I think you have to ignore people you only see when filtered through botox, plastic surgery, a professional makeup artist, and a camera (I'm not saying all of this is the case with Romijn). And once you've made that correction you'll see that old white people old.
30 years ago Rebecca Romijn was 10 years old.
Also, I'm not sure if celebrity-models that can and will spend unlimited amounts of money to remain young-looking count as a separate race.
I'm terrible at estimating the age of people in general.
Nah, celebrities don't count, and I think white people show their age very well, being intimately acquainted with them as I am. I was just trying to explain how I wandered down this path in the first place, before everybody jumped all over me to doing the liberal-contrarian "Isn't the world secretly conforming to conservative tropes, when you think about it?" Slate thing.
30 years ago Rebecca Romijn was 10 years old.
Oh, sure. What I meant is that for the class of 2017, Rebecca Romijn will have always looked 15 years old.
There's a bit on 30 Rock about this. It's in the episode when Tracy's adult son shows up.
You're just trying to make me feel bad.
If I were going to ignorantly stereotype, I'd say that white people on average get wrinkly/saggy younger than members of any other ethnicity I can think of offhand.
But I'm generally terrible at estimating ages -- I have about four possible ranges for adult-height people: Kid, which goes from high school into the early twenties, Adult but not really aging yet, which goes from kid up to around my age in the early forties; Middle-aged, which is anyone who's obviously no longer in their thirties; and Old. Within those ranges, I have no idea at all.
People in the broadly-defined category of "middle-age" look a lot younger than they used to, assuming they are in good health and have enough economic stability to take decent care of themselves, get enough sleep, etc.
Or maybe its just that I look at middle-aged people differently now that I am solidly in that demographic.
Rebecca Romijn will have always looked 15 years old.
Who she?
OK I can google with the best of them. She looks like a person who has never had to do anything but attend to their own appearance in her life; but she looks like a middle aged person in that category. Good for her. She does her job and she does it well. Other people have other jobs, other priorities.
11: Funny how that works. Anyone up to around sixty is now sort of in my age bracket. And I continue to be startled by fully adult, interesting, accomplished people who are a lot younger than I am.
Vs. 10, consider the weathering hypothesis.
Are there any races which are somehow distinctively non-caucasian which are still equally light in color to white people?
Plenty of Asians are paler than plenty of Caucasians.
If you don't have freckles, you're not doing "pale" correctly.
I have, although I perform red-faced somewhat better than pale.
I wonder if people are better or worse at estimating the age of the lightest Asians compared with people who are closely related but darker-skinned.
The truth (and this really is the truth) is that poorer people age faster regardless of race.
Of course, given her privilege, Heebie's doesn't mention this.
What? Stephen King's ageless-yet-wizened magical Native American had a hard-scrabble life of poverty. Ridiculous.
Being the subject of a Rod Stewart song really ages Maggie.
There was some doc about veterans of high school rival football teams whose players, now in their mid-30s, ie my age, suit up to play each other again. The milieu, AFAICR was a middle/lower middle class town in New Jersey. It was really striking (to me) how old and decrepit all the people looked.
Well, I have found this interesting, with a whole lot of data on white people from the movies. It has seemed to me in most cases that people have at least two "breaks" when their faces change to something not entirely recognizable, or recognizable as qualitatively different. The first is in the early to mid-20s when looks settle in until somewhere around the 50-55+. Lucky lucky dude that has this inevitability postponed. Gary Cooper 1930, 1940, 1960. The Cary Grant of North by Northwest feels entirely different from the Grant of Notorious or Monkey Business. Go check it out and disagree if you like.
Maybe it is partly in carriage and demeanor. And as you can tell, this applies mostly or only to men. At least for me.
Tanaka Kikuyo does this little skip up the bank of a hill in a 1930 film and does it again in Sandakan No 8 in 1975. Damn if it don't look like the same woman to me.
Asians may age better. They're usually thinner.
I was going to blame relative poverty, culture, and calzones, but it was striking.
27: Calzones are twice a deadly as pizza because grain is above and below the cheese.
25: Throw down! I challenge Moby to a cute-off!
Ah, it was Easton and Phillipsburg, NJ. Doc was called "Replay." You can look up the pictures and see if you agree.
O.K., but no feet. I've got toe issues.
I disagree with 21.1, based on a survey of 120 year old Ukrainian peasants.
Sunlight, hard work, suffering, worry, tragedy all might "age" people for specific decades. I partially disagree that wrinkles denote age. What does "age" mean? Is there a "as young as you feel?" Betty White is kinda hot. I've seen 15 year olds with thousand mile stares and lonely codger shuffles.
The truth (and this really is the truth) is that poorer people age faster regardless of race.
Yeah, 21.1 nails it. I live in one of the poorest parts of SF, and I realized lately that that's skewed my sense of "normal." Yesterday I was temping at an ad agency that's surrounded by other similarly SWPL employers. When I went outside to eat my lunch at a nearby park area, I was amazed by how youthful and healthy all the lunch-breaking workers looked: skin a-glow, bodies toned, etc. It seemed like I'd fallen through the cracks of the universe into a television show. Not that I watch television.
And yes, some of this is doubtless my being racist, sure.
37: That's the whole other end of the state. Outside of sharing a couple of senators and the electoral college votes, it really doesn't have much to do with me.
An alternate theory is that there are some people who can guess ages but most characterize people the way LB does (mid-twenties to early fifties are all one clump). I say that because when I ask people my age, perhaps a third will be within a year. Everyone else tends to guess ten years younger (which I attribute to a jeans and sneakers wardrobe, mostly. Maybe good posture helps. I don't even dye the grey streak.). So I mostly think that people are bad at guessing ages in general.
re 21.1: The difference in appearance between the moms I see at Caroline and Joey's schools and the moms I teach at Last Chance Community College is quite striking.
39: That's how I feel about that part of NJ. They root for the Eagles and shit over there.
They root for the Eagles and shit over there.
That's obviously much, much worse. Eagle's fans boo small children.
I guess Eagles/Philly fandom could explain the premature aging on its own, without even the double deadly death trap that is the calzone.
I don't know to what degree smoking correlates with poverty, but smokers definitely age faster judging from the folks I see clustered outside enjoying a cigarette. It's one of the reasons I quit so often.
I say that because when I ask people my age
I think the closest I ever come to asking people my age is cackling at them and screeching "Back when I was a girl" as I explain how you used to have to Shepardize cases in paper books, and figure out song lyrics by arguing with your friends about them.
That particular part of PA/NJ can switch to NY teams in a pinch if they need to. Yankees hats are common. They get NY TV stations there.
Easton itself is a mostly working-class town that's fallen on hard times, and not recovered quite as much as other parts of the area.
Shepardize cases in paper books
Did you ever actually do this in practice? I remember being taught to do it in law school, but I'm pretty sure I've always only "Shepardized" electronically as an actual lawyer.
As a summer associate, but not afterwards. That was for an elderly partner who didn't quite believe that electronic databases were reliable -- he also wanted a final round of cite-checking done in paper books.
There are so many body-image, ageist, classist etc and cultural issues floating round here that the racism has become a little irrelevant. What, wrinkles are the baddest evillll?
Is it really all that to be able to do all that stuff, like 200 ethnic restaurants, 16 high difficulty cliffs and 6 triathlons in a year dude! At 40! Or still able to plow the fields at 70? WTF?
Rather than sitting under the Boddhi tree or on the front porch chewing and spitting? Doing nothing is not old at 30 it's fucking wise because drinking deep at the fount of experience just gives a fucking bellyache.
Doing lots and lots of stuff as long as you can is great huh? Nah, but society has its reasons to make you believe it. Useless is so much better.
If memory serves, Rebecca Romijn, in person, is startlingly luminous. Jerry O'Connell, not really.
Also, in case anyone in Generation X happens to be in need of a reminder of the encroaching insult and injury of time, Tony Danza (i) is entirely grey and (ii) wears reading glasses on the exercise bike.
51: Are you trying to be the Eric Alterman of Unfogged commenters?
God, no, I hate that namedropping wanker.
53: Yes, we all know how much you detest name-dropping.
Okay, I was giving this 50 comments to see whether anyone would agree with him that Wyclef looks 26, but you've all failed me.
I'm generally judged to be 5-10 years older than I am, while Lee is almost universally guessed at 10+ years younger. This is probably based on how we present ourselves as well as anything race-related, but I do have more gray hair. (Hooray!)
Recently a looked in the mirror and said "Wait a minute, this is not my face. My face is like this one, but significantly less droopy."
It wasn't a moment of wounded vanity so much as alienation. What is going on here? How did this happen?
Let's see Wyclef in ten years. Men fall off a cliff in their 50s.
My contention is that women do age more gradually but steadily than men do, and a 40 yr old woman looks more different than her 30 year old self than a 40 yr old man than himself at 30. But a sixty year old woman looks more like herself at 30 than a man. Ryu Chishu at 80 was unrecognizable (and he is quite distinctive), but I could have picked out Sugimura Haruko at 80 with a glance.
My theory is that this has to do with changes in relative estrogen to testosterone levels.
56: It sounds more like Talking Heads lyrics.
But was in my beautiful house with my beautiful wife. That part was fine.
Huh, I thought that was my brain. Have I ever told you all about the time I pretended to tear my shirt while singing along to "MY GOD, WHAT HAVE I DONE?" and then looked down and noticed I had actually torn my shirt?
re: 21.1
Yeah, I noticed (on the very rare occasions that I'm back in central Scotland) that quite a lot of my high school peers and old friends look _ancient_. Not all of them poor, per se, as it's a fairly poor area but with a wide mix of income levels, but on average quite a bit poorer than the SE of England. The Scottish diet, and smoking, has obviously had a big impact. That said, a couple of them don't seem to have aged at all. It's obviously a bell-curve distribution, and some people are freaky outliers. The guy who is married to my ex [a year old than both of us] looks like he's in his mid 20s, while she looks like she's about 50.
I didn't age much at all between 25 and 35. There's essentially no difference other than slight changes in weight in photos over that period. Then about five or six years ago I suddenly aged at least 10 years. PITA.
By "Scottish diet," do you mean haggis or the "whatever fits in the deep fryer" dinner?
Whatever fits in the deep fryer. I mean, it's a bit of a cliche, and I'd expect that a fair few of my ex-classmates are as bourgeois foodie as anyone else, but it's still, generally, a diet high in saturated fat and salt.
It's probably stress, more than anything else. Look at CEOs.
I'd think frying CEOs would cut stress.
of course 66 does not preclude haggis, blood pudding, or any other breakfast staples of the like.
There's 5 million ways to fry a CEO.
I know plenty of white people who are shockingly well-preserved. None of them smokers, of course.
My general impression is that Asian people in general and Chinese people in particular wind up being very well-preserved. Not always, but often enough to be noticeable.
Just the other day I was talking to a significantly younger male friend of mine, and realized that he had way, way more grey hair than me. Of course, one of my female Jr. High buddies went grey in college, and I've known several guys who have lost most of their hair in their early to mid 20s. So hair is often going to be a wild card.
Mostly I think I have aged pretty well, of course, being fat means less face wrinkles generally.
There was a guy in my sister's class who had very obvious male pattern baldness while in high school.
Buck had his prom date run her fingers through his hair and say "Wow, you're really going bald." He was finished going bald before he was twenty. On the bright side, he's hardly changed since.
He was finished going bald before he was twenty.
Wow.
I had a couple grey hairs in junior high. In my mid-thirties, a streak came in, but besides that, my overall level of brunette-ness seems to be holding steady. I'm glad I didn't dye it when it looked like a greying trend.
Buck had his prom date run her fingers through his hair and say "Wow, you're really going bald."
You really should have been more sensitive about these things.
IMX much of age estimation has to do with movement; fast = young and sure = young. I can pass for 10 to 15 years younger as long as I'm not seen getting out of a hard chair after an hour in some dark restaurant. (Also, the old man's shuffle is partly and sometimes a defense against murder by Fluffy. She keeps trying though.)
re: 67
Epidemiologically speaking, of course, CEOs and the like are way way way healthier and less likely to get sick than their underlings. The whole executive stress thing is a myth.
76: I was in middle school at the time, so not all that interpersonally smooth yet.
75: I am greying very, very, very slowly, which is annoying me no end -- I'd really like it to look more definitely grey at some point so I don't keep on trying to figure out how obtrusive it is (at this point, in bright sunlight, quite, in indoor lighting, not particularly).
The Scottish diet, and smoking, has obviously had a big impact.
Being from the States I don't have much room to talk, but the high incidence of chronically horrendous diet and seriously messed up levels of heavy drinking I routinely witnessed while living in Edinburgh was the one thing I didn't much like about the place. I still get a little depressed when I think about my accidental foray into a Farmfoods. And my bedroom window overlooked the Royal Mile so I did get a heavier than normal exposure to late night crowds.
Also to bagpiping buskers, of course.
I just feel like my children look so much younger than I do.
My child is finally losing the baby fat on his legs. It makes him look old, like a 3rd grader.
Sally looks alarmingly adult. And, since she's started playing rugby, rather like a domestic violence victim. I wasn't picturing her coming home from practice with quite so many identifiable cleat marks on her, let alone the rest of the scrapes and bruises.
Are you looking forward to being entirely grey, or when you get entirely grey, do you think you'll dye it? If you do dye it, would you be trying to replicate your natural hair color, or experimenting with other hues?
I don't think I'll dye it, and I wouldn't bother changing my hair color now, but if I were coloring my hair anyway, I figure that's the time to try chestnuts and auburns and dark reds.
Go straight to blue hair. Old ladies and Katy Perry roll with it.
Looking forward to all, or a definite part, being grey -- if I were going to dye to cover, I'd start now rather than waiting. I went red for a couple of years in law school, and it was too annoying to keep up -- there is no way I'm going to get around to doing anything like that reliably every three weeks or so.
Yeah. For all that I think that I'd experiment if I were dying my hair anyway, the truth is that that sort of effort (=takes more than two minutes) doesn't fit with my grooming regime.
Mostly, I really don't like the look of grey roots on dyed hair. Some kinds of unkempt (most kinds of unkempt. Who am I kidding -- basically all kinds of unkempt) I'm fine with, but I really don't want to be walking around with a half-inch of grey under dyed brown hair, and I would be all the time. And grey looks great on lots of people, it's just the suspense that's killing me.
What's the suspense? Whether you will silver? How long you'll be mostly brown with some grey?
You could put up a photo and let us photoshop the hair grey in various shades and patterns.
What it will end up looking like -- some grey looks great, some not so much. However it turns out, I'm leaving it, but it's annoying not knowing.
I suppose I could bleach it platinum and worry about dark roots rather than grey roots.
The combination of inordinate vanity and crippling laziness is a difficult one.
Just add poor taste and you can wear Ed Hardy.
78: That wasn't clear on my part. I was using them as examples of people with low stress. They keep their hair, look young, while poor people who worry constantly about finances age rapidly. This is, of course, just my impression and not based on any hard data.
re: 85
That's sort of in the nature of rugby, I suppose. We have one teenage girl who trains at our kickboxing club, and I always wonder how she explains away the bruises at school. Not that they anywhere near are as bad as rugby injuries, mind.
re: 85
Rucking is nasty - hence the cleat marks.
98: Sally explains the injuries by bragging shamelessly about how tough she is. Acorn, tree, proximity. (Not so much the toughness, but the shameless bragging.)
99: One of the girls I knew in school who'd played rugby had to quit because of a spinal compression injury she'd gotten from rucks. Made me want to stay the hell away from the sport.
Great, now I'll be googling 'rugby spinal compression injury' all night.
Maybe rugby isn't the safe alternative to American football that people have started thinking it is.
Googling rugby injuries probably isn't wise if you don't want sleepless nights. Although I'd expect in teenage girls its not quite as risky as 200lb blokes. Not that I ever played much. Four or five years at school, but only in ordinary PE classes. I expect people who played competitively (school, or local clubs, or whatever) like ajay or dsquared have more direct insight. Alex maybe played league rather than union?
102: Sorry! FWIW, it wasn't debilitating or paralyzing (when I knew her, anyway). It was more that she was at risk of a really bad injury if she kept playing, IIRC.
http://jpubhealth.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2010/06/25/pubmed.fdq047.full
Yeah, I did a certain amount of research when I was worrying about it before, and came down on "not actually safe, but not dangerous enough that I'm going to stop her, particularly given the size/strength difference between the girls she's playing with and grown men."
re: 107
Yeah. The 10 injuries per 1000 player hours in that report doesn't seem [to me] excessively high. Just as an impression anyway. I don't know how it compares to other sports. I had more than 10 injuries per 1000 hours from jogging, ffs [but I am injury prone].
