random bullet points about violence and moving

• I didn't get to walk around much while in NYC. On my way to Central Park with a friend, though, we passed a corner where two down-and-out-looking men were arguing loudly. "What the bother are you doing?" shouted one, "Woman walking with her kid and you bother with her like that." The other man was gesturing menacingly toward him with this thing that looked like a homemade bullwhip. We just kept walking. It did remind me of how pleased my mother was on the phone back when I told her I had decided against moving to New York.
• Yesterday in Harvard Yard I saw a woman with an uppermost-crust English accent go absolutely apebother on her seven-or-so year old daughter. The daughter was wheeling along the bike with tassels on the handlebars and, as part of a tantrum, had the idea to just leave it on the ground and walk away, at which point Posh went postal. Nothing physical, just shrieking, still disturbing, and yet also with the accent she still sounded classy. Made me wish again I had gone through my original plan to disappear as part of this fellowship and emerge with a bushy head of hair and a plummy English accent.
• Sister B and her daughter are coming in town to visit. This meant I was supposed to do some cleaning today, although the most productive parts of that were more pre-moving stuff than cleaning per se. On the latter, however, I continue to marvel at how ubiquitious mop technology is given its fairly small advantage over pushing a rag around vigorously with one's foot.
• Part of my pre-moving preparations are that I made real progress in my plan to get rid of 25% of my wardrobe. This includes various T-shirts and sweatshirts that I have been saving not because I have any plans to wear them again, but because I have one nostalgic connection or another. My plan for these, I think, is going to be to take photos of them and make them into a Flickr set, then discard.
• So far, so good, with my effort to lower my use of profanity by substituting "bother."
• First things I did today were cash in my accumulated spare change and buy a replacement iPod. The change came to within $10 of what the iPod cost. Which means that, for the past two years, I could have just been throwing my spare change in the wastebasket, if in addition I paid attention to my belongings enough not to lose my iPod. The ongoing tax imposed by my absent-mindedness, especially when its consequences are compounded by being sleep-deprived and traveling like at ASA, gets so bothering tiresome. Ugh. I don't know why Apple can't help people track down lost/stolen iPods since they can match the serial number and iTunes store account of any iPod that plugs into iTunes.

asa rulz

I started today with the $28 (plus tax/tip) breakfast buffet, and am ending it now with a $26 (plus tax/tip) room service pizza.

BTW, I don't know if Fabio has this in his "grad school rulz", but while it's good to be able to describe your dissertation to another person in 2-3 sentences, those sentences should be delivered without using air quotation marks 5 or more times.

Also, the outgoing chair at Wisconsin came up to me and said people had been mentioning to her how I had linked to a couple of selections from her webpage in saying she should start a blog. She said, "You should have linked to my Hoops and Hurdles memo, that's my favorite one." We then discussed our favorite memos that she had sent out as chair, hers being the annual memo she send out regarding sexual harassment, mine being the memo she sent out to rally collective support for normative restraint as a solution to unsustainable growth in the cost of the free printing offered to graduate students (an approach was has basically worked; I thought about posting her memo along with a detailed rational choice analysis of the rhetorical strategy by which it worked).

I have enjoyed ASA, but I have not spent as much time interacting with several of those I would consider in my "most cherished circle" of sociology friends as I would have liked. Of course, every time I text Sal trying to get his whereabouts, his first response is always that he's out loitering in the parking lot.

dispatch from manhattan

Back in my hotel room at ASA. I am pinch-hitting a presentation for someone at 8:30 tomorrow morning, but have it under control. My presentation at the orientation to the Minority Fellows Program this afternoon went well enough. I also spoke there last year. The two experiences easily rank #1 and #2 of most interesting and engaged audiences I've had in speaking at a major professional conference.

Earlier Tina showed me her iPhone, which is the first time I've handled one. I tried to text a message and could not get it to type a single word correctly, although sometimes it's suggested correction was correct even though it did not share a letter with the word I was trying to type (apparently it understands, e.g., if you miss every key to the left). That I found maddening, but then Tina showed me the photo program where you can scroll through programs and flip them around and zoom in and such, which was amazing. As was the ability to do the same thing with maps. Tina was excited to actually be able to use the phone on the iPhone, as that part doesn't work in Canada. If it wasn't for the text messaging and two-year AT&T lock-in, I would have been sold, even at $600.

