November 25, 2007 – 1:15 am
So I went to an “untenured faculty” meeting at Columbia recently. Rather foolishly I expected the meeting to be about the plight of the assistant professor. You know, struggles, stress, fighting for more respect, how do deal with feelings of insecurity, etc. That was exactly what it was about, except that with the exception of [...]
November 24, 2007 – 7:50 pm
A friend and I did some shopping yesterday, including a stop at Ten Thousand Villages, which prominently announced underneath its name: “A Not For Profit Store.” This being my first time, I asked my friend, “So, then, what’s the point?” The apparent point is that the money they would make as a profit gets [...]
November 24, 2007 – 12:10 pm
Just because I’m very pleased about the outcome of Australia’s elections does not mean I wish ill on the outgoing PM. In fact, I just sent him an e-mail with an exciting idea for what he might do next:
November 24, 2007 – 7:16 am
News today of the son of Oral Roberts, Richard Roberts, president of Oral Roberts University, resigning after accusations that he embezzled funds for such luxury items as a stable of horses and a trip to the Bahamas on the university jet (the university jet?!). Or, I guess it isn’t embezzlement if you just charge [...]
November 23, 2007 – 9:55 am
For a decade, we have “done” Thanksgiving on a pot luck basis with two other families with children about the same age who also do not have family in the area, along with whomever else anyone feels like inviting. The “children” are now 18-27 and some are not in town. This year [...]
November 22, 2007 – 10:43 pm
Happy Thanksgiving, all. I was talking to a graduate student the other day who said he likes to call Thanksgiving “Genocide Day.” I replied, “Well, I’m very excited to have my family out here for their first Genocide Day outside of Iowa!”
And, indeed, they did come to Evanston. This was my mother’s first [...]
November 22, 2007 – 8:46 pm
I like listening to books-on-tape in the car. This is probably because I’m getting older and can’t stand most of the music played for “kids these days” on the radio. I wouldn’t mind listening to more talk radio if I could find someone who shared my biases. Even that darn NPR is [...]
November 22, 2007 – 8:31 pm
A lovely hush has come over the blog, and my email inbox, this Thanksgiving holiday, as all you Americans take a break from your internet duties to (hopefully) remember what we are all working so hard for. Though up north our Thanksgiving is a distant memory (mmm…homemade biscuits…), it is nice to realize why the [...]
November 20, 2007 – 3:07 pm
Yesterday my son (B) - who’s eight - and I waited for an hour and twenty minutes to see a doctor. We weren’t in the emergency room or anything, we hadn’t been triaged to the end of the list. We had an appointment, and the doctor was an allergist.
While we spent some time working on [...]
November 20, 2007 – 11:45 am
I spoke at Northwestern’s proseminar for first-year graduate students yesterday. You know that family dinner scene in Say Anything where Lloyd Dobbler realizes he’s started off badly and tries to talk his way out of it and comes across worse and then tries to talk his way out of that and comes across worse [...]
November 20, 2007 – 9:56 am
It’s a treat to begin the morning with a really good cup of tea and an article in the Chronicle about a friend’s research!
See
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/2558/race-class-and-the-choice-of
Congratulations Eszter!
November 19, 2007 – 10:22 pm
Hello everyone. I’m new at this. My first thoughts are about how “out” to be. Now that I do a lot of public sociology, I have a public personna to consider. How much can I say to the web about the interesting things I’ve observed without delegitmating myself and my work? [...]
November 19, 2007 – 11:37 am
Update: Problem solved. After some consultation from an outside adjudicator, Mike wins the prize for his copy-and-paste-perfect solution although Peter’s solution from a few minutes earlier might work if I fiddled with it. Mike: send me your address, and then start waiting by your mailbox for the prize.
In addition to public accolade here, I will [...]
November 19, 2007 – 12:56 am
I was in San Francisco this weekend for a conference. First night I went with some people for dinner at a great restaurant and the bill worked out to $50/person plus tip. Second night I went with many of the same people to this hole-in-the-wall Vietnamese restaurant that had been recommended. The [...]
November 18, 2007 – 3:20 pm
The term “gnotobiotic” stems from the Greek words “gnosis” (”known”) and “bios” (”life”). Somewhat paradoxically, a gnotobiotic animal is, at least originally, one with no known life. That is, a gnotobiotic animal is born and reared in a sterile environment, so that it is germ free (or GF, in the parlance of the articles I’ve been [...]
November 18, 2007 – 1:00 pm
This is a WordPress.com blog, which is not as flexible as if it were a WordPress blog we were serving ourselves. For example, I would love to have a custom favicon instead of the WordPress logo next to the URL up in your address bar, but WordPress.com does not allow this. Even though [...]
November 17, 2007 – 9:15 pm
I’m about to go to bed. I moved to NYC thinking it would change my life. That things would be exciting. That I would finally get away from Madison, where the few things I did were eat out and go to movies.
Now I live in NY. And I eat out. Movies are no longer a [...]
November 17, 2007 – 12:19 pm
Traveling this weekend, and I’m having a lovely time.* However, my travels have been a bit more, um, exciting than usual. For example, for the first time in my life I was paged in the airport. A bit freaked out at hearing my (mispronounced) name over the speakers, I rushed back to the gate I [...]
November 16, 2007 – 9:18 am
From Jon Elster, Ulysses Unbound, p. 72:
It is a conceptual truth that one cannot consciously decide to adopt a belief simply on the grounds that having it would be useful.
Not to get all personal here on sociology’s brand-new team blog, but can I just say: clearly Jon Elster has not dated some of the people [...]