1) Are calzones really worse than cheesesteaks?
2) I heard from an (Asian) friend that non-white people have firmer skin (something about collagen? I am not a dermatologist) and age better, especially Asian women. This friend told me skin cream companies were investigating this, but I haven't researched googled it myself.
3) People in China are terrible at guessing my age, sometimes going up to 15 years under my real age. I get a lot of "why did your parents let you come to China all by yourself?" comments, and then people recoil in horror when I tell them my real age. I think part of it is I'm not obviously wrinkly and I have a thin face. Small face = young and small in China, apparently.
4) Sun, too much plastic surgery, smoking, bad diet, stress, sleep deprivation, and meth all make you look old. The first four are why starlets look old (most 'cute' teen actresses will look 40 by the time they're 25), and the last five all are Stuff Poor People Do.
One of my grandmothers had long, snowy-white hair, which she wore pulled back in a nun. Her hair, along with her perennial outfit of floor-length black serge skirt and men's dress shirt, made her look like a nun in mufti.
I used to look forward to having long white hair, but my parents are in their late 60s now, and my mom's hair is mostly black and my dad's is salt-and-pepper, so it looks less likely. Gray hair is less appealing to me than the white.
110.1: how'd she talk the nun into that?
Looking forward to all, or a definite part, being grey
My mother reports becoming a gray-haired late-middle-aged white woman has meant more strangers come up to her for directions and assistance than ever before; she thinks because she's now the least-threatening demographic anyone can imagine.)
||
I wonder if there is a single one of our supposedly "patriotic" CIA torturers or Blackwater mercenaries who would emulate what Witold Pilecki did for his country?
||>
I think 95 is my personal mouseover. (I'm not always sure what my vanity is, but live in awe of the brother who had the guts to say to my mom, "Buying brand-names shoes is vanity? USING BIG WORDS is vanity!")
107
... particularly given the size/strength difference between the girls she's playing with and grown men."
This cuts both ways, she is also more fragile than a grown man.
116: Not if she's playing in her weight class.
live in awe of the brother who had the guts to say to my mom, "Buying brand-names shoes is vanity? USING BIG WORDS is vanity!"
I'm thrown into a spiral of sputtering at that, I admit.
The square cube law works in favor of smaller people -- how hard they're hitting each other is a function of mass, but strength of connective tissue is a function of the cross-sectional area of the relevant tissues. In relation to how hard someone else her size can hit her, she's less fragile than a 220 lb man, not more. But I do appreciate the effort to make me nervous.
120: the primary defense against concussive injuries is neck strength relative to head mass, not connective tissue strength. And kids have bigger heads relative to body size.
Little kids do -- Sally's proportioned like an adult by now.
I'm not particularly vain about my appearance -- look at me, how could I be? -- but will admit to being pleased at the way my hair has gone grey. It was very useful to me in my 20s and 30s, when looking older (and presumably wiser) was professionally important. Now I'm pretty much invisible, and so that's still fine.
I would like to further say to anyone who might wish to discuss rugby injuries and my daughter: shut up shut up shut up shut up shut up lalalalalalala I can't hear you.
120
The square cube law works in favor of smaller people -- how hard they're hitting each other is a function of mass, but strength of connective tissue is a function of the cross-sectional area of the relevant tissues. In relation to how hard someone else her size can hit her, she's less fragile than a 220 lb man, not more. But I do appreciate the effort to make me nervous.
Women aren't just miniature men, they have different proportions and in some ways they are more fragile even allowing for their lower weight. ACL injuries for example .
123: I generally look much younger than my age--and that has not necessarily served me well in my professional life. OTOH, I'm not going take up any of Britta's 8 things (aside from the stress) to make up the difference.
My visit to Anchorage (whence I return home tomorrow) coincides with a major Native convention. In the airport, I was average height. In the hotel, I'm a giant. And boy am I greyer than a whole lot of people who otherwise look my age or so.
I looked younger than my age for a long time -- into my 40s -- but it's fading now. Oh well. We all have to get used to this eventually.
On the hair turning grey or silver or white: I feel as though there must be a rule of thumb based on what your youthful hair color is/was. Most of the people I know who had what I'll call sandy blonde hair are turning to a kind of iron grey. Yellow blonde might be different; I don't know any of them in later age. Reddish-brownish-blonde seems more like to turn more silver.
No? (For some reason I haven't known many dark haired people for enough decades to make a judgment on dark hair. My mother, dark-haired, colored her hair when she started to go grey/white.)
One thing I quite liked about playing Rugby was the steady stream of minor abrasions, cuts, bruises and whatnot. Let you know you were still alive and fucking up the other fuckers. The occasional "awkwardly caught in an enormously powerful mindless vise" moments, not so much. But Sally will be fine.
Some rugby player put his thumb up the butt of some opposing player while in a scrum or something. I read in the news. It was in Australia or something but I assume it is illegal everywhere.
||
Maps!
(Found in the general vicinity of Halford and other Los Angelenos IIRC.)
|>
"Antipodes?"
"Why you dirty man, I've never tipped does."
My brief but exciting memories of rugby suggest that 131 could be an honest accident. Probably not, but I was clawing for air.
I divide aging into the effects of being outdoors a lot, which it's now confusing to call 'weathering', and serious bad health. Plenty of people are wrinkly and splotched and still bounding up cliffsides. Though many of the ones I know are professors, so probably pretty damn healthy to start with, and they've had health care and the benefits of high status for yonks. Wasn't the British Civil Service analyzed w/the conclusion that being high status improved your health independent of everything else they could think of?
Yes, having money improves your health.
I was just watching Bill Moyers on PBS, and he had on Matt taiibbi and Christina something that wrote the Plutocrats book, and they were basically eviscerating the financial sector for an hour. I thought it was great, but I also had the thought that, you know, Republicans aren't being irrational when they want to kill PBS.
Shit, I forget that Bill Moyers is on Friday nights. It's replayed sometime on Sat. or Sun., and also on Monday night (I'm pretty sure).
Did they discuss whether or not the finger up the butt was accidentally done?
132 is amazing and great.
Also, the Thomas Guide (still have one!) didn't come out until 1946! People in Southern California must have been very unhappy before then.
Intentional, but the financial sector feels very strongly that it's necessary to stay competitive.
Nobody said Republicans were being irrational in pursuit of their apparent goals. (There is an argument to be made that they're irrational in pursuing such extreme income inequality, since it destabilizes not only the economy but also the polity at large. You can only push people so far before they say "enough". Republicans, or plutocrats, are not being smart on this front. They're not a unified bunch, though.)
Sometimes they seem more vindictive than rational.
132 is indeed super duper great.
143: I don't know who "they" is. There's the defund PBS crowd, and there's the cut Medicaid crowd -- they're roughly the same people. But the real plutocrats need some law 'n' order.* Top CEOs have been begging government types not to let the country go over the so-called fiscal cliff, because it would cause a second recession, among other things.
Point is that Republicans aren't actually a unified bunch -- your basic plutocrat doesn't mind funding PBS, probably.
* I heard that Al Gore's net worth went from $2 million when he left office to $100 million today. Huh. Is he a plutocrat? I have no idea how he made that money, so I don't know. I'm not trying to confuse matters; I'm just not sure that Republicans have a monopoly on plutocracy.
Further to 132, you just can't beat the LA Times comment section:
My guess is that the vast majority of this trove will be deemed worthless, and will be quietly junked in a few months. Just because something is old does not make it rare or valuable. And I don't think the library should seek what is euphemistically referred to as "a grant" to store maps that have no historical value.
What is "grant" a euphemism for? A blowjob?
That would explain why everybody keeps seeking grants against longer and longer odds.
Continuing 145: I don't want to be an asshole here, but I also understand that Chris Matthews (MSNBC) has a $5 million/year contract -- or maybe it's only $3 million per year, I forget -- and while I have no proof of this, it doesn't seem an outrageous possibility. Obviously Chris Matthews doesn't want to defund PBS and isn't particularly vindictive against poor people or the average man person. We have to distinguish between the system that overly rewards some people from those who want to actively crush the needy underfoot - though that gets confusing, since the system in question does do the crushing, so, um, er.
re: 135
Wasn't the British Civil Service analyzed w/the conclusion that being high status improved your health independent of everything else they could think of?
Yes, it's a very famous study, and part of what I was alluding to in 78.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitehall_Study
My visit to Anchorage (whence I return home tomorrow) coincides with a major Native convention. In the airport, I was average height. In the hotel, I'm a giant.