So far my visit to New York has affirmed that New York really is too much for me, even though I recognize that Midtown and Downtown--where I was today--are much different from Uptown. Even so, the commotion inside me is so much I don't think I could handle so much commotion outside, all the time. The honking alone when I walk around outside nudges me toward disequilibrium.

BTW, I thought about not paying the $15/day to have wireless in my room. Since I can check my e-mail on my phone. My resolve for this crumbled in less than a half hour.

no one ever said the 's' in 'asa' stood for security

OK, I have way too much today to do to be blogging, but: ASA has opened their new online messaging service, and it's structured in such a way that anyone with a lick of sense who received the e-mail with their own username (their e-mail address) and default password can immediately deduce anybody else's password. Which means one can pose as anyone else and leave messages for whoever under their name. This is not especially different from what one was always able to do with ASA, since it's not like the old messaging systems ever had any kind of security to verify that people were who they said they were. And it's not like when you leave a message at a hotel for someone you are asked to prove who you are, etc.. What it adds the veneer of security that comes along with there being a nominal password, so spoofed messages are likely more credible.

Plus, you can also use the new system to send e-mails to anyone! So, if you've had any pent up inclinations for poison-pen e-mails, just pick your favorite senior sociologist and go. Maybe Fabio will post a special edition of his "Grad School Rulz" about how you can use the ASA messaging system to destroy your rivals on the job market.

(Needless to say, I changed my password before posting this. If you change your password, you can also set the system to forward messages to your e-mail account, so that you don't have to wonder if anyone has left you a message so long as you are checking your e-mail.)

reminder: asa blogger extravaganza

The ASA NYC blogger get-together, a.k.a. YearlyRojas, is Saturday at 6PM, with the present plan to proceed from the Hilton Lobby. I have misgivings about this plan, as I don't quite get how people who are a little later are going to figure out where we are, but I am passive-aggressive in these misgivings, choosing just to state them publicly rather than act toward any kind of alternative. Anyway, you're invited. You? You. Fabio is offering to buy a drink to people who have pre-ordered his book. Dan is offering to buy a drink to anyone who can name a Kiss song that is not on his iPod. I am offering to thank anyone who pre-orders my drinks.

Also, Tuesday 8:30 am, at an as yet undisclosed location in the Hilton, "Blogs as a Forum for Public Sociology," including Hargittai, Healy, Uggen, Freese, and two people I don't know. Somebody should bring bagels.

have $500 and reasonable social connections? well, then, you could be a proud owner of your very own asa section-in-formation!

From a mass e-mail sent to the Wisconsin sociology listserv:

PLEASE READ THIS.  OUR ATTEMPT TO START A SECTION-IN-FORMATION ON 
DISABILITY AND SOCIETY IS IN JEOPARDY.
 
WE need 100 people *WHO ARE CURRENT MEMBERS OF ASA* who are willing to 
support our petition to the Committee on Sections----or our petition 
will not be considered.  We have well over 100 people who indicated that 
they support the section-in-formation, but the problem is that many are 
not current ASA members. [...]
  
*If you are already an ASA member who has indicated support, how can 
you help*?  
 
Approach colleagues, friends, grad school buddies or graduate 
students who are ASA members and ask if they will support this...  
(Or, if you have grad students are not members, convince 
your chair that they should be and get them signed up 
pronto.)  Depending upon how much this is worth to you, and if you can 
afford it, offer to pay their section dues [$5-10/yr] for them for two years.   
All we need right now is their names--no money.  Frankly, at this point I 
would pay their section dues in order to get this thing off the ground.  
(Yes, I will).

I understand that more sections = more money for ASA, regardless of where the money comes from. Still, does anybody feel good about these open listserv requests for recruiting "grad school buddies" with zero interest in a topic to sign up for a new section and have other people pay their dues for the two years it takes to get the section started (at which point they drop out)? Is there any integrity whatsoever to the process of forming and maintaining sections at this point?

This message also bothers me because the author later writes, "I am not trying to plug ASA membership.," and seems to think it's an abomination that ASA requires that the people who count toward becoming an ASA section be ASA members. Sections-in-formation take ASA resources beyond what they raise in dues. Besides, if ASA membership isn't important, why is becoming an ASA section so important?

