Academic Mixtape 1

A distillation of cool stuff that's crossed my radar

Aug 2

“If you want to try to change the world, you will inevitably encounter the guy with the bucket of dark gray paint.”

Here’s the full text of the monologue from the Barbie movie. (Throughout the movie I felt more ambivalent than I anticipated, because so much of it is simply an entertaining version of Contemporary Feminism 101. But then I stepped out of the theater and immediately felt less weird I when I was able to stroll right into the Men’s bathroom, while the Women’s had a line of maybe 10 people out the door. I realized that we still need a good dose of Feminism 101. The choir needs to stay enthused with a good sermon, and those who don’t know the tune definitely to learn the lyrics. I heard Greta Gerwig interviewed on the radio about her conversation with Mattel executives as they were fleshing out the script and she needed their approval. Mattel were asking her, “Do you really think we need to go there and do it like this?” And she was like, “Yes, we really do.” Yup.)

From the former head of the National Science Foundation, “Women Scientists Have the Evidence About Sexism“

Who does the work to support STEM undergrads who are struggling with private challenges (concealable stigmatized identities)? Women. Another piece of solid work from the Research for Inclusive STEM Education Center at ASU.

This story about how Black land-grant universities haven’t been getting the funding that is due to them is quite something. Not a surprise, but still something we should know about.

It turns out that a lot more people have Alpha-gal syndrome than was previously known. That’s the allergy to mammalian flesh induced by the Lone Star tick. In all sincerity, I wonder if anybody’s done any calculations about how this might have affected CO2 emissions.

Michael Kraus was denied tenure and landed a new faculty position. Here’s him telling his story about how he got through this difficult time.

There was a guy who was performing well with the NFL with his sports career on track and then decided to quit to focus full time on his side job selling Pokemon cards. Because it was making him so much more money. I thought this was really interesting. (Also, in general I have really appreciated reading The Athletic. They are definitely have great ~~football~~ soccer journalism, at least, don’t know about the rest of the stuff. I they were recently bought by the NYT, which makes me worried about its future.)

“An equitable collaboration begins when everyone is at the table when the research question is first identified — not when some members are picked up later on.” This is from a good feature story in Nature about people who are doing genuine collaborations with people in the Global South instead of parachute science. Having spent most of my research career working out of a big field station in Costa Rica, and having formed a variety of relationships with people there but not the kinds of collaborations that I should have been, I think this is an essential read for folks doing I science.

Here is a comprehensive and well-researched story about the conflict over putting massive solar installations in the Mojave Desert, even if I disagree with where it lands. I think any reasonable person finds it absolutely maddening that the forces that are working to build these big solar farms in swaths of intact habitat are also doing everything they can to prevent and inhibit the implementation of rooftop solar in cities. Why is it that every house in Phoenix, Las Vegas and LA don’t yet have solar panels on them yet??!! But does that mean that solar farms in the desert are inherently a bad idea? Will we need both rooftop and solar farms? But regardless, plowing the desert over before even putting them on roofs of buildings is absolutely wild and simply the result of power companies working to maintain their monopoly on energy instead of letting the people who own houses and commercial buildings to generate their own energy from the sun. Meanwhile, at this moment, the York Fire is consuming a measurable fraction of all of the Joshua Trees on the planet. Living through this climate and biodiversity crisis is a lot of things, and at this moment, it’s just plain exhausting.

Who do people in the US trust on climate change? Their local TV meteorologists.

I think this characterization of “zip code-based affirmative action” as a problem much bigger than legacy admissions is spot on. Also the data-rich story in the New York Times about the uber-wealthy has some good interactive to play with.

We have had laws against affirmative action in California for quite a while, and so when someone like the President of Cal State San Marcos speaks up on this issue, they are more likely to have some wisdom to share about how to move forward.

Ann Patchett’s latest book dropped this week.

Fieldwork for all. (Because science needs everyone)

I thought this was a thought-provoking review of a new Kehinde Wiley show in San Francisco. Anyhow, some months ago I caught a show of a dozen or so of his paintings in a gallery in LA that sells his work, one piece was decidedly entomological, and I liked his bugs. See details in the photos below.

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