Heh. Charley is a giant among Eskimos!
Having spent much of the past two days at that same convention, I'll just say that it's given me a renewed appreciation for the astonishing physical variation within a single traditional "race." The people I've seen cover pretty much the whole range of human variation along several axes.
I still get a little depressed when I think about my accidental foray into a Farmfoods
+1. even the name radiates depression.
109.3: However, I hear tell that in some cultures it is commonplace to intentionally low-ball when "guessing" a lady's age? Or are the Chinese not so much bothered with this?
I think I've mentioned this before, but it is topical so I will again. When I was 28 or so, I brought my sisters (26 and 23 or so) to my office. A woman I had worked on the same floor with for two years asked if they were my daughters. I hope she just figured all white guys look the same and that she didn't really think I looked that old.
Mrs y (mid 30s at the time) was minding her older sister's babies on one occasion when somebody came up and asked if she was their grandmother. No she was not pleased. Why do you ask? But everybody involved in that encounter was white, and Mrs y did in fact look as if she was in her mid 30s, so I've no idea what was going on in the questioner's head.
Yeah, as per a previous thread on a similar topic someone once asked me if my wife was my daughter. I'm older than her by 6-7 years, and she looks young-ish for her age [so I could imagine someone guessing an 8 or 10 year gap], but this was 8-10 years ago, when I was a lot more youthful looking myself and could easily have passed for my mid to late 20s, and you'd need to be pretty crazy to think that someone else pretty obviously also in their late teens or early twenties [at the youngest] was my daughter. But it seems someone did.
re: 154
FWIW, if you'd happened upon my Mum, when she was in her late 30s, with a baby or two, it could have been either [a child or grandchild] or both; as my brother and nephew were babies at the same time. So a 30-something granny isn't crazily unlikely.*
* the Daily Mail tells us they are rife, taking up council houses and sponging off hard-working fascists like their readers.
In college I did the Big Brothers/Big Sisters program and I was at my little sister's middle school for some reason and some administrator implied that I was a student by asking me something class or hall pass related. I really do not look young for my age, so I think the phenomenon was much more "some middle school girls look like adults".
156. Oh, I've known 30-something grannies. But if you go and coo over a couple of babies in a shopping mall and the woman looking after them looks 34, it wouldn't be the first thing you'd think, would it?
re: 158
No, definitely not, yeah.
While my ex and I were working in the front yard, a black man in his seventies asked me and my then boyfriend if I were my ex's mom. We were both in our late twenties, and my ex is fully Asian-Am. It was hard to know which to be more puzzled about.
||
I got my absentee ballot in the mail today. I like how 5 of the 6 local offices have only one, Democratic, candidate listed. Kind of removes the need to do any research.
|>
With regard to how Asians age, I don't know how many of you remember this cartoon from when it first made the rounds.
Whoops, screwed up the link: this cartoon
(I've volunteered, and have to stay at the gate. If I don't get on this plane, I'll go pick up a paeklje.)
OT: Who is Russell Arben Fox? (yes, I know I can google but I'm asking for an overview)
168: Mormon guy who sometimes comments at Crooked Timber and has a blog called In Medias Res which, IIRC, contained some posts about Harry Potter that amused me once upon a time? That's about all I know.
169: I knew I'd heard the name before, but couldn't recall where. He has a post here that I was wading through, and I was a bit startled when I got to the Mormon bit -- does that color my opinion? I don't know. God knows I shouldn't get hung up on this 'as a leftist, shall I vote for Obama' business, but the question bugs me, so I've kept reading.
It turns out that John Emerson has commented in that Russell Arben Fox thread.
I like how 5 of the 6 local offices have only one, Democratic, candidate listed.
Occasionally there will be a race with only a Democrat and a Green-Rainbow candidate. I think Green-Rainbow is the MA branch of the Green Party.
150: I was a giant in Hong Kong and a dwarf in Scandinavia. It was quite noticeable when in crowds. Yes, there's plenty of variation but those Vikings tend towards huge.
||
Case for Irrational Voting FDL, yet another analysis of lesser-evilism and the electoral college by an activist.
But this in the comments is a logical point that is new and important
The number of independents in those swing states are higher than the rest of the country for a reason: that's where the highest discontent of [sic - with] the two parties occur. If the electorate were rational, then this is where 3rd parties would be most popular, not the least.
I don't know if this is true, or what it might mean. If Jill Stein were projected to get 20-30% of the vote in Ohio, how would this change the two majors' national strategy? But it is something to think about.
170,171:Emerson's notion of "branding" is too gentle, and is connected to my thoughts about tribal loyalty and social group cohesion/coercion, and liberal authoritarianism. There is a comment in that thread that essentially says "If you don't totally commit to Obama right here right now I can fairly say you hate women."
Fuck you
|>
Right, the problem with liberals is too much tribal loyalty.
Liberals take forever at the Whole Foods butcher counter.
re: 152
No, the Chinese appreciate frankness towards others' physical appearance where we prefer politeness. "You look fat" (not a compliment), "why is your skin so dark?" or "you have a pimple on your nose" are perfectly appropriate greetings to strangers. I remember once I was showing a friend some photos of me in China which were about a year old. She looked at them critically and said, "hmm... you've lost weight, but you looked better back then because your boobs were larger." I can't imagine an American friend saying that.
I really think it's a combo of having a small face/thinnish build, where the association is that foreigners are all big and American especially are fat, so small foreigner = young, and looking young/having a young affect in general.
How are Chinese on frankness about how food tastes? I'm on two years of eating moon cakes and giving polite compliments when really I'm thinking the Chinese either suck at dessert or don't tell anybody else about the good desserts.
They invented gunpowder and the west was happy to adopt it. But the west invents frosting but they're too good for us and they won't take our example.
174: If Jill Stein were projected to get 20-30% of the vote in Ohio, how would this change the two majors' national strategy?
Bob, there are a few pieces (with discussion thread) in The Nation on third parties, here and here.
These are chiefly about the potential impact of third party candidates' participation in presidential debates; there are rules about allowing them to participate, having to do with electoral viability. I didn't look any further -- just chanced upon those this afternoon.
For the rest of 174, I have to bow out. I'm not in the mood for a fight tonight.
you've lost weight, but you looked better back then because your boobs were larger.
IME, this is something that American women who get concerned with looking appealing to men don't always appreciate. When American women worry about their bodies, they focus mostly on being thin, but this is not nearly as huge a priority for American men.
Actually now that I think about it, there's a parallel here in the (much less intense) world of male body insecurities. Het men concerned with looking good focus on looking more buff than other men, which may not actually be the biggest priority for het women.
Does the desire to show up people of the same gender wind up outweighing the desire to appeal to the opposite gender? (Restricting our attention to het Anglo-American culture.)
Het men concerned with looking good focus on looking more buff than other men...
It's maybe a corollary of the "I don't have to outrun the bear, just you" rule.
What is the biggest priority for het women?
171 took a while to compose, because I was trying to think of something more insightful and inclusive than "you know, a lot of dudes dig fat chicks," which was probably just my original impulse.
Fitness-wise, my goal is to be in good enough shape so that if I get a heart attack, the medical people will know I at least tried to avoid one.
But not fit enough that I'll think something containing bean paste is a treat.
Bave's question remains unanswered!
181: Does the desire to show up people of the same gender wind up outweighing the desire to appeal to the opposite gender?
I'll take a stab at this: yes, for women, often. It's a pretty well-known phenomenon, no? Women are often (sometimes) competing for the approval of dominance over other women in the 'attractiveness' arena.
Insert all kinds of caveats about how some women don't like this at all, and/or don't have many women friends because of it, and/or decline to participate in the culture, etc.
OT: I had to watch Dancing with the Stars twice this week. This culture is doomed.
Take her to lunch and some really long dinners.
178-9:
Mooncakes are far from the only Chinese desserts. They're only available for about one month a year anyway. Try black sesame soup, red bean soup, black glutinous rice soup, glutinous rice balls in soup, tapioca/sago pudding, or tofu pudding.
Also personally I don't much care for the usual brown-skinned mooncakes, but I love snowskin mooncakes. You should try the latter if you haven't.
General Tso's Chicken is my favorite Chinese dessert.
In related news, is there a jurisdiction where it is legal to hunt Guy Fieri for sport? I'm asking for a friend myself.
"Which navy blazer is yours, Mr. Vice President?" "The one that says 'Bad Motherfucker' on it."
