Category: Academic Life
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What Academics Say vs. What They Mean
Academia has its own language. On the surface, it sounds polite, thoughtful, and collaborative. In reality, it’s a carefully evolved dialect designed to survive meetings, peer review, and email threads that never end. Here’s a quick translation guide. Peer Review, But Make It Passive-Aggressive Peer review is how science moves forward. It is also how…
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Emails, Messaging Apps, and Modern Work Inefficiency
Modern work has perfected a strange illusion: everyone is busy all the time, yet very little seems to move forward. Welcome to the world of modern work inefficiency. Our days are filled with emails, meetings, follow-ups, calendars, and tools designed to “streamline communication.” Somehow, the more we optimize communication, the less actual work we seem…
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Academic Publishing Profits from Free Labor…and We Call It Productivity
This post examines how the academic publishing business model relies on unpaid academic labor, public funding, and prestige-based incentives, and how common productivity metrics in academia quietly reinforce that system. Researchers write the articles.Academics review the articles.Academics edit the journals.Universities pay the salaries.Libraries pay the subscriptions. Yet academic publishers continue to generate billions in profit.…
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Why We’re Exhausted Despite Flexible Schedules
It’s Monday. Specifically, the Monday between Christmas and New Year’s—the liminal space of the calendar where time is fake, inboxes are quiet(-ish), and everyone is technically “working” while hoping no one notices they are not. You are free to work today.You are also free not to.Both options feel vaguely wrong. Welcome to the promise of…