It’s been a busy month at work in a bunch of ways— I’m teaching a class that meets seven times a week, and we’re continuing to interview job candidates. I did find time for a bit of blogging, though, so here’s the usual irregular-interval summary of my online activity:
Me on Substack:
— Never Make Mistakes Journalists Can Understand: How the Claudia Gay plagiarism scandal reminds me of some past scandals in science writing, and the cynical lesson to draw from them.
— Coldest of the Cold: A wrap-up of my series of articles about the history of laser cooling.
— Reviews of Recent(ish) Writing About Pop Culture: Me writing about Steven Hyden on Pearl Jam and Rob Harvilla on the 1990’s.
— Christmas, Best-ofs, Sports Media, Meritocracy and More: A bit of tab clearance.
— Willpower vs. Motivation: The difference between finding ways to want to do a thing and making sure it gets done whether you want to or not.
— Obviousness on Screen: On Barbie and Killers of the Flower Moon and my Inverse Mike Ford problem.
— Taunting and Toxicity: In which I yell at clouds about a combination of sports Takes that I find jarringly incoherent,
Me Elsewhere:
— Coldest: how a letter to Einstein and advances in laser-cooling technology led physicists to new quantum states of matter: The third and (for now) final installment of my article series for Physics World about the history of laser cooling.
Links Dump:
— Six Attempts To Find Noah Kahan Interesting, by Steven Hyden: Does a nice job of capturing my basic reaction to this singer-songwriter, whose big song is nice enough but in larger doses is kind of unremarkable.
— We Are All Mean Girls Now by Kat Rosenfield: Anti-bullying as a boon for bullies.
— What We’ve Lost in Music Criticism by Freddie deBoer: A eulogy of sorts for Pitchfork.
— Choose two of the three: career, family, community, by Erik Hoel: There’s something to this, but it’s a little bleak for my tastes.
— To go and lay down in that sense of it. by Charlie Becker: A lovely bit of writing about people who are really into what they do.
— “Argylle” Review by Sonny Bunch: Interesting less for the comments on this specific movie than for the observation about the current era of incredibly expensive movies that look terrible.
— Man arrested for series of squirrel-painting incidents, by Phillip Pantuso: Just spectacular work in the “I can’t believe it’s not Florida” genre. 13/10 for everyone involved, no notes.
— Why Does Taylor Swift Make People Insane? by Josh Barro: Seriously, did she offend a witch in a forest, or something?
Pseudo-Random Photo of the Month:
There has been nowhere near enough of this in the last month— this is a picture from up at Lapland Lake, where I went to get some cross-country skiing in. The general lack of snow has been a real bummer, especially since my teaching schedule this term precludes playing in the regular pick-up hoops game.
Pseudo-Random Song of the Month:
This is a very old song that I don’t think I had ever encountered before. At least, I don’t remember encountering it before somebody praised the lyrics on social media. It is, indeed, a nice piece of songwriting.
So, that’s what’s been going on for the last month or so. If you want more stuff in this vein, here’s a button:
If you want to respond to any of this or mock me for not having heard that song before, the comments will be open: