Evaluate My Work, Not My Body Art

Ambika Kamath

When I was an undergrad, one of my reasons for wanting to continue in academia was my aversion to Western formal clothing. If I became a Ph.D. student and then a professor, I thought, I would hardly ever need to wear suits or dress shirts, and such a life appealed to me. I had seen academics of all stripes dress in all sorts of ways, and I naively believed that this signalled something very progressive about academia’s stance towards appearance: wear what you want, because you’ll be evaluated based upon your ideas and work, not how you choose to present yourself.

But a recent article in a column called Ask Alice (published on the website of Science, one of the most high profile scientific journals out there) confirms my naivete. In this piece, an anonymous academic who finds themselves in a “conservative place” for their postdoc, asks Dr. Alice Huang, “Am I crazy…

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Confirmed: SC Implementing Retain to Impede

dr. p.l. (paul) thomas

Residents of South Carolina have yet more evidence of the state’s inept history with education reform: The rush to model SC’s reading legislation on Florida’s failed policies has begun to fulfill my warning that Read to Succeed is better labeled Retain to Impede.

Nathaniel Clary, reporting for The Greenville News, has detailed, Read to Succeed fails its 1st test. What are the failures?

Clary ticks off the list:

And while communication lapses, missing training programs and a flubbed statewide test marked the first few months of the statewide Read to Succeed program championed by Gov. Nikki Haley last year, the threat still looms that third-graders could be held back starting in the 2017-2018 school year if they don’t measure up to the state’s reading standards.

These first failures include flawed implementation on top of the essential failures of replicating the discredited Florida model as well as…

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My Mangled Glass Menagerie

Technology

I Allow Myself Poetry

Paper Pencil Life

I’ve said this before, but poetry is probably the largest influence on my comics.  What I feel and experience in reading my favorite poems is what I hope to express in comics.  The poet Dorothea Grossman is up there for me in terms of guiding this idea.  I so wish I had VOLUMES of her work instead of the slim selected poems that was published shortly after her death.  The poem that I mention in the comic is called “I Allow Myself” and you can find it here along with many others and a couple of podcasts that feature her work.  I also want to note that I misquoted her poem in the comic.  It should read: ” I allow/ myself the luxury of breakfast/ (I am no nun, for Christ’s sake.)”

I am a proud subscriber of Poetry Magazine and still an avid listener of the podcasts.  I *still* have…

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Jonker Walk Night Market

The Pictureteller | Southeast Asia 2014/2015

In this last post about Malacca we will be focusing on Jonker Street, or Jonker Walk as it is called. It is the centre street of the historical Chinatown, which is part of the Malacca world heritage site. The street was once famous for its many antique shops, but nowadays these shops are in numbers surpassed by clothing shops, crafts shops and restaurants. During the weekends there is a night market, and also some entertainment on a stage located where Jonker Street and Tukang Emas Street converge. The night market is really busy and there is a lot going on, but food-wise it is a bit limited since there are a lot of stalls selling plastic toys and TV-shop gadgets. The food on offering is mostly different types of snacks, which will perfectly suffice for someone on a food quest. These nights the proper food deals goes down in the…

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‘I Would Prefer Not To’: The Origins of the White Collar Worker

Longreads

Nikil Saval | Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace | Doubleday | April 2014 | 31 minutes (8,529 words)

Below is an excerpt from the book Cubed, by Nikil Saval, as recommended by Longreads contributor Dana Snitzky.

* * *

I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils…

—Theodore Roethke, “Dolor”

The torn coat sleeve to the table. The steel pen to the ink. Write! Write! Be it truth or fable. Words! Words! Clerks never think.

—Benjamin Browne Foster, Down East Diary (1849)

They labored in poorly lit, smoky single rooms, attached to merchants and lawyers, to insurance concerns and banks. They had sharp penmanship and bad eyes, extravagant clothes but shrunken, unused bodies, backs cramped from poor posture, fingers callused by constant writing. When they were not thin, angular, and sallow, they were ruddy and soft; their paunches sagged onto their thighs.

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The Two-Sentence View of History

An Indigenous History of North America

I’ve been reading a lot of accounts recently that argue indigenous people asserted much more control over many areas of the continent into the 19th century than modern people usually assume (check out The Native Ground by Kathleen DuVal or An Infinity of Nations by Michael Witgen, not to mention Hamalainen’s Comanche Empire) and I got to thinking about the response my post about the teaching of Native history received.

One of the most common responses was along the lines of “Well, Native Americans didn’t contribute much to history anyway, they didn’t do much important, it’s sad but they were basically just wiped away by Europeans.” There is an incredible amount of hindsight bias in that kind of thinking. When you are living in a society in a time where Native people have been very carefully thrust out of view, it is easy to see the dominance of European-descendants as an inevitable…

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There is crying in science. That’s okay.

Gangaur Ghat – Udaipur

Kevin Standage

Gangaur Ghat is located at the heart of the city of Udaipur and is very easy to find. Upon leaving the City Palace via the north gate, walk down until you reach the flight of stairs on your left for Jagdish Temple. At the road junction, turn left and head down past all the souvenir shops until you eventually reach the waters edge.

This was a place I kept returning to during my stay in Udaipur, there was always something happening but in a quiet and peaceful way. There are a few cafes close by as well if you want to linger for even longer.

The name-sake Ghangaur festival is celebrated in a grand manner every year in Rajasthan. Gangaur signifies Lord Shiva and Parvati together. It’s believed that Parvati returned to her parental home during Gangaur, to bless her friends with marital bliss. On the last day, Parvati…

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