Comments on: Publish You’re Squarish

By: tzs

tzs — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 16:55:52 +0000

Guilty pleasures: reading legal history and Roman law texts in Latin.

Oh, and candied apricots dipped in dark chocolate. And Stilton with a good glass of Laphroig.

By: Michael Mouse

Michael Mouse — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 15:02:37 +0000

Eric Rauchway at #3 reads blogs; Seth Finkelstein at #10 writes comments on blogs.

My guilty pleasure is even worse: I write comments on blogs under an obvious and silly pseudonym, and the comments are usually feeble jokes that undermine any constructive academic purpose served by the blog post.

By: mathpants

mathpants — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 14:47:53 +0000

a million points should be awarded to anyone who answers that their guilty pleasure is plagiarism.

Seriously, I hate questions that are meant to elicit a response that shows you’re an acceptable level of naughty.

When confronted with the “what’s your biggest weakenss” question at a job interview, one should always answer “stealing from my employers.”

By: Tom Hurka

Tom Hurka — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 13:57:58 +0000

Wouldn’t the real guilty pleasure be googling other people’s influence, checking their Amazon rankings, and calculating their h- and g-indexes? It would be the Web of Science equivalent of Facebook stalking.

By: Jacob T. Levy

Jacob T. Levy — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 13:15:12 +0000

Isn’t it odd that there were no really geeky or genre pleasures? Is that generational? I would think that if I sampled a dozen academics, at least one would say something about Civ/ comic books/ WoW/ D&D/ SCA/ SF novels/ SF movies/ shlock horror movies. Those are hardly the equivalent of ‘porn’ or ‘snorting meth’—they’re pretty safe for an academic to admit without losing positional points (admittedly also without gaining the positional points Kieran rightly mentions).

By: Dan Drezner

Dan Drezner — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 12:03:06 +0000

@29… that’s amazing, Patrick, it’s my guilty pleasure as well, except I use the IMF’s Articles of Agreement.

Printed on higher quality paper.

By: steve

steve — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 06:50:05 +0000

my guilty pleasure involves something in a size .357 and weighs in at about 158 grains.

By: SG

SG — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 06:48:15 +0000

developing my own role-playing system (which, of course, didn’t really work) and then subjecting other actual living beings to it.

I did this once for two years running.

Do I beat Dawkins?

By: joel turnipseed

joel turnipseed — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 06:25:25 +0000

uh, magistra: if we required all civil servants to pass a Monarch level victory test at Civilization before they took office, we would—the world wide—have much, much better governments.

By: Sister Josephine Reilly

Sister Josephine Reilly — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 05:57:10 +0000

Anal sex.

By: magistra

magistra — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 05:52:04 +0000

One of the more printable of my guilty pleasures is an obvious one: playing Civilisation and telling myself that I’m really learning something useful about the dynamics of historical development.

By: Few more links! « Entertaining Research

Few more links! « Entertaining Research — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 04:01:13 +0000

[...] Henry at Crooked Timber on some free software for academics (as well as on their guilty pleasures). [...]

By: joel turnipseed

joel turnipseed — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 00:58:34 +0000

I don’t know Vivian: I think I, for one, would much rather post sarcastic comments on CT than check my Amazon ranking (but do wish I’d taken a screenshot when I was in the top 10…another lifetime ago: but maybe next book?).

Now, must go finish snorting Smedley Butler’s ashes from a copy of the U.S. Constitution, with a rolled up copy of my DD214.

By: vivian

vivian — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 00:47:08 +0000

Well, sarcasm is clearly not a guilty pleasure for any of us. And, re: comment 10, if anyone really read (let alone enjoyed) the Chronicle of Higher Ed then Scott would never need to blog again.
Henry got it right in composing this post – what folks really love and hate to admit is just how much they (we? naah, they!) get off on googling their influence/ checking amazon rankings / Web of science citation hits.

By: eb

eb — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 23:08:48 +0000

I’m fairly certain that the Western Historical Association has met in Vegas.