Back before The Pip was born, our previous departmental administrative assistant used to bug me– in a friendly way– about how Kate and I ought to have another kid. (She had two kids of her own, about two years apart in age.) “When are you guys going to have another baby?” she would ask, and […]
Category: Society
Instagram Culture and the Democratization of Pretension
When I was going through the huge collection of photos I have from the Forum in Rome, I kept running across pictures containing two young Asian women (neither of them Kate). This isn’t because I was stalking them, but because they were everywhere, stopping for long periods in front of virtually every significant ruin and […]
Big Media Me: Here and Now
The NPR program Here and Now has been running segments this week on Science in America, and one of these from yesterday featured me talking about science literacy. We had some technical difficulties getting this recorded– it was supposed to happen at a local radio studio last week, but they had some kind of glitch, […]
Beyoncé and LIGO: Stochastic Awareness of Science Is Probably Okay
I’ve had this piece by Rick Borchelt on “science literacy” and this one by Paige Brown Jarreau on “echo chambers” open in tabs for… months. I keep them around because I have thoughts on the general subject, but I keep not writing them up because I suspect that what I want to say won’t be […]
Twitter Is a Cocktail Party That I’m Not Invited To
As I go through my daily routine, I find myself sort of out of phase with a lot of the Internet. My peak online hours are from about six to ten in the morning, Eastern US time. That’s when I get up, have breakfast, and then go to Starbucks to write for a few hours. […]
Kids and Schools and Liberal Guilt
Matt “Dean Dad” Reed is moving to New Jersey, and confronting one of the great dilemmas of parenting (also at Inside Higher Ed): what school district to live in. This is a big problem for lots of academics of a liberal sort of persuasion: From a pure parental perspective, the argument for getting into the […]
A Constructive Response to Professorial Anxiety
Engaging in a bit of tab clearance before I head off to DAMOP tomorrow afternoon, I noticed that I still had How to Teach an Ancient Rape Joke open. This is because while I found it kind of fascinating, it’s not all that directly relevant to what I do, and I didn’t have anything all […]
Miscellaneous Academic Job Market Notes
A few things about the academic job market have caught my eye recently, but don’t really add up to a big coherent argument. I’ll note them here, though, to marginally increase the chance that I’ll be able to find them later. — First, this piece at the Guardian got a lot of play, thanks in […]
So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, by Jon Ronson
Over the last month or so, it’s been kind of hard to avoid this book, even before it hit stores. Big excerpts in the New York Times and The Guardian generated a good deal of buzz, and arguments on social media. Unsurprisingly, as one of the main elements of the book is a look at […]
Yet More Academic Hiring: 2:1 Bias in Favor of Women?
I continue to struggle to avoid saying anything more about the Hugo mess, so let’s turn instead to something totally non-controversial: gender bias in academic hiring. Specifically, this new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science titled “National hiring experiments reveal 2:1 faculty preference for women on STEM tenure track” with this […]