Little Atoms Podcast with the Brilliant Neil Denny

I was so please to have had the opportunity to speak with Neil Denny on the Little Atoms podcast. He asked such thoughtful and insightful questions, and i love the fact that he allows long-winded academics like me to waffle on when necessary. I really do need to learn how to speak in sound byte one of these days…

My new Qwerkywriter!

I am so excited to have just received my new Qwerkywriter in mint green. I have moved my old black one to the office and this one now graces my home work station. It is definitely the best mechanical keyboard out there. I love that it simulates the feeling on typing on a typewriter, and that I can use it wirelessly with my iPad.

Qwerkywriter.jpeg

An amazing review in the New Yorker! →

Heartfelt gratitude to Rebecca Mead! She really understood what I was trying to do with this book. I couldn’t be more thrilled with this engages and rigorous review.

“The virtue of Ghodsee’s smart, accessible book is that it illustrates how it might be possible for a woman — or, for that matter, a man — to have an entirely different structural relationship to something as fundamental as sex, or health.”

Read the full review here

Winter academic reading

My spring semester is about to start, but I had some time to delve into some great books about Eastern Europe and the politics of knowledge production during the Cold War. I wrote review of Birth of Democratic Citizenship and To See Paris and Die, I read Know Your Enemy for the first time and it inspired me to go back and reread Laura Nader’s and Noam Chomsky’s essays in The Cold War & The University.

Books.jpeg

Oxford English Dictionary on "Socialism"

The OED allows a lot of room for interpretation of the word “socialism.” Some people want to pin it down to state or collective ownership of the means of production, but it is clear that in modern usage it can mean a lot of different things to different people including: “any of various systems of liberal social democracy which retain a commitment to social justice and social reform, or feature some degree of state intervention in the running of the economy.”

“Frequently with capital initial. A theory or system of social organization based on state or collective ownership and regulation of the means of production, distribution, and exchange for the common benefit of all members of society; advocacy or practice of such a system, esp. as a political movement. Now also: any of various systems of liberal social democracy which retain a commitment to social justice and social reform, or feature some degree of state intervention in the running of the economy.”

OED Socialism.jpg