Academic Mixtape 27

ho, ho, ho

Chaucerian advice for the holiday season.

The limits of refusal. This piece about how much in higher ed is scaffolded on the idea that we can just ‘choose to say no to service’ is so ever deeply messed up.

This story (by the perennially exceptional Elizabeth Kolbert) about Vanuatu’s case in The Hague against, well, me and you and everybody else, about Climate Justice, is an essential read.

Some good (?) news: monarch butterflies proposed for protection under the Endangered Species Act, as a threatened species.

A story by Carl Zimmer about the concerns of creating “mirror life.” A bunch of really wise and smart people are pointing out how dangerous this can be to create life that might not be able to be digested or attacked by other lifeforms. In the coming years, it seems foreseeable that we can create an organism that has chirally flipped versions of the major macromolecules. Which is absolutely wild to think that because we should just because we can? Setting aside the very serious issues here, I can’t help but think of the mirror world like in Star Trek. Would these mirror microbes all be sporting goatees?

Jeremy Berg (former EIC of Science, among other things) has decided to share some unvarnished stories and truths about stuff inside the NIH.

This new study looks at gendered stereotypes of ability among young children, and it’s stunning (if not surprising) how young kids are when they develop the messed up idea that boys are better at computer science, engineering, and physics. Think about what’s happening in our homes, preschools, media, and all that, and what we have to do differently.

I suspect that most of us didn’t hear about the stadium disaster in Guinea, that happened on the first of this month. Here’s a detailed report from the scene, from The Athletic. As the content warning at the top of the story lets you know, this isn’t an easy read. (If you’re not familiar with The Athletic, it’s an independent journalistic outfit that does spectacular coverage of sports generally speaking. They recently got acquired by the New York Times, which isn’t thrilling to me, but so far they seem to still be great and you can subscribe separately to The Athletic.)

“Are we being punished for a feminist utopia that never happened?” So all of this ramped-up misogyny that we’re seeing from government and beyond is a backlash to, what exactly? What advances are they actually so mad about?

Et tú, ABC? This is about how the network capitulated to a lawsuit from Trump claiming defamation, when all they did was report simple facts. This is a super disheartening indication of where we are going from here.

As I mentioned last time, I’ve been working to avoid all of the thinkpieces describing what went wrong with people in the US in this last election, but some keep getting put forward by people whose perspectives I think are good. So with that caveat, let me share this one with you that made its way through my anti-hot-take firewall. “A disease of affluence.” This makes makes the point that people who voted for this onslaught of hideousness didn’t do this out of a position of economic anxiety, but rather just the opposite: that the voting folks are so well off that they can vote their grievances even if it’s against their own interest.

advice from Teen Vogue: Donald Trump and his allies don’t care what kind of leftist you are. Be a doer: “The more our political energy goes to the politics of self-expression, the less there is for the fights we really need to win against mass deportation, mass incarceration, the climate crisis. None of the actors who profit from the above care what kind of leftist we are, so long as we fall in line. A better show of our political identity is how we make changes in the world around us, not our slogans and mission statements.”

Watch The Waiting. It’s 15 minutes and worth every one:

Meanwhile, I’m taking a break from sabbatical for an actual winter break. Things will be slow here until early January. I hope you find some joy over the break.