Every department should have one person who says, “Wait a minute.”

Sometimes a meeting benefits from that person who hears nine people agree and proclaims that the tenth opinion deserves a hearing.

At work and at home, I get excited about new ideas, new approaches, and new tools. As the Academic Director of Academic Technology Services at UC Davis, I have spent part of my career encouraging faculty to create and use online resources, to teach hybrid or online classes, and to teach with images, audio, and video. Even when I read about the latest in artificial intelligence, I might ask “What could we build with this?”

My Religious Studies colleague Naomi Janowitz asks a different question.

“What might we lose?”

I have attended tech-centric faculty meetings where I have seen Naomi take notes with a Lamy fountain pen in a notebook. I have led discussions about efficiency while she steered us back toward attention and the needs of our students. Naomi asks what people should do with the time the new tools save. Read another book? Have another conversation? Think a little longer?

Years ago, I encountered a phrase from the Babylonian Talmud: ipkha mistabra, often translated as, “The opposite is more probable.” I have always liked the phrase, even if I have rarely practiced it except to challenge my students’ arguments and assumptions. Most of us prefer agreement. Agreement feels productive. Sometimes agreement gets us to lunch sooner.

Universities, however, also need people who delay lunch.

When a colleague retires, an office gets emptied. The books disappear. A favorite teacup remains unused in the departmental lounge. Someone else eventually inherits the furniture.

Sometimes the real vacancy appears during a conversation when you suddenly realize that the person who would have challenged everyone’s assumptions is no longer in the room.

I got to read this poem at Naomi’s retirement party.

For Naomi Janowitz: The Start of Summer

ONE

I remember the first time I was brought to her office.

I wanted to take the stairs.

But no, my elderly guide, the chair of English,

Insisted on the elevator, telling me on the way to the 9^th floor,

“I think you should really get to know Naomi Janowitz.”

We arrived at the highest point on campus, the entire county her vista.

She may have been the only weekday Davisite

who could see both the Sacramento skyline

and all four surrounding mountain ranges.

Surrounded by all those canonical texts,

I was struck by more analogues than I can process.

From that elevation, I saw Zeus on his eagle,

I think of Hliðskjálf, the high seat of Odin,

or the Garuda upon which Vishnu would be mounted.

No matter the religious imagery, on that first visit to the office

I was both taken in and taken aback.

TWO

When I arrived in California a few years before,

I noticed how deliberately our academics thought,

how lugubriously they talked.

But not Naomi.

Quick-witted, quick-minded, quick-tongued,

She was more like Saraswati,

The Hindu goddess of learning, speech, poetry, music, and wisdom.

I felt compelled to bring a court stenographer with me

on subsequent visits so that I could later consult an accurate record of what was said,

to review the titles of the books that had been recommended,

to consider the methodological insights into research and teaching.

THREE

When I started to teach with technology,

Naomi continued to teach without technology.

When I said, “Let’s embrace the tool,” she shook her head.

“Ipkha mistabra” / EEP-khah miss-TAHV-rah

The Babylonian Talmud tell us,

“The opposite is more probable.”

If nine people in a room agree to a course of action,

let there be a 10th person who says no,

who says, “Put down the smartphone.

Who says, “Put down the laptop.”

Who says, “Put it down in your notebook. Or just listen. Listen and then think.”

AI is not the path to Yahweh.

The newest freshman at UC Davis and the most veteran professor alike

Are surrounded by distractions, delimited by temptations.

What is the proper course of action, the most moral choice, when thus beset?

Naomi has an opinion about that.

Rather than a devil’s advocate, she appeals to the angels of our better natures.

FOUR

So the books have been packed up, many of them given away.

The teacups she donated to the ninth floor student lounge will remain.

But what of that magical office, that intellectual throne room in the clouds?

What function Olympus, when the gods are retiring to Berkeley?

The KDVS Office Hours may be rebroadcast forever,

but the office has still been emptied.

FIVE

After she escapes the samsara of faculty meetings,

committee meetings, impromptu teacup meetings.

After the classes and the grading and letters of recommendation,

all of them blessings.

After the escape to the Parinirvana of a paid-off home in Berkeley,

where does that leave the rest of us?

After so many years of affection, of devotion,

What do we see when we look up to the ninth floor of Sproul Hall?

A true believer, I’m ready to keep in my heart,

to keep in my crowded soul, the image, the idea, the example

of Naomi after she has departed.

We will think of the conversations.

And if we can think quickly enough, we will think of the insights —

sudden as raindrops amidst an endless Davis summer,

a summer that starts today.

Three questions from last week’s pub quiz:

1. Psychology. What phrase describes the mental discomfort experienced when one holds conflicting beliefs or attitudes?

2. Pop Culture – Television. On what television network did Outlander originally premiere in the United States?

3. Another Music Question. Chrissie Hynde is the longtime lead singer of what band that was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2005?

You can subscribe to the weekly pub quiz here: https://www.patreon.com/c/yourquizmaster

Thanks to everyone who supports this Substack. Below please find a pub quiz with 31 questions. Enjoy!

Dr. Andy

Pub Quiz for June 3, 2026 – This version has no answers

1. Mottos and Slogans.…

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I arrived at the UC Davis Medical Center on Sunday at about 11:45 a.m., still early enough to say good morning to everyone I met as I checked myself in.

My wife, Kate, and I were separated almost immediately when a nurse took me back to record my symptoms and vitals. Later, Kate said that she should have insisted on staying with me. I had my phone, but she had the backpack containing snacks and reading material. I wouldn’t be reading much; I was trying to rest my eyes.

Something strange had happened after I stepped out of the shower that morning. My left eye was suddenly filled by a Rorschach tangle of threads. Kate was about to head out for a walk with friends in the Arboretum, but when I described what I was seeing, she immediately changed plans.

“Get in the car,” she said. “We’re going to the medical center.”

Both Kate and my brother Oliver have experienced retinal detachments in recent years, so she recognized the symptoms more quickly than I did. Always reading about health, wellness, and longevity, Kate has become an expert who spots trouble before I do.

