Hol­i­days should as much as prac­ti­ca­ble not be allowed, for they allow the worker the leisure it takes to con­sider their lot in life.

danah boyd con­sid­ers the state of mind, of soul, of worka­holic aca­d­e­mics. I am put in mind of five young fac­ulty mem­bers in our depart­ment, one of whom is tenured. In the fir­ma­ment of instruc­tors, they teach the lion’s share of intro­duc­tory classes. Is this because they’re new, and shit runs down­hill? Is it because they’re a new gen­er­a­tion of enthu­si­as­tic and dri­ven ped­a­gogues, who rel­ish the thought of get­ting that one last bit of opti­miza­tion the­ory into the heads of the young prospec­tive protégés?

I have not had one sin­gle con­ver­sa­tion with any of these five young folks in which time-​​pressure didn’t fea­ture — typ­i­cally as an explicit topic. This life of the mind seems more like life in a small, iso­lated village.

Read more about the Graph­ing Cal­cu­la­tor, Texas Instru­ments, and how together they’re mak­ing Amer­i­can stu­dents inept illit­er­ate fools.

For money.

Penn Jillette’s “This I Believe” spot for NPR’s Morn­ing Edi­tion: There Is No God:

Believ­ing there’s no God stops me from being solip­sis­tic. I can read ideas from all dif­fer­ent peo­ple from all dif­fer­ent cul­tures. With­out God, we can agree on real­ity, and I can keep learn­ing where I’m wrong. We can all keep adjust­ing, so we can really com­mu­ni­cate. I don’t travel in cir­cles where peo­ple say, “I have faith, I believe this in my heart and noth­ing you can say or do can shake my faith.” That’s just a long-​​winded reli­gious way to say, “shut up,” or another two words that the FCC likes less. But all obscen­ity is less insult­ing than, “How I was brought up and my imag­i­nary friend means more to me than any­thing you can ever say or do.” So, believ­ing there is no God lets me be proven wrong and that’s always fun. It means I’m learn­ing something.

Read the whole thing, and pre­serve it. It’s the kind of words we need more of, these days.

An arti­cle at Quid nomen illius? enti­tled “Bree-​​yark!”:

A few months ago, I sug­gested that role-​​playing games con­tributed to the glut of grad stu­dents who aspire to be pro­fes­sors. I still think there’s some truth to that. I know that I first encoun­tered abbre­vi­a­tions such as “q.v.” and terms like “respec­tively” in the pages of the Dun­geon Master’s Guide long before I ever saw them in college-​​level books, and my inter­est in the Mid­dle Ages, still going strong, began with those baf­fling price lists of weapons and armor in the Player’s Hand­book.