I like moon cakes. Slide them down to me. Fruitcake, too, especially that Texas one.
196: I find it a little sweet.
Black chicken, white chicken: As long as it's sweet, it's a good dessert.
No rice at all here so I think I'll order a fried egg sandwich.
Mooncakes are far from the only Chinese desserts. They're only available for about one month a year anyway. Try black sesame soup, red bean soup, black glutinous rice soup, glutinous rice balls in soup
- You got soup?
- We got soup.
- What kind of soup?
- All kinds of soup.
We got beet soup. (That's the sweet soup.)
Then there's meat soup, parakeet soup,
Shredded wheat soup, concrete soup,
And the special today: dirty feet soup.
I had some awesome chinese fried dough dessert thing at Shanghai Dumpking King not long ago. Yum yum yum, that's what I say. Yum yum yum.
Topically, I've been talking to a black man who I thought was a dozen years younger than he was.
Also topically, last week at the gym I ran into a retired black guy I used to work with and told him he was the best -preserved 68-year old in the world. I had no idea he was that old, I just thought he had retired very early.
I don't think you can retire from being black.
210: even if you manage it, all you get to be is weird, judging by Michael Jackson.
re:178
If you're not into red beans and weird gelatinous stuff, traditional Chinese desserts aren't all that great. They make a lot of cakes, but they taste like the cakes you buy in Chinatown--sawdust and shortening. As much as I love Chinese food, I'm not a huge Chinese desert fan. In China, ice cream bars are popular, and some of the more expensive ones are pretty good. It's a bit of an adventure though, because the wrappings don't resemble the inside all that well. I once got a chocolate covered ice cream bar with a "surprise" in the middle and it turned out to be something that tasted like soggy communion wafers. The popsicles are probably even better than the ice cream.
I don't think anyone really likes moon cakes -- you eat them because you have to, because they're special. But there are lots of other things that are genuinely delicious, like jin duy and Macanese custard tart. Also, pineapple pastry, which I never thought I liked until I had them from a fancy Taiwanese bakery, whereupon they became my favorite thing ever. And sugar egg puff, my second favorite thing.
Shanghai Dumpking King
I love that place!
I look 10/15 years younger than my age, despite being from Philly. When I lived in Philly, I stuffed myself with cheesesteaks. I also have a tendency for binge drinking. So what's my secret? It's very simple, too simple to put into a best-selling book: Never. Go. Outside. The sun is bad, people.
215: Pasty is the new black.*
*"Black" as in "symbol of chicness," not as in "African-American." This explanation brought to you by the Standpipe Bridgeplate Department of Jokes That Require an Explanation Longer Than the Original Joke Are Rarely Worth Telling.
213 explains why clew went to bring in fruit cake. Category: desserts of obligation.
||
Reading applications for a popular liberal arts tenure track position. A hundred applications, of which probably 2/3 are totally qualified.
First, let's narrow down the 66 using semi-arbitrary cutoffs - they didn't explicitly say that they could teach X, even though I assume most competent teachers could teach a course they haven't taught before.
Next, let's whittle down the, say, 25 remaining candidates based on who we think would actually accept a low-paying job with too much work in a hick town in Texas.
Next, let's conduct phone interviews and maybe contact some references, and bring people to campus, and make some offers.
Next, let's get turned down by all of the candidates when we make our offers. Because they don't actually want to work for that little money in a hick town in Texas. And the search will have run out of money so we can't bring anyone else to campus.
So out of those 66 qualified people, many are stuck in visiting prof/adjunct hell when we'd love to have them, just because we can't figure out how to connect with the right people.
(Maybe this search will be better - we do get excellent hires. But the search committees I've been on have tended towards being duds.) Sigh.
|>
There's no way to better assess their true willingness to take the position before the interview stage? Would they not be candid for some reason, like the self-validation of being flown in, or wanting to have other offers in hand to aid negotiations elsewhere? ISTM there's some kind of potential to be mined in the 41 you ruled out. (And maybe I'm remembering things you already said here.)
If there is a better way, I'd love to implement it. Right now, my guess is that everyone feels so bedraggled and awful in the application stage that they honestly report that they'd be significantly interested in a position here.
Then by the time they come to visit, either they've worked out Plan Bs or they've got offers closer to families or they're in the running for better offers.
We consistently get feedback that the people they met on Heebie U campus were incredibly nice and friendly, but can we do better on the salary or teaching load? Or they feel they won't have time to make process on their research, (which is true.)
Do they know the salary when applying?
Probably not? We haven't yet met as a search committee, and I can't remember it being standard to put salary range on the advertisement.
That's probably an incredibly effective way to whittle down the applicant pool, actually. I might toss it out there when we meet this week that if we were more upfront about our salary limitations, we might weed out candidates who are unlikely to accept our offer.
Yeah, especially if it's that inflexible, there's not much to be lost by making it known upfront, I think.
If I had to guess, the administration won't be sufficiently transparent on salary with us, because they'll worry that it will reduce their bargaining position.
We actually have a new pres and provost since the last time I've been on a search committee, so maybe we're offering less self-sabotagingly low salaries than we used to.
sounds like you guys need to lower your standards. haven't you been through this before?
Seems weird to me not to have salary in the ad. Is that a normal academic thing? I just had a quick look at the Oxford jobs page, and whilst the top professorships don't have salaries described, all the lower fellowships, lecturer jobs etc do, as a grade and thus the money is described as between this and that.
I don't think we're exactly skimming off the strongest candidates and then getting rejected by them. It's usually how well we think they can cover the courses we need taught, and possibly help out with close departments who are short-handed.
well however weak they are, it sounds like you need to go after weaker ones. again, I think you must have adopted that strategy in the past, right? otherwise how did you fill any spots?
From what I've seen a significant fraction of tenure-track job postings don't lead to hires, even at research universities (e.g. the three places that interviewed me in 2011 failed to hire anyone that year; one of them successfully hired in 2012, the others still haven't). So I'm not sure to what extent this issue has to do with your salary and teaching load versus just being something that happens everywhere, because people have choices and sometimes turn down job offers.
Just checked our website - we just say "salary is competitive". So maybe that's honest and we're offering more money, to prevent the bind we've had before.
(I know with our math search, with our 7th offer we increased our salary offer significantly, to where the new hire was offered more than I made. Then in the next few years salary parity has been a hot topic at Heebie U.)
Seems weird to me not to have salary in the ad. Is that a normal academic thing?
I think this has come up before here. No faculty job I've ever applied for listed a salary in the ad, and I very few of the postdoc jobs did. I have noticed that UK jobs at whatever the analog of assistant professor is (lecturer? reader? your language confuses me) tend to list salary ranges, and also that by US standards they're always really low.
231 is probably right. Still, it's a shame that such an alarming amount of effort is spent on both the application side and the search committee side, and sizable stress for applicants, and the matching process goes so poorly.
228. Asilon, I think most university posts over here (LI, LII, SL) are on nationally agreed salary bands agreed with the UCU. Somehow I doubt if that applies in the land of the free and the home of the brave.
"salary is competitive"
"We pay the best 8 out of 10 faculty members."
178: Three things about moon cakes: 1) There are really, really good ones. 2) Most of them are not good. 3) Like any festival specific food, the necessity and mass production contribute to #2.
231 is true. It seems astonishing that positions with > 400 applicants can fail to find a single good fit, or find a few and fail to hire them, but it happens all the time.
selection bias: I'm happy I decided to turn down all TT offers (even R1, which is what I had thought was my "dream") and do something else. This made some of my former colleagues crazy. They're still miserable, as far as I can tell.
Remember, talking about salary in the US is taboo.
226
If I had to guess, the administration won't be sufficiently transparent on salary with us, because they'll worry that it will reduce their bargaining position.
You could put a low number in the ad and then if you are actually able to offer more that should increase your yield.
Or you could institute an application fee (perhaps refundable unless the candidate turns down an offer).
Or you could make the candidates pay for any campus visit (again perhaps refundable if they don't get an offer).
I'm astonished that your position gets only 100 applicants. My job gets sneered at by unemployed grad students, and it had 166. For a small liberal arts type place I'd expect closer to 300.
In any case, I suspect your institution is doing what a lot of institutions are doing: attempting to hire a person who would be a reach for them if the economy hadn't shattered four years ago. It's probably not the salary range, and if you want to start making your candidates pay fees for the privilege of applying you'll deserve the mess you get, but I'd take a hard look at your second cut.
