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Well, the fabled “irrefutable” report never materialized yesterday. Perhaps we can now move on to matters of greater moment, such as having a firm grip on reality.

I was wondering when Chomsky would hold forth on ChatGPT, and now that he has (and, predictably, used a bucket of the coldest disciplinary water available) I am happy to concur with the general sentiment of his response. He is a little late to the party, but quite welcome.

I haven’t updated my CV on this site in awhile, and there has been some activity piling up, so.

I had a Perspectives article in Technical Communication Quarterly late last year, 2021, “Expanding Ethical Pedagogy in Technical Communication: Learning from Killer Nanobots.” It’s probably the first peer-reviewed work I’ve written that is almost entirely about teaching, though I also make a broader argument about ethics and tech comm.

I also published a short story in the Feb/March 2022 Analog Science Fiction & Fact, “Math of the Spear Carrier.” The print version came in the mail the other day. There’s an equally interesting story behind the writing of it, but I’ll leave that until later.

Thirdly, while I was in line at the DMV today, I received word that the article that I co-wrote with Drs. Ozaki and Hill in Technical Communication in 2020, “The Rhetoric of a Kamikaze Manual,” has received the 2022 CCCC Technical and Scientific Communication Award in the category of Best Article Reporting Historical Research or Textual Studies in Technical and Scientific Communication. Yay us!

Lastly, I’ve known this bit of news for awhile, but I have a forthcoming monograph at Fortress Press/Lexingtonentitled Rhetoric and the Synoptic Problem. It’s in the production stage currently, so I’m more confident now in describing it as a done deal, and it may appear this year. It’s been a long time coming, and it may end up being anti-climatic for me, but it is something, definitely, to sense a project has nearly been realized.

The book will argue that the Farrer Hypothesis is the best working hypothesis to the Synoptic Problem in New Testament studies by way of rhetorical theory. My innovation is seeing the Synoptic Problem as less about source and textual criticism and more as a writing problem, a question of how ancient writers composed that can be addressed using interdisciplinary knowledge of how all writers and rhetors typically compose. The book’s six chapters feature case studies of different aspects of gospel rhetoric, such as how the post-resurrection accounts interact with each other and how the apostles are portrayed from gospel to gospel. These case studies collectively argue the synoptic gospels as we have them are consistent with them being a series of competing rhetorical narratives about Jesus, with the authors of Luke and Matthew reacting to previous gospels with the goal of superseding their versions of Jesus’s life. However, at the same time, I acknowledge that the Farrer Hypothesis has special difficulties and cannot be pushed beyond an educated guess. The Synoptic Problem, I hold, is an unsolvable problem due to a lack of evidence and lost original context, and it is only a philosophical acceptance of the inaccessibility of a solution that paradoxically allows a frank and unsentimental view of the limited options.