It feels a little weird to do a time-in-review post this weekend, given that I didn’t write anything new this week. (The main reason being that this was the first week of my two-week module in our first-year seminar course, so I was prepping two classes and not just one. Also, the Board of Trustees met this weekend, which meant I was on a LOT of Zoom calls and then in-person meetings.) It’s been four weeks since the last one, and I have both a small amount of time to kill and a lot of browser tabs to clear, so let’s recap:
Me on Substack:
— Never Tell Me the Odds: Some thoughts on the discourse around success in careers with a lot of aspirants and few openings.
— Why I’m Not Writing About the Physics Nobel: Mostly personal venting, honestly. I am teaching about it in the first-year course, which is part of why I’ve been so crazy busy…
— Every Class Is Some Student’s Orgo: Thoughts on organic chemistry and other “weed-out” coruses, spinning off the NYU adjunct who got let go after student complaints.
— Sports in These Times: Again, largely personal venting, and a bit of a 1500-word subtweet about conversations around sports that I find really frustrating.
— What Sports Means to Me: An attempt to unpack why a particular Take on the psychology of (male) sports fans is so off base as to be Not Even Wrong.
Me Elsewhere:
— Physics Professor Chad Orzel speaks on his new book, “A Brief History of Timekeeping, by Adrian Ring: I did a guest lecture for a course on Science, Technology, and Society, and one of my students interviewed me by email for the school paper.
Links Dump:
— Disentangling the Facts from the Hype of Quantum Computing by James Clark: Well, I’m glad we’ve got that settled…
— Aristotle’s Physics: A Physicist’s Look by Carlo Rovelli: There is a sense in which this is a bit of a cheat, because it’s putting math to things in a way that Aristotle couldn’t, but it’s interesting.
— Nobel Prize: Quantum Entanglement Unveiled by APS’s Physics: Includes links to the original papers that won Clauser, Aspect, and Zeilinger their Nobel.
— Did We Learn a Single Fucking Thing From Covid? by Jeff Maurer: Probably not.
— Since COVID, the Government Has Gotten Worse at Core Functions by Josh Barro: See above.
— Two New Books Helped Me Understand How Male Friendships Last, and Why Some Fail by Dan Kois: This was interesting, in a “You may be overthinking this” kind of way.
— Book Review: Richard Reeves' "Of Boys and Men" by Matt Yglesias: This book is in the weird zone between “this sounds interesting, I should check it out,” and “I have seen this reviewed so many times and ways that I don’t need to read it.”— Legion by Sam Kriss: I’m not sure I agree with (or fully understand) the point he’s making, but there’s some lovely writing here.
— Who Invented Mac and Cheese? by Karima Moyer-Nocchi and Adrian Miller: A surprisingly deep history.
— The Original Tiger Kings by Chris Jones and Michael J. Mooney: A fascinating deep dive into Siegfried and Roy.
— Rod McKuen Was the Bestselling Poet in American History. What Happened? by Dan Kois: I’m just old enough to recognize McKuen as the punch line to a lot of jokes, so this was really interesting.
Pseudo-Random Photo of the Week:
I keep myself entertained/distracted at The Pip’s baseball games by taking photos of the action, which is sometimes a bit of a challenge because the fields are mostly fenced in. Kate took this shot of me at a game a couple of weeks back, just barely getting the angle over the fence at the North Colonie fields.
Pseudo-Random Song of the Week:
We watched RRR with the kids, and it is delightfully deranged.
So, yeah, that’s a bunch of stuff. Probably going to be light on new content this week, too, but if you want to get whatever I write next, here’s a button:
And if you want to say something about my one-line summaries of any of those links, the comments will be open: