Zeb Larson

Photo essay: Country & Eastern Kenyan interest in country music goes all the way back to the 1920s and 1930s, when locals first heard Jimmie Rodgers on early country and western records.

Photo Essay: Nashville or Nairobi? That’s a potato, potahto question when it comes to country music in East Africa. Kenyan interest in country music goes all the way back to the 1920s and 1930s, when locals first heard Jimmie Rodgers on early country and western records.

Well, we haven't left yet so let's see what happens, but maybe, just maybe his teeth have stopped shifting so much

The 10 month sleep regression has been brutal. For the most part, he's been a game little trooper at night and sleeps well unless he's really sick, but this last month has been multiple wakeups every night, some of them an hour or longer.

Don't get me wrong, I would also love to be able to take advantage of this and sleep longer, but even having some quiet time to myself is a good thing.

Naturally, the first good night's sleep he's had in weeks and I'm awake at 3 AM.

(I sound pissed but honestly, I'm so happy that he's had a genuinely peaceful night's sleep so far. I hope this bodes well).

If there's any justice in this situation, it will be that they're unleashing forces they won't be able to control. Who knows what happens, but the people who have made Epstein conspiracies their personality don't seem like they'll be deterred by this.

Thank you! This is very helpful. I worked there once upon a time, but it looks like everybody that I knew has moved on or retired.

There’s a neurosurgeon’s memoir that ends with a patient (smiling, cured of partial facial paralysis) telling the man “I hope I never have to see you again!” and him responding “me too!” It is the only appropriate goodbye.

“Hey honey, let’s you, me, and the baby go to Philly in January so we can sit in a downtown Hilton. What? No, I won’t be able to take off the week of Christmas.”

-a convo I’m never having

Yep, the paid stuff they give me that isn’t a federal holiday.

Yeah, I wrote a whole piece once about the fact that people a year or two after I left would ask me if I would use my PTO to go to conferences or for fieldwork and my consistent response was “fuck no”

…did the AHA send an e-mail about using AI? I feel a disturbance in the force.

It was really sloppy too, she copy-pasted an image caption of mine without the image into her article (which also raises the question: what the fuck was the editor doing?)

It comes in handy though. I got plagiarized by an emeritus faculty member and I immediately recognized it as my writing because she kept the phrase “it’s striking.” That one is mine, use it at your own peril.

People genuinely dislike uprooting themselves even if they're very well-off, and I don't care how low a state cuts its income tax rate, somebody who's that well-off in Boston isn't going to trade it all for Shepherdstown, WV.

I’m not a big Biden defender by any means, I think his legacy is a mix of enabling genocide, a doomed climate bill, and a failure to do the one thing he set out to do (save us from Trump).

But.

If he had done this, there would have been op-eds in every paper demanding that the 25th be invoked.

Am I connected to any historians of the NPS or anybody who has worked for the NPS in Alaska? I’m writing a piece on Wrangell-St. Elias for SFGate, and I’d like to touch on how cuts to the NPS threaten the park (especially given its size, or opening it up to commercial exploitation).

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We have a direct flight and at least it’s relatively short. It’s the easy sounding part to me. I’m just so sleepless and staring down the barrel of what nights might or might not look like.

Where ya headed?

And to be clear, based on other place’s forecasts I actually think Columbus is easier in some ways. It gets hot, but the heat seems less punishing than Philly or New York, and unlike New England we’re used to it being that hot and have the infrastructure to cope with it.

It was amazing, we had mornings in the high 50s and afternoons in the mid 70s. For three whole days we had a break from swampy misery and I actually liked summer. Now we’re swinging back to normal.

At bare minimum, I won’t have to juggle my day job with this!

My hope is that it’s a reset button for him and we come back in a better sleep pattern than the one we left.

So…fingers crossed, I guess?

I’m headed on vacation tomorrow to Massachusetts and it’s our first one with baby. I’m *exceptionally* nervous. Not for the travel part, but deviating from all of our routines and the familiarity of our house upends the illusion of control that I have. We’re also in the middle of a sleep regression.

I’m skeptical whether our current system would tolerate this because there’s prestige around A: getting those precious precious grants, and B: doing all of that field work.

This is pretty much the only way to create viable independent scholarship, because it’s not possible for people without institutional affiliations to take on a lot of distant archival work. (Even people who have them are struggling with this).

I mean, we’ve already seen Republicans take steps in that direction in Wisconsin and North Carolina. We’re not talking about a political Rubicon; if we got a Democratic governor I’d actually be stunned if they didn’t try and weaken the office.

A disconcerting number of high status people upended their worldviews because other people did not affirm that status in the way they thought appropriate.
And social media accelerated this because for high status people it is often the experience of people telling you that you are wrong.