Weekly Varia no. 18, 03/18/23

Posted on by Josh Nudell

This week was Spring Break. I have never been one for “spring break” trips, both because of personal inclination and financial considerations. But, this year, we used the break for the second trip to bring wedding festivities to our family. Members of both of our families met up in Las Cruses, New Mexico, which we used as a base for exploring the Organ Mountains, White Sands, Mesilla, and other local attractions. I would particularly recommend the Zuhl Collection at New Mexico State University, which contained just a spectacular collection of petrified wood and fossils.

The combination of travel and family meant that my break hasn’t been as restful as I had hoped, but it was restorative in other ways. One of my brothers made it to this trip and I hadn’t seen him since before the pandemic started because the last two planned attempts were both disrupted by COVID. Likewise, we were able to visit friends in El Paso and see their first child who was born last year. Despite having every intention of maintaining a modestly productive routine I mostly spent my downtime at our AirBnB reading such that I finished three books and part of a fourth within the week. I can feel the words starting to burble beneath the surface again, but they’re not ready to burst forth just yet.

Now I’m back in chilly Kirksville. Yesterday I finished grading my outstanding assignments and this weekend I will be spending the time between naps putting the rest of my course materials in order for the coming week. In other words, a pretty normal weekend.

This week’s varia:

  • Judge Kyle Duncan spoke at Stanford where, conservative commentators claim, he was “cancelled” by student protests. Students did protest at the event by asking him pointed questions, but they also settled in to allow him to deliver his prepared responses when he decided to pivot to question and answer and proceeded to berate the students who asked questions. Mark Joseph Stern suggests that this was Duncan’s intent all along, as an audition that would raise his profile onto a short list for the Supreme Court under the next Republican administration. Ken White (Popehat) is disgusted with everyone involved in the incident. I’m inclined to side with him in the sense that responding in kind to deliberate provocation is entirely counter-productive, which is why I have been developing a non-engagement policy on social media.
  • Kate Wagner of McMansion Hell fame has a design column at The Nation. The first installment explores the rise of what she calls “griege” (gray + beige) aesthetic. She argues that it has become the dominant mode because of a confluence of factors, most notably the digital unreality of online realty and that many buyers are looking for an investment and thus are thinking about resale before ever completing the purchase.
  • A home Zillow valued at $417,000 on the Outer Banks of North Carolina fell into the sea last week, leaving a 21-mile long debris trail. This marks the fourth such home in the last 13 months. The effects of climate change are already here.
  • The Biden Administration is pushing for TikTok to be sold or else face a ban in the United states because of its link to the Chinese Government. This story follows the comments from a TikTok spokesperson, but it also came out this week that the company had used the location data of US journalists to try to determine who had been talking to them.
  • Pro Publica has video and a story about the rise of Teneo, a conservative influence group funded by Leonard Leo. I am always struck by the conspiracy-minded nature of these groups, where they justify their own conspiracy by claiming the existence of a preexisting structure among their perceived enemies. Of course their examples rely on faceless archetypes rather than concrete examples because such a conspiracy doesn’t exist.
  • Police departments have not been defunded, but, like in many other sectors, large departments are suffering from staffing shortages. This is leading to departments like that of New Orleans to realize that they need to re-tool their mandate so that they can focus on the worst types of crime and other, less dangerous, responsibilities can be passed to non-police agencies.
  • Federal regulators saw problem after problem at Silicon Valley Bank more than a year ago, but acted too slowly to correct the problems. Embedded in that same story is a note about how SVB grew expansively after the rollback of the Dodd-Frank regulations. Correlation is not necessarily causation, though, and this story implies that existing regulations should have caught the problem. I am still inclined to believe that there were overlapping causes of SVB’s collapse, including regulatory failure, the particular spending practices of venture-capital funded startups, a sudden tightening of the bond market, and the particular makeup of SVB’s depositors that had an unusually-high percentage of very large accounts that made the bank vulnerable to runs.
  • Former President Trump took to social media to say that he expects to be notified of an indictment next week, including in the statement comments to his supports akin to the ones he said on January 6, 2021. The little commentary I’ve seen indicates that this stems from a probe into the Stormy Daniels payoff, but this could well be rampant speculation at this point.
  • The city of Newark performed a ceremony to inaugurate a sister city arrangement with the Hindu nation Kailasa, which doesn’t exist. Kailasa was invented by Swami Nithyananda, an Indian scam artist on the run from rape charges.
  • A Maine resident is appealing a rejected vanity licence plate “LUVTOFU,” saying that he’s a vegan.
  • ChatGPT Starting To Think Journalist Could One Day Be Capable Of Independent Thought (The Onion).