And, what's with the part about getting chairs to have grad students sign up? Are there departments that pay for their graduate students to be ASA members?

Update: Instructions on how to form your own ASA section are here.

the far eastern front in the war to shrink the pet-child gap

The sociologist who wrote the article on "Animal Selves" that I highlighted here a couple weeks ago has written a letter to ASA protesting their plan to offer a tour to China (I couldn't find the link, so I've pasted as jpg above). Me, I'll admit I don't understand how ASA's tour business works and so don't know what I think of the enterprise generally. I guess if ASA is going to be in the tour business, I wouldn't agree with them letting the political views of some members prevent other members who want to go on the tour.* (I presume the substantive importance of China to those interested in global society is without question, as is China's dismal human rights record.)

Anyway, the protest is made on both human and animal rights grounds. Comparisons are made to Nazi Germany and to ASA's decision to hold its meetings in Montreal. China is said to be "bankrolling genocide." Even so, "Although [China's] treatment of people is shameful, its treatment of animals is far, far worse." That said, by my tally, description of human rights abuses does edge out animal rights abuses, by a word count of 141-139.

BTW, according to a post on this site, eating dogs was banned in South Korea in 1988 just before the Olympics, but is presently legal in China (but not Taiwan or Hong Kong). I wonder if China will ban eating dogs before the 2008 Olympics open.

* I might feel differently if, say, ASA were talking about holding its annual meetings in China, although there would be nonhumanitarian grounds for complaining about that decision as well.

sociology bloggers: are we having a get-together at asa?

Sorry if somebody has already posted about this and I've missed it. It has become an annual tradition, though.

UPDATE: The current plan is to meet at Saturday, 6pm, in the Hilton Lobby. Presumably we will go somewhere else, which means we need to have a plan for how to let people know where we've gone.

sooners

Carleton has posted a sociology job ad with a deadline of July 13, with the idea of conducting preliminary interviews at ASA. Is this unusually early, or is my understanding and recollection of sociology job deadlines wrong? I guess the ad doesn't ask for letters of recommendation, just references. I've never been asked to write a letter of recommendation for a position with a July deadline, but I don't know if that says more about my experience as a letter writer or about the rarity of July deadlines for positions open to new Ph.D.'s. Anyone?

(Part of me asking is that everyone in sociology seems to be complaining about how the job deadlines are getting earlier and earlier. If ASA kept records of their application ads over the years, this could actually be an interesting thing to study, especially in terms of how the sequence has gone of places moving up their deadlines. I don't think there would be any rule against ASA trying to impose some kind of guidelines to set the timing of the market, but that would require the ASA leadership to show leadership, and I'm not naïve enough to stand on the platform waiting for that train.)

a dream deferred is not a dream denied

Okay, so maybe the sociology world isn't ready for the idea of a group twittercast of ASA. It's only April, though. If Twitter continues to grow at its current rate, then by the ASA meetings in August, the world will actually be needing to grow babies in vats and signing them up for Twitter as soon as they ripen just to keep the trend going.

This has been one of my notoriously unfocused Saturdays. I'm in the middle of reading five separate books right now. The best may be Allen Brandt's The Cigarette Century, which is a great (but long) history of the cigarette industry. The book, perhaps oddly, reminds me about what I found so interesting about pharma that made me go on a ten-book-bender about the pharmaceutical industry last year. With cigarettes, you just get these corporations that engage in all sorts of ugliness in the service of getting the public to buy a product that is horribly bad for them. With pharma, you get these corporations that engage in all sorts of ugliness in the service of getting the public to buy products that are often good, sometimes bad, and regularly hard to tell exactly which.

i have a dream

In that dream, I manage to convince at least 20 people who will be attending the American Sociological Association meetings in New York this summer to engage in a simultaneous pseudonymous group twittercast of the events.

You, if you are going to the meetings, can help my dream come true.

No, I haven't figured out the details. But I see the potential for an interesting piece of socioconceptual art.

