In this series, I’m talking about big issues in how we think about our scientific past. This week I get into more detail about what the Scientific Revolution did and didn’t do. Read the first post in this series, on ancient Greece and math. The Scientific Revolution The term “scientific revolution” is kind of misleading […]
One of the things that’s actually helpful about applying for funding to support me in my final year of dissertation writing is that it forces me to be reflective about the process of writing and take stock of where I am and where I still need to go. I just submitted what is likely my […]
If I had to encapsulate my academic aspirations into a single image, it would be the memory of sitting around the coffee table in the economics department lounge at Carleton, eating my professor’s homemade scones, drinking tea, and debating applied philosophy with professors and students. What a combination – professional, personal, erudite, homey, congenial, and […]
On being the elephant in the room… Before I was pregnant, I didn’t think so much about the concept of a post-pregnancy body except to wonder why celebrity magazines seemed to be so obsessed with it. But that also seemed pretty normal, since these publications are already obsessed with women’s bodies at every stage of […]
Hey, have you heard of this thing called cancel culture? Read More It was perhaps not surprising just after the 2016 election to discover that a portion of president-elect trump’s base espoused ideologies of white supremacy. What was surprising to those who were paying attention but perhaps less familiar, was that trump also garnered significant […]
My mom has a bit of a problem with experts. If you asked her, my mom would tell you that the problem with experts is that they don’t have to justify their opinions on the basis that they have implicitly earned that trust, and, in the reverse, other people who are not experts have not. […]
Money is perhaps the first thing that comes to mind when most people consider pursuing a graduate degree, and for good reason – this is a life built on financial uncertainty that is, for many people, prohibitively expensive to even enter. I’ve experienced quite a range of financial situations as a grad student and the […]
Bon Appetit thinks you’re using too much pepper, but medieval Europeans think you’re not using nearly enough. This article popped up in my feed a week ago, and it literally invited me to reply, so here it is, a quick history of pepper in Western cuisine. The author, Molly Baz, says: Can somebody please tell me […]
An experiment with frozen yogurt that’s halfway to ice cream. Among my many “wrong” opinions (such as the fact that I hate avocados) is that I don’t really love ice cream. I’ve enjoyed it, and occasionally I even crave it, but unlike most people, I really could do without it most of the time. I […]
This week was very grindy, by which I mean I did a lot but it also felt like nothing happened. The British Library. This was my one week at the British Library, my second archive here in London. I could definitely see a difference coming from the Wellcome, which is very modern and very well […]
A running list of things/people that have been sustaining me for the past year, in no particular order: Mac’n’cheese Childcare, both affordable and not Nap time Spotify Google Maps My personal map of Palermo Video calls My laptop Historical sewing YouTube Surprising omissions from this list: Tea coffee (seriously, I thought that both parenthood and […]
The Root – Watch: Roomful of Rich, White NYC Parents Get Mad at Plan to Diversify Neighborhood’s Schools I benefitted from NYC’s practice of school segregation, and I have to come to terms with that. Like many liberal white Jews, I find the process of admitting my privilege very easy at times and very complicated at […]
In my circles, the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg is one of those deep losses that aches dully for a long time. Among the women I know, there is a feeling that RBG was one of us, whatever that means. To a certain subset, it means that she was a working mother. Read More The […]
I learned a whole lot about spices and trade. A lot of things clicked this week. I sat back and took a look at my Geniza research while also thinking about what I’ve learned from the Genoese notarial records, and a picture of medieval Sicilian trade really emerged. I was kind of surprised to realize […]