Thinking for a moment about my dad who was legally blind by the time he was my age, I fell asleep on the drive to Sacramento.

The first nurse who took my vital signs looked at the monitor and asked whether my heart rate was always so low.

I glanced over at the number.

Forty-eight.

“Usually,” I said. “Though not quite that low.”

I explained that I had meditated that morning and had just taken a nap in the car. She suggested that an EKG would be in order.

I was first brought to the eye room and then, I think, promptly forgotten. It was Sunday, after all. When a nurse later entered to retrieve some equipment, waking me from a nap in the examination chair, she stopped in surprise.

“Oh!”

She had not expected to find a patient sitting there.

Soon they moved me into an overflow waiting area because another patient needed the eye room. One might assume patients assigned to the eye room would eventually see an eye doctor. Yet I felt no real discomfort, and I had an audiobook and no wish to do any scrolling, so I settled in.

Eventually, a physician came by to explain that the ophthalmologist had been called into unexpected surgery and would be delayed for several hours. How different was I from the patient now in surgery?

I texted Kate and told her she should bring me the backpack and then head home.

Instead, she brought me vegetarian chili.

She later observed that she had grown used to airport prices and found medical center food surprisingly affordable. I suggested that perhaps we should return sometime for a lunch date.

As the afternoon wore on, I sat in a hallway away from a coughing eye-trauma patient, watching the Sunday parade of humanity pass by.

My favorite was a man in his thirties who walked the hall laughing and gesturing animatedly. He appeared to be carrying on a delightful conversation with absolutely no one. At first, I wondered whether he might be struggling with mental illness. Then he drew closer and I noticed the discreet earpiece tucked into one ear. He wasn’t talking to himself at all. He was enjoying a conversation I could hear only half of.

A little later, I watched an older man being wheeled down the hallway by a young orderly with cornrows. The patient had both an arm and a leg in fresh casts, yet he enthusiastically showed the orderly photographs of his motorcycle.

The orderly smiled politely, asked questions, and examined each picture.

I wondered whether he would ever ride that motorcycle again.

The longer I sat there, the more I realized that the medical center had become an accidental retreat.

Most Sundays I move from greenbelt to greenbelt, and from task to task. My weekends this quarter have been filled with papers to grade, emails to answer, and events to organize.

Instead, I had been given a chair, an audiobook, a bowl of chili, and nowhere I needed to be.

Every few hours another nurse would arrive to take my vital signs, and every few hours the same question would return.

“Is your heart rate always this low?”

By the fourth or fifth inquiry, I began to regard my slow heart with a certain affection.

Perhaps the meditation that morning had something to do with how calm I felt. Perhaps the audiobook helped. Perhaps I was reassured by the competence and kindness of the people caring for me. Perhaps Kate’s presence in the background of the day gave me permission to relax. Whatever the cause, I spent most of the afternoon observing rather than worrying.

I had come to the hospital because something was wrong with my vision, yet as the unhurried hours passed, I found myself paying closer attention than usual.

I noticed conversations, acts of kindness, and uneasy smiles. Watching the passersby, the patients with their medical wristbands, like mine, and their families, wearing their temporary badges, I noticed boredom, patience, humor, anxiety, resilience, and the thousand small dramas that unfold every day in a large public hospital.

I never learned whether that motorcyclist’s doctor told him if he could ever ride again, just as he never learned what I was doing in the hallway while transfixed by floating spiderwebs. We were both temporary residents of the same strange Sunday community.

My vision had become less reliable, but my attention had sharpened.

Finally, around dinnertime, I received a thorough examination and some good news from the ophthalmologist: No retinal tear. No retinal detachment.

What I did have was a vitreous detachment, a condition common among people in their late fifties and sixties. It sounds alarming until you learn it’s a routine part of getting older.

Only doctors and small children are allowed to tell us that we are getting old.

Even so, somehow I had missed that chapter in the handbook on aging.

When it comes to aging, no one hands us a syllabus. New developments arrive without warning. One morning you discover that your knees have made other plans. Another morning you hear everything except your breakfast date in crowded restaurants. On a Sunday in June, you step out of the shower and discover spiderwebs on the inside of your eye.

Doctors learn from their patients. Sunday visitors to medical centers learn patience.

As for me, I learned that an unexpected day spent waiting can become a day spent breathing slowly and paying attention.

For Pub Quiz fun, please subscribe via Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/c/yourquizmaster.

Best,

Dr. Andy

Three questions from last week’s pub quiz:

1. Mottos and Slogans. What product uses the slogan “You are not you when you are hungry”?

2. Internet Culture. Sony recently launched the Reon Pocket Pro Plus. Is it a new type of headphone, audio recorder, or portable air conditioner?

3. Newspaper Headlines. With fewer than 5% of its population made up of regular smokers, what country whose name starts with the letter S has recently been declared smoke-free?

In each newsletter, we recognize the causes of our gold supporters of the pub quiz on Patreon.

The Mavens support Meals on Wheels Yolo County

For over 50 years, Meals on Wheels Yolo County has prepared and delivered freshly cooked meals to seniors in Yolo County. in 2026, MOW Yolo County is providing approximately 1,200 aging adults in the region with the nutrition and social engagement they need to eat well and age well – safely and with dignity. Join the Mavens in supporting Meals on Wheels Yolo County!

www.mowyolo.org

Lynne Conrad-Forrest MD and Quizimodo support Planned Parenthood

Both these institutions do a lot of good and are in need of financial support in these dangerous times. Planned Parenthood provides primary care including contraception, hormonal therapy and sexually transmitted infection screens and treatment, as well as pregnancy counseling.

https://www.plannedparenthood.org/planned-parenthood-mar-monte

Please upgrade your membership to gold to be recognized here!

Thanks for keeping my Substack solvent! I appreciate you.

Please see the attached. The winning team (Tutus) scored 27 of 30 questions correctly.

Dr. Andy

Pub Quiz for May 27, 2026

This ve…

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My son Truman visited the Strand Bookstore in New York City last week. An ambitious reader himself, Truman knew his bibliophilic adventures would pique my curiosity, so he texted me pictures of the storefront and the poetry shelves.

