I got the idea for this series from zunguzungu who publishes a collection of links to great posts every Sunday and from Feministe that allows people to self-promote on this day. In this series, I will publish a post every Sunday that will contain links to the posts from my blogroll that I enjoyed the most during the week. These are not the same articles I linked to during the week. These are the ones I would have liked to comment on if only I had time.

Readers should feel free to leave links to their own (or somebody else’s) posts written during the week in question that they believe were especially great. It doesn’t make sense to link to an entire blog because that never works. So please, just the specific posts you really liked this week.

This is what I’ve been reading:

Baron-Cohen tries to defend his indefensible arguments about those bad, insensitive autistics. And Part II.

How to choose an academic journal to submit your article

New opinion survey instrument and political spectrum/landscape tabulator in beta testing

An open letter to Etsy shops

How one’s attitude to traveling evolves as one gets older

What’s wrong with “bros before hos” attitude to life

A post on privilege inspired by me

If you are on the non-academic job market, here are the best ways to handle interactions with a headhunter / recruiter

The geek culture and sexism: do they have to come hand in hand?

Does your university offer you workable solutions to dealing with students who have mental health issues?

Why care about Rabindranath Tagore?

Do your male family members trick you into doing more housework?

Is blogging in decline? Read a post and do a survey.  I don’t think it is in decline or likely to be any time soon, which I let the people conducting the survey know as clearly as possible.

Films you can show in a Latin American History course.

On a regular basis, I receive messages telling me that I could improve my blogging, acquire more popularity and gain allies if only I started writing less aggressively. There have been so many of such messages over 2,5 years of blogging that I now have a separate folder for them in my blogging mailbox. I save them because, more often than not, they are extremely aggressive which makes them even more hilarious.

Fellow blogger Z shared that she also has received similar exhortations. So I decided to conduct a poll and find out whether “if-only-you-could-be-less-aggressive” messages have anything to do with the gender of the blogger who receives them.

The poll is located in the right-hand panel of the blog. Please vote!

After almost two and a half years of blogging, I have seen certain comments crop up with scary regularity and had to learn to decipher them. Here is a list of such popular comments and my translations of what they really mean. Feel free to add your own:

This is a straw-man argument – How dare you denounce sexists, racists, and homophobes to whom I proudly belong?

Where is your respect for freedom of speech? – I will spout any kind of rubbish I want and you will listen and never object.

You would gain more allies if you were less aggressive – Shut up and go into your corner, you woman.

Everything you write is ridiculous – I’m vaguely bothered by something you said but I’m too stupid to verbalize what it is that bothers me.

You don’t even know me, so how dare you say these things about me – I’m such a center of the universe that everything published online has to be about me.

This is a horrible blog! I will never come back! – I will read all of the posts you ever wrote, commit many of them to memory, and keep leaving endless comments about how this is a horrible blog and how I will never come back to it.

You just say this because you are autistic – I am bothered by clear, logical arguments.

You are elitist – I don’t understand all these long three-syllable words.

You are lying, this never really happened to you – I don’t know how to reconcile your experience with my very limited world view.

All of you Lefties / feminists / autistics / women are the same – The world makes no sense to me unless I have subdivided people into groups and assigned labels to them.

It is a waste of time to argue with you – I have no idea how to respond to your arguments.

My niece Klubnikis doesn’t call her father “papa,” “father,” “padre” or “Dad” even though she can say all these words perfectly well.

She calls him “Papoontin” because a shorter appellation must seem grievously inadequate for such an important person.

A very old, slightly eccentric and highly esteemed scholar was saying to me once, “My dear child, why do you want to specialize in contemporary literature? If you do that, you might end up meeting writers. Believe me, there is nothing worse than that. They are all such intolerable creatures. Self-centered, in need of constant adulation and ego-stroking, peevish, and unreliable. Why don’t you join us, the Golden Age specialists, instead? All of our writers have been dead for a very long time. It’s such a pleasure to work with them.”

At my department, we are assigned to teach three days per week in one semester and two days per week in the following semester (or vice versa). The Chair of the department always makes efforts to ensure that this system is in place for all faculty members, irrespective of where they are on the tenure track. It’s easy to get used to a good thing, so I assumed it was like this everywhere. However, I just discovered that there are places where you need to get tenure before you can hope for a 2-day teaching schedule.