Plus, the whole theme of the conference is "Is Another World Possible?" I think this theme is better than most of the other ASA meeting themes since I've been in this business. But, still, there is something naive about it that smacks of The Baby Boomers Who Run Sociology reminiscing self-indulgently about the days when they would sit around their dorm rooms in various degrees of drug- or rally-for-the-revolution-induced haziness asking each other this question. The real question is not whether another world is possible, because a very different world from what we have now is inevitable and is, in fact, well on its way. The real questions are instead what ways the world will be more benign and more pernicious than the world we have now, and whether anything can be done to nudge the future more toward the former than the latter. Anyway, the transformations of connectedness manifested in innovations like blogs and like twitter seem one vital part of the Another World that is on its way, and I continue to be amazed at how little appreciation sociologists in their forties and above seem to have of this.

in surf city it was two girls for every boy; in soc city it's three retirees for every new ph.d.

The big annual meeting of demographers is going on in New York City, and even though I'm not able to attend, I thought I could at least write a demographically-minded post. The new issue of Footnotes, the newsletter of the American Sociological Association, has an article titled "Too Few Ph.D.'s" that makes the following observation:

"Since 1993, the 'replacement rate'--the ratio of the annual number of new PhDs awarded to the number of PhDs retiring--has steadily declined in all social science disciplines. Figure 1 shows the replacement rate between 1993 and 2003 for these disciplines. ... By 2003 (the last year for which data were available), there were two-thirds of a new psychology PhD for every PhD psychology retiree. In contrast, there was less than one third (.29) of a new PhD for every one PhD retiree in sociology."

Among other things, this observation would seem to explain:

1. My sense that, in certain institutional respects, the experience of my broad cohort in sociology has resembled that of a game of musical chairs, only except instead removing chairs, removing people.

2. The increasing difficulties editors report in finding people to peer review articles.

the sociology straw that broke the chief illiniwek camel's back

So, sometime in the last week I got an e-mail saying that the American Sociological Association council had passed the member resolution that had been offered on Native American sports nicknames (see post here). Today, from ESPN.com:

Illinois trustees vote to retire Chief Illiniwek

URBANA, Ill. -- The University of Illinois swept aside the last vestiges of Chief Illiniwek on Tuesday, voting to retire the mascot's name, regalia and image.

The school will continue to call its sports teams the Fighting Illini under the resolution. Chancellor Richard Herman is to decide how and when Chief Illiniwek's name and image will stop being used and licensed to apparel makers and others.

The trustees do not say that the sociology resolution was the decisive development that led them to this vote, but obviously they're not going to publicly admit that, are they?

I know what you are thinking: If only the ASA resolution against the Iraq war had passed before the war actually started.

Update: Corrected to fix abominable error of saying "trustee's" instead of "trustees." I hate when I do that. Also, in case it isn't completely clear, my belief indeed is that Chief Illiniwek was an absurdly insensitive mascot without any defensible place in a contemporary university, and so I am very glad he is gone.

immortality is mine!

I was having a conversation with my dissertation advisor the other day about a couple of articles he has published that have recently received attention from some major media outlets. Then, however, we turned on to the true star turn of recent years: my own appearance in an article on blogging in Footnotes, the official journal of the American Sociological Association. Small-town boy detective finally hits the big time, I know. If you mail me your issue in a self-addressed stamped envelope, I will happily autograph it for you.

The interview was my attempt to push e-mail interviews to the next logical step by actually blogging the content of the interview as I was doing it (here, here, here, here). In the end, I just sent the reporter a set of links. If you read the article, see if you think my quotes read like a person writing for his blog rather than speaking to an interviewer.

I think the reporter did a great job with the article, although perhaps I'm biased since I'm quoted at length. I would have liked to have seen more sociology bloggers interviewed, as well as URLs of the blogs of those that were. Eszter is also interviewed in the article, as is C.N. Le, who I don't know personally, and Rebecca Hensley, who I don't know at all.

resolution redux

I received a prompt reply--certainly far more prompt than this follow-up--to my cordial query about the references for an assertion in the American Sociological Association resolution about Native American mascots (original post). As promised, these references are:

"Sports Mascots and the Media" with co-authors (i.e., C. Richard King, L. R. Davis-Delano, E. J. Staurowsky,& L. Baca), in Handbook of Sports and Media, A. A. Raney & J. Bryant, editors, 2006, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

"Of Polls and Race Prejudice: Sports Illustrated's Errant 'Indian Wars,'" with co-authors (i.e., C. Richard King, E. J. Staurowsky, L. Baca, L. R. Davis, & C. Pewewardy), in Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 2002, 26(4): 381-402.