Looking at the rows of titles, I recalled my favorite quotation by philosopher Mortimer Adler: “In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.” Years ago, I treated books as relics of genius, believing that close reading would expand my ambitions and abilities.

As a thank-you gift for my wife Kate’s brother and his wife, Truman purchased a coffee table book about Broadway, both devoted theater fans. Truman recently watched Nathan Lane and Laurie Metcalf in Death of a Salesman, proof that New York still showcases extraordinary actors the way the Strand showcases great books.

Something about those poetry shelves in Truman’s photos—the colorful spines and the scope of the collection—sent me straight back to the spring of 1988. That year, I took the train from Boston to New York City to meet my mother, who traveled up from Washington, D.C. My Uncle Alan and Aunt Barbara lived on the Upper West Side in a beautiful two-bedroom apartment overlooking Central Park. They possessed the finest view of anyone I knew, a panoramic vista that filled me with wonder and appreciation for America’s grandest city.

We visited the Natural History Museum, where my uncle served as director. We also strolled past the midtown public library, an institution whose grand lions and long history perhaps inspired my mother to become a librarian. We dined in small restaurants, where this Godfather fan kept his eyes open for gangsters, and eventually sought out the Strand Bookstore.

My mother and I walked the aisles together, she gravitating toward history and I toward poetry. I selected several titles, accumulating a stack almost too heavy to carry, including a massive tome of Allen Ginsberg’s collected poems. The next day, as I prepared to return to Boston, I realized the literary haul exceeded the capacity of my suitcase. To solve the dilemma, I donned two full layers of clothing to free up space for the books.

After bidding farewell to my mother at the 96th Street and Central Park West subway entrance, I descended to the platform and purchased a subway token. Eager to read, I found a secluded bench, sat down, and pulled out a fresh book of poetry.

A few minutes later, a man approached me. He claimed to have a gun in his pocket and demanded my wallet. Barely thinking, I stood up and locked eyes with him. In that moment, I realized I towered over him. Bulked up by layers of clothing, I looked larger and more formidable than I was. Sensing his hesitation, I spoke firmly: “Look, just cut it out, all right?”

I turned my back on the man and walked away, dragging my overweight rolling suitcase. I marched toward the nearest stranger and sat down uncomfortably close to him. Because the exit lay in that same direction, the would-be mugger had to run right past me to flee the station. My Allen Ginsberg collection remained secure.

In retrospect, I doubt the man possessed a weapon, and I certainly recognize that I lacked good sense. Typically, muggers injure those who resist, and my instinctive defiance came with serious risk. Yet, I successfully protected my wallet, an item that held virtually nothing anyway because I had spent my last dollar on books. The poetry had cleaned me out long before the mugger got the chance. My remaining funds covered only my MBTA train fare from South Station to my BU Central Green Line stop.

Sitting beside that stranger, with my mother only a few blocks away above ground, I felt the adrenaline fade. Burdened with literary ambitions and my heavy books, I felt a tremor starting in my hands. Soon I felt the entire world shake, and indeed it did, as the southbound C train finally roared into the station.

Thanks to all the paid subscribers who support my writing and my pub quiz!

Dr. Andy

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When I was growing up in Washington, D.C., I assumed that vibrant culture belonged mostly to large cities. Big cities like mine had the museums, the used bookstores, the music venues, repertory movie theaters, and the strange conversations in lobbies and on sidewalks. I loved all that, and when I first imagined living in a smaller city, I worried that I would have to give some of it up.

This past weekend proved me wrong.

On Friday evening at The Sofia in Sacramento, I attended an “In a Nutshell” storytelling event produced by my old friend the comedian and author Keith Lowell Jensen. Taking on the theme of “Cults, Crackpots, and Swindlers,” the four storytellers, Glynn Washington, Johnny Taylor Jr., JP Frary, and Holly James, shaped lived experience into timing, revelation, and surprise. They knew when to delay, when to interrupt a pattern, and when to let the audience complete the thought just before the punchline arrives. One story circled its ending so patiently that the punchline felt less delivered than discovered. My daughter and I left feeling we’d seen a master class in narrative economy.

On Saturday, I joined poets, musicians, and friends of the Sacramento Poetry Center for the Save the Press fundraiser in the park-like garden of Bob Stanley and Joyce Hsiao. The cause was wonderfully concrete: helping transport and restore an early 1900s Chandler & Price letterpress (the kind that needs to be painstakingly hand-fed paper, ink, and moveable type) so that SPC can make broadsides, posters, and fine poetry-art pieces. I performed a poem about this: poetry, often accused of floating too far above practical life, will soon have not only weight, but also gears, rollers, ink, and transport costs.

That afternoon featured a poetry pub quiz (Taylor Swift and Emily Dickinson were cousins?), delicious food, about 100 poets, and the beloved Davis poet and dancer Allegra Silberstein. This 95-year-old Poet Laureate Emerita of the City of Davis has attended most of the nearly 500 readings I have hosted over the last two decades. At Poetry Night, the smiling nonagenarian always reads last at the open mic, and people clap for her the longest. Surrounded by poets and music in a Sacramento garden, she again reminded us that communities form around the people who return. As Walt Whitman said, “To have great poets, there must be great audiences too.” Allegra is both.

And then on Sunday, I hosted Stories on Stage Davis at Sudwerk. There, actors read fiction aloud in (or, in this case, outside) my favorite brewery, though literature has almost always needed rooms, venues, voices, food, and listeners. The printed story returns to the air, or, in Sunday’s case, the gale-force winds. The actor lends breath and timing to the author’s sentences. The audience, many of us with beverages nearby, receives fiction as a communal event rather than a private errand.

Across these three days, the categories kept crossing. Comedians became memoirists. Poets became fundraisers and preservationists. A garden became a literary salon, and a brewery courtyard became a theatre. I love these porous borders. A city’s cultural life grows stronger when people stop guarding their genres and start sharing their chairs, microphones, mailing lists, and Saturdays.

