monkey's uncle

In the spirit of critics misunderstanding the life of university researchers that I started in my last post, I felt the need to chime in a bit on a story that has really made the social-media rounds in the last couple days. This kerfuffle stems from a Forbes piece by Susan Adams enumerating the 10 [...]

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I guess the time has rolled around again for my annual navel-gaze regarding my discipline, my place within it, and its future. Two strangely interwoven events have conspired to make me particularly philosophical as we enter into the winter holidays. First, I am in the middle of a visit by my friend, colleague, and former [...]

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Well, it certainly has been a while since I’ve written anything here. Life has gotten busy with new projects, new responsibilities, etc. Yesterday, I participated in a workshop on campus sponsored by the Woods Institute for the Environment, the Young Environmental Scholars Conference. I was asked to stand-in for a faculty member who had to [...]

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I’m done now with the first week of the Spring quarter. It was a bit challenging because I had to attend the PAA meetings in Washington, DC for the latter part of the week, but Brian Wood ably covered for me on Thursday. I thought that I would use the blog as a tool for [...]

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We will be having another of our occasional Stanford Workshops in Formal Demography this April 28th-30th. The theme this time will be “Migration and Adaptation,” and we have a terrific lineup of speakers coming. As in the past, the workshop is funded by NICHD and receives substantial suport from the Stanford Institute for Research in [...]

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Nicholas Wade, who normally writes really terrific stuff on science in the New York Times, has a brief piece on our Anthropology fracas du jour. It’s good to see an expression of concern for the place of science in anthropology in such a prominent place and by such an important science writer.  I just wish [...]

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There has been quite a brouhaha percolating through some Anthropology circles following the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Associate in New Orleans last month.  It seems that the AAA executive board, in all its wisdom, has seen fit to excise the term “science” from the Association’s long-range planning document. You can sample some of [...]

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In a recent editorial in the New York Times, Harvard economist and former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, N. Gregory Mankiw provides some answers to the question “what kind of foundation is needed to understand and be prepared for the modern economy?”  Presumably, what he means by “modern economy” is life after college. [...]

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I’ve had this idea for a couple years now and thought that I would put it down on paper as it were. When I first got to Stanford (in fact, when I was being recruited for the job), I was asked if I would teach a class on Human Nature. I remember thinking to myself, [...]

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