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It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.
That, of course, is about baseball, it’s the opening line of “The Green Fields of the Mind” (h/t Austin Kleon) by Bart Giamatti, father of Paul. Giamatti was also a professor of English, president of Yale, and later commissioner of Major League Baseball before dying at 51. Imagine what he might have achieved if he’d chosen a real major!
I’ve been thinking about that line this week as two things that have brought me joy over the past few weeks come to an end: the Women’s Cricket World Cup and The Great British Bake Off. My heart isn’t broken (even though South Africa lost in the cricket final). The semifinal between India and Australia was one of the best matches I’ve seen in a long time, an extraordinary display of grit and skill, and a great moment for women’s cricket. Even if you’re not a fan of the sport, it’s worth a watch.
Working horizontally
Jared Stein over at Rarebird Tech has a fascinating post about the makeup of vendors exhibiting at the recent EDUCAUSE conference.
Our categorization shows that nearly 2/3rds of vendors at EDUCAUSE 2025 can be considered horizontal companies because education is just one of multiple industries that they serve. (This is excluding those companies that do serve other industries, but education is still their primary market.)
This largely confirms our sense of the EdTech market over the past couple of years: Big Tech, including Google and Microsoft and OpenAI, is becoming increasingly influential.