I grew up in Washington D.C., in the shadow of the National Mall, The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and the 9:30 Club. Now that I live in Davis and move often between Davis and Sacramento, I recognize that these communities are making the culture we live in. They ask us to attend, to host, to introduce, to clap, to buy the book, to fund and move the press, to pass the hat, to bring a friend or a daughter, and to thank the people who set up the chairs and stick around to stack them afterwards.

For more Pub Quiz fun, please subscribe via Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/c/yourquizmaster.

I also want to recognize those who visit my Substack the most often, including Elaine, Michael, Luna, Jean, Ron, Myrna, Maria, to whom I send sustained compassion. S

Best,

Dr. Andy

Trivia from Last Week:

1. Current Events – Names in the News. Olympian Ryan Lochte has joined Missouri State as an assistant coach in what sport?

2. Sports. The NFL has announced the two teams that will compete in this coming season’s Monday Night Footballopener. Name just one of them.

3. Shakespeare. Hamlet contains the Bard’s best-known ghost. What play contains his second-best known ghost?

In each newsletter, we recognize the causes of our gold supporters of the pub quiz on Patreon.

The Mavens support Meals on Wheels Yolo County

For over 50 years, Meals on Wheels Yolo County has prepared and delivered freshly cooked meals to seniors in Yolo County. in 2026, MOW Yolo County is providing approximately 1,200 aging adults in the region with the nutrition and social engagement they need to eat well and age well - safely and with dignity. Join the Mavens in supporting Meals on Wheels Yolo County!

www.mowyolo.org

Lynne Conrad-Forrest MD and Quizimodo support Planned Parenthood

Both these institutions do a lot of good and are in need of financial support in these dangerous times. Planned Parenthood provides primary care including contraception, hormonal therapy and sexually transmitted infection screens and treatment, as well as pregnancy counseling.

https://www.plannedparenthood.org/planned-parenthood-mar-monte

Please upgrade your Patreon membership to gold to be recognized here!

Today I got to be the master of ceremonies at The UC Davis Information Security Symposium. The more than 100 attendees got to learn from experts from UC Davis, UC Berkeley, UC San Francisco, and even the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I got to introduce guests, fill time with announcements about the Summer Institute on Teaching and Technology (which I also get to host), and, my favorite part, read an original poem about information security and the various topics, themes, and alerts raised at the conference.

Find my poem, below.

After the Alerts

The stewards of our systems speak of doors
most of us never see:
doors made of numbers,
doors that open when a tired hand
touches the blue blossom of a link.

Somewhere a classroom fills.
Somewhere a grant proposal
leans toward its deadline.
Somewhere a payroll file ripens,
and a student sends one true sentence
into the machinery of a course.

And beneath it all,
the almost-invisible keepers
tend the rootwork underneath:
patch, permission, protocol,
the small liturgy of access,
the patient mending of the net
before the morning catches.

They know how danger arrives:
it speaks our jargon,
it borrows our names,
it wears our campus colors,
it polishes its teeth
with perfect grammar.

They understand the human system
inside the technical one:
the hurried professor,
the student wanting only
to solve one more problem set before dinner.

So they build more than barriers.
They build habits of looking twice,
rooms where questions can enter,
a table long enough
for the expert and the newcomer,
the analyst and the poet.


Collaboration becomes a kind of shelter
large enough to hold
all our whispered passwords,
all our bright mistakes.

And if the university is a body,
then this week we have named
some of its nerves,
some of its scars,
some of its sleeping alarms.


Do not snooze.

We leave with our pockets full
of ordinary instructions:
check the sender twice,
ask for help,
keep learning.

Carrying new cautions,
we leave together,
which is the oldest security,
and the best beginning.

Thanks to the organizers of the symposium for involving me and for making room for poetry, a mode of expression that I think should open or conclude every major event or gathering.

Dr. Andy

I hope you enjoy last week’s quiz. Don’t you want to know which W celebrities I met?

Dr. Andy

Pub Quiz for May 6, 2026

This version has no answers — Become a paid subscribers to discover the answers!

1. Mottos and Slogans. What kind of deodorant once used the slogan “Strong enough for a man, but made for a woman”?

2. Internet Culture. It was on May 6 that Steve Jobs of Apple Inc. unveiled the first iMac. Name the century.

3. Newspaper Headlines. Chonkers has come to San Francisco. Using two words, what is Chonkers?

4. Four for Four. Which three of the following four most successful living African-American performers whose last names start with W has Dr. Andy met in person: Denzel Washington, Billy Dee Williams, Oprah Winfrey, Stevie Wonder?

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For thirty-six years, I have walked into UC Davis classrooms once carrying books, notes, and attendance sheets; now carrying less, and trusting discussion to carry the hour. I have taught poetry, essays, multimodal autobiography, writing across media, and the occasional class that threatened to become a graduate seminar because someone in the back row asked a smart question about a line in Yeats or Baldwin or Didion.

Like many faculty, I once imagined education as mostly forward-looking. Students arrived. We spent ten weeks together. They wrote papers, revised them, stared at me stone-faced when I made jokes, tolerated my enthusiasms, and eventually disappeared into careers, marriages, graduate schools, parenthood, and lives I could only partially imagine. New students replaced them the next quarter. The years began stacking like the boxes full of poetry books in my garage.

When I first began teaching, I did not understand that some classrooms continue echoing long after the quarter ends.

The echoes arrive unpredictably.

Some echoes arrive through email or Facebook Messenger. Sometimes I will encounter a familiar face at the Farmers Market or on campus on Picnic Day. If I am lucky, I encounter a former student standing unexpectedly in my office doorway twenty years later, smiling in a way that briefly collapses time.

About two decades after taking my T. S. Eliot class, Sarah Oliver Gordus, the student who trained me as a new public affairs host at KDVS in 2000, knocked on my office’s open door. I could still remember her from our Young Hall classroom years earlier: long red hair, intelligence mixed with seriousness, and the kind of attentiveness that makes discussions feel alive rather than merely procedural. Yet suddenly there she was not as a student frozen in memory, but as a fully formed adult carrying two additional decades of experience, disappointment, accomplishment, humor, and history.

