Academic Mixtape VII
yet again, good stuff to read. how does he do it?
It’s nice to see the New York Times sharing good reasons to leave your fallen leaves alone, and not bothsides with a paean to the beauty of big huge barren green lawns.
Is science community blogging not dead? Here’s a really nice piece by Jeremy Yoder in the Molecular Ecologist questioning whether the tight bounds that folks have wanted to place on the term ‘coevolution’ are serving us well.
More blog posts to share! On the difference between revising and editing. Stephen Heard has kept it going at Scientist Sees Squirrel on a weekly basis for quite a long while now, and is always a good read.
More of this, please: “How I learned to nurture relationships in academia—and be more kind”
A nugget of good news from the front lines of burgeoning fascism in the US: In the previous missive, I shared the shocking-but-unsurprising news that Scholastic (the K-12 book fair people) decided to cater to white supremacist book bans by removing all of their books with brown and queer characters on request. There was substantial uproar. After a few days, they tried to explain that they weren’t being racist and homophobic, and that landed poorly. It eventually took them about a total of two weeks to cave and reverse course. Good on all of us for compelling this change! As I saw someone write (and I’ve had trouble relocating the original post): Scholastic decided to side with the people who buy books instead of the people who ban and burn them.
An important piece of research came out in Science Advances, which showed extremely high rates of attrition among women faculty at all career stages, demonstrating that the primary factor driving them out is toxic workplaces. It’s a very solid piece of scholarship and worth a read of the paper itself. And also, the write-ups in Science and in Nature are worth your time too. This might not be a surprise, but considering how much time people spend fussing about implicit bias, recruitment, and related stuff, the more evidence we have to support allocating resources to improving institutional culture and accountability, the faster we fix this mess.
THIS:
and also, We Cannot Cross Until We Carry Each Other.
Here’s a nice research study about the value of including metacognition in your teaching. (Which by the way, by the way that search engines work, it turns out that my smallish post on metacognition in teaching from ten years ago has wound up being one of the more heavily read posts in the archive. Huh.)
On a related note, when you assign reading, it’s important to specify how you want them to read and what you want them to get out of it.
A couple dozen species have been declared extinct by US Fish and Wildlife, including eight species of Hawaiian honeycreepers. Of course in this time span across the world, many many more species have gone extinct.
Another academic article about the importance of natural history. I feel like at some point in the past decade, we’ve turned a corner and now this is a thing that’s not controversial to assert anymore. Which is good. Now can we see this in our curriculum again?
The 50th anniversary of Pauline Kael’s first review in The New Yorker was published. This is a good article putting her work, and film criticism more broadly, in perspective.
I thought I’d share with you some books that I’ve read and appreciated over the last few months. I just finished Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy (first thing by him I’ve ever read), and am starting in on Tom Lake by Ann Patchett which I am sure I will like. Also, Shallows by Tim Winton; Desert Oracle by Ken Layne; Commonwealth by Ann Patchett; It Goes So Fast by Mary Louise Kelly (thanks to the friend who sent it to me! And we need to talk about it more!); The Guest by Emma Cline; Liberation Day by George Saunders; and Radical by Nature, the revolutionary life of Alfred Russel Wallace by James Costa.