1. potluck last night to celebrate/mourn emily's grad school hunting trip, which will be long (a month!) and presumably full of food that is not as good as that on offer in our bay area friend circle: sweet potato fries of two varieties, emily's own cream of zucchini & squash soup, lovely couscous and wild rice salads, zachary's pizza (although: isn't that cheating?), homemade ice cream, gooey orangey chocolatey cake with grand marnier whipped cream.
2. new baby! in particular, a macbook pro that is lightning fast and has a time-suck of a camera attached to it and actually belongs to benetech but oh well. and speaking of benetech: i have business cards! and benefits! below is a picture of me demonstrating both the existence of business cards and the timesuck camera. enjoy!
3. today's task, after a weekend of brusque-to-brutal email interactions: edit my APSA paper back into my prospectus, taking care to highlight the hypotheses with, like, sixteen-point bold font. i find it difficult to believe it when many of my sentences begin with things like "observationally, we expect..." -- but it turns out that some readers of the APSA paper failed to diagnose the presence of observational implications in all that theoretical gobbledygook. oh, and i'm adding two new sections to my prospectus: an "executive summary" (surprisingly useful!) and "what this prospectus is not about" (painfully necessary!).
i might even choose cases soon. you never know.
4. everyone's a little bit (ok, a lot) racist: white people in tuscaloosa, including most of the board of ed and the superintendent, seem unable to understand the implications of hearing "undisciplined" and "overcrowded" as good reasons to engage in some de facto resegregation. said one white parent who supported the plan, which moved mostly black and latino students back to their "neighborhood schools:" "I’m not one who looks to resegregate the schools." at least, not in so many words. meanwhile, hundreds of kids who had gone to the trouble of getting themselves bused to better (whiter) schools were kicked out, reassigned, and then readmitted after the school year had already begun.