Two pieces to share this week. The first is on Slate, which is not so much a response to a piece in the NYT that went academic-nuclear last weekend (about why the lecture is awesome), so much as another piece of a larger conversation about how we envision students. The second is a biiiiig faaaaat pity party for me and my academic booky wook, which I ended up writing for “fun.” On Vitae, I attempt to wrangle that pity party into some important activism for the thousands of scholars who are somehow heroically managing to write books with no institutional support, which I (surprise) find exploitative and wish would stop. Remember when a book would get you tenure? Yeah, neither do I.

As always, thanks for reading!