SleepPhones are great! They are super comfortable and secure (I toss and turn a lot, anything in-ear never had a prayer). I wear mine working out too.

Under-appreciated advantage over cheaper, similar competition: super easy to clean. The mechanism slides in and out of the band, which is machine washable. You’re not just building up sweat and oil might after night.

Oh 100% absolutely. I mean the gentrification of Hyde Park and Woodlawn with active, deliberate harm to the black community started at the University’s inception in 1898 (1895? 92? They keep changing the “established in” date on all their merch and propaganda, it’s hard to keep up) and continues to this day with no signs of slowing.

I also should have specified that if we’re talking about student/faculty attitudes the “real” UChicago community does not or at least should include Booth and the psychopathic econ department. That’s where all the money comes from (because it’s evil) but everyone except admin hates them. Also I’m pretty sure they would argue “community” means communism and community of any kind should be abolished in favor of a social free market or some shit, whatever garbage they are peddling these days.

Important additional context that didn’t make it into this tweet, this donation was explicitly directed toward promoting “free inquiry and expression” at UChicago. Decades ago that was a legit strength of UChicago that really was pretty ideologically neutral, and that history gives them a phenomenal tool for spinning dog whistles and ultra conservative policies as part of “the life of the mind.”

Here’s the announcement email from the University’s president yesterday.

Worth noting that Eman Abdelhadi is faculty at UChicago, speaking out against her own employer alongside hundreds of other faculty. Eman is particularly adept at making sure every time they use “free inquiry and expression” as a conservative dog whistle it gets thrown back in their faces. (She’s also just kind of a badass.)

UChicago admin work very hard to promote this image of the school as a bastion for “sane conservatives” by taking stances diametrically opposed to the what the students and faculty actually stand behind. The real UChicago is anti-genocide, pro-union, and knows that promoting free speech doesn’t mean tolerating hate speech.

I use this example to introduce formal and functional approaches to topics in the social sciences. Any argument you try to make within the debate ends up including a variant of “…because sandwiches [abstraction about what formally defines a sandwich]”, which itself presumes that the “right” way to carve up the world is in categories of form. You could also conceive of sandwiches functionally, where something isn’t a sandwich if we (some cultural or linguistic group) just don’t think of them that way.

From a functional view, the very fact the debate exists at all means hot dogs aren’t sandwiches, cereal isn’t soup, pop tarts aren’t ravioli, etc.

Then I make them think about it in contexts like language, Durkheim, and policy making and watch their little minds explode.

Yeah it’s got a reputation for exactly this. It’s a terrible movie, but the ending is a completely stupid and unearned tearjerker.

Click.

I absolutely consider Phantom Tollbooth a masterpiece. There’s nothing else like it, and it has extraordinary persistence.

I really wasn’t attracted to my now husband at all when we met. I remember also really disliking his smell (not BO, just regular pheromones or whatever).

11 years later we are extremely happily married and he’s sexy as fuck. His appearance hasn’t changed (except that he’s actually a little overweight now and looks a decade older) but every day he’s just hotter and hotter. Not like a “I just love him so much on the inside.” Like I genuinely perceive him to be extremely physically attractive (and equally good to smell) and look back on early days with complete confusion.

n=1 so grain of salt and whatnot, but I’d say if you’re vibing enough to make this a question worth asking then it’s probably worth giving it a shot to see if attraction develops

Edit: Please don’t actually tell them you’re not attracted to them though. That’s weird and unnecessary. You don’t need to lie either, just don’t comment on their appearance until/unless you start to notice those little things that have grown on you.

I’m 4/5 typically but I will get flashes of level 1 gore. Not randomly or frequently (thankfully), but like if I am reminded of a particular kind of injury I find very distressing I will see it very vividly for just a moment. Not fun.

My dreams are also really vivid.

If you have a good understanding of what grad school actually is, you know it’s not going to be college+, and you’re still excited? Go for it! Just go in with the attitude that this is the start of a career path (not school) with many branches along the way. Most people you’ll work with will act like your options are 1) aim for TT at an R1 or 2) cut your losses and go into industry. Those are both legit paths, but pay attention to what you’re loving and hating about the experience.

Maybe you absolutely love teaching or mentorship or grant-writing or data analysis or giving conference talks or science communication or managing a lab or any of the other billion things you have to be responsible for at some point. There are career paths between the extremes that can let do so the stuff you actually like doing, and they exist both in and outside of academia. If you go in letting yourself get excited about whatever the hell you actually get excited about, you can figure out what the path you actually want could look like and prioritize those things that don’t make you miserable.

• a PhD who voluntarily pursued an instructional faculty track at an R1 where I never again have to backseat the needs of my students and my love of pedagogy behind desperately looking for research funding because publish-or-perish even though o have at bare minimum 3 months a year to devote entirely to whatever research I am excited about in the moment…or play video games if I prefer

Don’t fight, guys. This is academia. You’re both wrong.

I mean, GPT 3.5 consistently quotes my dissertation and conference papers back to me when I ask it anything related to my (extremely niche, but still) research interests. It’s definitely had access to plenty of publications for a while without managing to make any sense of them.

