my life that I would not have done if it hadn’t been for my “conversion to Christianity” as you put it. For example, my wife and I wouldn’t have spent a year writing and publishing a companion guide to Oswald Chambers’ devotional classic, My Utmost for His Highest. But obviously, I hope that the changes inside me are ultimately more impactful than the external ones.

JB: You have an outstanding academic pedigree. Help our readers understand how your academic achievements became possible. Let’s start with your grade school and middle school days. What were the things that you most enjoyed doing in school? How would you describe your education in K–8: did it challenge you, did it leave you bored, or a combination of the two? What would you have liked to see differently, especially if it was your kids instead of you? How well prepared were you for high school? How much math and science did you know when leaving middle school?

JM: I attended 11 of my 13 years of school in Minneapolis, so my points of comparison for the Minneapolis public school system were the 3-8 month long stints I spent in Princeton, NJ, Cleveland, OH, and Manheim, Germany, and the one year I spent in Strasbourg, France. Based on those four comparisons, I feel like the schooling I received was just fine—it had some areas where it did better and some areas where it did worse. Overall, I enjoyed school, and the closest friends I formed were from school, not from church, sports, or other places. In kindergarten through eighth grade, the best part of school was when I got to be in a smaller group of people who were getting special attention. Obviously, that is what most kids enjoy! In my case, there were times when the small groups were for kids that were “highly academically gifted” but other times it was just because I was a student who could speak English fluently when I was in France or because I was assigned to a small research group when I was in Germany. One notable exception was my third-grade class. In that class of 26 students, everyone felt like they were getting special attention. I recently looked back on a journal that our third-grade teacher made us keep every day. It was wonderful to see what our teacher was able to do with a motley group of nine-year-old kids. Unlike some of my other years in school, that year was not boring at all. I would love it if more teachers could be like our third-grade teacher. But that is asking a lot!

I spent my eighth-grade year in Strasbourg, so I didn’t finish math with the rest of the students who, like me, had been admitted as seventh graders to a special math program at the University of Minnesota. When I came back, I was a year behind them. But they let me stay in the program, which included linear algebra and multivariable calculus, throughout my high school years, and it set me on a firm foundation to use math in college and beyond.

JB: Let’s turn next to your high school years. What were they like? What were your extracurriculars (sports, drama, public speaking)? What subjects did you like best? Tell us about the awards you achieved. For instance, as a high school senior in 1989, you attended the prestigious Research Summer Institute, where you were declared the “Rickoid of the Year” winner—your name is even in Wikipedia on account of this award. Tell us about that award as well as others that you achieved in high school.

JM: In high school, I finally found a sport that I wasn’t terrible at, at least relative to my peers. My best friend from grade school, who was quite athletic, had always dragged me along with him to soccer and little league, but when I returned from France, he dragged me to the cross-country team at our high school. As a freshman, I wasn’t very good, but at least I wasn’t terrible, and I improved by the end of that first season. In my junior year, I was an alternate for varsity and our team surprised everyone by winning the state championship. I was co-captain the next year, and we again won state. My experiences with long-distance running were the most formative of my many experiences in high school because I had to push myself further than I thought possible and throughout the rest of my life I took the same approach with everything I tackled.

The award you are referring to was actually from a summer program that I participated in between my junior and senior years in high school. And yes, there’s a list of people who won the award on Wikipedia along with other notable people, such as the mathematician Terry Tao, who attended the program. That was probably the biggest award I received as a minor. The other awards were for things like Mock Trial, where I won the state meet with a team of my friends, and Debate, where I was one of only three people from our inner-city high school to win awards against the suburban kids.

JB: Tell us about your process of applying to colleges. What groundwork had you laid that allowed you to put your best foot forward? Where did you apply and where did you get in? Why did you decide to go to MIT? Was it a good choice?

JM: As a result of that summer program and meeting people like Terry Tao and Sydney Yip, I decided to broaden my horizons—I applied to three schools instead of only two! Applying to only two or three schools may seem shortsighted, but things have changed a lot since the fall of 1989 when I was applying. Nowadays kids have to apply to 15 or more schools to increase their chances of getting in to at least one place, but back in the 80s, applying to one or two reach schools and one backup school was pretty normal.

The three schools on my list were Princeton, the University of Minnesota, and, thanks to Dr. Yip, MIT, and because I got into all of them, I had to make a decision. I had a hard time deciding between MIT and Princeton, but in the end, I asked God and felt like my answer was for me to go to MIT.