Album of the Week: Jukebox the Ghost, I Got a Girl EP (2022)

Currently Reading: Abdulrazak Gurnah, Afterlives

White Sands National Park
Organ Mountains National Monument
Compressed Iron, from the Zuhl Collection
Pyritized sea life from the Mesozoic era

Weekly Varia no. 17, 03/11/23

Posted on by Josh Nudell

This was a big week for me because my first book was officially released. I will have an update on what comes next for my writing soon enough, but, first, I have to get through this semester. This week marked the end of the first half of the spring semester. Flowers are starting to pop up around Kirksville, but I mostly didn’t get to enjoy them because I was busy trying to finish a round of grading so that I had one less thing to do over the next week. I didn’t quite meet my goals because my week filled up with meeting after meeting as everyone tried to squeeze in one more thing before break. Still, I got close enough that I should be able to take a much needed few days off over the next week.

This week’s varia:

  • Pasts Imperfect this week came early to align with Purim. The lead story is Jordan Rosenbaum unpacking the history of Hamantaschen, concluding that the traditional cookie is indeed symbolic, but comes from a different part of the figure of Esther and represents neither Haman nor a hat.
  • Javal Coleman writes in the SCS Blog about being the only Black person in a Classics Department. This is a great piece about belonging and the modern propensity to define black people as outside rather than the ancient tendency for inclusion. I read this when it first came out two weeks ago and meant to include it in a previous wrap-up but failed to do so.
  • Matt Gabriele brings an old blog post to Modern Medieval, in which he critiques the idea of a meaningful distinction between “public” and “academic” scholarship in terms of what we are actually doing (rather than genre conventions and tone). He notes that this is a blog post. from 2015, but is again timely in light of a recent New Yorker story dredging up last year’s controversy about “public history,” which had the former president of the American Historical Association, James Sweet, airing his grievances against trained historians who engage the public online. The piece is not worth linking to, but, like his jeremiads last year in his presidential column in Perspectives, Sweet’s willingness to air his grievances against younger, tenuously-employed generations is a dispiriting omen about the future of the profession given that a) he is hardly the only senior scholar to feel this way, and b) far from confronting the fact that the field is under attack—thus foreclosing an academic home for those people he lamented were simply Tweeting away—it gives more fuel to those people doing the attacking.
  • Bill Caraher weighs in on ChatGPT. I appreciate his willingness to express what he does not know, and see some sense in his suggestion that ChatGPT and similar products might be able to replace remediation for students who understand the material in every way except the writing. I’m not sure I agree in whole, but he’s right that there is a cost for both the student and the teacher when you need to take time doing what is effectively remedial work, and I have often found that campus writing centers are only so helpful when students need this sort of foundational help. He followed it up with a thoughtful post on paywalls, publishing, and AI aggregation.
  • Paul Thomas has a discussion of ChatGPT, but through the lens of citation in the sense that it (and the new I.B. guidelines) has added another layer to the cognitive load that comes with citation. His position here is also rooted in the chaos of trying to teach and unteach nitpicky citation style (rather than hyperlinks, which would only work for some fields, even at a future date), which prompt students to get distracted from the process and meaning of citation in the name of accurate formatting. I’m certainly sympathetic to that frustration.
  • A new study is claiming that there was no exacerbation of mental health crises during the pandemic, which they concluded by excluding from the study lower-income countries or study the effects on younger groups or anyone who was already prone to mental illness. This might be correct within the bounds of the study, but only by generalizing so much that it masks a more accurate representation of what happened. This also might speak to the human capacity for resilience and forgetting. For my part, I’m still waiting for the period of lockdown boredom I was promised.
  • Elon Musk is reportedly planning his own town in Texas. I don’t like giving the man air time, but something about the Wall Street Journal headline (I can’t read the whole part because I’m not a subscriber) touched a nerve. Company towns are not utopias, and we should be very wary of the latest return to a Gilded Age labor environment, alongside…
  • Arkansas became the latest state to facilitate child labor.
  • From NPR, a story about a Medicaid requirement that if a person receiving treatment under the program dies, the state government is supposed to recoup the amount spent from the estate. Some states do this in a pro-forma way and collect almost nothing or set relatively high income thresholds, while states like Iowa contract the task out and aggressively recoup the costs—including by seizing the home. Even with carve-outs for spouses and disabled children that can defer collection, this seems to be an exercise of cruelty in the name of fiscal responsibility.
  • More and more companies are admitting that the recent “emergencies” are excuses to increase prices even when it is not strictly necessary to keep up with rising costs, and prices in these situations tend not to go back down.
  • Silicon Valley Bank, a bank that services many tech startups, collapsed after a panic this week. SVB pursued “Venture Debt,” where provides money for those startups, but the companies were spending much more money than anticipated. Not for nothing, this collapse also follows just a few years after another round of banking deregulation.
  • The BBC has decided not to air and episode from the latest David Attenborough program because it includes themes of environmental destruction and they fear right-wing backlash. Not only is this a travesty, but Attenborough’s work has featured these issues for years, so it isn’t as though this is a new development.
  • RIP Tevye the Milkman.
  • Some Toblerone packaging is going to have to drop the Matterhorn from its packaging because the company is moving part of its production to Slovakia, thus violating Swiss rules on “Swissness.” This AP piece has a neat trivia point, too, that the name is a neologism that blends the founder’s name (Theodor Tobler) with the Italian word for nougat (torrone).

