Pre-Vacation Weeks in Review

Links to tide you over

If all goes according to plan, Kate and I will be boarding a cruise ship in Miami a bit more than 24 hours after this posts. This is a new experiment in side hustles for me: I was contacted in the early part of the year by a guy who books speakers for luxury cruises, who saw one of my streamed book talks and wanted to know if I would be interested in trying it out. I’m not one to turn down a free trip to the Caribbean in December, so we’re going to be spending a week and a half sailing around to various islands, checking out the local scenery and culture, maybe a bit of snorkeling, and just generally reveling in not being in Schenectady in December. And I’ll be singing— well, public-lecturing— for our suppers.

My parents, who are too good to us, will be coming up to stay at our house and make sure that SteelyKid and The Pip, you know, go to school and get fed and that kind of thing. And also that Charlie the pupper gets his daily walks— more than that, they’ll be bringing Cousin Argos along, so there will be another knucklehead dog for Charlie to wrestle all day long.

Anyway, I will have some Internet connectivity during the trip, but it’s an open question whether I will choose to use any of it to post here. In case I don’t, I’ll leave you with this collection of stuff I’ve already posted, and a bunch of links I’ve got open in tabs:

Me On Substack:

— Free Bird: Thoughts on the Twitter meltdown that still hasn’t entirely happened.

— Thanksgiving 2022: In which I wax sentimental about maybe my favorite big American holiday.

— Another Term Bites the Dust: A wrap-up of the Fall 2022 academic term, which was a weird one in many ways.

— Wormhole to 2006: So many of the arguments that make up the current #discourse feel like we’re just endlessly recapitulating fights from the Golden Age of Blogs.

— Why Do We Assign Writing?: It shouldn’t be for any purpose that’s defeated by an AI chatbot.

— Winter Solstice Book Recommendation Post: Buy my books. Also, these other ones that I enjoyed during the year.

— Persuasion and Partisanship: We should give the Warnock campaign a lot more credit for what they accomplished in an era of apocalyptic rhetoric.

Links Dump:

— Twitter alternative: how Mastodon is designed to be “antiviral” by Clive Thompson: Pretty closely related to the dissatisfaction I have with the platform, as described in the first link above.

— The Madness of Twitter by Ian Bogost: well described by the subhead “People just can’t stop tweeting about all the tweets they see.”

— How Math Became an Object of the Culture Wars and What Do We Really Know About Teaching Kids Math? by Jay Caspian Kang: Putting a really intense curricular argument in context.

— Every Bruce Springsteen Studio Album, Ranked, by Steven Hyden: Bruuuuuuuuuuce!

— A Trade Secret We All Know by Matt “Dean Dad” Reed: Teaching takes practice.

— Among the Academic “Anywheres”: Illusions of Belonging, by Joseph H. Manson: There’s some truth in the start of this, but I’m not sure I like where it ends up.

—ChatGPT Is Dumber Than You Think, by Ian Bogost: “ChatGPT isn’t a step along the path to an artificial general intelligence that understands all human knowledge and texts; it’s merely an instrument for playing with all that knowledge and all those texts.”

— A lot of the best political messages are really boring by Matt Yglesias: What works for the vast majority of people who aren’t political obsessives on Twitter.

— Method for solving notorious calculus problems speeds particle physics computations by Adrian Cho: Turnng lots of integrals into shitloads of linear algebra.

— We Might Have Long Covid All Wrong, by Natalie Shure: An interesting idea that I’m not really qualified to evaluate beyond that.

— Steven Hyden’s Favorite Albums of 2022, by Steven Hyden: A pretty good list.

Pseudo-Random Photo of the Weeks:

Most of the time, these are shots of The Pip taken by me, but this reverses the formula: a shot me me, taken by The Pip (using my DSLR camera). This is at the playground by the middle school in my home town.

Pseudo-Random Song of the Week:

‘Tis the season.

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And that’s a whole bunch of stuff. The optimal situation is probably that you don’t hear anything from me until a couple of days before Christmas; here’s a button if you want to find out whether we live in that best of all possible worlds:

And if you feel so moved, the comments will be open: