This is the kind of investigative journalism that I find extremely relevant. Have you ever bought books or anything else from online distributors? Ever stopped to really think about how that product you ordered actually makes it to your doorstep so rapidly, and at such a low price? Journalist Mac McClelland has a new article [...]I’ve decided to move this reading circle to Monday, post the reading and my comments on it immediately, and then let discussion run the whole week. I think this will be a bit better because it involves less moving parts. The reading for this week is Ruth Benedict’s “Anthropology and the Humanities“, her presidential address [...]Stop being an anthropologist. Some of my mentors, none of which are in anthropology departments, prefer to say “trained as an anthropologist, so and so, investigates…” as opposed to “so and so is an anthropologist.” If you are on the job market this may be hard to do as you are likely to have just [...]The piece for discussion this week (actually, it should have been last week, but I got caught behind a couple of different eight balls) is Vincente Diaz’s “Voyaging for Anti-Colonial Recovery“. It’s a short piece with a few flaws — it lacks the informality and wit of Diaz’s other work, and feels at times one [...]Peter Schmidt over at the Chronicle of Higher Ed has a new article that takes a long look at Charles Murray’s new book “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. Murray is one of the authors of the (in)famous book The Bell Curve, if you didn’t already know. Schmidt writes: Mr. Murray’s newest book, Coming Apart: [...]It’s 8 am, and already bright. I’m out for an early morning walk because it’s a good way to see what ‘s going on around this community–to see what people are up to, and also just to go check out the surrounding landscape. I like to do this a few times a week…it’s good for [...]The NY Times has an article about how corporate executives and government officials leave their laptops behind when they go to China or Russia, for fear that corporate or government secrets might be compromised by advanced spyware. it has become easier to steal information remotely because of the Internet, the proliferation of smartphones and the [...]Ok, since everyone on here seems to be writing about Jared Diamond, including Jason, I am going to go ahead and jump on the bandwagon too. I can’t resist. What can I say? I’m a complete opportunist. A true story in which Jared Diamond plays a key role: During my undergrad I had two back-to-back [...]Thanks to everyone to read and contributed to last week’s reinauguration of our ‘reading circle’ feature. This week I’d like to showcase some more great open access work by asking people to read an article from the open access serial Pacific Asia Inquiry: Voyaging for Anti-Colonial Recovery: Austronesian Seafaring, Archipelagic Rethinking and the Re-Mapping of Indigeneity [...]I’m currently on a committee which has been tasked with developing a set of ethical guidelines for visual ethnography in Taiwan. While I agreed to take part in this process because ‘image ethics’ are something I take very seriously, I am also very skeptical about the application of a medical ethics model to anthropology. For [...]