Academic Mixtape: The Ocho
the good stuff that you may have missed
Recognizing the heavy lifting that postdocs often do as mentors for grad students and undergrads.
Remembering the role of luck and privilege in academic achievement. And a good response to this post is here. (With twitter gone, are blogs and newsletters really coming back?)
This interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates about his visit to Palestine is worth everyone’s time.
The last time I saw Yaakov. highlighted read
"Despair is the perfect thing to do if you want to lose" - an interview with George Saunders. (I apparently read this without a paywall when it came out, but then apparently access was restricted after one week. I thought it was good enough to share anyway.)
You’ve likely heard that the American Ornithological Society is removing the English names for birds that have been named after people. A good writeup came from NPR. There was a post by David Sibley (yeah, that Sibley) about this this which I thought puts it into useful context. And Laura Erickson’s newsletter For The Birds on this is spot on, methinks.
Have you ever heard that story about how clueless NASA engineering men decided that Sally Ride needed 100 tampons for having one period in space? The Weinersmiths dug into the story to find what really happened, and as you imagine, the truth is more prosaic than the narrative that emerged. Yes, men are often if not generally clueless about the lived experiences of women, but no, nobody thought that 100 tampons was anywhere near normal.
Quiz: Critically acclaimed Horror film of the 2010s, or your PhD program?
Slate wrote a story about the need for personal mobility to work in higher ed. As an academic there’s nothing shocking or new in here but as a piece of journalism it covers most of the bases.
Liz Haswell’s newsletter Unprofessoring has had some great stuff of late. About what the what our purpose is, or isn’t, in our research.
What exactly is Long Covid, how does it manifest, and all that? Here’s a review article that I found really useful. And have enough of a biological and medical background to be able to understand it, fortunately. (Why is it that medical terminology is designed to be not only accurate but also incomprehensible to anybody who isn’t a member of their club?)
Why is Kristie Koski in tenure limbo?
The Texas Observer went deep into a story about a fifth-grader who was as unproblematic as you can imagine but ended up being handcuffed, arrested, and put in solitary confinement. In jail. A little kid. Who didn’t do anything wrong. This is just one small slice of the human cost of our epidemic of gun violence, our carceral state, disinvestment in public schools, and misuse of police force in situations that don’t require police.
Nature reports on the outcome of their postdoc survey. Their main takeaways are that it sucks to be in your thirties and a postdoc when other professionals are already well established in their professions, and this is not the best circumstance for creating and raising tiny humans. Yup.
Leonard Cohen’s poem about Tom Waits
It appears that scaremongering about civil liberties for trans folks, book bans, and such, isn’t working out so well when it comes to the ballot box. Those “Moms for Liberty” who all about those book bans? Many of them got booted off school boards, and many more failed to get elected. I wonder what the fascists will switch to trying to scare everybody about one year from now?
A well-reported news item about how climate change scholars are now using the phrase “climate emergency” on the regular.