On where to publish after tenure

Instapundit remarks on a paper that argues that law professors publish just as much post-tenure but dial down the journal placement.

The journal process can be slow and tortuous, and not infrequently results in papers that are worse, not better. It puzzles me a bit that well-known tenured economists with access to the NBER working paper series, which has essentially become a means of self-publication rather than a means of circulating unfinished work for comments, bother with the journals at all. If people will read and cite the NBER working paper, why spend time rewriting to make the paper more like the one that the referees would have written when you could write a new one?

Clerking for Scalia

This piece from a former clerk, with different politics than Scalia, gives a sense of what it was like to work for him. I particularly liked this bit:

He forced us all to acknowledge that words cannot mean anything we want them to mean; that we have to impose a degree of discipline on our thinking.

Odd that this is controversial.

Trump v. Hitler

An amusing piece from a German site (but in English) on the important differences between Adolf and Donald.

Assorted links

1. Do snapchat like a teen.

2. How many degrees of separation? Lots of interesting bits on measurement and selection bias.

3. On working at Hooters. This would make a fascinating topic for a serious ethnography that focused on the implicit transfer of money for attention.

4. Yet another Camille Paglia interview, this time with Nick Gillespie of reason.

5. Dan Drezner's theory of Trump.

#2 via MR

Link on #5 fixed.

Book: The Baby Boom by P.J. O'Rourke

O'Rourke, P.J. 2014. The Baby Boom: How It Got That Way, And It Wasn't My Fault, And I'll Never Do It Again. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press.

This book turned out to be much more autobiographical than I expected and less of a contribution to popular social science. I particularly enjoyed the bits towards the end about P.J.'s college years and the period immediately afterwards. If you like P.J., you will like this book, though for me it did not quite reach the level of Parliament of Whores, which is my favorite.

The earlier parts of the book, in addition to the humor, provide a picture of what childhood used to be like. I can remember going off to the local "wetlands" to catch frogs and lizards for hours with no particular designated time of return and no electronic devices by which my parents could contact me. That sort of free range play just does not happen any more, at least not in these parts.

Dick Spady, R.I.P.

Spady was the founder of Dick's Drive-In, a delightful relic of the 50s that my parents and I both enjoyed in our respective college days in Seattle. The Seattle Times obituary includes some history of the restaurant chain.

Hat tip: Mike McCutchin

Charles Murray on Trump

While not agreeing with everything Murray has to say, I found this piece thought-provoking. It pushes themes related to the decline of the working class in the US that have been on Murray's mind since the Bell Curve (though most critics ignored them there in their rush to talk about IQ).