I haven't looked at these references or at the specific evidence regarding the harm of Native American nicknames on Native Americans. Regardless, I hasten to point out again that I personally think Native American sports nicknames and mascots are objectionable--especially the Washington Redskins (which just now felt wrong even to type out loud) and Chief Illiniwek--even if they do not cause specifiable and demonstrable harm to particular Native Americans. The issue arises more from my experience doing quantitative social research with it being much easier to assert that something is harmful than to demonstrate persuasively that it is so, as well as my belief that professional resolutions that make claims about empirical matters should have some explicit connection to empirical evidence. I recognize how quaint and protocurmudgeonly such sentiments might seem.

With acknowledgment that it was dated, I was also referred to the bibliography for the resolution by the American Psychological Association. Even if one is not interested in the bibliography per se, the previous link is worth clicking on by academics just for the apparent contrast between an APA resolution and an ASA resolution, especially in terms of how the former make concrete points and tie them to specific citations of evidence.

newest asa member resolution: taking another political stand, but not one that will keep us away from chicago

Following the successful American Sociological Association resolutions in past years against the Iraq War and against the prohibition of gay marriage, circulating this year is a resolution against Native American nicknames in sport. Full text as follows:

Proposed Resolution of the American Sociological Association on Native American Sport Mascots

WHEREAS the American Sociological Association comprises sociologists and kindred professionals who study, among other things, culture, religion, media, sport, race and ethnicity, racism, and other forms of inequality;

WHEREAS the American Sociological Association recognizes that racial prejudice, stereotypes, individual discrimination and institutional discrimination are socially created phenomena that are harmful to Native Americans and other people of color;

WHEREAS the American Sociological Association is resolved to undertake scholarship, education, and action that helps to eradicate racism;

WHEREAS social science scholarship has demonstrated that the continued use of Native American nicknames, logos and mascots in sport reflect and reinforce misleading stereotypes of Native Americans in both past and contemporary times;

WHEREAS the stereotypes embedded in Native American nicknames, logos and mascots in sport undermine education about the lives of Native American peoples;

WHEREAS social science scholarship has demonstrated that the continued use of Native American nicknames, logos and mascots in sport harm Native American people in psychological, educational, and social ways;

WHEREAS the continued use of Native American nicknames, logos and mascots in sport shows disrespect for Native American spiritual and cultural practices;

WHEREAS many Native American individuals across the United States have found Native American nicknames, logos and mascots in sport offensive and called for their elimination;

AND, WHEREAS the continued use of Native American nicknames, logos and mascots in sport has been condemned by numerous reputable academic, educational and civil rights organizations, and the vast majority of Native American advocacy organizations, including but not limited to: American Anthropological Association, American Psychological Association, North American Society for the Sociology of Sport, Modern Language Association, United States Commission on Civil Rights, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Association of American Indian Affairs, National Congress of American Indians, and National Indian Education Association;

NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, THAT THE AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION calls for the discontinuation of the use of Native American nicknames, logos and mascots in sport.

As with all member resolutions, signatures from 3% of members are needed to place it on the ballot. Apparently if you copy the above text and send it to stop_indian_mascots@yahoo.com (presumably along with your name) that is sufficient to count as a signature.

The drive is being organized by Jeffrey Montez de Oca and Laurel Davis-Delano. I have sent an e-mail asking about the evidence regarding WHEREAS #6 of the resolution (the one about evidence demonstrating harm). I'm not saying anything about the quantity or quality of this evidence; I honestly don't know. It seems to me that there should be a requirement that resolutions that make claims about social science findings should be expected to provide references to those findings and preferably with the resolution itself. I'll let you know what response I receive to my query.

The resolution does not itself imply any actions other than ASA "calling for the discontinuation." I have a friend who works for ASA; I wonder if he'll have to be the one who gets on the phone and makes these calls. But to whom? By contrast, the American Anthropological Association has a at-least-ten-year boycott on holding meetings in Illinois (e.g., in Chicago) because of the University of Illinois flamboyantly offensive "Chief Illiniwek" mascot.

in which i do some charity ad copywriting on sociology's behalf

The American Sociological Association leaves no potential stone of revenue unturned. Here's an ad from the ASA's official newsletter:



"Have you thought about subscribing to your favorite magazine but you were reluctant to pay the newsstand price?" I mean, come on! What kind of economic imbeciles would sociologists have to be to actually languish under such a torment!

