Archive for the ‘Work’ category

Demo Boot Camp is Wow!

If you feel your physique needs a bit of help, or you want to lose a few pounds quickly, may I recommend Demo Boot Camp? Demo Boot Camp is fun! Demo Boot Camp is happening! It’s simple, really; just find a house that needs a lot of work and start ripping shit up. Watch while […]

Work

I’ve wanted to write a post about work for quite a while but haven’t been able to work it out because of work. So I’m going to justify it now on the grounds that, ultimately, blogging is work, a point I’ll return to in conclusion. To recap, then: Although I have too much work to […]

Weekend recs

How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, by Mohsin Hamid (2013) You start reading a novel you know nothing about. It’s written in the second person, which is rarely done and even more rarely done well. But as you read the story of a young man in an unnamed Asian city, you are first […]

Year-end mix: Too much of a good thing edition

Part 1: Cookies Here in the midwest, December rolls around and you start getting invited to Christmas cookie parties. Everyone makes their favorite recipe. Much hilarity ensues, with (literally) too many cooks in the kitchen and the oven going full-blast for hours. The smell of butter and sugar permeates your clothes. You leave your neighbor’s […]

Teaching Warhol

Here’s the draft syllabus for a seminar I’m teaching next semester. Feedback very welcome. Age of Warhol This course is a revision of one I’ve taught to undergrads and grads the last few summers — The Downtown Scene, 1960-80 — stripping out almost everything but Warhol and expanding the amount of time I was able […]

Post-hurricane jet lag reading list blues

It’s 4:30 am in New York, where I’m spending three nights before heading to Belgium for a conference later this week. New York’s not exactly on the way from Adu Dhabi to Antwerp, I know, but I have a long list of things that need tending to here and had planned for the last couple […]

Real life

Hey y’all! I’m not dead! I was moving. Now I am moved. A couple of days ago I posted on FB, as many did, in reaction to this super-dumb op-ed about how no one uses algebra in “real life” and everyone is terrible at it, so we should stop requiring algebra and above of college […]

Muffin

Cleaning out my desk today for an office move I discovered a copy of an essay I received from a student a couple years ago. I asked the class to write about a person who had had a big influence on them. I reproduce the essay here as is, with only the real names redacted. […]

What can a kid do?

I’ve been teaching some texts relevant to this New Yorker article and have been having mixed feelings about the issues it raises. It’s not long, but if you want the quickie version, Kolbert discusses an anthropologist’s comparison between this kid in the Peruvian Amazon: A member of another family, Yanira, asked if she could come […]

Snobbing on…

I missed my post two weeks ago. I apologize. It’s been hard for me to keep track of what’s going on. I’m ending a single year in a new place I’ve never been before, and heading off to another single year in another place I’ve never been before. My friends here have almost exclusively been […]