Author Archives: Robert Basil

Job-seekers need their “weaker ties”

This is a really interesting study that fortifies an important intuition: A team of researchers from Stanford, MIT, Harvard, and LinkedIn recently conducted the largest experimental study to date on the impact of digital job sites on the labor market … Continue reading

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How to write a lede

From the Irish Times: Having a monarchy next door is a little like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and has daubed their house with clown murals, displays clown dolls in each window and has an insatiable desire to … Continue reading

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Silly professor

It is puzzling, perhaps, when the paper of record publishes a piece arguing that it’s a waste of money and time providing and receiving education in schools.

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Hootsuite blog

Hootsuite, Vancouver’s vaunted social media management company, has helpfully updated the design of its already excellent blog. There are fewer listicles and more how-to cheat sheets (a favourite genre of mine, as my students know). A couple of days ago … Continue reading

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The scale of a work

Our friend Jonathan Mayhew, on finding the right size (for a book): I like saying that [my upcoming book on Lorca and music] is a medium sized book on a vast subject.  So it is with scholarship. You are rarely … Continue reading

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Talisman

The Paper Hound is “a new, used, and rare book store” on Pender Street in downtown Vancouver. “We don’t specialize in one particular kind of book, but we favour the classic, curious, odd, beautiful, visually arresting, scholarly, bizarre, and whimsical.” … Continue reading

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Good timing

University of Washington professor Kate Starbird and several of her colleagues just published “Repeat Spreaders & Election Delegitimization,” featuring an analysis of their 2020 Election Misinformation dataset, “including 307 false, misleading, exaggerated and/or unsubstantiated claims that sowed doubt in [the … Continue reading

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Stanford University’s “Writing Matters”

My former haunt, Stanford University’s Program in Writing and Rhetoric, has taken down its old Resources page. Happily, though, you can still find online its wonderful “Writing Matters” series, interviews with Stanford professors and students describing “writing’s connection with academic … Continue reading

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What could go wrong?

No Contest friend Chester Wisniewski provides the clearest précis I’ve read regarding the extravagant promises made on behalf of “decentralized blockchains,” in The Gospel of Crypto: A Solution in Search of a Problem. It’s concise, illuminating, and persuasive.

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Prime Yourself

There needs to be two of you: you and “you prime.” The latter is an heuristic entity brought into being by you for the purpose of protecting and orienting you. Your “you prime” makes the hard decisions – saying no to … Continue reading

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