Academic Mixtape 25

good stuff to read

It’s been almost a couple weeks since the extraordinarily bad moment landed in the US. I don’t know about you, but I am finding myself surprisingly recalibrated over this brief period of time. I think I’ve learned the lessons from how long it took me to recover eight years ago.

I’ve been back from the Entomology conference for several days, and it was heartening to be in the midst of community, solitary, and excitement about science. It made me realize that we cannot let them steal our joy even as they take away freedoms and work to harm so many people. The work goes on, even if the headwinds are stronger.

Most of the links I’m sharing here reflect what I’ve been browsing to contextualize the coming months and years. It’s not about what happened, but about how we will forge ahead as scientists, educators, and human beings. So, here goes:

The Cut asked a lot of smart people about what activism will look like in the coming years. There’s a lot of wisdom in here.

A new paper in CBE Life Sciences Education studies the routes that faculty members take in their journey towards justice-centered teaching. If you’re wondering how to support your peers (and yourself) in teaching science more equitably, here is some inspiration.

Journalism, Science News, and the Bold Stance of Leaning Into the Science: on the resignation of Laura Helmuth as EIC of Scientific American and her remarkable tenure.

How to stay alive and horny under authoritarianism.

On organizing.

Local politics is where we need to be. Says this article in the Nation. Also, John Oliver’s first episode in the aftermath.

Millenials and Gen-Z are worse on gender equity than earlier generations?! Also, how America embraced the gender war, from Jia Tolentino,

“Of all schools that have sent students to Harvard, one in 11 students has come from just 21 high schools across the United States.”

Drugmonkey reckons with the stakes of the election.

If you never were a twitter person, you might not be aware that over the past two weeks, there has been a wholesale emigration to BlueSky. It’s good over there, come on by, folks. You can find me there as @hormiga.bsky.social. Anyhow, here’s an entertaining and spot-on read about leaving twitter.

Here is an interesting tale of two editorials. This one in Nature, and this one in Science. Hmm.

The myth of the classically educated elite