Alternatively, and probably more likely, my papers are incoherent and it’s not GPT’s fault. If 8.0 gets tenure track maybe it will learn to ignore desperate ramblings of PhD students. Once 9.0 gets tenured though I assume it will only reference itself.

The ascend power from Tears of the Kingdom. Not so much in my literal real life, but any time someone in a show/movie is being chased or is trapped somewhere or even just stuck in an awkward situation I expect them to just fly through the ceiling and leave all their pursuers with question marks over their heads.

I actually totally agree. All people should begin worthy of our respect simply because we are humans, and our language should reflect that. Where the break is for me is that (again, for me) honorifics and similar terms imply hierarchical respect or deference, and that’s where the “earned respect” comes in. My respect for you as an equal is yours to lose; my respect for you as superior is yours to earn. In my language community, regular old please and thank you communicate the first kind, while honorifics convey the second.

I am also midwestern, and I have a problem with both miss and ma’am. The entire fact that there are two of them (and just the one for men) implies that age determines some portion of a woman’s societal value.

So as a fellow midwesterner, I’m not sure I agree with the idea that this is fully regionalized rather than a vaguer community-based (your church, your town, your parents’ profession, your school system…). I do hear that you want to be authentic to your own values and upbringing and completely appreciate that. But I’d consider whether the point of politeness terms and honorifics is to make you, the speaker, feel like you’re doing the right thing or about making your addressee feel seen and valued. If it’s the second, then you might consider whether it’s worth developing a new way of showing respect that can feel equally authentic in contexts where you may be unintentionally be making others uncomfortable.

Most decent people don’t want the second kind of respect. I know for me it makes me feel icky thinking that someone has muted themselves because they’re afraid of making me angry. Mind you I don’t think poorly of anyone who says it, ever, because they’re just doing what they were taught and trying to be polite.

Strong agree. I do not want to be shown deference if I’m not in an explicit position of authority and I do now want to shown respect if I haven’t earned it. (I also resent being asked to show deference or respect when it isn’t merited.) General politeness, like please and thank you, goes a long way toward demonstrating that you respect the person as an equal, which feels much more respectful to me than imposing some kind of arbitrary implied hierarchy of unearned respect between strangers.

I feel this way too. I know nearly who calls me ma’am is intending to be courteous and I don’t hold it against them. That said, knowing they are well intended doesn’t make me less uncomfortable.

Also the idea of sir being the term of respect for all men and even boys but ma’am being for “older” women adds some baked in unavoidable sexism, no matters how genuinely-not-actually-sexiest the speaker is. There are just necessary built in assumptions about the addressee when you have to choose between ma’am and miss (or similar). The implication is that societal value of women, and not men, is age-determined. The former often makes a woman feel undesirably old and the latter often makes her feel infantalized. It’s the same as the Mr./Mrs./Miss situation, where moving just to Mr. and Ms. alleviates that tension a bit. No clear answer for sir and ma’am honorifics though.

I’m a developmental psychologist, and the biggest thing is people just not knowing what “psychologist” means.

The tl;dr here is:

Most psychologists aren’t therapists. Most therapists aren’t psychologists. If you’re looking for quality mental health care, don’t revere the “doctor.”

A “psychologist” refers to someone with a PhD in psychology (or someone who does psychological research within an interdisciplinary field, like education or human development). Critically, a psychologist is a researcher (and often an educator at the college+ level). Psychology is a massive field, and the most common subfields are cognitive, developmental, social, clinical, and neurobio.

A “clinical psychologist” is a research psychologist is the particular subfield of clinical psychology. Along with research, clinical psychologists usually learn clinical psychotherapy practices and then may (or may not) choose to incorporate offering therapy into their career. A similar path is the “PsyD” (doctor of psychology) which also falls under the “psychologist” heading. Like a clinical psych PhD, a PsyD has had advanced training in research and practice, but the balance of the degree leans much more toward practice. People who opt for a PsyD rather than PhD usually plan to pursue a fully clinical career, but are qualified to do research as well.

A “therapist” is someone who is trained and licensed to provide clinical psychotherapy. Most therapists in the US have a master’s degree in social work (or a few others, like counseling psychology), specialized clinical training in one or more areas or treatments, and additional state licensure requirements. Clinical and counseling psychologists (with PhDs) can act as therapists if they get and maintain licenses, but this is a small fraction of therapists. PsyDs make up another chunk, but the majority do not have a terminal PhD/PsyD.

As a psychologist, I don’t say this because I think my PhD makes me better than someone with an MSW — the reverse! I hear people get advice to not see a therapist if they are “just” a social worker without a PhD. Meanwhile people come up to my dumbass self and think I am qualified to act as a therapist or like I know anything about clinical or abnormal psychology. Like, wanna know how 2-year-olds and 12-year-olds use nonverbal signals like shrugs to facilitate conversational interaction differently from each other and from adults? No? Then I am not the person you’re looking for. Go talk to that extremely knowledgeable and well-trained person with an MA.

…Meanwhile a “psychiatrist” is a whole other thing. They have an MD and can prescribe medication. Very rarely they may also offer psychotherapy, but that’s hard to make happen in the US a healthcare system.