Album of the Week: Moscow Philharmonic, Russian Easter Festival Op. 36 (Tchaikovsky Symphony no. 5 and Rimsky-Korsakov Russian Easter Festival Overture, a.k.a. grading music)

Currently Reading: Dan Saladino, Eating to Extinction; Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (it was a long week of grading)

Hamantaschen two ways: cherry and poppyseed.
Libby in full fighting form (on her back, yelling)

Weekly Varia no. 16, 03/04/23

Posted on by Josh Nudell

Every semester in an academic calendar has its own rhythms. Fall starts with energy and excitement created by a lengthier summer hiatus before usually turning into a race to Thanksgiving and a coda that is the final few weeks. Summer is both more frenetic thanks for the shorter terms and more laid back because everyone is working on a smaller number of courses at a time. Spring, by contrast, starts with everyone still not quite recovered from the fall, but is also divided more neatly into two separate arcs, one leading up to the spring break, and one from there to the end of the semester.

I like the shorter arcs of the spring semester in theory. But I have also been reminded again this week, the penultimate before break, that so much of exhaustion, stress, and burnout are bigger systemic problems, which has prompted me to dramatically overhaul the schedule for one of my classes in particular in order to align my expectations, what my students can handle, and the course outcomes. Fortunately, I overbuilt the latter, so I can do almost anything in the back half of the course and still meet every objective.

At the same time, though, I don’t relish the thought of adding this to my to-do list. While I don’t have an obscene number of students this semester (despite two of my classes being mildly over-enrolled), I am already teaching three new courses, with the one that I am now retrofitting mid-flight being the one I had expected to be able to leave on autopilot while I tended to the others. Naturally.

