Santa's elves are already hard at work on Christmas, so I've had to outsource this work to a bunch of Icelandic trolls.  It's a different labor contract, so forgive any bumps in the production chain. 

This is an article about the legitimacy of “public writing" for scholars, especially younger scholars. It seems to me to misunderstand the importance of what I consider to be the basic work of scholarship – – that is, academic articles in peer review journals, and scholarly works such as monographs or edited volumes. I recognize the difficulty of getting these things published now, but to be honest it was never easy to get them published, and none of the genres of writing these authors promote or doing any of the core work at the scholarship is doing. It may be the case that we need to publish less of the scholarship, and of more high-quality caliber. But there is some thought here, that this genre of work is dying. And I am afraid I just don’t see it.

Fascinating study of Twitter by the Pew Research Center; almost all political tweets are produced by a very small proportion of users.  (10% of users produce 97% of tweets), and only 13% of all tweets are about national politics.  What, in other words, if the problem of social media is that it is a superb medium for a certain small sub-sector of the human race, namely, loud-mouthed blowhards like me?

A good, detailed piece about Mr Rogers, as an artist.

Nice review of a new volume of "selected essays" by James Wood.  Whatever he writes, I read, as he always has not just good observations and provocative insights but beautifully poised sentences.  I admire both his way with writers and his way with language.

Maybe more later, if you're lucky, punk.