For the first time in a long time, we decided to make an evening of it and head to our local movie theater and enjoy all the pleasures of the big screen. Sitting through twenty minutes of in-house ads and “Noovie” productions was less pleasant, but surrounded by other adults…

The Great Hamster Wheel of Higher Education — The American academy is in something of a panic at the moment because there are more people with PhDs than there are jobs. This has been the case since the 90s for the humanities but it has slowly spread to the sciences. The sciences have always had the private sector…

I drafted this essay back when The Force Awakens was first released. For some reason, it sat in my Medium drafts folder without ever getting published. Here it is now. A number of responses to some of the fury over inconsistencies or, in some cases, betrayals of whatever we now…

Scholarship should be open, inclusive, and slow, but is slow dangerous to some? — In a recent post, Emily Bender laid out a thoughtful argument focused on establishing better values for scholarship. Bender believes that scholarship should be: – Open, with open amounting not only to accessibility but also for accountability, as in honest. – Inclusive, because the more approaches there are to a…

Heather Froelich pointed out that the U.S. Copyright office is seeking comments on artificial intelligence and copyright. Here is the comment I left, and a link to do the same is below. The comment begins somewhat awkwardly because the Copyright Office wants to know if you are representing yourself or…

Learning to Listen for How History Actually Gets Told A talk for the annual meeting of the Louisiana Aging Network Association, 16 August 2023 at L’Auberge in Baton Rouge, LA. The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, arguably one of the greatest works of Louisiana literature, is presented both in the original novel and in its later film adaptation as…

ResearchGate recently notified me that I had reached a milestone: my research items had reached 1,000 reads. Ignoring for a moment the awkwardness of “research items,” which we can, I think, chalk up to ResearchGate making it possible to publish a variety of materials, I want to think about what…

I recently purchased an iPhone 14 for my daughter. I was willing to do so because of the promised $200 trade-in value for her iPhone 11. (We are not a rich people.) I received the trade-in box, and I did all the things one does to return a device in…

BLUF (for my Army and corporate colleauges): The Army is an incredible organization to work for. At 1.2 million people in and out of uniform, it is larger than most people realize, but self-aware enough to recognize the dangers of inertia present in being so large. It has an active…