The Compost #4

A Gen X-inspired mix of links and recommendations intended to inspire and distract

The title for this weekly or bi-weekly or frankly when I can get my act together compendium of links and recommendations comes from "Conscious Uncoupling”:

We strive to take all that is ugly and rotting, and turn it into compost to grow beautiful lives. —KWT

Resources

I’ve been dabbling in LinkedIn lately, and have been enjoying Joe Stubenrauch’s posts. He runs a website and coaching practice called “Let’s Escape Academia”. (I don’t have any experience with his coaching, though).

Reading

As I wrote in a newsletter a few weeks ago, right now is a terrible time to be an academic in red states. Tressie McMillan Cottom wrote about Florida scholars from a sociologist’s perspective, in a New York Times Op Ed.

A poignant post by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein on getting tenure, and the complexities of celebrating that milestone:

I debated whether to say I am lucky or fortunate or privileged because I am one of the increasingly small number of people to have a tenure-line position. I will simply say I managed to squirm through the slim opening through a combination of factors that mostly have little to do with my scientific curiosity . . . —CPW

I loved this piece by Zadie Smith about the movie Tar as seen through the lens of generational differences.

Watching/Listening

A few of the “beach-read” (beach-listen?) podcasts that have my ears right now are Big Sugar, The Retrievals (the latest from Serial), and The 13th Step.

More thought-provoking is Hurry Slowly (which I referred to in last week’s newsletter).

An extremely niche suggestion, but we have been playing Liz Phair radio on Spotify nonstop around here. I can almost imagine I never left the west coast. Or my 20s.

LOLs

More like LOLsob, these video shorts about the real experience of a woman in science, are the inspired performances of Prof Jean Fan, an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering!