Twitter and Midterms and Day Job, Oh My
Odds and ends from a hellish couple of weeks
I have been quieter than my usual this whole fall, for day-job-related reasons, about which more later, but it’s been especially bad the last two weeks. This also happened to coincide with a particularly eventful stretch in the wider world, full of the sorts of news I would norally blog about. Typical.
I have a tiny bit of breathing room today, which I hope will expand a bit next week, but since I have this space and can’t be sure of the future, I’ll do quick-hit comments on several things in one post, in hopes this will get these topics out of my head for at least a little while.
— The really hot topic of the moment is Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, and I don’t really need to the flood of electrons spilled on this already. I’m somewhere in the same muddled zone as Matt Yglesias, Josh Barro, and Ben Dreyfuss, in that I think this is much less of an apocalyptic event than the loudest yellers would have you believe.
I have, however, been directly asked whether I plan to leave the service, so just to cover that once and for all: No, for a bunch of reasons. As noted, I don’t think Musk’s leadership is likely to result in much concrete and lasting change (I’ll lose my blue checkmark if he makes verification a subscription service, because it’s not worth paying for, but that’s trivial), so there’s no urgent need as I see it. And the primary suggested alternative service is Mastodon, which has this distributed-over-many-servers structure that really appeals to Linux geeks, but just seems like an extra level of complexity that’s going to prove more exhausting and frustrating long-term than anything Elon Musk might get up to. I may sign up to stake out a username there, but I just have absolutely zero enthusiasm for another picky-about-who-its-friends-are social network, particularly in a stage when it’s operating parallel to Twitter.
Most of all, though, I’m in pretty much the situation Ben Dreyfuss described in an earlier post, where I’ve got followers on Twitter who aren’t particularly portable, and that’s an important audience to maintain some access to. I was pushed to join Twitter back in 2009 by the editor for my first book, who said it would be good for marketing and networking. Which it has been, sort of. I mean, it’s not like I come close to getting all 8,000-odd followers to buy my books, or anything, but it does provide a channel to get a bit more word out than I otherwise would have access to. The idea of starting over from zero on a new service is just not an appealing prospect, especially since building out a new audience would require a level of engagement that I just can’t afford at this time.
— A big part of my lack of enthusiasm for social media at the moment stems from the impending midterm elections in the US, where after a summer that looked relatively hopeful for Democrats, we seem to have reverted to the prior expectations of a major win for Republicans. This is not a prospect that fills me with joy; while I find a lot of the people on the more progressive side of American politics to be tiresome scolds, their counterparts on the right are complete whack jobs who shouldn’t be trusted to make dinner reservations let alone run the country.
The most dispiriting thing about this is regardless of the eventual outcome, neither side will take any remotely useful lesson from the results, so we’ll just have exactly the same idiotic slap-fights for two more years leading up to the 2024 presidential election. And then more of the same until 2026, and 2030, and on until either some transcendant figure arises to produce a dramatic political re-alignment, or the Yellowstone supervolcano buries us all in sulfurous ash. I’m betting on the volcano.
Anyway, my sanity-preservation plan for election night is the same thing I backed into in November 2020: When I go up to bed Tuesday night, I’m leaving my phone on the downstairs charger, and reading a book with no network connectivity. There is absolutely no upside to following the collective freakout that will accompany vote-counting in real time; the results will be the same in the morning, and I will be happier for having skipped most of the in-the-moment shrieking.
— Speaking of vote-counting freakouts, I’ll re-up my post from back in January with my preferred set of perfectly reasonable and completely impossible electoral reforms. I realize this would never pass, but man, doing things this way would make election season a much better experience.
— On the day-job front mentioned above, I spent the last two weeks doing a module in our team-taught first-year seminar class, talking about the 2022 Nobel in Physics. this is, as the name suggests, a class for new-to-Union students who are potentially interested in majoring in physics and/or astronomy, and aims to introduce them to some of the “cool stuff” before the Winter term course on introductory Newtonian physics and its riveting array of blocks sliding on inclined planes.
