Research Musings was my graduate-school blog in 2014 and 2015. I wrote about academic life, writing, skepticism, religion, and whatever I had read or watched that week. The tone was often impatient. Sometimes that was the point. Sometimes it was just impatience.
This reconstruction draws from four front-page captures made between May 2014 and May 2015. Personal names, contact details, and account links have been removed. The posts below lead to local notes containing the surviving text or a description of it. Other controls are present because they were on the site. They do not pretend to work.
Research musings
Sociology · musings · rubbish
Learning how to say less
A short note on economy in writing and teaching, prompted by an interview with Amanda Palmer.
Grad students today are the worst
A deliberately cranky response to complaints about undergraduates, aimed instead at graduate teaching and the habits of teaching assistants.
PhD anxiety
Advice about doctoral work, writing, email, and the ordinary discovery that intelligence does not organize a dissertation.
Enough with the fallacy police
An argument against treating the names of informal fallacies as a substitute for interpretation or persuasion.
Open secret: Graduate students don’t like writing
An early version of an idea I still teach: a writing problem may also be an interest, practice, or attention problem.
Three ways to enjoy your PhD
Three suggestions about play, failure, and keeping doctoral work in proportion.
Call-out culture
A short argument about language policing, symbolic victories, and the use of privilege as a conversational weapon.
Survivorman and Bigfoot
A brief complaint about a survival presenter giving cryptozoology more credit than it had earned.
Sorry, this is a replica, not a real website :( Recovered posts open as local notes. Search, category, account, and archive controls do not.
What I was writing about
The academic posts are the clearest link to my present work. They are concerned with writing as a habit, the poor preparation many graduate instructors receive, and the small routines that make doctoral work harder than it needs to be. The language is blunter than I would use now.
The culture and skepticism posts belong more firmly to their time. They are argumentative blog posts written amid the atheist and skeptical debates of the early 2010s. Several make broad claims quickly. I have preserved enough context to make that visible.
Insecular (2012–2013) → Research Musings (2014) → Atheist Researcher (2015)
Writing is the thinking · Stop Calling It Grammar · When web standards were visible · Museum