I ended up being way more radio silent than I intended this week, partly because we had a lot going on, but mostly because classes start at Union next week, and I’ve been frantically prepping for that. Apologies for the lack of new content to the surprisingly large number of new subscribers showing up in the last couple of days.
Anyway, it’s been a couple of weeks since the last Week in Review and I have a bunch of Links Dump tabs open, so here’s a round-up:
Me on Substack:
— Is the Gender Distribution in the Humanities Cause for Alarm: Matt Reed mentioned that his daughter’s honors program in “the humanities” has 68 women and only 2 men, and I was surprised that it didn’t set off more discussion.
— Two Cultures on the First Day of Class: Discussions of syllabus writing remind me of some observations about disciplinary differences in the way faculty approach the start of classes.
— Worry Less About Cheating Students: We spend a lot of energy in unproductive efforts trying to prevent disinterested students from taking shortcuts.
— Goin’ Down to Hadestown: A report on a trip to take the kids to see an award-winning Broadway show.
Me Elsewhere:
—Chad Orzel: What happened to history’s missing 10 days? at the Big Issue: I thought this ran earlier, but it popped up last week with a late-August dateline, so I feel justified in linking it again.
Links Dump:
— Arts and Humanties: Don’t Leave College Without Them edited by Christine Henseler: I can’t say I’ve read all of these essays extolling liberal education put together by one of my colleagues, but it’s likely of interest to some of the folks who read this.
—Only from the mind of Martin: a perfect inbred queen by Razib Khan: You will be shocked to learn that George R.R. Martin is not a geneticist.
— The mythical martyrdom of Mitt Romney by Matt Yglesias: A pretty good recap of some fairly recent political history.
—Gorbachev Was Great Because He Failed by Tom Nichols: A pretty good recap of some much less recent but still in my lifetime political history.
— What’s a “Progressive” Anyway? by Jeff Maurer: A moderately deep dive into some really old political history.
— Academia: A Faculty Search Explainer by Timothy Burke: There’s a particular slant to this that I don’t always agree with, and some of the steps may be instituiton or discipline specific, but it’s a decent explanation of how we hire new professor.
— What We Talk About When We Talk About “White People Food” by Jenny G. Zhang: More nuanced and thoughtful than my usual reaction to these memes, which is a reflexive “You people are assholes.”
— What if the Old Guys Were Right? by Ethan Strauss: I was never a fan of Deadspin, so this look back at an early argument about its practices resonates with me.
— Self-Improvement Is, Generally, a Lie by Sasha Chapin: I’ve had this open in a tab for a while, mostly so I can pair it with the pseudo-random photo below:
Pseudo-Random Photo of the Week:
This is the nerdy device I use in the course of my ongoing self-improvement project, namely an attempt to lose weight: it’s a graph of my weight measured daily (blue line) and as a weekly running average (red points). This project crossed the one-year mark this weekend, with me down a bit more than 20 pounds over the course of the year. The gaps are days when I wasn’t able to weigh in on the scale in our downstairs bathroom— usually because I was on a trip out of town, or in one memorable case because I had Covid and was isolating in the upstairs bedroom.
The rapid upward trend of the last few weeks is me recovering from Covid, where I dropped more than five pounds in as many days because I didn’t feel like eating anything at all. I’m hoping to bend that back onto the original trend now, though we’ll see how the start of classes next week affects things (I’ve been on sabbatical leave for the past year). I don’t have a particular target in mind, but I’d be happy to go a bit lower still.
As noted above, the “self-improvement is a lie” thing is a sort of complement to this, as I have clearly managed some self-improvement here. That essay is correct, though, in that this process totally sucks and is super hard to maintain— it’s basically a constant effort to remember to limit snacking and make sure I get some sort of exercise every day. But it has been working to this point—my knees and ankles hurt a lot less after exercising these days than they did a year ago, so it’s definitely been worthwhile— and I wanted to mark the occasion here.
Pseudo-Random Song of the Week:
In honor of last week’s family excursion.
And that’s a bunch of stuff… This is going to be a very hectic week for me, as Fall term classes start Monday and there’s some ceremonial faffing about that goes with the new academic year that will cut into my writing time. We’ll hopefully settle into a new routine pretty quickly, though, and if you want to know what that is, here’s a button:
And if you have anything to say about all these links and stuff, the comments will be open: