Gummint historian and Versatile PhD macher Alexandra Lord wrote a lovely first person column for the Chronicle of Higher Education protesting the part of academic culture that encourages young scholars to sacrifice everything they value in their whole lives for one small part of their lives: scholarship.
You know, if you quit academia, it’s because you didn’t love it enough.
Don’t bother clicking on the rest of this post if you don’t care about what it’s like to be and then not be an academic.
Real TV. Really. Not PBS or documentaries about melting iceburgs. Dumb sitcoms. Dramedies. Two-camera jokeathons. I love them.
Rather than focusing on all the pain and absurdity of the past two days’ news, I’m throwing myself eyeball-deep into the waters of new TV.
I’m talking Parenthood. I’m talking The New Normal. I’m talking The Mindy Project. What else? Yeah, I think I watched Ben and Kate. I wish I hadn’t. I spent that 25 minutes checking my phone.
I don’t get invited to my exes’ weddings but if I did I still might not wear that dress.
In one of my younger moments of trivial triumph, I told a friend that I was continually amazed that the Velvet Underground made music at the same time as the Beatles.
She did not believe me.
But I was right. Both about the coincidence of the two discographies, and about the unbelievability that “Heroin” came out the same year as “When I’m Sixty Four”.
Don’t you want to take the Velvet Underground home and feed them soup?
People get their decades confused.
This is one way that punk is a 60s legacy. And one way that Dana Spiotta’s Stone Arabia, in part about punks-all-growned-up, is a novel that deals with the legacy of the 60s, though a bit less directly than her Eat the Document.
Some JP Morgan economists are saying that the iPhone 5 will ensure Obama’s election.
Not really. They are saying that the iPhone 5 will stop the rise of the oceans and heal the planet.
In fact, they calculated that the iPhone 5 could add a whopping 0.5 percentage points to our 4th quarter GDP.
Watch Party!
You know, when like-minded citizens gather at a lovely host’s house and nibble little baked cheesebuttons and trade watches.
So here’s the thing: from the watch party, Obama knocked the moon off its orbit.
My overall sense of Clinton’s speech was that every time the crowd roared for Obama, Clinton wanted them to be roaring for him.
Don’t worry, Bill. They were roaring for you both.
Thinker For Hire 