Tag: Off Topic

  • On Removing Good Feeds From RSS

    Warning: not about anything particularly Transpacific. For some weeks, I found blogging overwhelming. For someone who gets significant income writing a blog affiliated with a major tech news site and committed to developing this site, this is a disconcerting phenomenon. So I decided to take drastic measures. Google Reader had grown unmanageable. At somewhere around…

  • Cross-Disciplinary Slumming

    Fabio Rojas has a post at orgtheory confirming what I’ve always suspected about academic stardom: apply one discipline’s vocabulary to another discipline, and you look original. Rojas, an Indiana University sociologist, approves only if the new language also comes with new ideas and truly adds to the body of knowledge. Sounds right to me.

  • Off-topic: indexed. youtubed. gay'd.

    For a long time the RSS feed of indexed, with its index card distillations of popular sentiment, has been a favorite of mine. Today I happened to notice a link to this video on the indexed website. It’s an exceedingly complicated yet digestible narrative of many of indexed author Jessica Hagy’s entries. I just recently…

  • My Interview With Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer

    I and my colleague Ben Adler interviewed Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer for CampusProgress.org a few weeks ago, and it went up last night. Ben asked him about his dress code after he famously showed up in D.C. with a bolo tie. After telling us about the jeans he was wearing at the office, I told…

  • Off Topic: An Age of Empiricism? Let's See Some Numbers.

    This is the first of what promises to be many short essays on topics not related to the transpacific triangle. I’ll cut them off after their introductions to spare uninterested readers the details. John O. McGinnis, a law professor at Northwestern (whom I’ve never met), writes over the summer in Policy Review that “we are…