Kind of a thin week as far as writing stuff here goes, but that’s because A Brief History of Timekeeping had its US release on Tuesday. So I’ve been plenty busy doing promotion work, much of it in the form of talking to podcasters/reporters on Zoom calls. Some of that hasn’t come out yet, but it will be linked here when it does.
Me on Substack:
— Release Day!: Pretty much what you’d guess, some stuff about the book’s writing and thoughts on its release.
— Analytical Skills Can't Save You From Silly News Cycles: A bit of yelling at clouds about people reading wayyyy too much into off-hand remarks because there’s no actual news that requires deep analysis.
Me Elsewhere:
— 11 Pivotal Moments in the History of Timekeeping at Forbes: Another book-promo piece, this time in handy listicle form.
— Virtual Book Event for Northshire Books in Saratoga:
— The Big Idea: Chad Orzel at John Scalzi’s Whatever: A guest post by me about the big idea behind the book, namely “A clock is a thing that ticks.”
— Author Chad Orzel | A Brief History of Timekeeping: The Science of Marking Time, from Stonehenge to Atomic Clocks | January 27, 2022 on Cool Science Radio: A live call-in to a radio show. They caught me off guard a bit with questions about the science I did as a post-doc, and about a clock museum between Boston and Williamstown. This is why I enjoy live events…
— January Continues, the Nerdette podcast: I’m in the last segment of this, talking about time.
— How Measuring Time Shaped History, at Scientific American: A partial transcript of a conversation with Clara Moskowitz. I always find it odd to see my speech transcribed, because they inevitably put sentence breaks in places that they don’t exist in my head.
— Book Review: ABOUT TIME by David Rooney, at Forbes: Finally, something that’s not about my book… except it kind of is.
Links Dump:
— A matter of time: Union professor’s new book explores the history of timekeeping, by Union College: News story from my employer about the new book.
— A Brief History of Timekeeping: A new book explores how we mark time by George Bass: Review of the book in New Scientist. I’m done with book-related items now, really.
— Why "Gutfeld!" is the Highest-Rated Political Comedy Show on Cable, by Jeff Maurer: An interesting analysis of the political “comedy” landscape.
— The Case Against the Trauma Plot by Parul Sehgal: As is often the case with The New Yorker, this makes me feel like a cretin because I don’t recognize a lot of the works cited. It’s an interesting argument about an overdone trope, though.
— Listen to These Experts by Josh Barro with Tom Nichols and Lanhee Chen: I may end up writing something about one piece of this podcast conversation about expertise, but didn’t have time this week.
Pseudo-Random Photo of the Week:
I mean, what did you expect?
Pseudo-Random Song of the Week:
I bought this album because Steven Hyden was super enthusiastic about it in his various year-end pieces. It doesn’t always work for me, but this song’s pretty good.
And that was the week of my new book’s US release. Pretty exhausting, even before you add in the fact that we had two days when one of the kids was home pending the result of a negative Covid test. Next week will see the UK release, so expect another huge wave of book publicity events and links. Here are some buttons:
and the comments will be open.