Posts Tagged ‘welcome to my future’
A Bunch of Links for Thursday
* In the future, you can make telephone calls from inside your email. Also, in the future Google knows everything there is to know about you.
* Oh, crap: My adjunct story starts with the highly self-indulgent decision to pursue a PhD in comparative literature. To me, this meant I’d get to study great writers who happened to express themselves in different languages. To hiring committees, it meant I had GENERALIST tattooed on my forehead—the academic equivalent of a scarlet A.
* Vimeo has a sneak preview of The Promise: The Making of Darkness on the Edge of Town.
* Happy 35th birthday, global warming. Personally, like the first commenter, I count from Arrhenius.
* How the Pirates make more money losing. Via the MetaFilter thread on accounting tricks in Major League Baseball.
* Surviving and Thriving in Durham: a Tumblr blog.
* Slayage has a special double issue on Dollhouse.
* There’s a new Grow game, Grow Valley. (Here’s the walkthrough.) You may also Metagun, which Rock Paper Shotgun describes as “a game about a man who fires a gun that fires men who fire guns. At you.”
* The eleven most scandalous stories about Saved By The Bell from Dustin “Screech” Diamond’s autobiography. Not a hoax, not an imaginary story. Via MetaFilter.
* And you had me at “Rod Serling action figure.”
Someday
I have a new life’s ambition: to be named Admiral in the Great Navy of the State of Nebraska.
Freitag
* Peter Jackson is in negotiations to direct The Hobbit after all.
* Why doesn’t Superman cure cancer?
* The end of Journolist. How will Commissar Klein transmit our marching orders now?
* And incoming MLA President Michael Bérubé explains why no graduate student will ever be happy again.
Tuesday
* Blasphemy! Mattel is changing the rules of Scrabble to allow proper nouns.
* Towards a theory of erotic capital.
* Allen sends along three articles from the Chronicle of Higher Education on the disastrous job market in the humanities:
* Frank Donoghue: An Open Letter From a Director of Graduate Admissions.
* Peter Conn: We Need to Acknowledge the Realities of Employment in the Humanities.
* Lee S. Shulman: Doctoral Education Shouldn’t Be a Marathon.
Now I’m depressed.
* Ambinder has more SCOTUS speculation, explaining Obama’s likely strategy and why Elena Kagan is widely believed to be the frontrunner for the nomination.
* ExxonMobil paid no federal income tax in 2009 on $45.2 billion in profit. Two-thirds of U.S. corporations paid the same amount between 1998 and 2005.
* The West Virginia mining disaster that has killed at least 25 people appears to have been caused in part by corporate neglect of safe conditions.
* Frum: Don’t listen to Fox. Coburn: Don’t listen to Fox. Good advice.
Wednesday!
* If you became the last person on Earth, what would you do? Realistically. Via Kottke.
* At Slate: the international war over exit signs.
* Focus describes the job I’m training for as the 3rd best in America. Inside Higher Ed’s state of humanities departments describes my chances of actually getting it.
* Kotaku has a preview of the game that will prevent that from ever happening.
* “What’s the point of having a Philosophy department in an American university?”
In Our Underachieving Colleges (CT review still on its way: DD to blame if I never get round to it) Derek Bok claims that the standard assumptions within most departments in research universities is that the undergraduate curriculum is for attracting and then teaching majors, and, further, that our attention to the majors should be shaped by the aim of preparing them well for graduate school. This means that the curriculum is designed for a tiny minority of the students who take classes, and even many of them, probably, would be better off doing something other than going to graduate school (that’s me, not Bok, saying the last bit).
I don’t think of the curriculum, or the mission of my department in my institution, that way at all.
If I did I would campaign to remove our classes from the list of classes that meet breadth requirements and ask other majors not to require our classes. In most places, including in my department (even now, when we have a glut of majors, no doubt owing to the high quality instruction in my department and the newly found glamour in our field) most of the enrollments in Philosophy courses (as in most Humanities departments) come from non-majors trying to fulfill breadth, general ed, or other-major-specific requirements. If I were in the position of having to justify my own department’s existence, and was unconstrained by the comments of my colleagues, I would focus on the service we do to students for whom the course they take from us is the only Philosophy course they take.
* Gawker spoils the end of Remember Me, which apparently has the same surprise! ending as 80% of the stories we got when I was reading the slushpile for Greensboro Review and Backwards City Review earlier this decade. Sounds like quite a film.
* A new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association shows flu shots in children has dramatic success in reducing the instance of flu in a community.
* And Alan Grayson introduces H.R. 4789, Medicare buy-in for all. “The government spent billions of dollars creating a Medicare network of providers that is only open to one-eighth of the population. That’s like saying, ‘Only people 65 and over can use federal highways.’ It is a waste of a very valuable resource and it is not fair. This idea is simple, it makes sense, and it deserves an up-or-down vote.”
Other Links
* Why would Fox remake Torchwood? It’s like two years old and already in English. If they like it they could air it as is and it would cost them nothing. They should spend that money on Untitled Joss Whedon Cancelation instead.
* Wolverine admits to steroid use.
* Battlestar anthropology: The human population of Earth has generally always been 50,000. Via MeFi.
* Breathless news reports are claiming overstimulation during Avatar may have contributed to a Taiwanese man’s death.
* Lessons from an Academic Vagabound.
* How to Survive an Atomic Bomb. Helpful advice from Mutual of Omaha. Via Boing Boing.
Other Stuff
* Details on the U.S. operation of Port-Au-Prince’s last working airstrip from Crooks & Liars, a possible (or partial) answer to complaints about its allocation. A second airport is now working at Jacmel, administered by tiny American charity Joy in Hope. From Ryan, I see the Caribbean is still at risk for more earthquakes.
* Yahoo News is hiring bloggers.
* Gawker has your roundup of clips from the ongoing NBC late-night fiasco.
* Louis Menand and how to rescue the professoriate from professionalization.
The ultimate problem is this: How do you create a system for the production of knowledge that is, on the one hand, rigorous and peer-reviewed and, on the other, committed to aims and obligations beyond its own survival? The professoriate itself is well aware of the dilemma, Menand observes, and has enthusiastically promoted what sounds like a solution: “interdisciplinarity.” The hope is that if professors join in conversation with one another, they’ll remember to be interesting to people outside their building.
Theoretically, this solves everything. The disciplines are still accountable only to themselves, but they’re also engaged with something broader—i.e., other disciplines. They are still autonomous without being hermetic. Except that, Menand explains, interdisciplinarity finally does nothing to alter the ways in which the individual disciplines produce their professors. Rather than a therapy for academic neurosis, interdisciplinarity is in fact yet one more symptom of it. “Interdisciplinary anxiety,” he writes, “is a displaced anxiety about the position of privilege that academic professionalism confers on its initiates and about the peculiar position of social disempowerment created by the barrier between academic workers and the larger culture. It is anxiety about the formalism and methodological fetishism of the disciplines and about the danger of sliding into aimless subjectivism or eclecticism.”
The Market Has No Need For Great Thinkers
Dropping a classics or philosophy major might have been unthinkable a generation ago, when knowledge of the great thinkers was a cornerstone of a solid education. But with budgets tight, such programs have come to seem like a luxury— or maybe an expensive antique — in some quarters.
More Interview Advice
…for the academic job market from Edge of the American West (ari) and Edge of the American West (eric).
Gerry Canavan 