John Bohannan at Science Magazine has done an undercover sting of open-access scientific journals. Open access being the idea that journals should be free for any scientist to read, rich or poor. The current challenge with it is that authors must often pay to have their work published. Scientific journals…
The reason that I rarely write good blog posts is that it takes me so long. I dump hasty thoughts and stories into a file, play with them and connect them to other ideas, and work them over until they’re ready. Reframing sentences. Erasing this one, and turning that….
Waiting anxiously for my friend Lianna* to come over the other evening, I decided to put on the water for varenniki dumplings. She and several friends showed up a few minutes later, and we sat down at the kitchen table to chop vegetables from the market: large grime-covered carrots…
To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous grad school, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them? To quit: to sleep Once more; and by to…
I’ve seen more and more posts and videos on this of late, along with the student-loan-fueled “should you go to undergrad?” debate. (Coming up next: should you go to kindergarten? Wouldn’t you make more money as a child laborer?) At any rate, in my grad program, we’ve seen enrollment spike as funding…
…They don’t even know that they’re a foreign country. ~~~~~ I met with an academic award committee today to discuss my application to study religious change and conversion in Central Asia. I’d like to go be with people, to move slowly, share life, and learn what matters to them….
In college, I remember walking through the student union with my friend Stacy, checking our mailboxes then heading to the campus cafe, where we sat in easy chairs by the picture windows, looking at the gray November rain outside. “But I don’t see evidence… all I see is rain….
My classmate Katie* comes from a working-class, rural background. She works three jobs plus goes to school; she has a busy family, disabled mother, and absent father. And recently, I overheard her talking on the phone: “I want to be a college professor … I don’t want to spend…
We’ve been back in the province center for almost a week now. We’ll probably be staying here for another week, as Professor Rose and Jamie leave Mongolia next week… and Sarah leaves for Kazakhstan at the same time. Life in Ulgii has fallen into a regular pattern – so that’s what I…
This evening in Houston, Catharina introduced me to a Smithsonian TV series called Light of the Mind, in which anthropologist Wade Davis speaks with Nepalese monks. One of his guests, a French microbiologist turned Buddhist monk, says that western science has made “a major contribution to minor needs,” such as…