I mean, I love the books people write, but goddamn I can't stand the actual culture that exists around humanities research. Said as somebody who loves writing, I was so happy to be able to leave it behind. Five minutes of being on the outside and I never wanted to go through peer review again.
There's an undercurrent of desperate Keeping Up with The Joneses once you get to state R1 schools; some of the faculty came from exactly those schools and it galls them to have to slum it.
Absolute malpractice to talk that way to students.
As bad as things were in the late 2010s, I had this persistent sense in a decade or so they’d somehow be even worse. Am eternally grateful that I was lucky enough to leave all of this behind; I kept the parts I wanted and didn’t look back.
There are currently 6 permanent full time history jobs in the whole UK. 500+ PhDs being produced a year - not all of whom will want to pursue an academic year but likely most, and of course years will stack up onto each other. What a sector.
Heist?
For @jewishcurrents.bsky.social I wrote about the decimation of the right to asylum. I went into the history of asylum, how it was formalized post the World Wars, how it was never properly implemented, and how its destruction paves the path for authoritarianism.
jewishcurrents.org/the-death-of...
Ok, I’m going to need an updated org chart of who’s fucking who.
Yep, that’s another one. Got my PhD there.
100%. And you know what? They were great schools! Florida had a great university system and so did Texas. It is a tragedy what is happening to these schools — people should not have to abandon them.
One of the gutting things (and something that people unfamiliar with higher ed don’t seem to get) is that relatively few faculty have the luxury of getting to move to a blue state to continue teaching. Folks in Texas and elsewhere have very few options open to them, and that will only get worse.
How much I care about freelancing (the pleasure and drive I get from
it) feels silly sometimes because it’s such a small part of my income. I can’t make a living on it, nor do I want to try. And yet, I do actually love it to death.
I don’t normally cover science, but I do cover coding from time to time (I’m a dev by day) and yeah, the requests are kind of absurd, especially considering that it’s not really my beat
Lately I've been thinking a lot about science, scicomm, and the crazy world we live in.
And yeah. Now I'm completely reworking my newsletter.
Because I feel like us science folks — scientists, scicommers, journalists, everyone who believes in science and truth as a force for good — need to talk.
if you want something treat yourself because today would be your birthday if you were born today so that’s close enough
The Iranians have no sunk cost to guide them into fallacies when it comes to the United States. Most of the rest of the world wants to preserve some kind of relationship, but Tehran doesn’t have one and they’ve been taught that good faith diplomacy is a waste of time with him.
Yeah, there needs to be the weird fake intimacy of feeling close-up with the person (it's why so goddamned many of them are recorded in cars I think)
100%. It's an emerging skillset for that matter. Don't get me wrong, grad school didn't exactly train me to do the kind of writing I do now, but short-form video was on nobody's radar in my PhD program.
I’d add that this is also evidence of just how mentally and morally cooked the tech oligarchy is. They used to know this was “inside voice” stuff. Now it’s meant to be the organizing principles of society.
Yeah, you have to be entrepreneurial (and really committed to social media, which...ugh) to make short form work and that is a serious commitment.
It's my weakness that I just don't respect the format very much, and the idea of making them just sounds awful.
Reupping my review of Alex Karp’s embarrassing pamphlet of a book.
Palantir is run by a nitwit.
Anyway, Democrats need to campaign on grinding companies like this into absolute paste -- we can't tolerate a business culture like this in this country.
Some companies treat fascism opportunistically: it's just a cash grab. Others...well, they like the sound of it.
"status bro"
Even the really enormous ones, it’s at best around a hundred people. More realistically, a few dozen and that’s it.
Well, I hope more people will recognize that before it’s too late. Columbus City Council is preparing to develop local policy, so time is of the essence. If people see this and want to get involved:
forms.gle/wCvEseyQ6Yzz...
Yeah, Columbus Stand Up is getting in on this and I’m a member.
You’re probably right (I’m an outlier on this issue) but seeing things like the Hilliard facility and what those jackasses are ramming through with the gas turbines has me thinking that my fellow urbanites will be forced to catch up pretty soon.
Watching this campaign is so frustrating because it feels like she’s missing easy pickups in an environment that’s actually looking *good* for Democrats.