Academic Mixtape Eleven

articles that came out during holiday season that you might have missed

Welcome back to work from the holidays!

“Overall female researchers appear to contribute more to the public good of open science, while their male colleagues focus on private reputation.”

How to talk about climate change with people? Find your mango.

“Expecting all of your trainees to be as good as you remember (i.e., true or not) you were is not rational.”

Why parents struggle so much in the world’s richest country. (It’s straight-up difficult to do some things in the United States, with a dearth of parental leave support, scant vacation time, lack of public healthcare, and the epidemic of gun violence.)

The conversation about student loans doesn’t reflect the reality of student loans. Here’s a great piece about that from Anne Helen Petersen.

“We commonly misinterpret prior knowledge for learning.”

Identifying White Mediocrity and Know-Your-Place Aggression

A new review shows the global impact of outdoor and feral house cats (“free-ranging domestic cats), and it’s even worse than I thought it would be.

I worked in Antarctica for three years. My sexual harasser was never caught.

Notes from a retired copy chief

One consequential piece of news over the past month was the resignation of Harvard’s recently appointed president, Claudine Gay. What happens at Harvard usually has little bearing on what happens for the rest of us, but this was a landmark victory for the burgeoning fascist movement, with its work to devalue scholars and scholarship, and to dismantle educational infrastructure at every level. What happened? In two sentences: Right-wing extremists pretended to get upset about her remarks about free speech on campus, and then they pretended to get upset about some citation practices in her doctoral dissertation. The New York Times fueled the craze with a series of articles about this manufactured outrage, and the pressure grew too too much, apparently. Here are two excellent pieces that help understand what happened in this episode. First: How the higher education outrage sausage is made. Second: The Claudine Gay debacle was never about merit. And also, here is Dr. Gay’s own take on the events.

In a piece of news got that a lot less attention, the chancellor of University of Wisconsin-La Crosse was fired because he’s been producing and featured in porn, and under a pseudonym wrote the books: “Monogamy with Benefits: How Porn Enriches Our Relationship” and “Married with Benefits — Our Real-Life Adult Industry Adventures” Huh.

Self-promoting ecologist who hires an external PR firm to increase the visibility of his own research lab and promoted poorly conceived and debunked research continues to self-self-promote even more inadequately baked ideas.

Last, here’s an update on Substack’s Nazi problem that was the topic of my previous post, which was a joint effort by many substack authors. This campaign for this broader writing platform (substack) has finally gotten attention and had some success. We’ll see how much they deliver. Since it appears the people running the site genuinely have a history of being aligned with white supremacist perspectives, we’ll see. (I moved over here here with a clear-eyed view of who is on here, including many strong voices that I respect a lot. If they don’t deliver on their promises to remove authors using hate speech, then I will move again. The shift to this site was straightforward enough, so moving again shouldn’t be hard on anybody. Any feedback from subscribers, would-be-subscribers, and former subscribers would be helpful.)