April in Review

Shoures soote, and all that...

Well, it’s been another whole month, more or less, which makes it a decent time to round up my blogging output.

Me On Substack:

— Academic Quick Hits: Short(-ish) comments on a few items on staffing courses, the word “critical,” working weird hours, and student advising.

— On Teaching and Research: A lot of the discussion of the two principal activities of faculty is kind of out of whack, in my opinion.

— I Should Like This, But I Don’t: Brief thoughts about culture that on paper ought to really work for me, but just doesn’t.

— Everything About College Admissions Is Less Bad Than You Think: It’s that time of year when I end up reading a ton of college admissions content and doing a lot of on-campus events, so inevitably it ends up being blogged.

— Two Cultures and the Academic Literature: Thoughts on a particular split in the research practices of STEM and not-STEM disciplines, and how it manifests in the approach to database searches.

— On the Reality of Distant People: Why my Internet friends are more real than famous people.

Links Dump:

I’ve been playing around with Substack’s Notes thing, which does a nice and easy pull-quote feature and doesn’t have the length limit of Twitter, so I actually have fewer browser tabs open for Links Dump material than you might think after a month.

— Should scientific journals back political candidates? Probably not, by Ananyo Bhattacharya: I dithered about weighing in on the latest science-in-politics kerfuffle for so long that it kind of became moot, which is probably a win.

— All the nerds are dead, by Sam Kriss: This is a tad hyperbolic (in a fun way), but I feel the hipster/nerd distinction and the idea of them as sorting algorithms might have legs.

— HBO Means Excellence, and the People Hate Excellence, by Sonny Bunch: I find myself unwilling to watch a lot of “prestige TV,” so I’m not sure where I fall in this.

— Easiest French Fries by Smitten Kitchen: I suspect this would completely stink up the house, but I kind of want to try it. I wonder if it would be possible to do using the outdoor grill as a heat source, or if that’s just asking for a giant fireball?

— The Public Wants Less Scoring by Ethan Strauss: Getting at a little of what’s unsatisfying with modern NBA basketball.

Pseudo-Random Photo of the Month:

Not a lot of question about the subject matter for April’s photo: baseball season is back, which means I’m shooting several hundred photos per each of The Pip’s (many, many) games. This is him hitting a stand-up double in Friday night’s game with his travel team; the ball went well over the head of the second baseman you see there.

He was 2-5 on the weekend (1-2 plus a walk in that travel game, 1-3 in Saturday’s rec game), with 2 RBI and three runs scored (in theory, there’s another travel game today, but the weather doesn’t look good). He was pretty good in the field, too, though had a minor issue with his new first-base glove at one point.

Anyway, lots and lots of baseball around here right now.

Pseudo-Random Song of the Month:

This goes in the category of “In a Better World, This Would’ve Been a Massive International Hit,” but, you know, we don’t, and it’s not. Still makes me smile, though.

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