Dr. Shane Snipes

10/02/2026

09/12/2026

Wishing everyone celebrating Rosh Hashanah a sweet and joyful new year filled with peace, good health and happiness. Shanah Tovah!

08/27/2026

I have been thinking a lot about how we are framing the AI conversation. Most of the attention is on what the technology can do. That matters, of course, but I think there is another question that may be even more important: what happens to human capability as AI becomes more capable?

My new article brings together several parts of my work: research, theory, teaching, entrepreneurship, small business, community engagement, and sustainability. I argue that access to AI is not the same thing as being capable of using it well. A student can have AI and learn less. A business can automate and become less effective. A community can be surrounded by innovation while having very little influence over what that innovation does.

The challenge is to build people and institutions that can understand, question, shape, and use AI with judgment and agency.

One of the questions I keep returning to is this: if AI begins performing more of the work through which people historically learned how to become experts, entrepreneurs, managers, and professionals, how do we preserve the formation of human capability?

I would be interested in how others are seeing this in their own work, classrooms, organizations, and communities.

The question beneath the AI question We are spending enormous amounts of time asking what artificial intelligence will be able to do. That attention is understandable.

07/14/2026

The second post in my Making a Lovely Life series is about something my mother taught me: the balance between being and doing.

Patsy was always doing—cooking, organizing, caring for family, tending flowers, and making room for people. But she also knew how to be. She could disappear into a mystery novel, sit with her day lilies, look over water, or enjoy the flowers blooming from her porch.

In her final years, I learned that I could not fix Alzheimer’s. I had to stop demanding that each visit become something different and learn to be with her as she was.

Sometimes a lovely life is made by doing what needs to be done. Sometimes it is made by putting the task down, noticing what is blooming, and staying long enough to receive it.

Making a Lovely Life, Part Two: Being and Doing

Being and Doing Today I watched Friends and Neighbors, and the death of the main character’s father brought me to tears. The funeral scenes felt real and unpolished.

06/22/2026

The birth of religious freedom

All Things Considered on NPR One | 7:56

06/21/2026

Weekend Edition Sunday on NPR One | 6:02

06/15/2026

AI feels powerful because it works through language — the same tool humans use to turn ideas into reality. In this post, I explore why AI can feel like “thinking,” why expertise still matters, and why students should use AI to deepen knowledge, not avoid it. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/language-mirror-why-ai-feels-like-thinkingand-human-snipes-ph-d--1c2ie

One of the reasons artificial intelligence feels so strange, so powerful, and sometimes so unsettling is that it works through one of the oldest human superpowers: language. Before we had software, spreadsheets, search engines, databases, slide decks, or AI assistants, we had language.

06/04/2026

What a celebration with Borough of Manhattan Community College/CUNY with Mayor Mamdani

05/20/2026

What if happiness is not something we chase, but something we stop covering up?

In this new reflection, I write about the falsehood of “unconditional,” the discomfort of 10 days of silence, the hungry monkey mind, and how Dhamma helps us stop turning every reaction into a residence.

Life has conditions: homes, cars, pets, jobs, hopes, dreams, neighbors, leaders, disappointments, and all the little daily “character-building opportunities” nobody ordered. Practice does not remove the world. It helps us stop adding extra suffering to it.

The article also connects inner practice to public life, drawing on values carried by Native people, women, Black writers, abolitionists, and civic voices too often left out of the usual origin story.

Peace is not passivity. It is training.

Read the full reflection: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/falsehood-unconditional-silence-dhamma-practice-shane-snipes-ph-d--d8yoe

“Unconditional” sounds beautiful until life walks in with muddy shoes. A house has conditions.