If you want to get someone likely to accept an offer, perhaps look at someone who has been adjuncting or visiting with an otherwise good profile; they'll have a realistic sense of the market.
One approach is just to push your process back. The problem is that your candidates are getting better offers, so what you need to do is wait to schedule interviews until people have a better idea of what their options look like.
The general problem is that it's very hard for candidates to know in advance what sort of offers they're going to get. There were places I applied to that had no hope of competing with some of the places that ended up making me offers, but where I would have happily interviewed and whole-heartedly told them I'd be happy to go there before I had any offers in hand.
In any case, I suspect your institution is doing what a lot of institutions are doing: attempting to hire a person who would be a reach for them if the economy hadn't shattered four years ago.
Actually we're not. Of these 2/3 applicants who seem qualified, most are adjuncts, visiting profs, etc. Or ABDs with little experience.
It's probably not the salary range,
And on the searches I was on a few years ago, it was. That and the crappy location, and the heavy workload.
An annoying things about starting in January, is that I'm missing out on my first opportunity to see what hiring looks like from the school's side. I guess I'll be around for the end of the process, but I would have liked to see what the giant pool of applications actually looks like.
I'm astonished that your position gets only 100 applicants. My job gets sneered at by unemployed grad students, and it had 166. For a small liberal arts type place I'd expect closer to 300.
It's not philosophy.
I guess I missed the Chinese dessert subthread? Wife cakes ("old lady cakes"/lao po bing) are really good. They're flaky pastry around I think winter melon paste or something? Sort of chewy.
One approach is just to push your process back. The problem is that your candidates are getting better offers, so what you need to do is wait to schedule interviews until people have a better idea of what their options look like.
That's good advice.
242
... but I'd take a hard look at your second cut. ...
From heebie's description there is no reason to expect the 31 second cut candidates to be any more eager to accept an offer than the 25 survivors. You would have to look at the 34 less qualified first cut candidates for that.
Or perhaps you mean they should perform the second cut more or less solely on perceived willingness to accept an offer? Do the people who accept offers have anything in common (compared to people who reject them)?
250
Um, make that 41 second cut candidates.
249. It's good advice for a year or two. After that, when every university in the United States plays catch up until they advertise all their vacancies in May and interview for all of them in June for the following year, it becomes a recipe for chaos and darkness.
Advice to job-seekers: if the job description says "We need you to teach X, Y, and Z, and if you can teach W and Q it would be a plus" then you should explicitly address X, Y, Z, W and Q. It's perfectly fine to say "I don't have much experience in Z, but would be happy to prepare a course on it" - we just need some signal that you are actually okay fulfilling the job that we need filled.
252: But presumably that wouldn't happen - the more competitive institutions wouldn't need to delay their cycle. 231 notwithstanding.
Or they feel they won't have time to make process on their research
Does your university officially expect people to publish? If not, does the job description specify that it is fully a teaching job? I don't know from the sciences, but in the humanities there are plenty of people who would love to get a steady job that was explicitly just teaching, but you've got all these job listings that specify that you'll have to teach 4-4 and "maintain an active research agenda". Those used to make me livid, second only to the one-year positions that specified that you'd be required to advise students and help build the department.
Does your university officially expect people to publish? If not, does the job description specify that it is fully a teaching job?
Not really - there's an expectation that you'll "stay active". Student research is probably the most highly prized version of this. Attending conferences and giving a talk now and then is valuable. If you can publish 1-2 papers before you go up for tenure, then you are totally fine. If you don't, it's not a deal-breaker. Poor teaching is the only deal-breaker for tenure.
In the job description, the only thing that touches on research is the phrase "commitment to continued professional development".
I came across a job ad recently that asks for someone who "specializes" in all literature pre-1800, as well as global, ethnic, and women's writing in the 20th century, including literature in translation. Interdisciplinary methodologies encouraged. I sent it to a friend so we could laugh about it, and then she noticed that the department requires that your letter be under 400 words long. It would take 400 words to name all the subfields they expect you're an expert in.
In other news, my wolf cub has a possible two-year extension to its lifespan, so I'm only applying for jobs that won't make me commit suicide.
254. The "top" 5% or so could sit back and enjoy the show, but everybody else would have to make a searingly honest self-evaluation for every department about when they come into the market so that i. if they think they're attractive enough, the people who were interviewed but not hired by Princeton haven't yet been snaffled and ii. if they don't think they're attractive enough, they don't waste their time interviewing such people.
Whose administrators are going to be that honest? If the hiring world sorted themselves into October hirers, Christmas hirers, spring hirers, June hirers, and Summer vac desperates, it would make things a lot clearer, but human nature wouldn't stand for it.
Everyone says there is no downside to the situation I'm in (having some security in case I fail again this year), but I have found a way to make myself unhappy about it, in that I'm now not only competing for other jobs--I'm also competing for my job. The offer of the two-year is not officially mine until we see my evals in January, and my performance more generally. Everyone here said, "Hey, if you're on a one-year, fuck your teaching and throw yourself into research and applications." I never fuck my teaching, but I wasn't exactly busting my hump to make extra office hours and advertising my efforts to colleagues until now, and it's wearing me out.
But it's extremely tempting to fuck the job market instead and spend the next 2.5 years rolling around in the academic/social happiness of this place. I love everyone and everything here, and I'm doing really great work. Most TT jobs look miserable from this perspective.
re: 178 et. al.:
Yeah, there are some decent mooncakes, especially ones with nuts and honey in the middle (maybe Uyghur inspired?) I think the ones with meat or an egg yoke are kind of gross, but this might be my cultural bias talking. It is true though, that people regift mooncakes like crazy. I wouldn't be surprised if some mooncakes have been circulating for 10 years, kula-ring like, as long as the packaging doesn't look too out of date. I would also bet at the end of the line most mooncakes get thrown out instead eaten.
I do like certain sweet Chinese pastries, like Portugese egg tarts or sesame balls, as part of dim sum or for breakfast, but not as 'dessert.' I am very picky what goes into the dessert category.
242
... and if you want to start making your candidates pay fees for the privilege of applying you'll deserve the mess you get, ...
Maybe application fees are a bad idea but they need to be doing something to thin the herd a little. Perhaps make candidates write an essay on country music or what they admire most about Tom Landry.
That's awesome AWB. Also good on them, as one year positions with no chance of renewal really are uncivilized.
252: Many schools aren't in this position. There's a real risk to moving back which is that you're less likely to get your top choices. For many schools the pressure is in the opposite direction, you want to offer early so that you don't lose your top candidate to a better school who had them number 2 and didn't get their top candidate.
264: I think the problem here is that if you start adding hoops lots of people are going to still jump through them just because they really want a job and don't know yet how good a job they can expect.
253 confuses me. I would think that any candidate would be able to teach any lower division course immediately, and nearly any upper division course. Some of your fourth year honours courses might be a bit of a stretch, but you could prepare for one given a terms notice.
Are you really targeting people based on ability to teach these, not preference?
267
I think the problem here is that if you start adding hoops lots of people are going to still jump through them just because they really want a job and don't know yet how good a job they can expect.
I think if you make people invest a little in applying they are more likely to accept an offer (for the same reason that people don't like to sell at a loss). Of course there is no magic bullet if objectively what you are offering is significantly inferior to many other potential employers.
As I understand it, philosophy jobs often advertise with a distinction between required areas of competence and required areas of specialization. I wish lit jobs had similarly formal terms for these things in job ads. We need someone with an AOS in Victorian poetry, and AOCs in modern British fiction, gender theory, and postcolonial lit. As it is, the job lists read like you're supposed to have published monographs on everything from Milton to Dickens, with a PhD in digital rhetoric and a few articles on James Baldwin. OK!
As it is, the job lists read like you're supposed to have published monographs on everything from Milton to Dickens, with a PhD in digital rhetoric and a few articles on James Baldwin. OK!
Right. Which leaves them open to hire whoever the hell they want anyway.
253 confuses me. I would think that any candidate would be able to teach any lower division course immediately, and nearly any upper division course. Some of your fourth year honours courses might be a bit of a stretch, but you could prepare for one given a terms notice.
I know. I would have thought so too. But our math hire is definitely unwilling to teach some 2-300 level courses that are outside what he's seen since he was an undergraduate.
My guess is that more often, a candidate may not want a job where they only teach their pet topic once in a two year course cycle, and will be doing at least 2 service courses per semester. (Until they've been there long enough to add a specialization in their area of interest and drum up some numbers for more classes.)