My feeling about the way God answered my “which college” question, and other questions like it, was never as clear as if I had seen the answer written in flaming letters. But, just as I had gotten more comfortable with the idea that I didn’t have to know the answers to all my doubts before I could believe in God, so also I didn’t have to get flaming answers to my questions about what I should do before I would know that God was still very much in control and present in my life. So, as I headed off to Boston, I felt encouraged that I could stick to my decision with the confidence that I would be right where God wanted me to be.

JB: You graduated from MIT in two and a half years. That’s very quick for a school that is so rigorous in its science and engineering. How did you manage to get through so quickly? What was your major? Did your high school background allow you to place out of various requirements? Did you take an overload of courses? If so, how did you manage that because many MIT students struggle simply to get through the required load?

JM: I majored in chemistry, though my original plan was to spend four years and double or triple major (for example, in physics, material science, and math). I switched to chemistry because I saw that it offered me a quick route to graduation. I had taken a university chemistry class instead of the one offered at my high school, so I had college credit for the first two semesters. That, combined with my college language classes in French and German, placing out of linear algebra and multivariable calculus, and taking up to seven classes a term at MIT is what allowed me to finish early and save a lot of money!

JB: Describe your time at MIT. It seems that besides your studies, you were also rowing for MIT. MIT is a D3 school for most sports, but we understand it was D1 for rowing and that you were a silver medalist at the 1993 National Rowing Championships. Tell us the details and what drew you to rowing. But you also had outstanding academic success at MIT, being awarded MIT’s Merck Index Award for outstanding scholarship in 1993. Tell us about that award and your other academic successes at MIT. Was your time at MIT a time of pure success and happiness? Were there any challenges that you faced—if so, what were they and how did you overcome them?

JM: Just as cross-country running was my biggest learning experience in high school, rowing was my biggest learning experience in college. It’s one thing to push yourself physically to the absolute limit, but to be able to keep in perfect unison with seven other people while your body is wracked with pain is an even harder challenge. I was drawn to rowing because I stayed for a few weeks with a family in Northern Ireland and my host brother was the UK rowing champion for his age group. He took me out in a double and I was hooked. While I was participating in that summer program with Terry Tao and the other kids, I snuck away each morning and ran 1.7 miles from our dorms to the Potomac Boat Club. After practice, I would run back to the cafeteria just in time to grab food and then catch the subway and bus to the University of Maryland where I did computer simulations of nuclear fusion. Come to think of it, part of the reason I may have won that award is because it was an award given by my peers, and many of them were surprised that someone who was in such an elite summer research program would care enough to get up every morning to do a sport.

My rowing career ended at the 1993 National Rowing Championships where future Olympian and Hall of Famer Mike Wherley and I took silver in the pairs, but I didn’t retire because of an injury or anything like that. I was planning to row at UC Berkeley because I thought I still had one more year of college eligibility thanks to finishing MIT early. However, I found out, when I showed up at my first practice, that eligibility for grad students only works if you stay at the same school where you did your undergrad. If I had known that I might have stayed at MIT for my Ph.D.! Despite that setback, I had a fun second rowing career as a volunteer coach at Berkeley, Wheaton (Illinois), and finally at Wake Forest where I had the opportunity to individually coach a blind athlete who took silver in Beijing.

Of course, as you mentioned, there were other things I did in college besides rowing. I enjoyed the professors and staff in the chemistry department and was honored that they chose me to receive the Merck Index Award. It was probably in part because I had taken grad-level chemistry classes. By the way, those grad classes were some of the most challenging things I faced at MIT and made me question whether I was cut out for a Ph.D. program! But the fact that I survived those classes, by the grace of God, made me feel like I would be able to overcome whatever grad school had in store for me.

JB: Before we proceed to your graduate studies at UC Berkeley, tell us about some of your interesting family connections. Your father is Chris Macosko, who is a world-class engineer. Your dad’s third cousin is Hollywood producer Kristie Macosko. Your first cousin is Evan Macosko, a Harvard professor and inventor of Slide-Seq. Your sister Maren Macosko is a punk musician and founding member of The Soviettes and The Gateway District. Please expand on these and any other interesting family connections.

JM: Yes, my dad is a well-known researcher in the field of rheology, which is the study of fluids and solids that behave in unexpected ways. His brother (and their father before he passed away) spent a lot of time researching the origins of our last name. It turns out that everyone in the US with our last name is related through brothers who immigrated to the US in the late 1800s. So, Kristie Krieger née Macosko, who worked closely with Steven Spielberg and is a senior partner at Amblin Partners, is, as you say, my dad’s third cousin. The closer connections that you mentioned are with my first cousin, Evan, and my sister, Maren. Both are famous but for quite different reasons!

