For all of you doing the baby years: Today my spouse suggested that we kick back and have a meal of “pizza and beer” with our son — our youngest child — who just turned 21 and is staying with us, along with his GF.
The longer I’m in this business, the better the informal longitudinal data I have about others in it. An observation from this data: When people say “I really want to do X, but not until I have tenure,” they don’t actually do X after tenure either. The only systematic exception may be having a child.
My father had this [...]
I have two months left on my Verizon phone contract. Should I just say bother it and go get one of the new iPhones anyway?
I’ve been on Foad Mardukhi’s email listserv for about six months now. And I have to say, it’s great. In fact, it’s more than great. It’s astonishingly good. What he does is compile related news stories, information, and links, and send them out to a wide variety of folks (lots of academics, for one). As [...]
Yes, you are invited! Just because you read this post. Your friends are also invited, simply because you told them about this post. Further, all of you will receive an official scatterplot ribbon to wear on your ASA name badge, because you (yes, you!) are a sociology celebrity, at least in the eyes of this [...]
I’m reading a paper and staring at the word “lacunae” on page 4. I think over the past ten years or so, I have changed from someone who would use the word “lacunae” when “gaps” worked just as well to someone for whom seeing “lacunae” in a paper makes him rolls his eyes a little bit. [...]
Belle just offered her great post on teaching about race posted both here at Scatterplot and on her own blog, responding to pitse1eh’s blog. Both got great comments and useful links. This made me want to dust off my own essay on the subject. The core of this is an article I originally [...]
Okay, so I don’t really have rhythm. Having my luggage back from Africa makes up for it! And, casual initial inspection indicates no problems. Who could ask for anything more?
And, to stick up now for the continent I never would have forgiven had my luggage been permanently lost, the problem appears not to have been with [...]
We’ve had many discussions about this on scatterplot. I thought I would bring attention to a blog post on the NYTimes where a woman reflects on what she wishes she’d done differently in caring for her mother. I should add that the blog, “The New Old Age” is a great addition to my blog reading, [...]
I looked at the date on my computer just now and started trying to remember whose birthday July 8 was. Then I remember, it’s not a birthday: it’s the anniversary of when I started blogging. A thing about writing is that you can feel like you aren’t making any real progress day after day, but [...]
Finally! In response to Pitseleh’s bleg for advice:
I am less excited about teaching Ethnicity and Race in the Spring. Actually, to be quite honest, I’m terrified of it. I don’t know this area, hardly at all (outside ethnic enclaves, social capital, Latino/a immigrant literature, racialization) While I know that is something I can learn and [...]
First day in the office since returning from Africa. If I could draw, this post would be a cartoon with me dressed as a lion tamer using a tiny whip and chair against a gigantic ferocious lion labeled “Inbox.”
Still no luggage. Sal’s didn’t arrive either. Presumably they are lost in the same place, wherever that [...]
In case you’ve been in a cave somewhere (or, possibly, in Malawi or detained at EWR for having the wrong name or ethnic origin), Jesse Helms died at the beginning of July 4. Various people have been trying to find something actually nice to say about this pig of a man; two of the better [...]
Part of my complete clusterbother experience at the Malawi airport yesterday was that they made me check one of the bags that I had brought and packed as a carry-on. I had already packed my carry-ons so that one of my carry-ons had more important and one less important stuff. When I was made to [...]
(look! we saw a rhinocerous! and hippos! and we were enumerated in the Malawi decennial census!)
I am very glad that I went to Malawi, but I am VERY GLAD to be almost home and VERY EAGER to get back to work on papers, planning data collection, and my secret hobby project.
Yesterday was [...]
The NYTimes has an interesting article on demographic changes in Academia. It references Neil Gross and Solon Simmons’ piece on changing political attitudes (friends of mine, which I’m embarrassed to admit I haven’t read). They report that younger professors are more likely to be moderate. (See graph below). I have one question on this..
I arrived into Newark last night and as feared I was detained by the INS, or homeland security, or some organization for some time. I would have taken some ethnographic fieldnotes had I not worried that such activity would have put me into REAL trouble. The detention room is much like the DMV (only scarier). [...]
With the aid of turnitin.com, I caught a number of students in my large class who plagiarized an ungraded book comment assignment. They were given a zero on the assignment and a formal letter of discipline describing specifically what they did and were and told that a copy of the discipline letter would be forwarded [...]
Sal and I are in Lilongwe, in our best accommodations so far. I mean, if you got this room at a Motel 6, you would only grouse for a few minutes and be otherwise fine. And, we will be sleeping under separate malaria nets for the first time since Zomba.
However, I’m not posting [...]
Some call it grade inflation. Others call it a wide assortment of other terms; I prefer “grade incommensurability”: a given letter grade means different things from different instructors in different departments. An opinion piece in Inside Higher Ed proposes a new statistical approach: simpler than the Achievement Index I and others proposed at UNC a [...]
