The last recap post was at the end of September, and October and November were exceptionally busy for me at work, so there wasn’t a huge volume of stuff posted. I found some free time more recently, though, and things have kind of begun to pile up, so here’s a round-up of the last two months of stuff.
Me on Substack:
— Against “The Humanities”: A long-standing gripe about terminology.
— Critical Thinking Is Downstream of Human Feeling: A weird protest isn’t really about social justice per se, it’s just students sticking up for a friend.
— Big Wheel Keep On Turning: Season two of The Wheel of Time on Amazon.
— Academia: On Structure: A lot of the elaborate rules we construct seem to me to undercut the main attraction of the academic life.
— Quick Hits: Temperature, Therapy, History, and Physics: Brief comments on some not-really-related things to allow me to close a bunch of browser tabs.
— Bring on the Robot Cars: What worries me on bike rides isn’t the size or speed of cars, it’s the unpredictable driving styles.
— Who’s Afraid of Oppenheimer: The movie made nearly a billion dollars, but somehow none of the people I talk to have seen it.
— Small College Social Pathologies: A bit of thinking-out-loud about how some of the gripes students have are really caused by the scale of our institutions.
— A Method, Not a Major: Advocating for liberal arts education is not the same as advocating for majoring in “the liberal arts.”
— Accepting Obsolescence: In which I come to terms with the fact that SteelyKid is better at math than I am.
Me Elsewhere:
— Seventy-five years of quantum electrodynamics: A journal version of the historical talk I gave at the March Meeting. (The link should get around the paywall…)
— This Incredibly Silly Twitter Thread that will turn out to be far and away the most popular thing I wrote in the last two months.
Links Dump:
— Rob Harvilla, ‘90s Authority, Picks the Best Rock Year of the '90s, by Alex Pappademas: I’m a little older than Harvilla, so my experiences don’t always align with his, but I’ve been really enjoying the press tour for this book, and look forward to reading it.
— The Labors of J. Robert Oppenheimer, by Dan Garisto: A really nice deep dive into the science and history that didn’t make it into the movie.
— Henry Stimson Didn’t Go to Kyoto on His Honeymoon, by Alex Wellerstein: A nuclear historian digging deep on one of the rare laugh lines in Oppenheimer.
— Punishment Envy and the Perils of Institutional Engagement, by Ken White: A pretty good analysis of the problems faced by a lot of higher ed in regard to the Middle East crisis.
— Why the Culture War Died in Sports by Ethan Strauss: A similar story to the previous link.
— What’s Taught in School is Not Useless by MediaChomp: Basically a big screenshot of a post from some other site, but I like the opening anecdote.
— Stubborn Stains by Delia Marshall Turner: A lovely story recommended to me by Kate.
Pseudo-Random Photo of the Week:
We went down to my parents’ for Thanksgiving, where I usually accompany my dad on his long morning walk with their dog, Argos. This is one of the local bald eagles— there are several nesting around the lake now— perched in a tree near the spillway of the dam that created the lake.
This is a “wow” moment for me, because when I was a kid, in the days of DDT, bald eagles were rare and endangered. We never saw any in the wild. But now they’re a pretty common feature of life in the Southern Tier of New York. That’s an amazing win for the environment in general.
Pseudo-Random Song of the Week:
In honor of the Harvilla book and podcast (and also the Steven Hyden book on Pearl Jam that I finished recently), one of the greatest “He ain’t usin’ real words…” performances ever recorded.
And, yeah, that’s a bunch of stuff. Here’s a button if you would like to receive more in this vein:
And if you feel so moved, the comments will be open:
The Harvilla book is great. Really enjoyable (though I thought the start was a bit rough). I'm teaching a course on the 90s this term so I tend to read more on what I'm teaching even if I don't use it for class. Yeah, he's about 7 years younger than we are, and so his teen memories are our college years, but I think you'll enjoy it.
I feel exactly the same way about bald eagles, being of perhaps a similar age as you. I spent a lot of time in the outdoors as a kid, and saw lots of wildlife (including plenty of hawks), but never a single bald eagle. It still thrills me to see them. Foxes, too - never saw them in the 1970s and see them frequently now, though I think that’s less because their prevalence has changed and more because they’ve adapted to urban environments.