At the same time, I discovered just how many groups I’m involved in decided that we need to squeeze whatever we’re doing in before break, leading to quite a crunch on my time.

Reader, I am tired.

I’ll make it through this week and through the rest of the semester after that, but the feeling of exhaustion that swept over me when I resolved to make these changes reminded me of this piece about John Fetterman, depression, and the requirement for politicians to always be “on.” Despite the reputation that professors are callous, impatient, and disinterested in engaging with students, or perhaps because of it, I saw a parallel in always being on. I might be a dozen anxieties in a trench coat making things up as I go along (an exaggeration on all fronts, but with a hint of truth), but I am supposed to be approachable and welcoming to students, timely in my feedback on student work, prepared with my class material, and present in my classes (though I had a…memorable…professor in undergrad who was frequently absent with no notification), on top of being an expert in the content and a responsible colleague to my coworkers.

This week’s varia:

  • Hannah Čulík-Baird returns to blogging with a post that consists of two fragments, one on fragments as nodes of interconnection both horizontally and vertically and about academic voice. Full disclosure: I get a shout-out in the post as an inspiration for the return based on intermittent, ongoing conversations Hannah and I have had about academic writing and academic voice across multiple social media platforms.
  • Charles Roberts has a blog post pointing out that the issues of student engagement are the consequence of larger structural factors that professors are now being asked to solve without the training or support to do so. He has a note about how dispiriting it is to hear an accreditor devalue the teaching that professors do, which, yes. as I keep saying about ChatGPT, this sort of language is toxic and sets establishes dangerous misunderstandings that I think set students up to fail in the long run.
  • The International Baccalaureate program in the UK is going to allow students to use AI programs if they cite e.g. ChatGPT as a source. This is an unbelievably dumb policy that completely misunderstands what ChatGPT is. The director claims that they created the policy because he thinks it is more valuable for students to learn to critique essays that to learn to do it themselves, which I find is an absurd premise given that doing one at least to a certain level is required to do the other. I’m dreading how decisions like this are going to create headaches for me down the road.
  • Jonathan Wilson writes about the challenges of creating a one-size-fits-all (students and teachers) model for flexible deadlines. I also share his concern about the frequency of students using avoidance as the primary coping strategy for students in distress. In addition to avoidance leading to more avoidance, I often find that it causes work to pile up to the point that it is unmanageable and students will further avoid me because they’re convinced that they have to turn all back work in at once in order to participate in the class and earn my respect—no matter how many times I tell them otherwise and try to help create manageable timelines for getting their missing work in.
  • Given a new round of commentary about campus cancel culture, I saw circulating a Teen Vogue op-ed from 2021 that I missed at the time arguing that colleges and universities are conservative institutions—for many reasons, not the least of which is that the existing fiscal structure of the universities often demands a conservative approach to budgeting and, the larger the endowment, the more the entity functions like a hedge-fund with a vestigial educational institution attached. As a complete tangent, my favorite part of this article is not the content, but the form. This opening paragraph is exactly what I want to see in an introduction. It has a hook, context, and concludes with a clear, coherent thesis that organizes the rest of the piece. A+.
  • From the Vermont Digger: the girl’s basketball team from Mid Vermont Christian School forfeited their game in the state D4 basketball tournament rather than play against Long Trail because the latter team had a trans player. The school also applied to the state to be able to receive public tuition money while being exempted from anti-discrimination regulations. This is an abominable position, but one that is all too common these days. To receive public money, you should have to be in compliance with state rules on issues of discrimination.
  • The Montana state legislature is debating a bill that would ban anyone who received a COVID vaccine from giving blood. Opponents of this bill say that it will lead to an 80% drop in blood donations, thus creating a new public health crisis.
  • A Republican lawmaker in Florida introduced a bill requiring that any blogger or other writer who does stories about the Governor or other executive officials register with the state or face a fine. Just the latest proposal to curtail civil liberties in the name of strangling political opposition coming out of that state.
  • A white-supremacist Lutheran who believes that Hitler went to heaven and views the world in Manichean terms where either you believe in White supremacy and Fascism or you believe in Marxism is trying to gain control of the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod. This synod is already an extremely conservative denomination, but he wants to turn it into an alt-right organization. I hate it here.
  • Bari Weiss “reported” last month about a whistleblower at a clinic in St. Louis that offers care to transgender teens, ginning up an enormous amount of outrage and potential political action against the clinic. Parents of the patients, the patients themselves, and the clinic are speaking out against the allegations, as reported by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. After the previous four links, adding this one runs the risk of seeming like I’m beating a dead horse, but…
  • Two trains collided in northern Thessaly (Greece), killing more than 40 people. This is an awful tragedy and critics are pointing out that like the aging infrastructure that caused the crash in East Palestine, Ohio, the train network in Greece is in need of overhaul, even if some of the blame here falls on human error.
  • Pizza acrobatics are a sport. There are competitions, and the Washington Post profiled the 13-time world champion, Tony Gemignani. I’d personally rather eat the pizza.

