Category: Daily updates

Generally musings of the day, usually accompanied by a photograph

Listening to the Abel espionage case

Because of its restrained and historically accurate storytelling, Bridge of Spies is one of my favourite films.

Looking for something a bit meatier than podcasts to listen to on my exercise walks, I am trying out an Audible account with James Donovan’s Strangers on a Bridge: The Case of Colonel Abel. It’s the perfect kind of book for someone overly preoccupied with an academic project, insofar as it is interesting and detailed enough to be mentally engaging as well as mercifully unrelated to any work I need to do.

Books in progress — October 2021

Back in the day, I would write some kind of review or response to each book I read, which was useful in several ways. It gave me something short to refer back to in order to refresh my memory, as well as to share with people who might consider reading the book (2 pages on a blog is a much faster read).

It became impossible to continue with at some point in the PhD, either because I had too many books to read or because I didn’t have time to write responses.

Just for fun, here is a list of books I have in progress and how I am generally finding them. These are in no particular order and range from books I received today (Hayhoe) to ones that have been in a pile of reading in progress for several years:

Katharine Hayhoe. Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World. 2021: Reading because Hayhoe is a prominent voice in climate education and communication, with a focus on reaching out to groups not naturally aligned to the progressive agenda which saturates most climate activist groups

Allen Dulles. The Craft of Intelligence: America’s Legendary Spy Master on the Fundamentals of Intelligence Gathering for a Free World. 2016: Mentioned/recommended in several International Spy Museum Spycast podcasts and video lectures

John Le Carré. A Most Wanted Man. 2008: I love the 2014 film directed by Anton Corbijn and starring Philip Seymour Hoffman; I think this is Le Carré’s most engaging story because of the diversity of the people involved — they aren’t all just a bunch of grey spooks

Robert L. Jaffe an Washington Taylor. The Physics of Energy. 2018: Many people writing and organizing about climate change don’t know much about energy. This MIT textbook goes too far into the math for me on many occassions, but is an excellent general introduction to how energy works in our society.

Willy Ley. Rockets, Missiles, and Men in Space. 1968: I picked this up used because a few skimmed pages looked promising – turns out to be a highly interesting account of early rocket and space flight

Daniel Kahneman. Thinking Fast and Slow. 2011: A good summary of some of the cognitive science related to environmental and climate politics, but a bit hard to get through when I have seen the main ideas summarized and repeated in so many places already.

Aisha Ahmad. Jihad & Co: Black Markets and Islamist Power. 2017: A great example of scholarly writing well-written and concise enough to be accessible to an interested amateur audience – rich with personal experiences, and providing a very different perspective on what gives rise to Islamist theocratic governments

Herman Melville. Moby Dick. 1851: Recommended as a friend’s favourite — much easier to read than its fearsome reputation as a difficult book made me expect

Andrew Darby. Harpoon: Into the Heart of Whaling. 2008: Informative and well-written, but too depressing to finish. People really are awful

Simon Garfield. On the Map: A Mind-Expanding Exploration of the Way the World Looks. 2013: Not much new information for someone who has already read a bit on the subject, but well-grounded in images and descriptions of real maps

Oliver Morton. The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World. 2015: I loved Eating the Sun, but this one is too depressing to finish

Shi-Ling Hsu. The Case for a Carbon Tax: Getting P{ast Our Hang-Ups to Effective Climate Policy. 2011: Recommended at some point in my PhD research, but covers little new ground for someone who has followed the topic of carbon pricing closely

David Keith. A Case for Climate Engineering. 2013. Reading it to engage with the question of whether geoengineering is sensible to pursue — tiny but too depressing to finish

Diane Vaughan. The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA. 1996: Relevant for my Space Shuttle screenplay and also a fascinating analysis of organizational culture — applicable to everyone working on something hard and dangerous

William Perry and Tom Collina. The Button: The New Nuclear Arms Race and Presidential Power from Truman to Trump. 2020: Speaks to my long-term interest in avoiding accidental or unauthorized nuclear weapon use

Seth Klein. A Good War: Mobilizing Canada for the Climate Emergency. 2020: Widely discussed in activist circles, but frustrates me with two persistent types of superficial analysis, basically assuming that because WWII and climate change were big important challenges the effort against the latter can be helpfully modelled on the former, and accepting cost-free notional answers from people who want to come across as good to pollsters as strong evidence for a desire for radical political change

E.H. Carr. What is History? 1961: Read partly to wrestle with questions of disciplinary boundaries and methodological orientation in political science

James R. Hansen. First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong. 2005: I loved the film when I saw it with Holly, and astronaut biographies and autobiographies are one of the best parts of my screenplay research

Those are the ones that I am at least partway into and which I can find readily around the room. I should probably apply more discipline and self-control to not obtaining additional books while these are all still pending.

Workload, timelines, advisors, funding, pressure

A very good blog post on what to expect from a PhD program (and especially what the university itself won’t tell you): So You Want To Go To Grad School (in the Academic Humanities)?

