Tag: Academia

After his high school friend drowns, a young academic’s mind leads him down a dark path of conspiratorial explanations.

Grieving after giving up on academic life.

Andrew Kay found himself on the dating scene and the academic job market at the time time, living life as one long interview.

When the people teaching Milton and Morrison subsist on leftover chips.

Why would a tenure-track professor find himself selling his plasma to make rent? A story about debt in the academic world.

In New Republic, Daniel Estrin writes about how a former insurance adjuster claims to have solved the 118-year-old cryptographic mystery of the hidden message in Edward Elgar’s infamous Enigma Variations.

When does fact become fiction? William Deresiewicz on essays, embellishment, and the slippery slope of “truthiness.”

Indeed, the famous eclecticism of “The Waste Land,” which incorporates quotations from multiple languages and literatures, can be seen as a tribute to the educational philosophy that governed Harvard during Eliot’s time there… Yet as Crawford shows in the impressively researched Young Eliot, the “melange of topics” that Eliot explored in college “mightily enriched his poetry.” […]

Underlying the entire conversation was a tension between the two purposes of history, the philosophical or scientific, and the civic. The philosophical or scientific perspective considers the pursuit of historical truth to be of highest value. Like any organized scientific activity, historical research is corrupted when oriented to immediate public ends. Its public value ultimately […]

The Web dwells in a never-ending present. It is—elementally—ethereal, ephemeral, unstable, and unreliable. Sometimes when you try to visit a Web page what you see is an error message: “Page Not Found.” This is known as “link rot,” and it’s a drag, but it’s better than the alternative. More often, you see an updated Web […]

Charitably, we can see the practice of reviewing one’s own works as a kind of knowing critique of the insider trading that can occur among authors and reviewers. Why bother to solicit reviews for your books when you can write them yourself? There may, however, be something more poignant here. Even for holders of tenured […]