Album of the week: The Barefoot Movement, “Pressing Onward” (2021)

Currently Reading: Dan Saladino, Eating to Extinction; Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children; Nikolaus Leo Overtoom, Reign of Arrows

https://vtdigger.org/2023/02/27/mid-vermont-christian-school-girls-basketball-forfeits-playoff-game-rather-than-compete-against-team-with-transgender-player/

Weekly Varia no. 14, 02/18/23

Posted on by Josh Nudell

Practically speaking, week five of the semester passed in the same blur as week four. There were substantive differences, but to the same end point, which has left me without the time or energy for posts between the weekly varia entries. It also left me grasping at straws for something to introduce this post. Out of desperation comes inspiration.

At the one-third mark of the semester, I am loving my course on ancient Persia. I structured the course around two interlocking themes, orientalism in our interpretations of Persia and continuity and change in the imperial structures of West Asia, including the development of religion and ideology. This course has also given me an excuse to dive into the rich recent bibliography on Persian history.

My most recent read was Matthew Canepa’s The Iranian Expanse: Transforming Royal Identity through Architecture, Landscape, and the Built Environment, 550 BCE–642 CE (California 2018). Canepa traces the evolution of royal ideology and conception of where they sat in the world through their palaces, sacred spaces, funerary practices, and gardens, with a particular emphasis on points of disjuncture. That is, Canepa was more interested in change than in continuity, and in how subsequent dynasties competed with the ones that came before in establishing their own legitimacy. I particularly like that Canepa did not skip the Seleucids, but instead acknowledged their indelible place in the royal lineage of the region. I assigned several chapters to my students, many of whom are more familiar with modern history and thus found the discussion of ritual, cosmology, and monumentality disconcertingly anthropological. I will concede that this focus on royal architecture offers a top-down vision of the world, but placing them within a landscape over such a long continuous span I thought gave life to otherwise static monuments. The Iranian Expanse is a densely-packed, but immensely rewarding read.

This week’s varia:

