Wednesday: Annotated Biblio-blography

MEDIA MATTERS
“The amount of time teenagers watch television increases their risk of becoming depressed as adults, researchers find” writes the Los Angeles Times in an article published this week.  The piece discusses outcomes of a collaborative study by the University of Pittsburgh and Harvard Medical School that suggests a link between TV viewing and depression.
The Pope warns that [...]

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Wednesday: Annotated Biblio-blography

Writing Contest: Cliopatria announces its 2008 blog writing contest. There are multiple nominating categories. Can you imagine this award on your CV?
Presidential Sentence Structure: In response to Obama’s appearance on last Sunday’s “Sixty Minutes” show, the Borowitz Report’s (yes, a little over the top) article, “Obama’s use of Complete Sentences Stirs Controversy: Stunning Break with the Last Eight [...]

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Shrinking Endowments ≠ Job or Affirmative Action

The MLA job search may be shrinking before our eyes as colleges and universities are beginning to retract their postings due to withdrawal of funding. I’ve already had two of my applications tossed due to search shut downs (and these are just the ones I know of so far). One notice I received by mail [...]

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Wednesday: Annotated Biblio-blography

Many are focused on election results today and CNN has done the legwork for us here at phdmamas and surveyed the front pages of newspapers worldwide to gauge reaction to Senator (and President-elect) Obama’s victory:
(CNN) – Around the world, media reaction to the Democrats’ victory has poured in, as newspapers and broadcasters reflect on the Barack Obama [...]

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As if you needed one more reason to vote…

After you vote today, November 4, enjoy a FREE TALL COFFEE at any Starbucks.  Simply tell them you voted and enjoy a complimentary caffeine boost.  Phdmamas everywhere rejoice!
 

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Wednesday: Annotated Biblio-blography

After reading Mark and Katie’s story of traveling the country in a T@B on their blog, www.wanderful.us, I have been extolling the virtues of cross-country travel in an RV (especially a shiny-new Airstream) to my husband, but so far he is not on board.  In the meantime, I regularly check out Mark and Katie’s blog [...]

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Money matters

For academics wanting to take a break from the headlines in order to experience a more measured approach to the current financial crisis, I have two recommendations that are free from partisan politics and posturing.
 The first, Ronald T. Wilcox’s Whatever Happened to Thrift: Why Americans Don’t Save and What to Do about It (2008) is [...]

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Is Beauty Pageantry the New Political Prep School? Part II

Romantic poets such as William Wordsworth and Percy Shelley were fascinated by the Doctrine of Recapitulation: the idea that an individual’s development actually repeated the stages of species evolution (think about all the growth stages of the human fetus and how they mirror the evolutionary process). Apparently, the latest in beauty pageant trends, according to [...]

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Post-VP Debate language police: A “team of mavericks”

Palin [of the McCain campaign]: “I’m part of a team of mavericks.”
A team of mavericks. I’m sorry, how does that work in reality? Because, that’s rhetorically impossible.

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VP Debate Tonight: Is beauty pageantry the new political prep school?

I have mixed feelings about the whole Sarah Palin thing. It’s no secret I’m voting for the Obama ticket and my husband walks around with a big Obama head on his t-shirt. But, Palin is a subject of intrigue for me (and obviously the rest of the country) as she revives that conflation of entertainment [...]

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