This is one more reason to appreciate my department. I see absolutely no difference in the way junior and senior faculty are treated (except, of course, the salaries, which is only right.) I have a feeling that I somehow chanced onto this really great place of employment, so now I’m not even aware about how things could have been.

So many employers organize weird events to make their employees feel good about the company and spend tons of money and time on these efforts. The strangest corporate event I have ever heard of was at a huge financial company where middle-aged corporate types of the kind that sleeps in a suit and a tie clutching a briefcase and a BlackBerry had to jump around in sacks to show corporate spirit and a willingness to participate in corporate fun. They were traumatized by the event for weeks but didn’t feel like they could refuse.

However, you don’t need to do any of these things to get your employees to like the company and identify with it. All you need to do is just treat them right.

My sister is a professional job recruiter (you can read her advice on looking for a job here). She says that, in a difficult economy which is not likely to improve a whole lot, the employers who will come out winning will be the ones who learn to treat their employees well and will be able to offer people who work for them something greater than just the salary. She and her business partner and friend have a boutique recruitment agency that is still very young. They only have two employees at this point but they do all they can to make the employees happy and comfortable in the workplace. Here are some of the things they offer to the people who work for them:

a) educational opportunities (professional seminars and, in the future, possibilities to get another degree) paid for exclusively by the company. These are not the kind of folks who make an employee pay for professional improvement out of his or her own pocket;

b) respect for different working styles. Come in late, leave early, dress any way you like – as long as your job is done, there will be no humiliating dress codes, punching in and out, etc.;

c) regular trips to nice restaurants paid by for the company. And when I say nice, I mean really upmarket Montreal restaurants;

d) flexible schedules and regular hefty bonuses.

And this is just the beginning.

A good employer knows that everything is dispensable except human beings. Workers who love their job, understand how their place of employment functions and are enthusiastic about it are priceless. Only the employers who realize this will survive and prosper. The rest are doomed, be they part of academia or industry. This is why I’m convinced that my university, even if it isn’t very well-known at this point, has a much brighter future than many neighboring schools that are more famous but that treat their employees with a lot less respect.

Some professors apparently are not underpaid:

NEWPORT, KY (September X, 2011) – A journalism professor at Northern Kentucky University has posted a flier on the Internet offering a $10,000 reward to anybody who can provide verifiable and irrefutable proof that Sarah Palin is the birth mother of Trig, the boy she claims she delivered on April 18, 2008. . . Brad Scharlott, an associate professor of journalism, has read rumors online for years, and is now offering the $10,000 reward because he wishes to find the truth about the controversy. 

“The circumstantial evidence that Sarah Palin pulled off a pregnancy hoax, possibly to enhance her political standing, seems overwhelming,” Scharlott said, but added that he is still open to the possibility that Palin did give birth to Trig, and would gladly give the reward money to anyone who provides proof. 

The most hilarious thing about all this is that this effort is being loudly applauded by a group of pseudo-Liberals who were extremely appalled by the Obama’s birth certificate debacle. (Just do a search for “Obama’s birth certificate” on the website I just linked to and you’ll see.)

A fascination with strangers’ uteri is the only truly bipartisan sentiment many people share.

What is it with people trying to generalize and ascribe their own (quite freaky, I might add) experiences to others. Look at this individual who thinks he can speak in the name of all European immigrants:

“The suburban dream house is the idealization of every immigrant’s Dream — the vassal’s dream of his own castle,” wrote Italian-born immigrant Edgardo Contini. “Europeans who come here are delighted by our suburbs. Not to live in an apartment! It is a universal aspiration to own your own home.”

I’m a European who came here and I’m horrified with the suburbs. It’s all just empty streets, huge garages with tiny houses attached to them, and sprinklers watering the asphalt where nobody ever walks. The only entertainment is going to the mall and to the movie theater that only shows crappy comedies and weird cartoons. You can’t get anywhere without a car, everybody is dressed horribly, the food is really unhealthy. For people who want to raise children, suburban America is a nightmare.

Oh, what wouldn’t this immigrant give to live in an apartment in one of the great American cities! Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore, maybe Seattle. That’s where life is. Culture, civilization, opera, people who read, travel, and debate. Hell, maybe even good coffee if one is very lucky.

I have no doubt that this Contini individual indeed dreams of being stuck in a suburb and good for him. However, there are many Europeans who find the suburban lifestyle to be intolerable.