By Heather M. Whitney. As unideal as eating lunch at your keyboard is, it happens. Course and meeting schedules can be unforgiving. Before the semester starts, it can be a good idea to stock your office with food that makes in-office lunch take less thought. This semester, I’ll be lucky to have fifteen minutes for lunch most days, so I have been investigating what to get. With the help of the always spot-on Alissa Wilkinson (whose work you should check out, including her new project The Glass List) I have compiled some options from Amazon — ideal since they can be delivered straight to my office. More...

By Rob Goodman. Nineteen days after the world failed to end, blood stopped flowing to the brain of Harold Camping, prophet of doom. Had he felt his stroke coming as he confidently forecast apocalypse? Maybe not; maybe he had no more foresight into his own demise than the demise of the world. Or maybe he had simply confused the two—after all, he was approaching his 90th birthday, and his own mortality couldn't have seemed far off when, on national billboards and his own radio network, he set a date (May 21, 2011) for the end of days. For some, it is a short mental step from "my end is imminent" to "the end of everything is imminent." Call it apocalyptic narcissism.
We flatter ourselves when we imagine a world incapable of lasting without us in it—a world that, having ceased to exist, cannot forget us, discard us, or pave over our graves. Even if the earth no longer sits at the center of creation, we can persuade ourselves that our life spans sit at the center of time, that our age and no other is history's fulcrum. More...

When state Sen. John Arthur Smith speaks, people listen — and that includes the rest of the Legislature and Gov. Susana Martinez. A Democrat from Deming, Smith is a respected voice on fiscal matters and serves as vice chairman of the Senate Finance Committee.
That he has taken the trouble to write to Gov. Martinez about concerns with the financial state of Northern New Mexico College should alert its supporters. That would include students, faculty and staff, not to mention the people of Española and greater Rio Arriba County. More...

I am feeling particularly down about my science these days, owing to a combination of professional events mixed with too little sleep and probably too much salt (darn you, Cheetos and beef jerky). So I am cranky and thinking nobody cares about any of this and it's been ages since I heard anything at a conference that makes me go "Wow! I wish I had thought of that." It's crushing boredom and disillusionment all around. But it's not like this blog has ever been all rainbows and unicorns, so no surprises there.
Here's an off-the-top-of-my-curmudgeony-head list of things that suck about being a professor as well as those I still realize are great despite my advanced grumpiness.
The sucky:
1) It is hard constantly facing criticism and rejection. Even acceptances don't come without criticism and a ton or work. Sure, we are all fighting the good fight for the accuracy of science, so sloppy or incomplete work should not get a pass, but, after what I have seen as an author, reviewer, and associate editor in the past month, I am finding it really, really hard not to start getting disillusioned by the peer review. There are a lot of douchebags with too much ego and too much time on their hands, ranging from obnoxiously nitpicky to downright malicious. More...

By Christopher Tucker. Some of you may have walked past those bulletin boards covered in red and white notices in search of participants to ingest this, or attach themselves to that. Perhaps you’ve gone so far as to take one of the tear-off tabs home with you. It always comes down to one question: “Can it really be that bad?”
Medical research for academic studies has so many variations and degrees of invasiveness. All of it comes down to one thing: a way to make money that requires no previous skills, education, or experience.
I’ve found myself scanning those flyers and considering the possibilities. Sometime before the winter of 2012, I decided science could have its way with me. I found out that it wasn’t free money, but it wasn’t the worst thing I’ve ever been through, either. Presented now are my experiences and reflections. Hopefully, this can help guide you in the future, when you’re standing in front of those bulletin boards wondering, “What if I did this?” More...

By Matt Reed. Textbook costs have been a major issue for decades. I remember being shocked at the cost of books when I was a student, back when they were printed on papyrus and delivered by dinosaurs. Students then sometimes had the option of trying to find used books, but that was pretty much it. In the age of electronic resources, I’ve become a booster of Open Educational Resources. I think we’re at or near the inflection point where it becomes possible for students to get through a majority of classes without actually buying books, assuming the faculty are on board. Free options have become markedly better over the last few years, and I know many professors are concerned about book costs for their students, so I’m optimistic that we’ll get there. From a student perspective, money saved on books is the equivalent of a tuition cut. Read more...

By Matt Reed. As a kid, late August carried the dread and melancholy of knowing that summer vacation was nearly over.  I’m seeing some of that now with The Boy and The Girl. As a teenager, late August carried a certain relief and excitement. The dreary summer job was ending, and I could get back to school to see my friends. The same held true in college.  In grad school, late August suggested that I could finally get away from the crummy summer jobs that I felt like I should have already aged out of, and get back to the business at hand. At DeVry, late August didn’t mean anything at all. The “summer” trimester ran from July through October. Read more...

By G. Rendell. Right up front . . . no, I'm not done wrestling with the question of how to teach sustainability to 21st century students.  Rather, I've gotten to the point where my initial back-of-an-envelope analysis of my answer to that question is starting to show its flaws. I need to take a step back, look again at the whole picture, rethink what the pieces are and how they fit together. The bits that I've already posted are in no danger -- the relative clarity which induced me to address them early on makes that fair to say.  But the bits that remain don't separate quite as cleanly from one another as I'd originally thought, which means that I probably haven't picked the right scheme for teasing them apart. More, a bit later. Read more...

By Laura Wright. In May, I gave a reading from my contribution to Defiant Daughters: 21 Women on Art, Activism, Animals, and The Sexual Politics of Meat, a book edited by Kara Davis and Wendy Lee. The text pays homage to Carol J. Adams’s foundational ecofeminist animal studies work The Sexual Politics of Meat,first published in 1990 and in print and much-discussed by scholars ever since. I read my entry at a local bookstore packed to the rafters with friends and strangers alike, all of whom hung on my every word. At the end of the reading, people hugged me. They bought the book and asked me to sign it. In my professional life, I have never given such a reading and, as a result, I have never experienced anything that felt quite as rewarding as what I experienced that evening. Read more...