Despite whatever misgivings I may have about sociology, I do not believe that there are any sociologists who are, in anything approximating a clinical sense, idiots. Understand, moreover, that because no one starts college as a sociology major, everybody is already some years past buying their first magazines by the time they join ASA. Consequently, I don't understand how anyone can reach even the lower-bound age and literacy of an entry-level ASA member and not already know that, if you are going to subscribe to a magazine, you should be able to find a better rate than the newsstand price.

So, it will be obvious to every member who reads this ad that ASA is not actually offering them anything special when it says it can get them magazine subscriptions at below newsstand prices. Why pretend otherwise? Rather than making some weird and inept pitch that makes the ASA sound not just overcommercialized but incompetently overcommercialized, why not just try leveling with members? Why not offer an ad that says something like:

Whenever you subscribe to a magazine, somebody makes money. Why not have it be ASA? Do the discipline a favor. Besides, it won't cost you anything, because if you can find a price lower than what's listed on our service, we can match it.

take my discipline. please.

A few years ago, the American Sociological Association had the idea of starting a magazine to help bring sociological wisdom to the masses. The resulting quarterly, Contexts, has repeatedly expressed its aspirations to be the sort of thing anybody interested in sociologicalish issues can pick up and read, although it has been unclear how many readers Contexts has been able to attract who are not practicing sociologists, former sociologists, or relatives of sociologists.

With the latest issue, Contexts has added a humor column ("The Fool") for its back page. The author is Harry Green, whom I've never heard of before and who is described as "once a promising sociologist." He has apparently moved from that to being now on the Contexts masthead as its in-house "humorist." I don't know how one scores that gig, but presumably it's through some kind of personal connection to The Guys In Charge. But does cronyism have to imply cornyism? The Guys In Charge surely do know some clever jokesters, right?

Apparently not, or at least not any who were willing to step up to the plate for Contexts Comedy. Green's humor column is bad--and not bad in the so-bad-it's-good way, but bad in the so-bad-that-it's-really-horribly-claw-out-your-eyes-and-burn-your-ASA-membership-card bad way. Seriously, I think I've shed most of my illusions about the capacity for Mainstream Sociology to embarrass itself, and yet I found this embarrassing.

The premise of the column is that there are reports of terrorists lurking in American sociology, and Green has been commissioned to investigate. Armed with the chief ordnance of lazy humor writing--bullet points--he reports evidence of various suspicious characters in the discipline. One example of the kind of Harry-hilarity that ensues:

Harvard University. You never see any of its sociologists at ASA meetings. What do they spend their time doing? And where did this place get so much money if not from Saudi oil? And what is Harvard President Larry Summers if not a lackey of the New World Order?

Worse, despite the idea that Contexts is at least supposed to have a pretense of being accessible to the person on the street, most of the attempts at humor are based on in-jokes that not only do you have to be in the sociology fold in order to get, but are obscure enough that they won't even be accessible to the average sociologist. An example:

Douglas Mitchell, University of Chicago Press. "You're only as holy as your beard is long." God-fearing, born-again Christians don't have beards that long--except of course for my Uncle Ebenezer, of Hogfarts, West Virginia.

Or, hey, if convulsions of laughter have not yet compromised your ability to read, try this one:

Central Florida University. That's right. We had never heard of it either. Jeb Bush is up to something down there. Eminent environmental sociologist Riley E. Dunlap disappeared from Washington University at Pullman three years ago, said to be "abroad." Now, suddenly he is teaching at Central Florida. Operatives are not usually in training camps for this long, so he must have been studying something especially diabolical--like eigenvalues.

The editors of Contexts, in their comments at the beginning of the issue, note that they plan to work on having accessible articles even though "you have probably never seen the terms sociology and good writing in the same sentence." Of course, around the academy, you would probably also not often hear sociology in the same sentence as "technically sophisticated" or "intellectually rigorous." And sociologists themselves are selling cartoon mugs that poke fun at the discipline's irrelevance to society. But if we are going to have bad reputations in so many ways, can't sociologists at least allow the world to think that, at the end of the day, we might at least be clever and funny? Or do we have to use our discipline's magazine to dispel whatever delusions anyone might have about that?