A Sound of Sheer Silence

Northwestern has a bye week this week, after their 34-18 victory over South Dakota State . Instead of an essay, I am going to include an interview I conducted over email with my friend Frank Strong.  Frank is an educator in Austin, Texas.  I "met" Frank a number of years back when our respective writing covered very similar grounds, and this summer I got a change to travel to Austin for the first time and actual meet him in person.  When he is not teaching, Frank is a tireless advocate for free and honest education in the state of Texas, which is not an easy job in this day and age.  He his one of the co-founders of the Texas Freedom to Read Project, which you can read about here .  You can find his written work at Anger and Clarity . Frank is also a proud graduate of the University of Texas.  Texas has a big game Saturday against Ohio State in Austin, so it made sense to me to bring him on to discuss college football.  There are some small edits to hi...

Tomorrow, Northwestern with open its 2026 football campaign against the South Dakota State Jackrabbits.  The game will be played at Northwestern's exceptionally cool and beautiful temporary stadium on Lake Michigan.  The game starts at 8 pm Eastern/7 pm Central and can be seen on the BigTen Network, which is available on many cable and satellite packages as well as through the FoxOne app/stream service.  Which is how I will be watching the game.  Sigh.  Remember kids, there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. Having gotten this out of the way, I would like to kick off this season by discussing how to be a responsible sports fan.  Being a sports fan is, or at least can be, a perfectly reasonable and productive lifestyle choice.  But there are also some ways in which it can become very toxic, both to yourself and those around you.  Fortunately, these toxic dimensions can be avoided by keeping a few simple principles in mind. 1.  This is...

Good evening.  My name is Michael Boyle, and I am a fan of Northwestern University football.  In a bit I will explain how  I came to be a fan of this somewhat niche team in the Big Ten Conference of what is now referred to at "FBS" college football.  But first, I want to share my vision for this project so that you, the reader, can have your expectations properly set for what I plan to provide over the course of the fall. Beginning on September 5, 2026, Northwestern will play a series of 12 games on a generally weekly basis.  Before each game, on Friday, I will post an essay in connection with the game.  I say "in connection with the game" because I anticipate these essays will have a varied degree of connection to the actual game that will be actually played on the field.  Perhaps some essays will provide some sort of substantive analysis of the game, but I suspect many of them will be inspired by the game in a much looser fashion, on a more thematic ...

In January 2023, Virginia Marie Boyle nee Jones passed away.  I have tried, over the course of the time since then to write something about Mom.  The problem, I have come to realize, is that I was trying to write something that described who she was.  That is, I have come to see, an impossible project.  It can't be done, at least not by me.  Instead, what I can do is describe who she was to me .  I can only tell you what she was from my albeit narrow and singular point of view, and not try to occupy some sort of objective perspective.  I can only talk about her in a personal, and perhaps even narcissistic, way.  And so, this is what I will to do here. Let me start at the end, and work my way back to the beginning.  Prior to January 2023, I have never lost someone who had the significance in my life equivalent to Mom.  A friend was killed in a car accident when I was 8, and I lost my maternal grandparents at 13 and 23, respectively (my pa...

It is cliche to say that we are products of our environment.  Usually this cliche is deployed to talk about the family dynamics, and that's part of it.  But it is more than that.  We are all formed by the physical locations where we reside, the culture or cultures we live in, the specific events we encounter both directly and in the background of our lives.  These elements both provide insight into some aspects of life and hide other aspects or scenarios.  Most people to one degree or another work understand these formative elements and try to move beyond them, but I don't think it is possible to do it completely.  If you want to understand someone, it is important to understand what elements formed them, because those elements will make their mark on what they do. At the same time, I am becoming increasingly convinced that being a good person is an irreducible, almost existential quality.  In particular, I think being a good person is orthogonal to th...

I am writing this on November 6, 2024, a few hours after waking up to the see the results of the Election.  If you are looking for answers, unfortunately I have none to provide you.  Nor I do I have any sort of concrete set of plans. Instead, as I lay in bed unable to get back to sleep, I came up with three principles that I hope to follow in the days, weeks, and months ahead.  I think this is going to be bad, bad in a way that none of us who have lived our entire lives in the United States have ever experienced.  How bad, in what ways, we can speculate about but not really actually know.  For me, in this kind of uncertainty, what matters is having a set of priorities and clear principles that you can rely on to navigate your way through chaos.  So, here are the ones I plan to be using.  Perhaps it can be useful to you as you process and make sense of what has happened. 1.  What Matters Is Each Other.  I am not  a rich or powerful man by...

Last night, I attended--for a time--Maundy Thursday services.  It was the first time I had been to Maundy Thursday, or Holy Week services at all, since 2021.  The services were held at my new parish, the one I have been attending fairly consistently since the middle of 2023.  It progressed in a fairly standard manner for the first part.  Instead of foot washing, there was hand washing, in which each person in turn was washed and then washed someone.  I've never seen the Mandatum done that way before, but it was fine.  After that, they were going to do Communion in the form of a sit down meal.  The problem was that I had plans to go to dinner with Danielle after, so I slipped out after the Peace before everyone sat down.  Which was a bit of a shame, because I always found the stripping of the altars very powerful, and I missed that. During the course of my (admittedly brief) time at the service, I mostly thought about the fact that I hadn't been si...