  • Brett Devereaux has a long piece on ChatGPT and history classrooms, echoing a lot of the refrains given by a lot of us AI-skeptics about the purpose of essays and what the AI does poorly, which is a lot. I particularly like how Brett articulates the essay as a form and as a pedagogical tool. He offers a nice metaphor about an Amazon box for how the AI can mimic the essay container (sort of), but it can’t comprehend that what brings joy about the delivery is what is in the box, not the box itself.
  • Inside Higher Ed has a piece giving some higher ed context for Vermont State University’s decision to have a completely digital library and surveying the backlash to the decision.
  • Education researchers conducted a meta-analysis of flipped classrooms and found that the results were far less positive than its proponents often claim. Their findings dovetail with my anecdotal experience that many “flipped” models include more “passive” learning than most traditional lectures, but push that process outside of class where students will watch it at double speed or skip it altogether, leaving them unprepared for the “active” component in the classroom. They also note that “flipped” can mean any number of different things. This is also my problem with education discourse on Twitter: nothing is going to work in every class or for every teacher. Active learning leads to better results than passive learning, but there are a myriad of ways to reach active learning.
  • BBC Travel has a piece about a lost city under the sands…of California. Investigators have been uncovering the set of Cecille B. DeMille’s Ten Commandments, which he buried because the film set was supposed to leave no trace.
  • Corey Doctorow has a good piece on Google’s doomed and short-sighted attempt to chase the AI-search fad.
  • There are videos of Türkiye’s president Erdogan boasting about waiving zoning regulations that allowed construction companies to quickly build buildings in regions affected by last week’s earthquake that killed more than 44,000 people, one week out. One estimate puts the number of buildings not up to code at 50%. Rescue crews are still finding people alive more than a week after the disaster, but relief agencies are facing budget shortfalls for a number of reasons.
  • Legislators in Idaho advanced a bill that would more or less annex eastern Oregon into “Greater Idaho.” Eleven counties in Oregon have signed a petition in support of the bill, but such a change would still require both Oregon’s legislation and Congress to sign off on the plan.
  • Shortly before last weekend’s Super Bowl, researchers at BU released findings that their study of 376 former NFL players detected CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy) in 345 (92%), which points again to the game’s brutality.
  • One of the balloons shot down by the US Air Force last week might have been launched by a hobby group in Illinois. This makes me think of how much we don’t know about these balloons, which is then both the cause of and then a reaction to the hysteria.
  • The Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit against Fox News has revealed documentary evidence for the obvious, that Fox News continued to push election fraud stories because to do otherwise risked their bottom line if viewers switched to the even more shameless Newsmax.
  • The Onion does a New York Times (parody).
  • A gunman killed three Michigan State students just off campus before killing himself on Monday. There are too many guns.
  • Packers Sanitation Service has been fined after an inquiry revealed that more than 100 13–17-year olds were working overnights. Last week I had a story about an Iowa bill that would legalize this sort of work. I’m generally in support of people being able to take up economic opportunity of any sort, but nobody should be put in a situation where they are forced by circumstance to work in dangerous and exploitative jobs and these are the latest examples of a concerted effort to undo progressive reforms that curbed the worst excesses of capitalism in this country. Child labor is particularly concerning in that it also undermines the promise of an education that, at least in theory, would offer a pathway out of those circumstances.
  • A Mars Wrigley factory in Pennsylvania has been fined $14,500 by OSHA after two men fell into a vat used for mixing the ingredients for Dove bars. One wonders how active Willy Wonka has been in efforts to defund the agencies that regulate workplace safety.
  • The man who stole 200,000 Cadbury Creme Eggs in Britain is facing several years in jail. The headlines are more entertaining than the crime, though. He stole a truck, broke into the industrial facility, and drove off with the trailer before surrendering when he realized that he was being followed.

Album of the Week: Pixie and the Partygrass Boys, Snake Creek (2021)

Currently Reading: Adrienne Mayor, The Poison King; Mick Herron, Spook Street

Merlin, modeling “Friday night”
Libby, modeling “weekend life”

My Information Age: weekly varia 11/20/22

Posted on by Josh Nudell

One of the things that I have been thinking a lot about as Twitter lists toward the waterline is how I receive my information about the world. For better and for worse, tapping into Twitter feels like connecting into a larger hive mind and thus has become my primary source of information about any number of topics. What I see is absolutely filtered through a particular information bubble because I aggressively mute both topics and accounts that I believe are not worth my attention, but the accounts I follow do a much better job of curating information for me than I could ever do for myself. Sometimes this information came because I was able to lurk in conversations I would otherwise never have been in a position to hear, as David Perry recently wrote on CNN. Sometimes it was in long threads by a single author. Frequently, though, Twitter was a platform where people would link to and discuss stories from a whole range of outlets.

