Blogs

Mudwoman is Joyce Carol Oates's newest novel. It follows the mental breakdown of a female university president. Gothic or problematic?

Being able to hack a restaurant wine list is a surprisingly useful skill. Wine is becoming increasingly popular with tasting rooms and wine bars opening up all across the country. As a grad student, I've found that even a basic wine knowledge can be an invaluable skill for dinners and parties with professors and other students. So here is your primer on hacking the wine list and tasting wine.

As I've written before, we're on the cusp of a cross-country move. Because of our usual summer research routine, in which we work at a west-coast research biology station for two months, we've been in transition for a long time now: living not at our old home, but not in our new home either (although I must admit, the biology station is familiar, welcoming, like a second home).

Someone at work sends you an email that you aren’t quite sure how to interpret. Maybe the phrasing is ambiguous, maybe it uses a term with different meanings, or maybe there just isn’t enough context to decide what’s being said. It seems weirdly hostile, but you don’t know why there would be hostility. What do you do?

We hope that your summer is going well and you were able to enjoy a rest in July just as much as us! Now we are back to work and ready for action! We at GradHacker have been so busy with thinking about the future, getting new authors and reading through amazing forthcoming posts that we completely forgot our own birthday. We are a little over a year old now, and have had such an amazing year!

If trust is one key coin in the realm of academe, then there is distressing evidence that many college presidents don’t have much faith that their peers at institutions with big intercollegiate programs are in control of these programs.

2012 has been a confabulous year. Sure, that's a made up word, but you can get past that, right? Here's the deal, our "traditional" conference structures are bending. In between the usual annual conferences and regional events, some atypical meet-ups are taking place. Sometimes we call them "confabs" and/or "unconferences," but they are different…and I think that's a good thing.

I didn't write about Colorado last week. It was too recent, too raw. I didn't think I had anything to add. I saw memorials on FaceBook, Op-eds about gun violence and violent movies, and all I could do was nod my head. There didn't seem to be anything else to say.