Notes from dissertopia

I still haven’t come up with a clever title for this weekly feature, which shares some of the things that we’ve read, listened to, watched, or thought about over the last week.  These are the best, the most important, or just the most fun.  Any ideas for a clever title, or things we missed?

Like Connie, Christoph Niemann loves coffee.   Also like Connie, Christoph Niemann is a great artist.  Unlike her, Niemann celebrates his love for coffee by using it to draw on napkins.

Don Worster discusses his new biography of John Muir. “I wanted to see as much as possible of what Muir saw of the natural world—and he was one of the most widely traveled persons of his time.  I too had to do a lot of traveling.”

Dave Eggers wrote a play for Thanksgiving and put it online.

The Times of Higher Education did some reporting on anthropology’s war with itself.

The music and book blog “Large Hearted Boy” gives an ongoing rundown of the early best-of-the-year-lists, (books and music)his own list is here:  Vice Magazine presented their own generic list here, and “Pretty Much Amazing” handed down a list of commandments for making year end lists here.

In an effort to rid their lives of crappy things, the people at the Counter Intuitive Comparison Institute of North America (CICINA) have provided a way to compare apples and oranges, and mammoths and british people, with The Big Chart.  Along the way they openly mocked engineers in their quest to determine the single best thing.

Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh considers the recent attacks on Mumbai in the context of 9/11.

Ken Worpole reviews Dai Smith’s biography of one of my own academic heroes, Raymond Williams.  ”He was admirably perverse in his pedagogic priorities, preferring to speak for free to a small conference of adult education tutors or secondary school English teachers, rather than flying half way round the world for a large fee to lecture to other academics. He retained an abiding loyalty to the foot soldiers of education and political activism rather than to the officer class of academic theory.”

No-one has time to read this much, but here are the 100 best Anthropology blogs, separated by sub-discipline.

There are also some things that we found this week that we are reading regularly, links to our favorite sites are in the sidebar.  (update: the new theme doesn’t really have a place to put links.  Instead, you can find our favorite websites on the “Links of Note” page