I have other sources of information, of course. Several places in my RSS feed bring me a healthy dose of information and commentary, including three (Keith Law, Bill Caraher, and Joy the Baker) that do weekly roundups up things that they read, for instance, and I am in several Discord groups that share links. Nor am I opposed to trekking into the wilds of the internet to hunt down my own stories. What Twitter offered was the convenience of having a diverse selection of information brought into one place. Finding stories of note from a range of outlets represents a significant time commitment that I rarely feel that I have these days, even when those stories are not found behind a paywall (I understand the need for paywalls as a business model, but I can only subscribe to so many things).

The question I have is not whether this is a habit I need to develop, but whether I should commit to doing some sort of weekly roundup of essays and articles that I discover in the process. In some ways this would mark a return to my roots, since, years ago I did regular roundups in this sort. The last of those posts went up nearly a decade ago, with links to five stories about topics that ranged from the diary of Franz Ferdinand to a profile of King Abdullah of Jordan to an Onion story that I found amusing. I stopped writing these posts for a few reasons, including that they didn’t get a lot of traction, which made writing them seem like a futile exercise, and that Twitter had come to fill that role in my media engagement. It doesn’t help, that I tend to skim this sort of post that other blogs put out.

And yet, thinking out loud here, I am warming to the idea of a weekly wrap of some sort with a short reflection, links to stories worth reading from the week and a short-form update on articles and books that I’ve read. Such a post would give me motivation to read more widely to curate my list and provide another low-stakes chance to talk about things that I have been reading even when I won’t be writing a full review. In fact, my primary hesitation is over whether writing this post will be something that gets lost in the wash of the other things I have going on.

But there is only one way to find out. For now I’m going to mimic Bill Caraher in calling these posts “weekly varia” that go up either Saturday or Sunday, but I also expect the format, content, and timing of these posts will evolve as I find my groove.

Without further ado, here are the varia for 11/20/2022.

  • Climate change has been a significant factor behind the malaise I have felt this year and, despite the general advice to PhDs in my position to apply for every opportunity, there are jobs I have opted not to apply to for environmental reasons. Reuters published a lengthy piece (with pictures) about how one of the cradles of civilization, Mesopotamia, is drying up. Climate change in this case is being compounded by water usage upriver.
  • From NPR, the FDA approved a safety study from Upside Foods for no-kill meat—that is, meat grown in vats and a feature of speculative fiction stories like Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake. I am skeptical that this innovation will save humanity, but it is absolutely necessary. This week an Environmental Science professor shared an infographic on Twitter about the distribution of mammalian biomass on earth. Wild animals represent 4%, compared to 34% for humans and 35% for cows.
  • The Guardian has a long read about infrastructure challenges of coastal West Africa, where a booming population is leading to a boom of urbanization. I find it hard to read stories like this and not think about climate change.
  • The New York Times has an article about the minister Rob Schenck, who alleges that the leaked draft of Justice Alito’s decision in the Dobbs decision from earlier this year is not the first time that the outcome of contentious cases were leaked to allow Christian groups to prepare their messaging campaign. He goes further, too, claiming that he had exploited access to influence justices during his time as an anti-abortion activist. The Times says that they found gaps in his story, but also a trail of corroborating evidence. For a branch of government whose authority rests almost entirely on the perceived legitimacy of precedent, the current conservative majority seems hellbent on burning the entire institution to the ground. The only question seems to be how much damage will they do before that process is complete?
  • NPR had a story about how culture war issues are creating a teacher shortage. The article correctly identifies the rise in harassment of teachers and points to the numerous bills that have been introduced to punish them for addressing current issues, but it does not identify any of the other issues behind the teacher shortage (e.g. pay, burnout). I also hate that there is a cursory attempt at making this a “both sides” issue when only one ideological position is misrepresenting what happens in a classroom and introducing bills that criminalize teaching.
  • Jonathan Malesic writes in the Atlantic ($) about how employers moving from “sick” days to “wellness” days is a good thing, but that “mental-health days” are no substitute for changing the structures of work that actually cause burnout. This piece is an addendum to his excellent book that I reviewed earlier this year. I have found mental-health days hard to justify, despite an encouraging email from my employer at the start of the semester. Taking a day simply puts me one day further behind on grading and cancelling class periods creates work of reorganizing schedules and coordinating with the students that takes nearly as much time as the cancellations save. Then again, I have also been dragging myself to the finish line. Suffice to say, I am quite persuaded by Malesic’s arguments.
  • The Dig podcast from Jacobin Magazine has been running a very long listen five-part series on the history of modern Iran with Eskandar Sadeghi and Golnar Nikpour. I am an intermittent listener to this podcast, but this series has been a can’t-miss for me these past few weeks.
  • Another podcast, Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra has one final episode to go. The series is a dive back into the archival footage of 1940 that explores the plots to overthrow the US government and establish a fascist regime in its place, and how sitting members of congress working with German agents were complicit in these conspiracies. These agents were particularly effective at finding the preexisting fault lines in this country and fanning the flames.
  • The French Olympic Committee has chosen the bonnet rouge for the Olympic mascot in 2024. The brand director offered some platitudes about the power of sport to change the world before saying “The mascot must embody the French spirit, which is something very fine to grasp. It’s an ideal, a kind of conviction that carries the values of our country, and which has been built up over time, over history.” Which political cartoonist will be first with a smiling Phryges operating a guillotine? Then again, Gritty seems to make it work.