Students often remember versions of us that no longer exist, gone with the once black pigment of my beard. Somewhere in Sarah’s memory, I am still teaching Eliot to students carrying spiral notebooks instead of laptops, still standing at the front of a class before distracting smartphones adorned each desk. Meanwhile, she herself had continued making friends and discoveries through twenty years of life invisible to me. When such former students return, even briefly, one experiences the uncanny sensation of seeing both the past and present layered together like translucent pages in a Norton anthology.

Another student from that same Eliot class, Valerie Cullen Shepard, eventually headed to University of California, Los Angeles to pursue Milton studies and earn a PhD. At some point, I realized that my own Milton books had found their rightful future owner in Valerie. Books migrate toward the people who still hunger for them, and I had never met anyone so hungry for Milton. A professor’s shelves are less a permanent library than a way station. I still like imagining those volumes now being opened beneath different lamps, annotated in another hand. And now, photo holiday cards of Valerie and her family sit near those same bookshelves.

Some echoes take forms no syllabus could anticipate.

Years after taking a Writing across Media course I taught for Film and Digital Media students, a former student named Kevin contacted me with a request so unexpected I reread the message twice to make sure I understood. He wanted me to become a minister and officiate his wedding to Natalie, who years earlier had babysat for our family. Teaching already blurs categories. Students become colleagues, collaborators, fellow citizens, neighbors, and even friends.

I had spent years teaching students to find meaning in other people’s narratives; it had not occurred to me that one day I might be standing inside one of theirs, holding a microphone and trying not to cry.

We are present for many undergraduate transitions. We see students during heartbreaks, illnesses, intellectual awakenings, family crises, exhausted mornings, and artistic breakthroughs they often conceal from one another. Yet even faculty who get to know their students well rarely see the longer arc. If not for Facebook or familiar names in the UC Davis alumni magazine (where I am also an alumnus), I would rarely witness who they become afterward. When former students return years later, they bring fragments of that largely invisible future back with them.

I think often now about the hidden continuity beneath a teaching career. Outsiders sometimes imagine that professors primarily teach subjects. Milton. Eliot. Virginia Woolf. Composition. Media studies. Poetry. Yet after enough years, teaching stops feeling like the delivery of information and starts feeling like short-term participation in hundreds of human stories that occasionally circle back to my attention. You begin remembering faces attached to particular moments of intellectual courage: the student who risked sharing a difficult image in a poem, the student who stayed after class to keep talking, or the student who started attending Poetry Night and then returned as the author of award-winning novels.

The richest rewards of teaching can arrive as applause at the end of the quarter, but they also can emerge decades later in the form of a knock on the door, an invitation, an email, a remembered classroom, a student who still carries part of the conversation forward long after both of you have changed.

These echoes that still ring for me like half-remembered lines of poetry have become some of the great sustaining surprises of my life at UC Davis.

For more Pub Quiz fun, please subscribe via Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/c/yourquizmaster.

Best,

Dr. Andy

Recent trivia for you:

1. Youth Culture. What is Labubu: A Chinese furry monster, a K-Pop singer’s nickname, or a Japanese virtual pet?

2. Hair Accessories. What common hair accessory shares its name with a small edible squid?

3. Science. Commonly found in granite, what M mineral splits into thin elastic sheets because of its perfect basal cleavage?

Everyone gets to see a post a week from me. Subscribers get at least two. Enjoy!

Dr. Andy

Pub Quiz for April 29, 2026 – This version has no answers

1. Mottos and Slogans. In 1964, an Act of…

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Today I walked halfway to Crepeville before Kate picked me up for brunch. Afterward, she dropped me off a mile and a half from home so she could rush to jury duty, and I walked the rest of the way back through another clear California morning. I owe these long walks much of my health. They pull me out of the mediated world of screens and back into physical space: trees shifting in the wind, the morning sun still gentle at the end of April, the rhythm of my own footsteps, a rusted bicycle leaning against a sycamore, the feeling that my mind can finally stretch out a little.

I often choose California’s weather over the pull of screens, especially as recent surveys suggest we Americans stare at screens for about seven hours a day. Over breakfast, Kate said that the numbers might be skewed by all the people who are scrolling past social media posts while watching TV. Still a fan of technological innovation, I nevertheless remain concerned about what happens when convenience replaces attention, contemplation, and the slow labor of making meaning.

When we go to an orchestral performance, a rally by the ocean, a Poetry Night performance, or an outdoor farmers market, we remind ourselves how lucky we are to live here, even when reasons for optimism feel scarce.

The cognitive offloading that accompanies many people’s uses of generative AI runs the risk of making us feel even more disembodied. Not merely intellectual, human insight also emerges through embodied experience: moving through physical space, reading faces, hearing the intake of breath before a point is made, enduring silence, physically writing in a journal, and struggling against the resistant material of the world.

I could spend pages on physical engagement with beauty, but as academic director at UC Davis, I also must engage with AI, even while my heart belongs to a world built by hand, word by word, and stroke by stroke.

This internal friction I feel intensifies when I text my children. Their lives revolve around the creation of original art and narrative (my daughter an artist, my son a filmmaker), so they view this technological shift with a justified chill. I suspect that they see the vast, unconsented scraping of human effort as a theft of the soul. Like the students I teach in my Writing in Fine Arts class this quarter, my kids understand that the struggle of artistic labor generates the meaning of the work. The solo recital must be rehearsed, and fingers darken with paint or ink. Bypassing the difficulty typically requires one to bypass the growth.

I teach my students to recognize writing as our most fundamental technology for thinking, as one of the best ways to create, deepen, and share complex thoughts. Yet, my administrative duties demand that I play with these digital prisms, examining how they might reflect or distort our academic missions. As I advise students, lead instructional designers, or consider my own future creative projects, I find myself caught in a liminal space between roles, needing to understand the framework of a tool that my own community of artists and researchers largely distrusts.

