Starting up Again

It's been a long summer, with more blogging and tweeting than I expected, so I've extended my blogging break into September this year. I will begin blogging seriously again on Monday. I've got a lot of things to talk about, including (I regret to inform you) the Tim Hunt affair, which appears to continue with new contributions on both sides of the controversy (see Jon Foreman's and Tom Levenson's recent, and very different, accounts of the events and their significance). I also want to write about what I learned during my time with Oliver Reichenstein's Information Architects in the Alps last week. They made me realize that my own "architecture" leaves a lot to be desired and that I could make myself more useful to more people by thinking seriously about my web presence. If I build it, it now seems reasonable to suppose, they will come.

Finally, I definitely want to write more about academic writing. I have way too much to say on the topic and part of my information architecture is going to have to be sorting it usefully into seminars for researchers, courses for students, a book or two, some journal articles, talks and lectures, and the aforementioned website. I have spent more than a decade now, I realize, trying to identify the essence of scholarly of writing and I have, by and large, been successful—at least from an intellectual point of view. I've been a bit less effective at building a coherent career around that essence, forever ambivalent about whether I am, myself, a scholar and teacher or a consultant and coach. The next ten years, let's say, will be devoted to deciding that question and living according to its answer.