Notes from the Ironbound

 I have a new piece at Tropics of Meta about John le Carre novels and how they are the true apex of "quit lit," that genre belove...

On academic Twitter today I've seen a lot of folks sharing charts showing the steep decline in the number of available jobs in the hu...

The seniors at my school are in the middle of the college application process, which means I am currently in the thick of letters of reco...

Getting bawled out by jerks in suits is something salespeople and academics have in common Tomorrow the school year begins for me, lik...

The Democratic primary field is a mix of clashing personalities who like to hear themselves talk and where white men are overrepresented....

A prophecy from the dawn of neoliberalism During the twelve years I spent in academia as a grad student and professor in history there...

I recently had the good fortune to hang out with two of my friends from graduate school. Like the middle-aged men that we are, we talked ...

I have a new piece at Tropics of Meta , which as far as I'm concerned is the little scholarly website that could. Read their stuff, it...

This post is not one where I am going to analyze politics or riff on pop culture, no sir. I know most of my readers are academics or form...

I just spent the last three days in East Tennessee in a house with a bunch of my grad school friends (some of whom make up the tens of pe...

Graduation day is the day when "This Is Where I Belong" by the Kinks becomes my theme song Today was my high school's gra...

Don't call them conservatives. Don't call them populists. Call them what they are: authoritarian nationalists. With the embrace of...

It finally appears that there is a growing awareness in American society of the crime of adjunct labor exploitation. Today Gawker did an ext...

Surprised that the hipsters haven't tried to revive this bourbon label A former student of mine who is now working on her PhD poste...

I am coming up on a very important anniversary: attending my first American Historical Association annual conference in Philadelphia back in...

Yesterday a friend from my crummy old "visiting professor" days posted a link to a new piece of academic quit lit on his Facebo...

Today I finally returned from my 16 day road trip with my wife and two daughters.  It has been a long, strange, tiring trip.  The sound ...

Editor's Note: My rather impolitic friend Cranky Bear has come out of hibernation with a vengeance this year.  It's a Friday nig...

Loyal readers of this blog may know that I once wrote quite a bit about academia and negotiating life after quitting academia.   If you ...