With regard to AI, those of us who grew up before such tools existed possess a “curator’s advantage,” a foundation of literacy built through decades of deep reading and exacting revision of our prose. When I ask a machine to contextualize a difficult book, asking about an author’s peers or influences (such as how Blake and Whitman influence Ginsberg), I do so with a mind already filled with the echoes of other texts. When examining a piece of writing, I recognize a shallow synthesis or a blatant hallucination because I spent my life marking up paperbacks and learning how to build a sentence from the ground up.

A person who masters the craft of language views technology as a lens, whereas a person dependent on the tool views it as a source, a crutch, or even a necessity. Sometimes I worry about those generations who grow up without the friction of the blank page. Educators must always consider how to model and cultivate human creativity, seeking to ensure it remains untamed by the homogenizing influence of a predictive model.

Nietzsche wrote in Thus Spoke Zarathustra that “Man muss noch Chaos in sich haben, um einen tanzenden Stern gebären zu können” – “One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.”

I plan to foster this chaos in me by staring into the eyes of my beloved, walking into a forest at dusk, or writing a poem whose wild pairings of images — a peacock feather caught in the spokes of that rusted bicycle on my morning walk — allow me to escape the confines of predictable prose. The best parts of life shouldn’t be outsourced.

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Best,

Dr. Andy

1. Three questions from last week: Mottos and Slogans. Known for its three-letter name, what organization and conference in 2024 changed their slogan from “Ideas Worth Spreading” to “Ideas Change Everything”?

2. Internet Culture. John Ternus is replacing whom?

3. Newspaper Headlines. According to a recent article in the New York Times, the new Netflix show featuring Zach Galifianakis concerns which of the following topics: gardening, jewelry, or muskets?

Dear Friends,

Enjoy last week’s pub quiz here. You will find first the version with no answers, and then a version with answers.

Thanks for your support on Substack!

Dr. Andy

Pub Quiz for April 22, 2026
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As a lifetime lover of the performing arts, I’ve sat through long orchestral performances and let my attention drift.

Wearing a blue blazer and my first necktie, I was taken to performances by the National Symphony Orchestra that became the resident orchestra of the newly-opened Kennedy Center. Later I would see Boston Symphony Orchestra performances, though my $4 student price tickets often allowed only partial visibility of the performers. I remember the lights being dimmed and my being carried away by the music, and even sometimes carried towards slumber.

Determined not to repeat my childhood lapses, I took a strategic nap before this Sunday’s festival. This time, the stakes were higher: I wasn’t in the back of the hall. I was sitting on stage at The Mondavi Center.

The Wennberg Orchestra Festival gathers every level of student orchestra in Davis into a single afternoon, and this year, as the Master of Ceremonies, I got to welcome the audience of 400 or more and introduce each group. That meant sitting at a lectern just a few feet from the musicians, right behind the second violins.

As I tried to communicate with my enthusiastic introductions, every entrance mattered. The tuning of all those instruments, led by the concertmaster, seemed to go on too long. One performer was recognized by the conductor taking the stage after the tuning had concluded; he made it to the performance just in time, despite a flat tire on his car. One could imagine him sprinting across town and then across campus, carrying his violin case like a misshapen football. I watched from the lectern as he slipped into his seat, breathless but almost ready,

Sitting so close to the action, I realized that I, too, was part of the set dressing. I remained visible, modeling an attentive silence for the audience without ever pulling their focus away from the sharply-dressed performers. I watched the student musicians tracking the conductor, bows rising together, eyes lifting and settling.

I enjoy speaking into a microphone before 400 people, but I didn’t always know how to negotiate the silence after each piece ended. I could sense the audience looking at me, waiting for permission to clap. Meanwhile, I was looking at the conductor, waiting for a nod. For three or four seconds that felt much longer, nobody moved. As the MC, I felt like the bridge between the sacred silence of the stage and the eruptive energy of the audience.

From the perspective of the audience, an orchestra is a unified wall of sound. From eight feet behind the second violins, the sound is engulfing. From my seat, the orchestral balance vanished; I heard the gritty, intimate details of the violins rather than the polished “wall of sound.” Perhaps only the performers and I could hear the audible breath of the woodwinds before a musical phrase. Under the stage lights, I could see the rosin dust rising from the bows.

The confidence, increasing complexity, and sustained excellence of the performances belied the youth of the performers. A familiar movement from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony appeared late in the program, and I reminisced about the well-worn cassettes that provided the orchestral soundtrack of my last two years of college. When that close to the performers, one actually feels the timbre of the orchestral pieces. The stringed instruments immersed me in sound. The kettledrums resonated in my chest cavity.

By the end of the afternoon, the stage belonged to the students and the conductors (especially Angelo Moreno) who had mentored them. The students carried the sound, held the tempo, and stayed with one another through the harder passages. Introducing the performers, and congratulating them after each rousing finale, I was filled with admiration and gratitude for their performances.

Neither teacher nor parent of these musicians, I left the stage proud of a community that still finds value in the slow, disciplined alchemy of turning rosin and wood into art. After each performance, and especially during the encores, the musicians could hear applause before and behind them on the Mondavi stage.

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Best,

Dr. Andy

Three questions from last week:

1. Film and Film Critics. About what 2026 Pixar film was film critic William Bibbiani speaking when he wrote that the film “isn’t just James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) if it had feelings, it’s also James Cameron’s Avatar if it was good”?

2. Youth Culture. Why has Bebe the parrot gone viral: Alerting Ukrainian soldiers to drones, exploring the Bahamas in a submarine, or accompanying Justin Bieber on stage at Coachella 2026?

3. Countries of the World. How many European countries have a larger population than that of Iran: One, three, or five?

This Friday I have a 9:20 a.m. doctor’s appointment at 2660 West Covell Boulevard in Davis, approximately 4.7 miles from my south Davis home. My son’s van picks him up at 7:45, setting the schedule that shapes the rest of my morning. Google Maps estimates a one-hour and 47-minute trek. If the van pulls away at exactly 7:45, I’ll arrive with a razor-thin three-minute margin. It’s a gamble against the clock. Should I walk?