Two paragraphs which are especially informative for people who don’t have recent personal experience in a PhD program:

The most important person in the process is your advisor, who is generally a senior member of the faculty in your department who shares your specialization. I struggle to find words to communicate how important this person will be during your graduate experience.. Graduate study at this level is effectively an apprenticeship system; the advisor is the master and the graduate student is the apprentice and so in theory at least the advisor is going to help guide the student through each stage of this process. To give a sense of the importance of this relationship, it is fairly common to talk about other academics’ advisors as forming a sort of ‘family tree’ (sometimes over multiple ‘generations’). Indeed, the German term for an advisor is a doktorvater, your ‘doctor-father’ (or doktormutter, of course) and this is in common use among English-language academics as well and the notion it suggests, that your advisor is a sort of third parent, isn’t so far from the truth.

If you are considering graduate school with an eye towards continuing in academia who you choose as your advisor will be very important: academia is a snooty, prestige conscious place and your advisor’s name and prestige will travel with you. But there’s more than that: your advisor, because they need to check off on every step of your journey and you will need their effusive letter of recommendation to pursue any kind of academic job has tremendous power over you as a graduate student. You, by contrast, have functionally no power in that relationship; you are reliant on the good graces of your advisor.

Related:

Into the fall

My friend Richard’s visit has provided opportunities, at this turning point of seasons, to bring friends together and enjoy multi-person conversations in contexts like distanced outdoor walks. It has been a great reminder of the world beyond the specialized niche of the PhD program, not to mention the sort of pre-pandemic social interactions which we all must value more highly now that we’ve felt and adapted to their absence.

My main task remains the same: finish the PhD and find something worthwhile to do after.

I’m grateful that I have such friends to enrich my life while I’m working.

Crazy heat out west

In the Pacific northwest of the US and Canada’s western provinces and territories a severe heat wave is breaking all-time temperature records.

The region generally benefits from moderate year-round temperatures, both because the nearby and massive Pacific ocean takes in heat in the summer and releases it in the winter and because prevailing winds from the west come from the ocean rather than over land. As a result, homes, infrastructure, wardrobes, and lifestyles are not suited to extreme temperatures.

Related:

Moving from Markham

At the end of July I am moving out of the room on Markham Street which I have been renting since December 2015.

Like the most recent flatmate who moved out of this three bedroom place, I am being pushed out by the landlady’s refusal to meet her basic legal obligations. I feel a bit conflicted about effectively rewarding misconduct by giving in to the renoviction that she has been pushing for, but this has also become a place of enormous stress and little joy since 2019.

The neighbourhood where I am moving in August is near Glencairn Station, so it will certainly be a change of scenery. I’m a bit sad that I will be farther from campus and the amenities of downtown, but that place seems set to be temporary precarious housing too, somewhere to live as I get through the final PhD stages of committee review and defence and while moving on to whatever will occupy my time after the doctorate.

solo

Having just helped my second flatmate move out, I am living alone for the first time in many years.

Before the sequence of flatmates here in the Annex, I lived at Massey College or with family in Toronto, or for a while in an apartment above a streetcar stop at College and Dovercourt with what would be the first of many flatmates who were also graduate students at U of T.

I had two places on my own in Ottawa while working as a civil servant: one on Booth Street within sight of the Environment Canada headquarters tower which I learned of based on a “to rent” sign in the window and where I signed a lease within minutes of seeing the place, having been pipped on a couple of other OK places by being the second or third to see it in the last few days or weeks. The other was the eco- co-op Beaver Barracks, which appealed to me largely based on their geoexchange heating and cooling system, which seemed a particularly sensible choice to me based on Ottawa’s severe climate in summer and winter.

Barring some time in Vancouver, I pretty much went straight from Oxford to Ottawa at the end of my M.Phil in 2007. In Oxford, my second year had been spent living with two fellow M.Phil in IR students who were encouraging and lively companions and who remain friends today, though infrequently-seen ones. Before that, I lived among probably a couple of hundred at Wadham College, where my graduate student room had a glass wall which faced inward into a two-story courtyard with everybody else’s small rooms facing in, the glass notably acoustically permissive.

Before that, it was alternating between my parents’ home in North Vancouver and two UBC residences: mostly Totem Park in my first and second year, and Fairview later. Fairview Crescent was a great concept for a residence, with multi-person units arranged along a pedestrian-only central street with a café. Late in my time as an undergraduate, I remember we would hold debate society executive meetings there, having grown up a bit out of beer and nachos at one of the places in the student union building.

It need not be a bad thing to be alone. I am grateful for the many forms of electronic communication I undertake with friends and family around the world, and it makes an enormous difference compared to being cut off from communication as well as direct personal contact.

I am giving every part of the place a deep and thorough cleaning. If nobody else is around and the place is dirty, there’s nobody else left to blame!

Virtual memorial tomorrow

Elizabeth “Liz” Hope, who had been the Head Porter at Massey College since before I first visited the place, recently and unexpectedly died. As the chief authority in the lodge controlling entry into the college, her company was a day-to-day experience for all resident Junior Fellows and visitors. For me, she did a lot to establish and help me understand the character and workings of the college, and I am grateful for her evident care toward Junior Fellows and contribution to the unique college atmosphere.

Among her prominent roles was distributing information relevant to college members by email, which inspired a song by Junior Fellows.