JB: After MIT, it was off to graduate school for you. What made you choose UC Berkeley? What other places did you think of attending? Which scientists were you especially interested in working with when it came time to leave MIT? Was Berkeley a good fit for you? East Coast and West Coast are quite different. Did you experience a culture shock moving to the Bay Area? Describe your graduate days at Berkeley. In retrospect, do you think it was the right place for you for graduate studies? What was your area of specialization? Was Berkeley a good springboard to the next phase of your career?

JM: As I was saying earlier, the grad classes I took as an undergrad were extremely challenging. But I needed to do grad school to achieve my career goal, which had always been to become a professor. As a career, academia seemed the perfect blend of travel to exotic places, public speaking, and using one’s mind to help humanity. I also always liked teaching. For example, my part-time job as a 14-year-old was teaching French in an after-school program, and at MIT I signed up to tutor organic chemistry in the spring of my freshman year.

So, I knew I wanted to go to grad school, and the only issue was where I should go. My professors at MIT, rightly or wrongly, told me I would get into wherever I applied, so once again I only applied to three places. In the end, the only two I considered were U. Chicago and Berkeley. Chicago was offering more money, but I found a group of like-minded people at Berkeley who were enthusiastic about their faith and their science. To this day, I’m glad I decided to go to Berkeley, and I’m still friends with those people I met when I first visited the campus.

I’m from the Midwest, so I didn’t feel much culture shock either moving to Boston or Berkeley. In terms of specialization, I took my grad classes at MIT in quantum chemistry and did research on quantum dots, but just before I went to Berkeley, I became fascinated with the machinery inside living cells. So, at Berkeley I specialized in biophysical chemistry and used a device that gets signals from unpaired electrons the way that an MRI gets signals from protons. Using that device, I studied the molecular machinery that allows brain synapses to work and the machinery that allows viruses to infect their hosts. Scientifically, Berkeley was an epicenter for this type of research and was, most certainly, the right place for my graduate studies.

JB: After Berkeley, you did some postdoctoral fellowships. Simultaneously, you were also applying for visiting and tenure-track faculty appointments. We understand that you faced some challenges during that time, with initial interviews going well, but then a sudden loss of interest. Finally, one of your more senior colleagues, who hired you as a postdoctoral fellow, leveled with you that one of your advisors was giving you a less-than-sterling recommendation. This was a revelation. How did you handle it? And how did you eventually make things right with that advisor so that your path was clear to a straight tenure-track appointment at an excellent university?

JM: People told me that I couldn’t get a faculty position without doing a postdoctoral fellowship. But, always the optimist and, at that time, always overconfident in the value of my brand, I applied anyway. As they predicted, I didn’t get any offers. Later, after a two-year postdoc and a visiting professorship, I had the experience you mentioned—finding out I wasn’t getting the great recommendation letter I thought I was going to get. Looking back, I appreciate the honesty of that person’s recommendation letter, but it torpedoed my chances. Thankfully, I was able to get the letter writer to reconsider the contents of the letter (after I demonstrated improvements in my work ethic and abilities as a researcher). With a newly minted—and glowing!—letter of recommendation in hand, I was able to make another go at getting a faculty position.

JB: Until your position at Wake Forest, who were your mentors? From which teachers did you learn the most? What should students be looking for in a mentor? Outside of mentors, who were some of the most brilliant students and faculty you learned from during your student days? What are some of the best lessons that they taught you?

JM: I had excellent mentors: Carlos Bustamante, Yeon-kyun Shin, and David Keller, to name a few. Students should always see the more senior members of their field as people they can trust to help them, unless and until they these senior members prove otherwise. The vast majority of people who are already established in their fields truly want to help students find their paths toward success. So, students should go on that assumption. I found that asking older scientists for help, with the assumption that they wanted to help me, opened doors for me.

For me, one of the great things about going to MIT and Berkeley was that the students around me were some of the best in the world. I stay in touch with amazing people such as David Liu, Gjis Wuite, Jan Liphardt, and David Gracias. The lessons they taught me ranged the gamut, from how important it is to find good grad students, all the way to how the circumstance surrounding a person’s death are as important as how a person lives their life.

JB: One of your postdocs was with Nobel laureate Kary Mullis. What was it like working with him? He was always a bit of a renegade. How much of him rubbed off on you?