I want to, but a bicycle is also calling out to me. It reminds me of another weekday earlier this year when I met my wife at a north Davis medical appointment. I ended up biking past four different Davis public schools and was reminded what a bike-friendly town we live in.

From South Davis, I biked over Pole Line Road, past my favorite Davis brewery, and then through Chestnut Park where I meditate on Sunday mornings. I heard the familiar singers – the American robins, the northern mockingbirds, the house finches and the white-crowned sparrows – their chorus forming the soundtrack of my morning sit.

I encountered many other bicyclists, most of them ages 12–15, on Drexel Drive on the way to Holmes Junior High School, and was delighted to find a welcoming committee at all the nearby intersections. When I am driving (which happens rarely these days), I plot routes that avoid schools because of the stopped traffic. By contrast, on my bicycle, I was directed to breeze through all the stop signs by crossing guards in reflective vests, meaning that I sped through town. Even when I would slow down, these public servants would wave me through with big smiles on their faces, looking at me as if I had never biked in Davis before.

I have been treated like a VIP a few times in my life: When my theatre critic dad and I would show up to a sold-out play and be ushered to some of the best seats in the house just before the lights dimmed; when visiting Disneyland with my disabled son Jukie, and thus being guided past long lines and onto the amusement park rides that he could handle; or biking past Holmes Junior High or North Davis Elementary during the 8 a.m. hour. With my dad at the theatre, I felt important by association. With Jukie at Disneyland, I felt grateful that the world had made a little room for him. And on my bike in Davis, I felt prioritized by design, like a protagonist in a town built for two wheels.

Walking and biking entail different ways of taking in the city, with the walk a meditative slow -burn, and the bike ride a kinetic release. On foot, I can dictate emails, write drafts of poems, or see what Kate has posted on Instagram. My step count, once hovering around 18,000 a day, has dropped to about 15,000 since I developed plantar fasciitis last December and started supplementing my low intensity exercise regimen with time spent at Planet Fitness, trading circuitous greenbelts for stair-climbers and weight machines. Craving steps, I am inclined to walk.

But on a bike, I feel liberated, speedy, and empowered. Each straightaway invites acceleration and exhilaration. My bike eats up the miles, racing past pedestrians and slower bicycles as if they were stuck in place. Imagining wings, I create my own breezes, revisiting the joy that I first discovered at Stoddert Park in Washington D.C. when I first learned to bike in 1976. Speed sharpens the world, narrowing my focus to the line ahead and the rhythm of the pedals. The wind whistles through the ventilation slots of my helmet.

The question remains: Should I walk and stay present or bike and feel free? Which would you choose?

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Thanks to all the new players joining us at the live quizzes and to all the patrons who have been enjoying fresh Pub Quiz content. Certain friends have upgraded their memberships recently, which I really appreciate.

Best,

Dr. Andy

Three questions from last week:

1. Science. Starting with a P, what is the term for the open ocean zone that is not near the bottom or the shore?

2. Books and Authors. Happy National Poetry Month! Which young poet became nationally known after the 2021 U.S. presidential inauguration?

3. Current Events – Names in the News. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s 16-year grip on power may soon be coming to an end in what country?

Rather than grappling with the danger of voter fraud, today instead we face the political use of its myth to undermine democracy.

The Brennan Center for Justice is clear on voter fraud in the United States: “[Every] legitimate study ever done on the question shows that voting by noncitizens in state and federal elections is vanishingly rare.” I love that use of the word “vanishingly.” Math people might call this a horizontal asymptote, a line a curve approaches but never meaningfully reaches.

Like that horizontal asymptote, the gap between the fear of voter fraud and its actual occurrence is something the numbers make plain — if you’re shown the numbers. As the Brennan Center puts it, “we must be careful not to undermine free and fair access to the ballot in the name of preventing phantom voter fraud.”

Some would say this delegitimizing of elections is the goal, not the undesired by-product. In an era of increasing authoritarianism in the United States, citizens should recognize that manufacturing doubt about elections is intended to determine winners. This fear isn’t just a misunderstanding of math; for some, it is a deliberate tool of control. As Joseph Stalin is purported to have said, “The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.”

It’s important to count votes, but in an era of manufactured doubt, it is equally vital to count the bodies in the streets.

Sunday, The Guardian newspaper reported “More than 8 million people showed up across 3,300 No Kings protests on Saturday, calling for an end to the war in Iran, immigration agents in their communities and what they see as Trump’s creeping authoritarianism. Organizers say it’s the greatest number of protests in a single day in US history.”

My family and I were happy to have participated in No Kings 3 this past Saturday, but I think we might have also thrown off the official count.

Vacationing in the North Bay this past weekend, we followed a path towards a steady crescendo of dissent. We began Saturday morning in Bodega Bay, where a small, salt-aired rally felt intimate against the vast, quiet backdrop of the coast and along the busy State Route 1. As we moved inland from the coast, the energy began to thicken. In Petaluma, the mood was a communal hum, a few thousand of us marching past the Singing Resistance singers in front of Copperfield’s Books, and then gathering in Walnut Park like a massive, purposeful picnic.

By the time we reached Santa Rosa, the trickle had become a flood. We joined 12,000 marchers, and the atmosphere shifted from peaceful and determined to electric. The quiet determination of the coast was gone, replaced by a younger, louder, and more exuberant roar that filled Old Courthouse Square. The square vibrated as new waves of marchers arrived to diversify the energy.

At similar protests that I’ve attended in Davis, Woodland, and Sacramento, I’ve encountered many friends. So much hugging! I found myself scanning faces, looking for familiar ones, but finding none. Even without friends around me, I felt that I belonged.

While I would never engage in voter fraud, I might be guilty of protester head count fraud. Instead of counting as four people and a dog, we somehow became twelve people and three dogs. Perhaps an executive order is in order.

One woman standing on a platform wearing an anti-MAGA shirt saw me marching hand in hand with my disabled son Jukie. Jukie’s shirt reminded everyone that BLACK LIVES MATTER, while mine said “Make Racism Wrong Again.”

