Peter Levin’s Rethinking Markets

June 16, 2008

How about this…

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 6:08 pm

The Associated Press, following criticism from bloggers over an AP assertion of copyright, plans to meet this week with a bloggers’ group to help form guidelines under which AP news stories could be quoted online.

Jim Kennedy, the AP’s director of strategic planning, said Monday that he planned to meet Thursday with Robert Cox, president of the Media Bloggers Association, as part of an effort to create standards for online use of AP stories by bloggers that would protect AP content without discouraging bloggers from legitimately quoting from it.

The meeting comes after AP sent a legal notice last week to Rogers Cadenhead, the author of a blog called the Drudge Retort, a news community site whose name is a parody of the prominent blog the Drudge Report.

The notice called for the blog to remove several postings that AP believed was an improper use of its stories. Other bloggers subsequently lambasted AP for going after a small blogger whom they thought appeared to be engaging in a legally permissible and widely practiced activity protected under “fair use” provisions of copyright law.

In response, the AP indicated it would seek to create guidelines, though even that idea triggered further protests. Michael Arrington wrote on his TechCrunch blog Monday that AP “doesn’t get to make its own rules about how its content is used, if those rules are stricter than the law allows.”

Fuck you, AP.

June 12, 2008

Movie Night

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 6:47 am

Welp, had a movie night last night, and the highlights, lowlights, and, well, lights, were as follows:
- the dessert was good. Nutella semi-freddo (thanks JL), crepes, strawberries, bananas, sweetened ricotta, cinnamon graham crackers, vanilla marshmallows, dark chocolate. All good.
- the savory crepes were decent. I only had one (carmalized onion, sauteed mushroom, swiss cheese), and it was delicious. Other fillings were ham, asparagus, grilled zucchini and squash, spinach.
- the salad was not good. It should have been good, but it was gritty. Ouch. Top chef wouldn’t have served it. Next time, wash wash wash wash the lettuce.

And the movie, The Player holds up surprisingly well. With apologies to everyone I didn’t get to talk to that much because I was running about, I thought it went pretty ok.

June 10, 2008

All hail our new Culture Section Overlords

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 9:29 pm

Just in from my culture section listserv:

Dear Colleagues,

I’m pleased to announce the official results of our Culture Section elections:

Chair-Elect
Karen Cerulo, Rutgers University

Council Member
David Grazian, University of Pennsylvania
Eiko Ikegami, New School for Social Research

Secretary - Treasurer
Jennifer Lena, Vanderbilt University

Student Representative
Stacie F. Furia, University of California - Santa Barbara

Congratulations to you all, and thanks to everyone who agreed to serve the section by standing for office.

Special thanks, too, to the Nominations Committee– Paul Lopes (chair), John Krinsky, and Omar Lizardo– for your hard and productive work to develop a fine slate of candidates.

Lyn Spillman
Culture Section Chair.

June 9, 2008

On the job market?

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 1:12 pm

First of all, Barnard has a late-junior to early-associate position, in urban sociology. Let me know if you know someone who might be appropriate.

More generally, if you are a graduate student on the job market, here is some advice for you:

- Now, today, as soon as you can, make appointments with faculty in your department to tell them that you are on the job market. This includes faculty you are friendly with but who are not on your committee. Chat with them about what your topic is/was and your findings, etc. You can often pitch this as ‘I was hoping I might get some advice from you. I’m on the market this year, and I’m trying to situate myself professionally. Do you have any guidance you might offer?’ The end point should be to remind them who you are and that you are on the market. You will also get opportunities from this to work on your 2-minute pitch.

- In the next couple/few weeks, or perhaps after you definitely know where jobs will be posted, start to email faculty from schools you think you might be interested in applying to. ‘Hi there, Professor X, we met a couple years ago at the OOW section reception. I’m on the market, and I’m wondering if there might be a time to schedule in a coffee or drink or just a quick chat with you at ASA.’ If they are on the search committee, great. If not, you want to learn about schools as well as to let them know who you are. 3rd party introductions are good here, and essential for some of the fussier schools (see item 1).

- There are lots of places to get advice on things like CVs, cover letters. My suggestion is only that there is an inverse relationship between fancy formatting and substance. Be Thomas Keller here - call your dish PB&J and have it be great, rather than calling your dish tournedos de boeuf and having it be hamburger. A stark CV with little on it may seem kind of crappy, but a fancy CV with little on it is an instant no.