JM: By the time I started working with him in 2002, many of the mental tools Cary had used to invent PCR and his other brilliant ideas had been repurposed to other interests. But I still enjoyed talking with him since he was a wealth of stories and insights. I remember when I was over at his house in Newport Beach, he wanted to talk about the green smoothies he was drinking and how they were giving him invigorated health. He was always super kind and caring, and I felt bad for him because it seemed he still felt pretty betrayed by his company in terms of how much money they made off his invention and how little he got. That said, he seemed to have a great life and enjoyed working with the little biotech company that I joined while doing a visiting professorship in Southern California.

JB: Give us a timeline from receiving your doctorate from UC Berkeley (when?) to your taking a tenure-track position at Wake Forest University (when?). What were the highs and lows during that time? We understand that your PhD was broadly in biochemistry and molecular biology. How then is it that you are in the physics department at Wake Forest?

JM: I got my doctorate in 1999 and started at Wake Forest in 2004. I was hired by the physics department to replace someone in biophysics, so my background in studying the molecular machinery of the cell was perfect for what they wanted.

JB: Describe your time at Wake Forest. What were some of your most interesting research projects? Briefly describe the process by which you got tenure there and then became a full professor. Where was it smooth sailing and where, if at all, were there bumps in the road? What lessons would you want more junior faculty to know as they go through the process?

JM: I enjoyed turning velocity measurements of molecular motors into force-velocity curves for motors that were working inside living cells. To do that, we had to find a way of measuring the size of vesicles, which are like the shipping containers of intracellular transport, even when the vesicles were too small to measure with ordinary microscopy. Finding out how to do that was one of the more interesting research projects I tackled. My students for that project were great!

Getting tenure was not smooth sailing, and it probably never is. Young professors work their fingers to the bone to get enough funding and publications to justify a decision from on high that allows them to stay at their universities. It is a scary process! Thankfully, I was able to get several grants in my third and fourth year so that by the time I came up for tenure in my sixth year, I was in good shape. But those first two years were real nail-biters! My advice to junior faculty who are just starting a tenure track job is to remember that the hardships will diminish, one way or another, after six years. Also, I have yet to see a person who didn’t get tenure land a post-tenure-decision job that they didn’t enjoy. In fact, some people have found a lot of freedom after not getting tenure, so, even though it doesn’t feel like it, the “coin flip” of a tenure decision seems to always have a heads-I-win, tails-I-win outcome.

JB: Tell us about your achievements since being at Wake Forest. We would like you to speak, especially to (1) your creation of ”Cellside Story″ and ”Born in the DNA: A Bruce Spring-Gene Original″ as part of an outreach to underserved high school students (2010); (2) your co-invention of the Thermodynamic Venn Diagram and having one of the eight thermodynamic potentials now named after you (2011); your receipt of a Wake Forest University’s Sustainable Champions Award (2018).

JM: My time as a professor has been a good mix of things, which is what attracted me to the profession as a kid. As you mentioned, I did several projects that would help kids understand the molecular machinery of the cell. The two you talked about were done in partnership with students at Atkins Academic & Technology High School here in Winston-Salem, a school that has a rich history of serving underserved students. We also developed CellCraft, a tower-defense video game where the “tower” was a cell and it was defending against incoming viruses. The storyline was amazing, and I was honored to work alongside creative geniuses who have since done many fantastic things. The game was built in Adobe Flash and is thus no longer playable, but you can watch scenes on YouTube, and the music made at least one person write, “Should all of us disappear and the earth be consumed by the sun, I’d want this piece to survive. This one collection of notes that somehow manages to capture all of human hope, ambition and desire. Even now, many years later, it gives me goosebumps and makes my heart lighter. CellCraft, as a game, is no more but I hope this piece lives on.” That was a pretty great endorsement!

JB: Tell us how you came on board with Academic Influence. What are your frank thoughts about rankings of higher educational institutions? Is there a legitimate place for such rankings? The elephant in the room with college rankings is US News. What do you think of their rankings? Without betraying bias, can you give the dispassionate reader a good thumbnail of why the AcademicInfluence.com rankings are better? What do you hope to accomplish at Academic Influence? You’ve had some insightful discussions about higher ed rankings with other academics, such as Jeffrey Stake. What are some key lessons you’ve learned from these discussions?

