Not of General Interest

It's a little unnerving to realize that, as much as I believe that I've backed everything up in this Year of Hard Drive Crashes (p.s...

When you're taking notes on a critical article and it's really good, do you find yourself taking so many notes and writing down so ...

We teach critical thinking skills for a lot of reasons, but my zeal-o-meter for teaching these gets ramped WAY up by seeing hucksters and sn...

Inside Higher Ed has an interesting article encouraging librarians to think like gamers: “The librarian as information priest is as dead as...

This link is a little belated, but Horace has a great compendium of advice for grad students at To Delight and To Instruct . And while you...

Reviewing and evaluating is part of our job; if you think about it, it's most of our job as professors. We're paid for it, in one wa...

Does everyone put off all kinds of tasks (shopping for clothes, painting, various household things like buying a doormat) until summer, or ...

Part of the peri-writing process described below really doesn't have much to do with writing at all (like ordering books that I might ne...

Dr. Crazy has a post up about wanting the summer fun to start. If you're an academic, it never can because--surprise!--there's alwa...

We should be happy about The Sopranos . I don't mean just The Sopranos , although that's been the focus of a media frenzy for the pa...

This is the last week of the online class. What I've mostly been doing is grading the things the students have sent me and keeping the d...

Dr. Crazy's recent and much-admired post on grad school has Horace at To Delight and To Instruct collecting such posts. Since she an...

If you have time to waste, or if you're grading, check out Making Light's comments section , in which the commenters render great wo...

Thomas Hart Benton at the Chronicle writes about why he's moved from his nice home office (with an Aeron chair! I've never even see...

From the New York Times : “The longer you work, the less efficient you are,” said Bob Kustka, the founder of Fusion Factor, a productivity a...

Horace at To Delight and To Instruct is collecting posts on grad school advice; let him know if you have some.

In Diary of a Mad Housewife , the heroine reads Proust when she is sick. I had a colleague once who said that she didn't mind being sick...

The conference was good: lots of good panels, lots of necessary meetings, and pleasant encounters with colleagues from other institutions. ...

Brief conference update: I've noticed that a lot of my students don't wear watches (they use iPods or cellphones to check the time) ...

Conferences are the broccoli of travel. Want proof? Although I will dutifully eat broccoli without much enthusiasm for it, some madness c...