Journeyman again
Preface (1999) No one has born the weight of the decade's terrible academic job market more than young Ph.D.s. Caught between a culture that insists they cannot leave
Corporate authorship
i I love my job, for a whoe bunch of different reasons: for example, it exists. (Piece of dark humor that summarizes a moment: What's the hot new
Visit to the Salk Institute
During my recent trip to San Diego, I took a little time on my last afternoon to go to the world-famous Salk Institute.
In the main courtyard
As a graduate student, I wrote a couple articles on laboratory design and the history of science, including one on the Richards Medical Research Building, a Penn biomedical laboratory designed by Louis Kahn (a Penn alum and Philadelphia native son). Kahn later designed the Salk; and years later, Bruno Latour went there to do the fieldwork that would become the foundation for Laboratory Life. So it was pretty much irresistable.
Here are more pictures, though it's the kind of place that no photographs-- especially mind-- can do justice to. You really have to go see it yourself.
Advice to a young graduate student
A former student about to start a Ph.D. at my alma mater asked me for advice on his first year. I came up with a top ten list. While some of my recommendations are very location-specific, there's an intention behind even the Philadelphia-specific stuff that can be generalized to other schools.
Inventing traditions in potato chips
Some years ago, Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Rainger published a collection of essays on "The Invention of Tradition," on the ways things we think of as timeless, local,
Review of David Levy, Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age
Originally published in the Los Angeles Times Book Review. David M. Levy, "Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age" (New York: Arcade, 2002). When I