This was a huge amount of extra work (teaching twice a day instead of once), since I was making it up almost from scratch (I cribbbed bits from some other classes, but most of it was entirely new to fit the recent news hook), but it was also a lot of fun. This was a reminder of what I really love about my job: taking a really complicated subject, thinking about how to break it down in a way that included minimal math (but not no math, because these are prospective majors…), and present it in a coherent way that told a compelling story. I’m not sure how well it worked, but doing those six classes was a real mood boost. I may look at turning them into blog posts over the next few weeks, just to have a bit more of a record of it.
— The less positive day-job front is that my regular class and my administrative duties as Chair have been a real grind all term, and have hit a peak in the last couple of weeks. This is, I’m a bit bummed to realize, largely a self-inflicted wound, in that I never should’ve agreed to teach this course this term.
The issue is that this is a new-to-me course, Intermediate Quantum Mechanics (I’m using the Griffiths book, for those in the business), that I was scheduled to teach for the first time this year, after twenty-odd years of intermittent requests to do it. For the first mumble years, every time I asked for it, one of the senior folks got it ahead of me, and more recently when I’ve been the one with max seniority, I’ve had administrative roles that took up enough time that I didn’t ask for it. When we put the teaching assignments together last year, I was coming off a sabbatical after a four-year stint being in charge of the undergraduate research program, so it seemed like a great time to get back into teaching with a new course.
The problem is that over the summer, the situation changed so that I’m not only coming back to teaching after a sabbatical, I’m also stepping into the Chair role on very short notice. That brings with it a shitload of other work that takes up time I could otherwise spend on class prep. And agreeing to that was a big mistake— I should’ve looked for a scheme that had me teaching something more familiar, where I was just tweaking pre-existing notes and not writing new lectures from scratch. As it is, I’m barely a class ahead in my planning, and just constantly feeling harried. Which leads to the (probably correct) feeling that I’m not doing a very good job teaching this term, and thus to a distinct lack of enthusiasm for going to work every day.
If I do the same course next fall (as seems likely), it’ll be better, because I’ll be starting from an existing set of notes, and having gone through it once will let me smooth over the sections where the textbook did something weird so I had to slap together something better. Having gone through it once will also give me a more solid sense of the flow, and I can use that to improve the course. But this term has just sucked, and it’s mostly my own stupid fault.
(There’s a small consolation to be taken from the fact that there really wasn’t a much better option— we’ve changed textbooks since the last time I taught any of the other courses that run in the fall term, so that would’ve been only slightly less of a new prep for me. I probably could’ve cobbled together enough lab sections and the like to make up a reasonable teaching load, but it would’ve been awkward.)
— The other things on my mind about the day job are a very mixed bag, in ways that it would be inappropriate to talk about directly in any detail. Suffice to say, I’ve had roughly equal numbers of “I’m lucky to have this job” and “I don’t know if I want to do this any more” moments over the last few weeks. Which should net out to a neutral result, but whipsawing between them is exhausting in a way that makes it a slight net negative. I am really ready for this term to be over.
— That’s a bunch of bummer content, so here’s a song that always makes me smile (which came up on shuffle play while I was typing):
There’s a chord change as they go from the verse to the chorus and it just feels like the song opens up for lack of a better word (I never took music theory). I’m a total sucker for that, which shows up over and over in my favorite power pop songs.
So, yeah, that’s some stuff off my chest. If you want to see whether I carry through on turning those class notes into blog posts, or just whether I completely snap before the term ends, here’s a button:
If you feel moved to respond to any of the above, the comments will be open:
"When I go up to bed Tuesday night, I’m leaving my phone on the downstairs charger, and reading a book with no network connectivity"
Man, you have so much more willpower than I do. I wish I had a cabin somewhere that would actually prevent me from checking the internet that day.