Another suggestion here is to take advantage of the mail merge tools in MS Word or whatever its equivalent is for you. It may or may not be worth your while to create multiple iterations of who you are for different kinds of schools. I am inclined towards the belief that you are who you are, and your life will be easier with a single packet (including writing samples, materials for everyone even if they don’t ask for them), and then spend time finishing your dissertation or what have you. Because a) it already takes a long time, and you want to get it out in one or two waves and let the process do its thing; and b) you will not go far with a presentation of self that really differs from what you are comfortable with in order to persuade schools to hire you. If you do, prepare to wear that presentation of self for the next few years.

- The job market is a crap shoot, and you will likely face no other (or at best few other) areas where interval-level differences are transformed into categorical differences like the job market. Everything conspires to make you believe it is all about you - a referendum on your work, your life, your personhood. I can not tell you enough times that it is somewhat about you, but only a little. Departments argue, come to consensus, change their minds, interpret their needs and yours, are slow, have key committee members be sick the day you are being considered, and the list goes on. This is the one time in your life to be a good institutionalist and know that agency in the academic job market is overrated. Agency in the academic job market is overrated.

That’s it. I am sure you can find others who have better and more advice, but this is what I can offer without even knowing anything else about your situation. Be lucky you’re not having a child - my best friend told me that not only did they get overwhelmed with advice, but they actually started getting advice about the advice: ‘You see, man, you gotta know how to take the advice…’

June 4, 2008

Masters King, Rojas, Healy, Lizardo, Felin

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 6:08 am

I loves me some Orgtheory. Although my work most prominently overlaps with Brayden’s and Kieran’s (Brayden and I disagree enough on theoretical orientation and substance while agreeing on much else, to make it interesting), the site is a combination of latest-greatest published work, thoughtful social science insights to current events, and how to get through graduate school. You should look at their work often and well. It’s good to great.

Plus, Fabio has the single best post of the political season. All the posts after (and there are many insightful and more accurate ones) make this one even better.

June 3, 2008

Master Uggen

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 12:53 pm

I sure do love me some Chris Uggen. In addition to a rather expansive blogroll to launch from, he gives a mix of personal, popular, scholarly, and inside-baseball-y posts that I can not reproduce. My blog tends to be my early thinking, sometimes applied to contemporary news, with some more rambly stuff in between. His, I think, is better.

Lurk much?

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 12:36 pm

If you do, and you live in NYC, you might be interested in joining me and a couple other sociology blogger types for lunch on Thursday. Email me for the details - plevin {at} barnard {dot} edu. Might be fun.

June 2, 2008

Anchoring, art-style

Filed under: Art — Peter @ 9:34 am

At the Tate Modern, there are a number of paintings by Pablo Picasso. Ten are currently on display (well, as of last week, this obviously changes). Interestingly, however, there is no room where you can see ‘the Picasso paintings’ in one place. Contrast this with the room of Gerhard Richter’s, or the gallery of Rothkos.

Of these ten pieces, they are displayed in the following rooms/exhibit spaces:

Five (well, 6 if ‘Beyond Surrealism’ and ‘Surrealism and Beyond’ are counted differently, as the Tate suggests) different exhibits for the pieces. For instance, the Bust of a Woman hangs next to Albert Gleizes’ Portrait of Jacques Nayral.

Why this? Why no Picasso gallery? Because Picasso is serving a different purpose than Rothko or Richter - rather than showcasing an artist, he is anchoring various categories of modern and contemporary art. Picasso provides the entry point for any number of schools of art, because he was influential in creating them, but also because he is understood as the epitome of a contemporary artist. More versatile than Warhol, more accessible than Cezanne, Picasso currently provides the starting point for understanding surrealism, vorticism, the contemporary ’sublime’ (paired with Bacon).

Categories need centers, and commensuration depends on a ‘third metric’ that can stand outside of other, otherwise qualitatively distinct objects to render them compare-able. Just as cardinals or robins stand in for a central kind of ‘birdness’ against which hummingbirds and penguins can be ‘measured’, in late modern art, Picasso-ness is a measure against which other kinds of art categories can be understood.

Sure she’s good, but is she ‘Picasso-good’?