JM: One of the projects I did at Wake Forest was to create a natively digital biology textbook. We started that project when the first iPad came out and it was clear that students would be able to read textbooks in full color on a device that would allow them to underline, take notes, flip quickly to important information. As that project progressed, I was asked to sit on the board of advisors for an edtech company which later morphed into Academic Influence.

My thoughts about ranking colleges are that it’s a centuries-old extension of the kind of rankings humans have made for millennia. As such, there’s not much we can do about stopping the overall tendency, even if we think it’s bad. However, in addition to our long-standing tendency to rank things, there’s the more recent fine-grained ranking process epitomized by the US News & World Report’s list of best colleges that first came out in 1983 and that has been released each fall since 1988. When I was deciding whether to attend Princeton or MIT, I had no rankings to guide me or my parents. Today, students and parents use rankings as guides and as aspirational benchmarks.

My frank opinion is that the overall tendency for humans to rank each other’s pasts and futures is bad but can’t be helped. Whereas I think that the more recent tendency to rank the futures of young people at a fine-grained level is even worse and can be curtailed. Surprisingly, the way to mitigate this even worse ranking tendency is to come up with more ways to rank things. Our rankings at AcademicInfluence.com are better than US News’ offerings simply because we have more options.

With each new flavor of ranking, rankings have less impact on our collective psyche. US News seems to have a lot of different college rankings, but everyone knows that being ranked the #1 Regional University is not as good as being ranked the #1 National University. At AcademicInfluence.com, a solid case can be made for “Concentrated Influence™” being more important than straight “Influence,” and a solid case can be made the other way around. Likewise, the “Desirability Index” could be legitimately argued to be more important than either of the other two. Not only that, but our data drills down into disciplines. So if you know what you want to study, different schools will come out on top. Moreover, with our do-it-yourself settings, you can get any number of combinations for the things that really matter to you, not to your neighbor who lives down the street.

The main thing I learned from Jeff and others is that US News’ rankings have a huge effect on where people put their educational dollars. I grew up in the United Auto Workers’ “Buy American” campaigns of the late 1970s. As a kid, it made sense that we should turn our collective attention to car companies that could help our own citizens get jobs and thereby better our society. In the same way, it makes sense to turn our attention to ranking lists that will disrupt the monopoly that the US News has on us. By doing so, we will bring the flow of educational dollars back to a level playing field. Schools will collect dollars for being good, not for checking whatever boxes and jumping through whatever hoops the US News creates. If there’s only one company in the mix, there’s no way that all the many benefits of different colleges can be properly rewarded and incentivized.

This might be a good place to mention that international students are guided by US News far more than domestic students. In China, what job you can get, when you return home from a US university, directly depends on that university’s US News’ ranking—not anyone else’s rankings! So, as we turn our collective attention away from an exclusively US News-dominated ranking mindset, we will not only help level the playing field in our country but in other countries as well.

I also should mention that people who scratch their heads about the college ranking hubbub and wonder why people are obsessed with getting a list of top schools should think about college sports. The same mindset that drives the huge energy spent on college sports drives the energy spent on rankings. People are asking the question about whether their home university is better than other schools. There aren’t very many ways to answer that question. One way to answer that is through sports competitions. Another way to answer that is through someone’s ranking system. Sports give a more objective answer, but everyone knows that a school with a great sports team is not necessarily the “best” college. So, people are willing to put up with a less objective answer if they think it gets at the “best” in a way that is better than “best football and men’s basketball records”, “highest average number of sunny days”, or “fewest incidents of violent crime within a five-mile radius,” all of which are objective but don’t feel very close to a ranking of what is “best.”

JB: You’ve become a go-to person in the press for ChatGPT and other LLMs in higher education. You’ve also taught courses at Wake Forest about this technology, putting it through its paces and showing how it can enhance education. Please describe some of the key promises and pitfalls you see for this technology. Are there any guidelines you would give for how to use this technology to enhance rather than undermine education? How do you see this technology affecting higher education in the next five years? Are you optimistic about the future of higher education and the value it claims to offer?

JM: I’m very optimistic about the use of LLMs in education. People want to learn. They don’t just want to pass their classes and collect their degrees, although that is how many would like to caricaturize the average student. LLMs offer the possibility for anyone with an internet connection to learn in ways unimaginable ten years ago. I have taught classes that, as you say, focus on this technology. But none of these classes were classes where students signed up to specifically learn about ChatGPT or Gemini or any of the other choices. They were classes where students signed up to learn physics, writing, fintech, or something else. However, the whole class was structured so students would have to learn to communicate with these new technologies in order to use them for the class in the ways I assigned.

