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...
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...
Pay Very Close Attention

Pay Very Close Attention

I was pretty skeptical. The instructions were to show up at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute at the designated time, to prepare nothing in advance, and then to sit in front of a public audience with half a dozen strangers and make interesting conversation for 90...