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Our house was built in 1923 by a guy named Charlie Washburn. I’m not sure what year Charlie died, but the deed records show his wife was still living here when the house was finally sold to its second owner in the early 1980s. I do know a little about Charlie for three reasons: (1)…

The other day, the mate started telling me something he clearly thought was really funny: apparently a friend of ours had mentioned over poker that his wife had said to him, presumably in a dreamy voice, “Do you think the future Princess Kate thinks about becoming Queen?” I didn’t laugh. Instead, I admitted to the…

First, a quick explanation of the image you see here: I took that photo of the side of a train car at the National Railroad Museum in Green Bay, Wisconsin, this past summer, when I was there with the mate and the kid. The “Gratitude Train”was a train full of gifts sent by the people of France to…

While I was down in New Orleans last week at the American Anthropological Association meeting, hanging out with some cool scientists, rumors were flying every which way that the AAA leadership was attempting to create a new “long term goal” statement that would actively purge references to science from the AAA’s stated mission. Supposedly the…

I’m on a plane headed down to New Orleans, to attend a roundtable discussion at the American Anthropological Association on science and advocacy. I should be doing some of the various short essay work I owe, but Pixie doesn’t feel like it. She feels like doing some work at this space, and I’ve learned not…

The New York Times’ recent report on professors’ and university administrators’ distress over widespread plagiarism among undergraduates reminded me how this coming year, again, I will need to spend more time reminding my graduate students what counts as plagiarism and how to quote and document correctly. (Pet peeve: citations included within the quotation marks. More on that…

So here are a few journals I’ve lately been fantasizing about founding: The Journal of Clarity in the Humanities: This journal would accept original articles as well as translations from other works written in putative English. As a funding mechanism, the journal will offer a pay-per-minute telephone translation service for students attempting to wade through…

The prenatal dex project (campaign? offensive?) has turned out to be like having a child: I can’t really remember what life was like before it. Did I have endless amounts of free time before it all started a little over a month ago? Because now it seems to take up hours and hours each day. And hours and…

Tomorrow morning I gotta get back to writing the book—I gotta write the Bailey chapter—and I can’t if I don’t get this out first. But I feel so inarticulate, so in the middle of history, so much stuck before the story becomes clear. Bear with me in my muddled state, please. Yesterday afternoon, I sat…

Here’s the Science news report on my 2009 AAA session.