Just today a student was trying to get ChatGPT to help him with a physics problem about how, by throwing a ball at an angle while standing on a moving flatcar, you could throw it in such a way that an observer standing next to the train track will see that the ball travels in a perfectly vertical trajectory with no horizontal component, and how, by just knowing how fast the flatcar was traveling and the angle you had to use to make this kind of a throw, you would be able to know precisely how high the ball would reach. Both he and ChatGPT kept getting the wrong answer about how high the ball would reach. I showed him how to ask ChatGPT in shorter sections: “If you threw the ball straight up, which way would it look like it was traveling to the observer on the ground?” “If instead, you threw it at an angle of 50°, how fast would you need to throw the ball for it to travel straight up, relative to the observer?” “What would the vertical component of this initial velocity vector?” and finally, “Given that velocity vector, what would be the ball’s maximum height?”

This lengthy process showed my student two things: 1) that “prompt engineering” is a difficult-to-master skill that other people value because it gets otherwise unobtainable results, and 2) that challenging physics problems are simpler to solve, both for him and for ChatGPT, when the problem is carefully broken down into parts.

JB: Let’s now step back a bit. As you review your life, what do you regard as the most important influences? What gives your life meaning and makes life worth living? How would you summarize your worldview? Who are your favorite authors, both religious and secular? What sort of music do you listen to if left to your own devices? Other things being equal, would you rather visit a museum or frolic outdoors?

JM: I love to frolic, so much so that I often frolic in museums as much as I do outdoors! I have found that, as I review my life, the most important influences on me are those that have helped me see the importance of subjugating my loves and desires under the greater goal of loving others. This was a difficult lesson for me to learn and a lesson I am still learning. It is a version of the adage that Oswald Chambers uses (and which Voltaire inverts): “The good is the enemy of the best.” For example, my love of frolicking and being super-animated can be quite good, but it often steals focus from something that someone else is doing which really ought, at that moment, to be the center of attention. I have deeply appreciated those who have influenced me to see how love for others is the “best” and that all else is just “good.” My worldview is very much Christian, and I have recently been considering how loving others, in the way Jesus loved his friends 2000 years ago, is the only goal I need to have. There are hopes, warnings, and truths that are important to hold firmly in my heart. But in terms of a daily goal which gives life deep meaning, there seems to be only this one all-important goal. Of course, it is also probably the hardest goal we can set for ourselves each day!

Thanks to Audible, Libby (the public library’s mobile app), and text readers, I have been able to listen to hundreds of books while running errands, vacuuming, working in the yard, and other chores. I’ve read nearly everything that has been converted to audio format that was written by C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, G.K. Chesterton, and Madeleine L’Engle. Interestingly, all four drew their inspiration from George MacDonald, who happened to also write my favorite short story: The Wise Woman. Besides these authors, I have enjoyed listening to Graham Greene’s four Catholic novels: Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, and The End of the Affair. I’m not a Catholic, but his stories and characters made me more curious about and appreciative of people who are Catholic.

JB: Any final thoughts you would like to share with our readers? Where do you hope to be personally 5 years from now? What about 10 years from now?

JM: I hope that, over the next five and ten years, I will be able to continue to use AI technology to teach my students. At the same time, I hope to continue to learn from them about the best ways to use new technologies. One book I listened to recently was The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870–1914 by David McCullough. I had enjoyed listening to McCullough’s John Adams back when listening to a book meant switching out a CD every hour or so and listening at 1x speed (shivers!) So, I wasn’t surprised by how much I liked the story McCullough told about how the Panama Canal was finally successfully built.

What intrigued me about the Panama Canal project was how important it was to establish communication lines between communities of workers stretched out along the 50 miles of land that eventually became the canal. It started with a newspaper for the workers, then grew into a baseball league and friendly rivalries about which steam shovel squads were making the most progress. Without intramural camaraderie, which John F. Stevens started and George Washington Goethals continued, the whole project would have been doomed.

Back in the days of the Panama Canal project, word of mouth and the printed page helped people feel connected. Today, the connections are primarily through video, images, and words, which constantly reach out to us through our phones. Real-time voice-based conversations, either virtual or in-person, also play an important role. But to understand exactly how those modalities will make people feel connected and how they will enable our generation to do great things, well, I rely on my students to help me with that. Young people have great potential to spur one another on to ignite positive change for the world around them. How that will look in the next five or ten years will be intimately tied to how they will use communication technologies to spark the kindling. For my part, I can’t wait to see that fire start burning!