All careers are alternative nowadays

All careers are alternative nowadays

There are contrasting views on what PhD degrees are for, whether we are training too many of them, or whether we should be preparing them differently for what lies ahead. In the fields that I know better, this is often framed as the question of whether we should be...
Theories all the way down

Theories all the way down

“Don’t you have anything positive to say?” Well, as it happens I do! It can be found in a new paper by myself, Phoebe Gaston, Nick Huang, and Hanna Muller, “Theories all the way down: remarks on ‘theoretical’ and ‘experimental’ linguistics.” The question above came...
Remembering Akira

Remembering Akira

Akira Omaki (1980 – 2018) Akira Omaki, Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of Washington, passed away on August 6th 2018, following complications from lymphoma. Akira was 38 years old. Growing up in the city of Hakodate, on the tip of Japan’s...
Creating a parkrun USA event: 6-month update

Creating a parkrun USA event: 6-month update

Now that it’s 6 months since we launched College Park parkrun, it’s time for an update on our experience of creating a parkrun USA event. I wrote a blog piece about it shortly after our launch, but a lot has happened since then. We have made it through our first...
Creating a parkrun USA event

Creating a parkrun USA event

Helping to create a parkrun event in my hometown has been incredibly rewarding. parkrun makes amazing contributions to health and happiness, but it has struggled to gain traction in the US. These are some thoughts on what it takes. parkrun is the world’s largest...
Making stuff up as you go along. Selectively.

Making stuff up as you go along. Selectively.

When you talk do you just make stuff up as you go along, or do you plan ahead? And what does your grammar have to say about that? Three new findings about planning ahead while speaking tell a surprisingly consistent story. They take us from a long-standing worry about...
Pro-choice on the linguistics curriculum

Pro-choice on the linguistics curriculum

Linguistics as a field is different from how it was 20, 30, 40 years ago. There was a time when linguistics was dominated by a couple of sub-fields that relied overwhelmingly on similar analytical tools, working at roughly the same level of analysis. Things are...
Web presence for linguists

Web presence for linguists

These are notes initially written for a workshop on Web Presence at the 2015 Linguistic Society of America Summer Institute, at the University of Chicago, July 29th 2015. They have been updated for a workshop on Building Your Profile in a Digital World at the...