…and we’re back…

So that whole social media “platform” this was an interesting ride, wasn’t it? Turns out, nothing is ever free, the new captains of industry are as selfish and narrow minded as the old ones, and we are just the product. Oh wait, we knew that already: I submit that the materialist answer to the question — What …

Geoffrey Bennington’s review of the new translation of Derrida’s Of Grammatology: read as a commentary on the humanities.

Read the review here: https://lareviewofbooks.org/review/embarrassing-ourselves This was a great read over breakfast. I want to leave aside the intra-Derridean sniping and draw some bigger lessons from this review: 1. It’s dangerous for scholars to cut corners: look at the text, not your notes on the text. Advice for students and super stars alike. (or rather, we …

Some Suggestions for Improving the Humanities Dissertation and Defence at McGill

…or at least the dissertation in Communication Studies. How do you improve the dissertation and the defence?  A few weeks back, the faculty members in Communication Studies at McGill met to talk about the graduate curriculum and these topics came up.  But some changes we would like to make would be impossible in the current …

And now, an academic paperback for over $1500

So I went to Amazon to pick up Constance Classen’s The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch, which I’m looking forward to reading.  This is what I found:   While I’m definitely interested in picking up the book, and while it is clearly eligible for super saver shipping, this is the first over-$1500 academic …

Feature or Bug? Ebooks roll out later

Authors–especially academic authors–should always be happy when people want to read their work, and flattered by desire for access. And so please consider me flattered: thanks for reading and thanks for caring enough to tweet about it. But since Steven Shaviro’s comment mirrored my own confusion about a month ago (and has been making the …

The Politics of Journal Publishing in Music Education + Harvard Goes Open Access + Quebec Student Strike

Ted Striphas did it for Cultural Studies, and now Matthew Thibault has done it for music education. It would be great for people to assemble this kind of comparative data across fields and disciplines. And in related news one of the richest in the world–if not the richest–says it can’t afford the rising price of …