1. “By insisting that print [rather than online or ebook-only] is a necessary condition for scholarly quality, deans and scholars make it more difficult for university presses to stay in business, thereby making it more difficult for them to publish print books! At the same time, scholars insist on having their own work published in print while they increasingly engage the work of others online. And deans demand that scholars publish print books while not giving their libraries enough funds to buy them. So they insist on print and undermine the demand for it.” Matthew McAdam, humanities editor at Johns Hopkins University Press, on academia’s unsustainable and confused attitudes towards online and e-book publishing.
2. Kristie Dotson (Michigan State) is among several academics to have taken part in a series of “traveling hearings” organized by the African American Policy Forum on “juvenile justice, foster care, commercial sexual exploitation of children and ‘gender-specific’ experiences” particularly related to “coming up in Los Angeles in poor, disenfranchised black and Latino neighborhoods.” (via Sam Liao)
3. “It’s not A/B testing. It’s just being an asshole.” Tim Carmody explains what’s missing from the discussions about the recent social media experiments: “They’re all too quick to accept that users of these sites are readers who’ve agreed to let these sites show them things. They don’t recognize or respect that the users are also the ones who’ve made almost everything that those sites show.”
4. Apparently, “Federal Jurists ♥ Bentham.” (Update: alternative link.)
5. “The potential dangers of abusing such knowledge are one reason the storage of incidentally collected information is wrong. But there is another reason as well. The more insidious harm is not consequential but in principle. The collection of such data… violates our autonomy and dignity,” says Michael Lynch (Connecticut) at the NYT, on the NSA’s scary collection of everyone’s emails, chats, posts, etc. (via Hallie Liberto)
6. The American Political Science Association has created a new organized section, “political epistemology,” in response to a petition drive spearheaded by the editor of Critical Review, Jeffrey Friedman (Texas). The petition page describes some of political epistemology’s topics.
7. “Good metaphors have many other effects on readers than making them grasp some bit of information, and these are often precisely the effects the metaphor-user wants to have” says James Grant (Oxford) at OUP Blog.
8. Philosophy Talk on which books you should (have) read this summer.
9. In the spirit of your sayings (keep ’em coming, folks), check out the philosophy entries on lol my thesis. (via mlr)