Album of the week: Justin Townes Earle, The Saint of Lost Causes.

Currently reading: Fonda Lee, Jade City; Touraj Daryaee, Sasanian Persia: The Rise and Fall of an Empire.

Headline writers are at it again

Posted on by Josh Nudell

Jezebel has an article right now with a headline that asks “is office air conditioning a sexist conspiracy?” The answer to this question (despite the response I saw on Twitter) is clearly “no.” Nor does the article actually make any claim to there being a conspiracy, sexist or otherwise. It supports an article from the Washington Post that posits the status qui in office AC use is another tentacle of the patriarchy. In fact the article makes a perfectly reasonable argument, backed up by statistics, that the tendency by particularly male managers to keep the air conditioning at frigid (65!) temperatures during the summer a) disproportionately discomforts women and b) has a negative impact on the quality of work. The article uses an anecdote to point at male managers and while it might be appropriate to bleat “not all men” or “not all women,” I won’t fight the lack of nuance this point. I also have a problem with the misuse of air conditioning, and with heating systems during the winter, which tend to overcompensate and stifle the occupants (despite the parallel, this is also not a sexist conspiracy). The author is a bit glib for my tastes concerning how men dress during the summer, but the big problem is sweating up a storm outside on the way to work, anyway, rather than in the office, when 75 or so is not more than the office is heated to in the winter.

One might wonder where the insulation has gone and perhaps question the blind decisions of bureaucracy that also seem to miss the points about perceived temperature being relative, that one of the great virtues of AC is to, you know, condition the humidity away, and that heating and cooling are both things the company has to pay for. The author makes valid points and men, both as the larger proportion of managers and as the people who are less affected by the cooler temperatures, ought to bear the brunt of the blame for this situation. So is this status quo of the patriarchy? Is it stupid? “Yes,” to both questions. Is it a conspiracy? Well, that is something else.

If the headline claimed that office air conditioning is sexist, that is one thing, but it claimed a conspiracy, which is, by definition, is a secret plot concocted by a group of people working in tandem. As someone who has been compared to a polar bear and has embraced the resemblance on account of love for the cold (and for being bundled up in sweaters and the like), I would like to think I’d have been invited, even though I am never in a position to rule the thermostat. So a conspiracy is a hyperbolic. How about in the spirit of reconciliation, we all stop overcompensating for the weather at all times of year and reject the tyranny of the thermostat in all its forms. While we are at it, we can keep from getting carried away with the headlines.