I recently read these two articles, both about the children of orphaned men who used DNA testing to discover unexpected ethnic identities:
How much help is it reasonable to expect from your parents, and what makes someone “lucky” in that regard?
Over the past two years, I’ve been embarrassed to tell people where I live. Read More
A word about onions
I love onions, but I also hate them because people cook them badly. Read More
How to apply for grad school
Graduate school is a tightly-kept gate, and frankly it shouldn’t be that way. I’ve gathered some wisdom about how to succeed in making it past the gatekeepers from my own experiences as well as those of my friends in various fields. Read More
Working between history, archaeology, and art history: or, why I need a portable x-ray fluorescence scanner
My research year is going to start out pretty typically for a history PhD – a few months in an archive looking at some old manuscripts. And then things are going to get really weird when I bring an x-ray gun to Italy so I can take readings on things made of copper. Read More
Historians have too many learning objectives and it’s because we don’t know pedagogy – or even what we are
Recently, my medievalist cohort and I got together for a few sessions with the Center for Teaching and Learning to talk about how to write a syllabus, and all my frustrations about TAing came crashing down on me at once. Read More
Censoring Schiele and Revealing the Male Gaze
100 Years On, What Does It Say That We’re Still Censoring Egon Schiele’s Nudes?
This brief article on a recent international ad campaign highlights exactly what’s wrong with the female body in public spaces – that we just can’t distinguish between nudity that is erotic and nudity that is irrelevant to sex. Read More
Janet’s Greek Chicken Pita
Homemade gyros, a la my mother-in-law. Read More
Segregated schooling in NYC – How do we make amends?
I benefitted from NYC’s practice of school segregation, and I have to come to terms with that. Read More
What you need for pregnancy and what you don’t – goods and state of mind
Pregnancy, like any major life event, has a steep learning curve. You can’t really prepare, because you don’t know how things are going to be for you, but at the same time, you can learn about the range of things you can expect and know what resources are available once you run into trouble.
Robin Writes 