Weekend Reading: Good Luck This Semester Edition

By this time next week I think just about everyone on the semester system will have started classes, which means the summer’s over and campuses are once again full of activity. Whether you’ve been teaching or working all summer, doing research, or recharging for the long winter, here’s hoping everything goes well in 2018-19!

On to this week’s links:

• Miriam Elizabeth Burstein did some quiet looking into the question of superstar advisors and their advisees’ placements: The American letter of reference is a notoriously bizarre genre, because of course you are not supposed to say anything negative about one’s student. (Also notoriously, letters from the UK and the Continent, perhaps sensibly enough, do not adhere to this protocol. Tales of the accidentally disastrous results are legion.)
• Austin Kleon’s very simple rule gets harder as the nights get longer, but it does make sense: Don’t think too much about your life after dinnertime. Thinking too much at the end of the day is a recipe for despair.
• Paris Martineau recommends putting your phone in Do Not Disturb mode . . . forever. (Which not every one can do, obviously, but it is amazing that people have notifications on for, hypothetically, Instagram likes.): long-term use of Do Not Disturb mode doesn’t leave me stuck bouncing from app to app in order to gauge what I missed. All of the dumb texts, emails, and reminders are there, waiting to be read; they just look a little different a couple of hours after the fact. They feel less overwhelmingly urgent and more like what they actually are: words on a screen that can be dealt, according to urgency, when you have the time.
• I really like Supercomputer, a new podcast by Alex Cox and Matthew Cassinelli. The most recent episode, on morning routines, was pretty helpful!
• Also, and though I don’t usually recommend paywalled articles here, Paige Morgan’s “The Consequences of Framing Digital Humanities Tools As Easy to Use” strikes too close to home for me not to link (Update: Thanks to friend-of-ProfHacker Paige for providing an open-access link as well!: It argues that attempts to couch powerful tools in what is often false familiarity, directly undermines the goal of encouraging scholarly innovation and risk taking. The consequences of framing digital tools as either easy or more difficult shapes the relationship between librarians and the students and faculty whose research they support, and, more broadly, the role and viability of libraries as spaces devoted to skill acquisition.

For this week’s video, here’s Julien Baker’s cover of The Mountain Goats’s “No Children":Alt track: Ibeyi’s #hamildrop track, “Rise Up Wise Up Eyes Up”Photo “You Don’t Need Luck if U R Good” by Flickr user momo / Creative Commons licensed BY-2.0