I could imagine that with a large teaching load it would be difficult to also teach a new class that was outside your wheelhouse. Actually saying no seems weird to me, but I can definitely understand being resistant.
No jobs I applied for asked about which classes you'd teach in ad, but I was asked on at least one interview which intro-level grad classes I would be comfortable teaching.
261: If they're willing to keep you around at all, that means they have the money and the need, and it's a huge pain to hire someone else when you're right there. Spend a little more time in the office with your door open, but I wouldn't sweat it too much. Your evaluations will probably be good enough (and the value of being excellent at teaching is marginal.)
I'd also hit the market just on the grounds that a dice roll is a dice roll.
270: Philosophy has more of a unified core curriculum than some other humanities majors, which I think makes this more feasible.
258.1 sounds like the opposite of most of the people I've encountered who are hiring, who seem uncomfortable with people who aren't hyperspecialized. I had a memorable interview a year and a half ago with someone who asked me "You've written papers on X, Y, and Z. So which one are you, an X-ist, a Y-ist, or a Z-ist?" He seemed really unhappy that I didn't want to choose.
272
I know. I would have thought so too. But our math hire is definitely unwilling to teach some 2-300 level courses that are outside what he's seen since he was an undergraduate.
This guy is making more than you are? Does he have tenure already?
heebie, I'm curious about something (which hopefully isn't too anonymity-threatening; if it is, redact it): does the issue of your university being a Christian campus with a mission statement about the world being created and judged by God ever come up in the hiring process? It seems like the kind of thing that would make me uncomfortable about a job, even if I was assured it didn't play any real role.
Yeah, it does. I found it incredibly off-putting when I applied, and was quite uneasy, but then interviewed at the joint math meetings with the two senior math dept people, neither of whom are Christian, which may have even come up in the interview. (One being the dear man who lost his wife last week.)
I think it's a terrible idea that makes us sound not-secular at all. In fact, it's a totally secular campus with a chapel which hosts things in a generically Christian theme, which I've never felt any pressure to attend.
The people who think it's a good idea - IMO - have no idea how off-putting it is to the rest of the world. The previous administration was a bit more religious than the one before or after them. I think we should take that language entirely out of the application process.
"Totally secular" is a mild overstatement - there are tons of highly religious students, after all, and the faculty run a normal distribution. But the only time I'm ever in a group where the pastor leads a prayer is at convocation and graduation, and that seems totally reasonable for a school affiliated with a branch of Christianity.
a mission statement about the world being created and judged by God
This is stronger than what's in the statement - it just says that the biblical vision of a heavy-handed God is rich in significance.
Nevertheless, I think we should not bring the mission statement up in any way, shape or form in the job advertisements, let alone requesting that people affirm it.
||
The dirt is coming from INSIDE THE WASHER-DRYER!
|>
You're probably just running it in reverse.
Just define the "inside" to be the complement of the washer-dryer.
re: 274.last
And, I think, the syllabus for postgraduate study in philosophy [at least in my experience from Oxford] is structured so that you'll come out with at least a few areas of competence that differ from your thesis research topic, and if you pick fairly wisely, probably two out of the three will be fairly 'core': either 'core' broadly defined as in metaphysics/epistemology/language/science/ethics, or 'core' as in historical periods that are a big part of undergraduate teaching.
Although I looked back recently at some of the half-dozen or so things I claimed as areas of competence when I taught [things I actually _did_ teach] and I was reaching for at least a couple of them.
This guy is making more than you are? Does he have tenure already?
He was hired at more than I was making at the time, and was an ABD. I was asked to please not make a fuss, and the next year I got a 20% raise, which put me a decent notch above his salary.
And I think he would teach the courses if we needed him too, because he's basically cooperative. But he's definitely expressed more than once that he prefers not to, when given the choice.
We have to take two out of three big survey courses, one of which is directly(-ish) relevant to what we're researching and one of the other two. It hadn't occured to me, but I wonder if it's partly to prepare people to teach in a broad-based way? Mostly I had imagined it was the professors feeling like their subfield was important enough that everybody should know it, whether it's relevant to their research or not.
I wonder if it's partly to prepare people to teach in a broad-based way?
That would make it the only thing I've ever heard of in a grad program designed to help people teach well.
Slight overstatement, obviously, but my bet is that they're not hiding pedagogical tips in your course format.
288, 289: right, seems kinda weird.
On the other hand, if that's not the explanation, I'm baffled as to why I have to take this damn class.
re: 287
We [the 'masters' course I did, roughly ABD equivalent] would normally attend seminars [which you would probably present papers at], and tutorials [where you'd produce a paper every 10-14 days] for three courses (over 4 terms) in addition to the thesis. You wouldn't get in without already having 4 years of philosophy education before [I don't know how that compares to the US graduate school system?]* so those courses were definitely advanced/intense courses and you could reasonably expect that 90% of the people attending had already been reading and writing papers in that topic for a few years at least. That said, there would normally be only 8 weeks of seminars [where you might present once or twice], plus maybe 6 tutorial papers per course, so there was a limit to how much each could cover. These aren't lecture based courses, though. All seminars and tutorials.
* I taught one US grad student who the dept had decided hadn't done enough philosophy as part of her major, so required her to do a year or so of tutorials before they'd admit her to the course.
290: Someone is trying to drum up students by exposing them to their area? Or was, at one point, and now it's a territory thing?
It seems that in general hiring new people in ways that create inversions is one of the keys to getting other people in the dept. raises. The AMS surveys often have median new-hire asst. profs. making more than the median asst. prof. It's a bit counterintuitive, but it tends to work out best for everyone to make new hires at as high a salary as you can even if it's unfair.
re: 288
See 284 - definitely a conscious part of the course structure for the course I took. Although that's a two-stage process. Two year masters [part taught/part-research], then doctorate [which has no taught component at all, just the thesis]. Only the former geared towards inculcating a broad-ish subject competence.
291: yeah, I dunno. Hard to figure out how things correlate.
292: probably something like that.
re: 295
Yeah, I expect they end up more or less at the same point, just different routes. Different in the sciences, too. Friends who work in psychology [in the UK] specialised earlier, and did less taught work, but they produced a lot more actual research and published work before they graduated and went 'on the market'.
the biblical vision of a heavy-handed God is rich in significance
Is this on the letterheads? On college sweatshirts? That would be weird and kinda cool at the same time.
It's funny. If I'd been on Unfogged when I went on the job market, I probably wouldn't have been so skittish about moving somewhere where I had no previous ties. First because it's likely that a few of the Unfoggedtariat might live in the nearest big city, and second because even if no one lived nearby, I'd still have this social outlet to chat while I slowly made friends. It wouldn't be so lonely. I was quite scared of being super, super lonely.
This is stronger than what's in the statement
I was looking at an online course catalogue that contains a mission statement reading, in part:
[redacted. Sorry.]
290 On the other hand, if that's not the explanation, I'm baffled as to why I have to take this damn class.
Couldn't it just be that they want students who get a PhD from this program to have a good grounding in their field, construed more broadly than their specific research project?
I don't think any of the grad students I've talked to have taken me seriously when I've told them to spend more time in their first year or two of grad school learning about things unrelated to what they want to work on before they dig into research too much. Not that I would have taken such advice when I was in their shoes, either.
Yeah, "heavy-handed" was google-proofing.
Though if candidates aren't getting asked about the statement or their own faith at all, that's at least something. One friend of mine turned down an on-campus interview at Baylor when they requested a statement from him ahead of time about his own "faith journey," and a colleague from my field was asked in an MLA interview with Notre Dame how he would incorporate his Catholic faith into lit classes.
But he's definitely expressed more than once that he prefers not to
Don't say you didn't get a warning when the entire department is forced to move elsewhere and leave Professor Bartleby behind.
Oh, I see what you mean. They talk about its significance but don't actually say anything about its truth. I'm slow.
Right - it's a tiny technicality. Also (and I'll redact this in fifteen minutes or so) the word "[redacted] has some very [redacted]-specific meaning which is unlike the fundie meaning it has to the rest of the world's ears, and so it pops up in all these doctrines, and my theology carpoolmate explains that it sounds much more conservative than it is.
300: oh, probably. But in terms of methodology and content it's far enough away from what anybody in my lab does that I think my time could genuinely be better spend reading things more adjacent to what I actually do.
Also my advisor thinks it's stupid and pointless, so really I'm just following his lead.
