Academic Mixtape seventeen

good stuff from the past few weeks

Reflections on landing a tenure track job.

The National Academy of Sciences issued a report on the structural problems, and potential solutions, caused when scientists become caregivers (for children, aging parents, etc.). Knowing too many people (including myself) that ended up being sandwiched on both generational sides, this deserves more attention. (The report itself is here.)

Brian McGill had some tremendously cogent and incisive points about academic publishing in a recent post in the Dynamic Ecology blog, which has roared back to life.

(I would like to note that it’s never too late to start blogging. You want to have a successful academic blog? With social media fracturing, you’ll have a bigger potential audience than ever. I wrote some tips about this… seven years ago, but they all seem to hold up except the bit about platforms.)

GPAs are weird.

How college leaders can stand up for DEI workers and programs

Speaking of which, the UCLA campus newspaper published a detailed piece on the ongoing persecution of Priyanga Amarasekare because she decided to speak some truths.

An orangutan self-medicated a wound with a poultice made from a medicinal plant. Cool. Here’s the popular science article, here’s the paper in Scientific Reports.

They turned cattle ranches into tropical [dry] forest - then climate change hit. This is a nice piece in The Verge about an extraordinary career’s worth of work by Dan Janzen and Winnie Hallwachs in northwestern Costa Rica.

Emily Barr, the sister of Philip Seymour Hoffmann, wrote a touching essay in The Paris Review about her brother. [fun fact: if you ask me what actor I would have portray me in a movie, it would be him]

A nice article from a team of botanists argument for investment in, rather than the dissolution of, the herbarium at Duke.

So David Sabatini - whose actions when he was at MIT were so toxic, horrific, and exploitative that they were compelled to fire him after years of pressure - is now back leading a big research lab in the same city. Here’s where you find him in the Academic Sexual Misconduct Database.

Under the Jumbotron. And why is it that some of the best journalism about the campus protests against the genocide in Gaza are being published in Europe?

good reminder: Don’t lose touch with the joy of fieldwork.

Yes, vegan cheese can be amazingly delicious.

new preprint in Chemrxiv: Practical tips for intentional and inclusive recruiting and hiring for academic research laboratories.

More high quality “quitlit.” And yes, at some places there are some highly performing tenured professors making $54k/year.

Rest in peace, Steve Albini. Instead of sharing many of the obituaries, here’s an outstanding article about his evolution as a human being from the Guardian, that came out last year. He produced some of my favorite albums, the guy was a legend, and he left us far too soon.