Interesting Things I've Read (or Watched) /
Some Interesting Things I’ve Read Lately, Episode 1
Here’s a look at some of the articles and books I’ve been reading lately, or at least, the ones that stuck out to me. Originally, I wanted to do this as a weekly series, inspired by Cory Doctorow’s link posts where he comments on various articles he’s read - but I don’t have that kind of time. Also, I’m really not that great at remembering the various articles I’ve stumbled through online, so you’re going to get these when you get them.
Eric Alperin and Deborah Stoll, Unvarnished: A Gimlet-eyed Look at Life Behind the Bar
This book is about Eric Alperin’s life as a bartender and bar owner, and for the most part it talks about the experience of opening a bar called The Varnish in Los Angeles. I thought it was an interesting peek into a world I don’t know much about. My main gripes with the book, however, is how many times the authors break in the middle of a chapter and start talking about how to make drinks, or include drink recipes in the book. I understand that he’s a bartender, he wants to share the drink recipes, and he probably felt like they were relevant at those points in the books, but it really pulled me out of the larger story, and so I mostly skipped those sections. Those should have been an appendix or something; I signed up for a memoir, not for a recipe collection.
I don’t really drink much or go to bars, so that’s all I have to say about this one. Do read it, it’s fun.
Cal Newport, Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout
This is a pretty short book on how the current (very fast!!!) pace of knowledge work is unsustainable and it’s hard to produce your best work when you’re constantly hovering a hair under the limits of what you can handle in terms of workload. Tl;dr: working at 100% efficiency all the time creates stress and doesn’t actually mean you finish more or produce good work. He goes through some case studies of people who took their time to really develop their craft, or improve their business, then offers some practical suggestions for trying to reclaim time and set boundaries in an office job. Really, the book is about giving yourself permission to try not to accomplish everything at breakneck speed. It also kind of mourns the fact that we don’t really get to have long luxurious vacations to think about our work.
I actually found this to be a little bit vindicating to read. My personal projects take a while, not because I work on them for long periods of time, but because of how long they sit in various stages of completion. Yes, some of the reasons for this are procrastination or lack of time. But sometimes, part of it really is that I’m not ready to push forward on that idea yet. I think the added time to think about my projects has often resulted in a more coherent and mature perspective, which of course elevates the work. It’s hard to create something that cuts deep in a short amount of time. The best poem I’ve ever written took over a year to draft.
After reading this book, I went to Cal Newport’s website and discovered that he is also a computer scientist - in fact, he’s a tenured professor who regularly publishes academic papers. I was mildly surprised by this because despite the fact that he is very clear about this in all of his bios and on his website, people who read Newport are overwhelmingly not computer scientists, his books are for a general audience, and so in the public conversation about Newport we mostly think of him as a self-help author.
In hindsight, I really should have known, because I have vague flashbacks of reading a book where he kept talking about CS professors and referenced one who no longer responds to emails, because they’re a waste of time. Now, I understand that. However, as a student who interacts with faculty who have adopted such a policy, it’s deeply frustrating.
Anyway, I was curious about his research, so I went to look at his papers. His area is networking. (Side note: You might think, networking, as in, cables and setting up computers together? But this year, I was shocked to learn that networking, in the academic context, is a very theoretical area of CS research that essentially boils down to being math.) It was fun to see that he is upholding the “tradition” (who knows if they do this on purpose) of CS papers with very compelling names (for example, “How to Discreetly Spread a Rumor in a Crowd”) that bury you in incomprehensible math once you leave the first page. I’m not sure if computer scientists are better or worse than mathematicians, who like to also make their titles completely unreadable. Generally speaking, however, I feel like CS papers are much more readable than math papers. I wonder why this is.
Karen Kelsky, The Professor Is In: The Essential Guide to Turning Your Ph.D into a Job
What is says on the tin! I learned a lot about academia and the academic job market. I did not like a lot of what I learned about academia and the academic job market, but you know what, sometimes being cynical is how you avoid getting burned. At least it gives me some language and context to understand what’s going on if I decide to get a Ph.D.
Erin Bertram, “The Sublimated Grief of the Left Behind”.
This piece is part of a genre called “quit-lit”, which is where academics talk about why they are leaving academia and their feelings around it. This article is Erin Bartram’s farewell to her historian colleagues after her third failed attempt to land a tenure track position. Except it became more than a farewell to colleagues - it went viral on Twitter, and started a conversation amongst historians and other researchers in the humanities about the harsh realities of giving your entire being (it feels like) to academia for years and feeling like you get nothing in return.
What struck me about this was how beautifully it was written, and how emotional it was. Of course she can write - these days it feels to me like academics really spend a good chunk of their time writing, especially those in the humanities. But a lot of them write in a style that screams of their academic training, and I don’t know, this article felt human.
She wrote a series of responses to the comments she got, which added some additional context and nuance (and departed a bit from the emotional side of things). I also read many of the responses others wrote to her piece. They offered some more perspectives on the idea of quitting academia and what others thought of Bartram’s decision to quit doing research (why do humanities people insist on calling it “scholarship”?) entirely.
As a side note, I’ve spent a good part of this summer working on an undergraduate research project, and so I’ve spent a fair chunk of time thinking and learning about what it means to be an academic. Maybe I’m being cynical here, but based on what I am reading and seeing and some of the people I have talked to, aiming to become a tenured professor seems like a very ill-advised career choice, unless you are brilliant and talented and driven and lucky and ambitious and driven in ways that I suspect I am not. Also, the academic job market is a nightmare, especially in the humanities, and publishing culture strikes me as somewhat strange.
I think I like research, and I don’t know how I feel about it. I’ve always been a little bit artist, or maybe even a lot artist, even if I don’t really feel worthy of the title, and working on a research project feels a lot to me like working on a creative project in every way that matters. (Well, minus the fact that I don’t know much and am constantly confused and also am working with a supervisor, and if things go well I might help advance “science” in ways that are largely invisible to most people.) The problem is that I have a lot of interests, and while I’m starting to feel the pull of specialization a little bit, I am terrified that I will end up buried so deep in the weeds of my own discipline that I’ll have trouble relating normally to anything outside of it. I like being interdisciplinary. I’m scared of losing that in the process of learning to be a researcher, especially as a grad student.
A few years ago, I used to tell people that I didn’t think I was creative enough to be a scientist, and then I stumbled out of engineering back into “science” anyway. One of my mentors keeps telling me that you don’t need to be brilliant or innovative to get a PhD, and I believe him. However, I feel like it helps. I’ve been fortunate enough to meet a few people who are so brilliant it hurts, and to my surprise, they have mostly been very nice people who are also humans with interests. (Usually, the people who act like they’re brilliant are actually much less so.) However, it is also fascinating to observe how their brains work; it’s like they’re wired differently.
Obviously, most people aren’t so brilliant it hurts, and I’m sure there are multiple ways to be a scientist. But can I do it?
I don’t know, the jury is still out on that one.