It's pretty gross that the public face of Protestantism in the US is now so identified with fundies and the forces of idiocy that something as innocuous as that mission statement would be read as anti-science.
I agree with 308. I've never seen anything religious from the institution itself that has made me uncomfortable. Of course, I blame the fundies for perverting all expressions of reasonable Christian expression, not non-religious people for wincing automatically at anything reasonable and Christian.
Unrelated to this thread I had recently been reading up on the state of evangelical academia (curiousity, not a specific reason). It's often a bit subtle to work out whether schools' statements of faith are read by the school as anti-science or not. For example, I *think* that at Wheaton you're allowed to believe in evolution of every creature other than humans, but you have to think Adam and Eve were created separately and did not have ancestors. But I think the way that works is that no science professors agree with that, but they avoid contradicting it explicitly. And it wouldn't be obvious to me that "endorsing a missions statement" was necessarily a totally different thing from signing a statement of faith.
I would need to thoroughly investigate a school that mentioned a mission statement, especially one that requires applicants to endorse the mission statement (e.g. Baylor). So that'd definitely stop me from applying somewhere that was borderline and the time of looking into it wasn't worth it. (Whereas, say BC, I looked into and applied to.)
Said another way, Notre Dame doesn't mention a mission statement or ask applicants any religious questions. If somewhere is advertising themselves as more strongly affiliated with a faith tradition than Notre Dame, then my assumption is that I wouldn't want to work there. Even if the mission statement turns out to be something innocuous, it would still come across as saying that this isn't a place where we want atheists to work.
(None of this is Heebie-U specific because although I must know what school it is from UnfoggeDConII, I seem to have immediately forgotten then and weirdly never been able to work it out since.)
293: this can be a recurring issue where there is unionized faculty on a salary grid, as there is very little opportunity to address the issue.
293: this can be a recurring issue where there is unionized faculty on a salary grid, as there is very little opportunity to address the issue.
293: this can be a recurring issue where there is unionized faculty on a salary grid, as there is very little opportunity to address the issue.
That's a literal approach to raising a "recurring issue."
Notre Dame doesn't mention a mission statement or ask applicants any religious questions
I don't claim it's a school-wide thing, but as per 303, there are definitely at least some rogue faculty who have ideas about its Catholic mission.
Sorry, I meant in their advertisements. I have no direct knowledge of anything that comes up in interviews. I'm sure you're right that there are plenty of faculty there that do care. Though I'd bet that varies a bit by subject.
Gotcha. To add to your point, I think my colleague felt particularly ambushed by the question because there had been no indication up to that point that it mattered.
I think that anybody who felt ambused by a question about religion at Notre Dame would be a poor fit for a position there.
320: How would Notre Dame compare to BC or Georgetown in this regard? I know that BC values its Jesuit heritage and wants to be the premier Jesuit University in the U.S. (I have no idea how feasible that goal is.)
Had the colleague in 303 self-identified as a Catholic before the question was asked? That seems to me to make a big difference.
Notre Dame is more traditional than Georgetown. I don't know about BC. I don't know anybody who went there.
||
Humor me, because I'm over-thinking things because I'm uncomfortable with death: Is this Sunday the right length to invite New Widow to dinner, given that spouse passed away on Wednesday night? Or is he still too much in shock-mode?
We're out of town the following weekend, so it's between 1.5 week lag and 3.5 week lag.
|>
Is he close to family and are they around?
324: Give both options: "Sunday if you're up for it and definitely the night of your choice in Next Available Week" or something like that, assuming he's self-aware enough to turn you down if that feels better to him rather than feel guilted into anything.
325: He's got a son about an hour away. I believe they're pretty close, but obviously I have no real idea.
326 is spot on. This Sunday might be too soon, but make it clear you're open to seeing him whenever.
I was just thinking if he still had a house full of relatives you'd have a clear reason to wait. It doesn't seem like that is the case.
Ok then. Will do so. Thanks all!
Yeah, I suspect the house will be empty pretty quickly - she has two grown children, one of whom he's close to, but that one lives in CA.
Also, should I just email him? Send him a text?
Not a text unless you have a habit of texting him.
332. For god's sake write him a note and leave it at his house. Some things should still be vaguely personal.
We do text, oddly enough. But I'll probably stick with email and just add another disclaimer about how it's fine if he doesn't get the email in time.
Oh don't be a jerk. I've never been to his house, for one. For two, get with the times, Pops Y.
I could send him an evite. Or a Facebook Event Invitation.
I'm not suggesting you go into his house, just put a note in his mailbox. Because, oddly enough, he might want to keep it.
338: She'd have to look up which corner to fold.
When that priest at my church committed suicide, people pretty much showered his husband with food immediately. I think that the widower was grateful, because both of their families are in Canada. Plus the circstances were awful.
No, basically I'm sure you're right. It just plays to my weaknesses - I've already had it on my to-do list to pick up a condolences card and haven't gotten around to it.
Plus finding his address, figuring out how to get there, most likely to or from work which are the two times that spending an extra half hour on a task requires extra planning, and if the invitation is for this Sunday, I really should drop it off today or tomorrow.
Obviously I should just suck it up and do it.
341: There's also an old-fashioned device that would allow you to speak with him directly, or, if he's not up for talking at the moment you reach him, would allow you to leave him a message conveying warmth and sympathy in your tone.
I vote for emailing the invitation and sure, okay, send the guy a condolence card as well. But you're inviting him to dinner, invite him how you would usually invite him.
Allow me to be the first to suggest communicating by telegraph. VERY SORRY FOR LOSS STOP JOIN US FOR DINNER SATURDAY STOP
Have you considered walking up behind him and pushing him to the ground? Then you could say "GET THE MESSAGE?" and hopefully he would.
Yeah, the more I think about it, the more silly it seems to have to write out both a condolences card and an invitation. I'm going to go all 2012 and crazy here.
No, condolence card and invitation are both required, as they fill related but slightly different functions. Sending a condolence card means you don't have to write out a note inviting him to dinner but can do it over email, however.
Oh, maybe I misinterpreted you. Yes, writing them both out is silly.
346: what if you invite him over -- but not for dinner -- with an email, and then when he arrives hand him a written invitation for dinner plus a condolence card? Then send him on his way and he can come back at his convenience for dinner.
I don't understand why calling him with the invitation doesn't seem to be on the table.
A condolence card should mailed separately regardless.
just put a note in his mailbox
I believe this is officially illegal, though it's not as though you'd be prosecuted or anything.
Both cards should be written with very nice pens and sealed with a fancy wax seal.
And delivered by a liveried servant.
I don't understand why calling him with the invitation doesn't seem to be on the table.
For me, replying to an e-mail is much easier psychically than having to a return a phone call, and that would be even more true if I were in the midst of dealing with a major loss.
In general I feel more pressure from phone calls, both in terms of feeling like I should answer when the call comes in, and if miss the call or let it go to voicemail, feeling like I need to respond quickly. An e-mail I can read in my own time, and let it sit there in my inbox while I decide what to do, and I can phrase my thoughts more exactly when I do reply.
When I kick the bucket, please send your e-mails to: M/tch_M/lls_Lion@TheJungle.com
If I go first, don't call Sir Kraab. Send her an e-mail or note. THAT'S how strongly I feel about this.
I'm not going to turn on a computer for the first 6 months after M/tch goes to that Big Style War in the Sky.
I believe this is officially illegal, though it's not as though you'd be prosecuted or anything.
For reals? Why? And is it only mailboxes (ie the stereotypical receptacles at the end of a driveway with a rotating flag thing) or also in-door letter slots?
359: A 60-page report! It looks related to the drive to preserve the USPS's monopoly - if it's in the mailbox, you'll look at it, and a mailbox holds more material than you can, say, hang from a doorknob, so if advertisers start hiring people to go door-to-door and stick stuff in mailboxes, that's depriving the post office of revenue it could be getting. And although there's a blanket prohibition in the postal regulations on putting anything unstamped in a mailbox, I read the law as only imposing fines for doing this with commercial material.
So if my neighbors don't clean up after their dog, I can still shove the shit through their door's slot.
The first time I did door to door campaigning I stuffed leaflets into mailboxes when nobody was home. After a couple hours of that a mailman caught up to me with an armful of leaflets and told me off, adding that the only reason he was nice enough to not call in a formal complaint, including fines for each leaflet, was because he was an Edwards supporter.
362 is illegal squared (because the letter carrier was also violating the odious Hatch Act).
"The odious hatch act" sounds like old-time preacher slang for sodomy.