• Vignettes

    “Academaze” will be available to preorder soon! Below are a couple of vignettes I drew specifically for the cover of “Academaze” (cover design by Susan Lavoie, to be revealed shortly!). There are other drawings by yours truly on the cover, selected from among the 34 cartoons that make an appearance in the book. This is one badass plane, if I do

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  • Texting with DH

    My husband (DH) and I don’t communicate much during the work day, and when we do it’s usually via text messages. Mostly we discuss child pickup or dinner plans, but it can often turn hilarious. Fair warning: Considering that we spend a lot of time around small children, it’s not a particularly highbrow kind of hilarity. Here

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  • I Heart Suburbia

    Clarissa‘s post “Provincialism” gave me much food for thought. She used to be a big-city person, but now fears she’s become provincial because she is dreading traffic, crowds, and noise in the big city where she used to live and that she’s about to visit with her husband and baby. I grew up and spent much of my youth in

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  • Fellow Travelers

    There is a whole genre of books and movies that could be termed “deep and meaningful stuff coming out of random people’s lives intersecting by chance.” Sometimes they are well done, but as a concept they are not longer new. To me, the epitome of the genre is the movie “Crash” circa 2004. A cool IMDB list called

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  • Real

    What always pisses me off amuses me is the use of the adjective “real” to indicate something that the person using it imagines they would prefer over whatever it is that you are trying to make them do instead. Academia is not the real world and is not preparing the students for the real world.

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  • I am very excited. Like, embarrassingly, ridiculously excited. Da book that I have been boring you all with is really 97.34% done. Obviously, I just made up that percentage, but we are really close to done. We have one more pass through the text and finalizing the cover and then it will be off to a print test!

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  • Highlight

    In recent months, two papers by my group, on disparate topics, were editorially highlighted in two different reputable journals. Having your work selected by editors as particularly interesting to the community is a pretty cool recognition; it comes with additional exposure and eventual citations of your work. (One of the journals has very nice metrics tracking, and you could see a

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  •   Finished grading the final for my giant class and just submitted final grades!!! Yay! Now the summer of leisure catching up on paper writing and submitting commences, but not before the great May cleansing of backlogged editorial and refereeing work ends. My graduate students have been very patient as the end of semester kicked

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  • Angry Ghost

    This one is for a bloggy friend, who has little patience with teaching fads, especially those that “reinvent the wheel” without proper attribution.

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