After we walked by, she called out to me:

“Hey you! Hey Dad!”

When I turned around, she said,

“I see you and your son! We appreciate you!”

Squeezing Jukie’s hand, I smiled to her and to Kate.

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Best,

Dr. Andy

Questions from last week:

Countries of the World. Argentina is named after what metal?

Science. What is the name of the fluid that lubricates joints?

Books and Authors. Dorothea Brooke searched for purpose in what George Eliot novel published in 1871 and 1872?

My step-great-grandmother Zillah used to say that we entertain in order to attend to our homes, and we travel in order to attend to our wardrobes.

We prepare for the gaze of others and discover what no longer fits.

There is a story about Denis Diderot that haunts me any time I consider buying something for my home.

In a 1769 essay titled “Regrets on Parting with My Old Dressing Gown” (French: Regrets sur ma vieille robe de chambre), Diderot reflects upon the ways his life is upended by a gift.

He receives a beautiful new dressing gown, elegant and finely made, and suddenly everything else in his home looks shabby by comparison. The chair where he was once satisfied to sit and read? It no longer belongs. The desk where he writes his essays and his 28-volume Encyclopédie? It feels wrong. The humble room itself begins to accuse him. So he replaces one thing, then another, then another, until everything matches the robe. In doing so, he ruins himself. The gift did not elevate him. Instead, it rearranged his sense of what belonged.

When our friend Evan recently came for a visit, my wife Kate began to see the house as he might see it, rather than as we see it from within, accustomed to its compromises. She looked at the fraying dining room rug the dog had started chewing a few years ago, drawn to its thick weave. She looked at the ottoman we’d bought as a placeholder twenty years ago and never gotten around to replacing. She looked at the back yard recliners, worn down by weather and time and our indifference to both.

We bought much of this furniture twenty-two years ago, when we first moved into our Davis home, when pine and pressboard sufficed. Now, those pieces have become static artifacts of a household we’ve outgrown, though we hadn’t noticed the growth until the afternoon light hit the dust just right.

One replacement leads to another: the rug, then the end table, then the chairs. The house begins to shift.

I find myself looking forward to living in a slightly finer version of our home. Unlike Diderot, I will not be replacing my 34-year-old robe, a favorite wedding present from one of my first babysitters, the late novelist John Davenport, a gift I still use every day.

Of all the gifts I received on my wedding day, the only gift that gets more use than my terrycloth robe is the golden band that I haven’t removed since.

For me, the robe stays. The band stays. That is enough.

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I also want to recognize those who visit my Substack the most often, including Michael (thanks Michael!), Luna, Jean, Ron, Myrna, Maria, to whom I send sustained compassion.

Best,

Dr. Andy

Three questions from last week:

Books and Authors and Plays and Movies. Was Little Shop of Horrors originally a 1990 children’s picture book by William Steig, a film by Roger Corman, or an off-Broadway show with music by Alan Menken and lyrics and a book by Howard Ashman? Hint: Your guess is probably wrong.

Film. One Battle After Another won six Oscars; Sinners won four. What 2025 film came in third with three Oscars?

Youth Culture. To be released December 18^th of 2026, what cinematic space opera with a $200 million budget and five Oscar-nominees in its cast is likely to be one of the top-grossing films released in 2026?

The book haunted me as I drove my son Jukie first to Elk Grove and then to my old neighborhood of midtown Sacramento for the multi-block midtown farmers market and craft fair. I wondered how McCarthy with his incantatory, almost Biblical, diction and cadence would describe what we saw, from the Cuban food truck where we got lunch, to the many friendly people who passed us by.

Find below what I came up with.

On the day appointed for the market, the streets were given over to men and women, and the engines of commerce were stilled, and the long line of asphalt from J Street to Capitol lay barred to the traffic of the world. And there were gathered there the growers and the makers and those who trafficked in small bright things of no fixed necessity, and they had raised their tents like a Bedouin’s temporary city against the sun. Banners stirred in the heated air and the voices of the sellers rose and fell like petition and reply. And my son walked beside me and took in the scene with a steady regard as if he had come upon a place he had known before in some earlier dispensation.

It was near to the hour of ending and already the shadows had begun their slow extension across the pavement. Some among the vendors had packed their goods and stood idle, watching, and perhaps waiting for a conveyance, while others still called out in a last appeal to those who lingered. There were tables laid with objects wrought by hand, wires bent into cunning forms, glass and metal made to catch the light and hold it briefly, and the buyers moved among them with a kind of measured hunger. And though the things were small and the hour late, there was about the place a sense of reckoning, as if each exchange were to be weighed and entered into some unseen ledger.

We came upon a truck painted in colors that spoke of distant coasts and of kitchens set close to the sea and there we purchased a bowl of food that steamed in the heat of the day. Rice and beans and tomatoes cut fine, peppers and spices commingled, and all of it without flesh, yet made rich by the hand that prepared it. The woman who served it did so with a gravity that suggested the old transactions of bread and salt, and we took the bowl and went on, bearing it between us as if it were a small offering not yet named.

We found a stoop at the margin of that temporary kingdom and there we sat. The stone held the warmth of the day and the bottles of water sweated in our hands. We ate and watched. The people passed before us in their varieties and colors, young and unguarded, their dress light against the season that had come early and without mercy. Some laughed and some argued and some moved with a solitary purpose as if called elsewhere. Music rose faintly from some quarter not seen and a dog strained at its lead and the sun declined without haste or favor.

And the violence that underlies all things had absented itself from that street for that afternoon, as if by some collective agreement no one had signed and no one had broken. And I thought to myself that the city endures by such gatherings, that men and women come together not only to buy and sell but to be seen and to testify by their presence that they are yet among the living. The stalls would be struck and the street returned to its former use and the signs of the day taken up as if they had not been. Yet something would remain, carried off in the bodies of those who had walked there, in the taste of spice and the memory of heat and the brief commerce of glances exchanged between strangers. And my son sat beside me and ate and watched the world go by and the light faded over all of it alike.