Real life is like a Kurt Vonnegut novel. You know, you are going along living your life, and suddenly you get popped over into another life. I’m out in California, spending the week with my mother, who in February found herself invalid, on oxygen and very weak, needing a walker to get around [...]
I am still a grad student. Help me not fail. How do I write a “review essay” like the ones in Law and Social Inquiry?
March 20, 2008 – 10:35 pm
I guess it’s time to go public with this: After hundreds of hours of behind-the-scenes lobbying and deliberation, Scatterplot has decided to endorse David Cook in this year’s American Idol race, in a show of solidarity with all those who are simultaneously sort-of-goofy-looking and sort-of-alt.Ally.Sheedy-looking (here, doing “Hello” better than the original version). There [...]
Recently I have had a series of conversations with a pretty wide variety of people about what they like and dislike about scatterplot, sociology, and academia more generally. For now, let me focus on what people like. The acknowledgment that we watch TV comes up again again (here and here are examples, even if we [...]
(it took me a day before I realized I violated Jeremy’s no caps rule)
I am sort of a lawyer, and I read a lot of law blogs. One of the never-ending debates in legal scholarship is the use of first-person narrative in legal scholarship. First person narrative, or “storytelling,” is one of the principal methodologies [...]
March 19, 2008 – 11:49 pm
1. Tuesday’s Obama bender culminated the latest round in my ongoing worry about my control over my use of the Internet–as I’ve said, sometimes I feel like an alcoholic whose job requires him to work in a bar–and so I installed LeechBlock to break my ability to read news sites or blogs from the [...]
I recently attended a research talk by one of our good friends from orgtheory.net. I was introducing the speaker and therefore got close enough to the powerpoint to read the fine print on the opening slide. (Apologies for the two-piece picture, but the cell phone camera has its limitations). In case you [...]
March 19, 2008 – 11:51 am
Beer may be associated with an increase in earnings. But it also is associated with a decrease in productivity. How can this be?!? What am I to do? Drink and make more money? But then also be less productive? There is a crisis brewing here. Luckily, though, as it turns out, we’re all reasonably happy.
March 19, 2008 – 10:11 am
Here is a suggestion that emerged from olderwoman about our ask a scatterbrain series. This emerged as some had expressed that the series was anxiety producing. Ane one of the causes of this was that the advice often seemed to come from folks at the “top 20″ - where few sociologists actually are (and few [...]
A selection from someecards.com’s “somewhat topical” section.
While I am generally trying as ever to reduce my Internet procrastinative activity–at least if, by “ever,” we mean circa 1992–I regard the time spent today watching Barack Obama’s speech as procrastination well-spent. I thought the speech was brilliant, but, beyond that, I also thought it was the most nuanced argument I have ever [...]
Inside Higher Ed is running an essay by Lindsay Waters, described as executive editor of the humanities at Harvard University Press, in which he bemoans the emphasis on quantity-and-obscurity over clarity in humanities writing and calls for a “slow writing” movement. For example, he writes:
We had fights and had to have emergency meetings of [...]
Some awesome independent scholar dude named Ray Cha (bust down those Ivory Tower gates!) has a blog that is most awesomely about technology and policy (check it out, Madisonian.net folks) found my cross-post about Your Daily Awesomeness on Scatterplot.
So awesomely awesome is Ray Cha’s awesomeness: the man has empirically assessed the use of “awesomeness” over [...]
I appreciate all the recommendations about a portable GPS for my car. As I said, I had some ambivalence about buying one because I really don’t drive very much and they are $200 or more. But, you know, I was thinking I might as well get myself a present to celebrate my [...]
March 16, 2008 – 10:57 am
Here at Columbia there was just a conference in honor of Herb Gans. Unlike most conferences, I enjoyed this one. I actually really enjoyed it**. The keynote speaker was William Julius Wilson. He spoke on the book he’s finishing up right now, which takes both structural and cultural arguments about poverty seriously. Basically, the [...]
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(Note from Jeremy: Sara is renowned for wanting to do birthdays up big. However, I resized the photo and put it in just as a thumbnail so that it would not be so big as to crash anyone’s browser. The photo is from last year, when we were at the [...]
Oy. I don’t know exactly when it was that I transitioned from an anxious sense of misspent youth to an anxious sense of misspent middle age.
The Whole Foods next to where I live has a blackboard sign advertising “Whole Trade Roses.” I don’ t know anything about the rose business or its seedy exploitative underbelly, but is Whole Trade supposed to be a counterpart for Fair Trade? Doesn’t Whole Trade sound way more potentially unseemly than Fair Trade?
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