Academic Mixtape 23
It’s been a month since the last mixtape? What can I say, I’ve been deeply engaged in fun sabbatical stuff. The upside to me doing these less often is that I’m more picky about what I share, and yet again, this is a heckuva selection.
Dave Eggers wrote a gorgeous paean to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Challenging the neutrality myth in climate science and activism
I appreciated this essay about going back to re-read books that once had a big impact on you. Ten years ago, I re-read The Magus by John Fowles and it landed extremely differently than my first read in the summer between high school and college. I wonder what a re-read would be like now?
Here are a couple reviews of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book, which get deep into substance.
How do you use office hours? Here’s some science about what is most effective.
More peer-reviewed science about how LGBTQ+ doctoral students are working to reframe the narrative, that their identity helps makes them impactful teachers and scholars. This is a great piece of work.
We must train specialists in botany and zoology — or risk more devastating extinctions. Nice to see this in the pages of Nature, and also nice to this message from a scientist in a BRICS nation.
The Atlantic published an article about students struggling to keep up academic reading loads. One of the scholars quoted in the article was done dirty by the author, here’s their account of this incident that’s gotten a lot of attention.
Legacy admissions in California are now illegal, apparently.
The backstory of the people and times behind a photo that went as viral as things would get in 1974. This is a lovely read.
This article in The Athletic (which still is very solid journalism even though they were unfortunately acquired by the New York Times) is ostensibly about soccer coaching but really it’s about the value of leadership training and I think it was really fascinating, and I have been thinking about it for the past week since I read it.
Underrepresented minority faculty in the USA face a double standard in promotion and tenure decisions. Well, yes, duh, but the data in this peer-reviewed article are valuable in that folks who want to run universities based on evidence now have evidence to change practices.
Instead of writing for the “general public,” maybe try writing for the field next door? I thought this was a useful framing.
This is what happened to Richard Dawkins.
Lucille Ball was a real one:
So CalTech runs these online bootcamps, charges a lot of money for them, and then has them fully run by outside contractors who essentially have nothing to do with CalTech? And then they sucked?
Science is political. It’s been how many years since the March For Science, and I suppose we need to keep having this conversation.