Mama PhD

I think I had an idea for a blog post in mind this morning — I was going to write about my daughter’s upcoming travels, the semester-plus that she’s spent with us, and the bittersweet sense I have of sending her off (yet again!) into the world not fully prepared, but nonetheless ready. But right around noon I learned of a sudden death — the mother of someone Nick has been in school with since kindergarten — and whatever idea I might have had was immediately gone. While this mother and I didn’t know each other well, we’d been in each other’s houses, years ago, when the kids were small and still had play dates and birthday parties. We’d seen each other at PTA events over the years. It was that kind of relationship.

I have wanted to write about the "having it all" media flapdoodle, but the published responses have gone off in so many different directions I have had trouble keeping up. So I am grateful to Libby for her elegant distillation.

We like to joke in economics that we economists seem to always have two hands. We are known for saying “on the one hand” and then explaining some policy implication, only to follow quickly with “on the other hand”, followed by a conflicting policy implication. I found myself thinking of this recently while on vacation as I debated the merits and costs of possibly buying a laptop computer or a tablet.

I did not know what to expect at the “Sustainability Across the Curriculum Leadership Workshop” I attended last week at...

Sometimes the best way to tell what’s occupying me is to see the open tabs in my browser. I just closed eight that had to do with the recent Atlantic piece by Anne-Marie Slaughter, “Why Women Still Can’t Have it All.” The responses I’ve been interested in focus mostly on what it might mean to “have it all” rather than taking up the well-trodden “mommy wars” positions that have become so predictable as to be boring. Perhaps the furthest from Slaughter’s original piece is Tim Kreider’s “The Busy Trap,” a lovely paean to what he calls laziness, but may simply be sustainable living.

Jill at Feministe linked to Nora Ephron's 1996 commencement address at Wellesley. The entire speech is worth reading, but this...

Many people are familiar with the race for partner that takes place in many law firms, and with the struggle for tenure that occurs in academia. These two cases are examples of what game theory calls a “tournament,” in which many workers compete for some prize based on their productivity. It is seen as a way to encourage workers to do their best and to act in ways that are in the best interest of their employer. I thought of this concept recently when I spent some time on the campus of my first job out of graduate school, a job that I left only steps ahead of what would almost definitely have been a tenure denial. As I went back there to work on some research, I realized that while the experience had been difficult, I had landed on my feet.

Last weekend I watched our eight-year old daughter board a plane alone, her ticket in a plastic sheath around her neck, her pink and white Pottery Barn backpack filled with enough books and snacks to last far longer than the ninety-minute flight to Kansas City. I had spent the past month convincing her that spending two weeks with her grandparents and cousin and attending Shakespeare Camp would be an adventure, and almost as much time reassuring my nervous husband of the safety of her flying as an “unaccompanied minor.”