Great blog by Pat Thompson on academic writing:

▶️ https://patthomson.net/2026/03/08/getting-comfortable-with-being-uncomfortable/

"Academic writing is a form of thinking. It’s not the transcription of thoughts already completed, but a process of thinking itself. One of the ways we make writing harder than it needs to be is by writing as though our argument has arrived fully formed, rather than being wrestled into shape over several drafts."

This is why you *need* to write yourself, even and especially when writing is hard!

#AcademicChatter #PhD

Just received an email asking me to peer-review a paper, and asking me to decide whether to review it based on an abstract in which every piece of LaTeX code has been replaced with ‘[[EQUATION]]’, so that it reads like:

‘For [[EQUATION]], let [[EQUATION]] be the semigroup of partial bijections on the lattice [[EQUATION]]. For a subset [[EQUATION]] of [[EQUATION]] with size at most [[EQUATION]], we show that [[EQUATION]] and [[EQUATION]] are the unique possible...’

I am not quoting the actual text, but this gives the idea. The email was generated by the publisher's paper management system, so I assume it is to blame, not the editor.

Over the years, I have developed fairly low expectations of academic publishers, but this particular bit of incompetence is new to me.

#academia #AcademicPublishing #AcademicChatter

Workshop review forms be like: here’s the same question twice, phrased differently. Please suggest a presentation type out of the following options: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

#AcademicChatter

My new paper got published, about urban civic learning, alternative counter culture spaces and democratic cities. Open Access!

>> Hacker–maker urban spaces as infrastructures of incidental civic learning

#academia #academicchatter #urbanism #cities #OpenAccess

https://doi.org/10.1007/s44327-026-00210-6

Help me name the summer class which goes with this reading list ...

1. Bregman, Rutger, Elizabeth Manton, and Erica Moore. 2020. Humankind: A Hopeful History. First English-Language edition. Little, Brown and Company.

2. Bohannon, Cat. 2023. Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution. Random House Canada.

3. Flannery, Kent V., and Joyce Marcus. 2012. The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire. Harvard University Press.

4. Graeber, David. 2019. Bullshit Jobs. First Simon & Schuster trade paperback edition. Simon & Schuster Paperbacks.

5. Cann, Candi K. 2026. Augmented: Life and Death as a Cyborg. The MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/15315.001.0001.

#academicchatter #higherEducation #anthropology #sociology

Been busy academic article writing and publishing.
1. got a paper published (more later), after a bit of a struggle, but very worth it.
2. after 3 month wait heard about a draft paper submission to a new local journal initiative that had decided they werent doing journal after all and sorry we didnt tell you. (disappointing!).
3. got a citation from what looks like a GenAI created paper.

1 out of 3 aint bad.

#academicchatter #academicpublishing #academia

Here comes another of my random "hey do I know any..." posts.

Hey, do I know anyone who knows about EXORCISTS?

And what about PILGRIMS?

Or PIRATES?

Or ALCHEMY?

It's for Writing the Occult, so they need to be comfortable presenting on Zoom (but will receive token pay for their efforts)

#academicchatter #academia #writers #writing #writingcommunity #books #religion #exorcism #pilgrims #pirates #alchemy