The Week in Links (Sally's Apizza Edition)

Would that I were in Granada at the end of the month:

Owen Jones, la Alhambra y el Orientalismo

Owen Jones and the Alhambra

Of these, my favorite is the one in O Porto, thereby pushing Portugal higher up from its already-high spot on my travel list. My favorite bookshops in the world, not the most beautiful, but still, are Green Apple Books in San Francisco and Tmol Shilshom in Jerusalem. I'm also a fan of the branch of La Central located at the Reina Sofia in Madrid (the photo doesn't do it justice at all), and thought that might also have been in contention for the title of most beautiful. If you're so inclined, leave your favorites or candidates for most beautiful in the comments section:

The 20 Most  Beautiful Bookstores in the World

A bookstore specializing in books on Spain for English speakers (first spotted over at Books on Spain) looks like it might have potential (regardless of however much I might detest the substitution of the numeral '4' for the word 'for'):

Books4Spain

My intro-lecture-class colleague and I are seriously considering writing a budget line into our team teaching development grant for a pair of these:

The Best Time-Saving Device Every Professor Needs to Have! 

A post on the Wikipedia blackout from the Stanford CMEMS group blog that is just generally much better than mine was:

When Wikipedia Went Dark

Of interest:

The Upside of Dyslexia

Since this aggregation of links will be posted automatically while I'm in Wooster Square, it is especially appropriate to note that Yale undergrads, by and large, are smart, thoughtful, curious, inquisitive and funny as all get-out. Please don't reflect poorly on all of us, ever, by deliberately misunderstanding/selectively understanding a statement on a web page and launching into a solipsistic, anti-intellectual tirade on that basis. *Headdesk*:

Kill the Language Requirement

And finally, permit me to ascend a small soap box. This came across on the Cornell Medieval Studies list and particularly because of that, because I know that people I care about personally and professionally will have read it, I must repost and declare how very much I disagree with this advice. My own experience on the job market has, admittedly, been limited and atypical and I have been unusually fortunate. With that said, from my own experience, having watched that of friends, and now from a very privileged position of being able to watch the whole thing from through the looking-glass, if you are going on the job market, please, please do be yourself. If what this columnist suggests is true — "no matter where you are in your career, but most especially if you are just starting out, or (god forbid) a grad student, you are, as an academic, insecure, verbose, defensive, paranoid, beset by feelings of inadequacy,  pretentious, self-involved, communicatively challenged, and fixated on minutiae. Consequently, here’s how you act in interviews:  rambling, obscure, petrified, subservient, cringing, disorganized, braggy, tedious, emotionally over-amped, off-point, self-absorbed, defensive, and fixated on minutiae" — then still don't pretend to be someone you're not in the interview. Try to stop being those things! In general! Not just in an interview! First of all, doing so is likely to improve a whole host of things in life in general as well as in academia. And second, you're going to be interviewed by a bunch of smart people who can generally see through an act; they may not know what's beneath the act, but they'll know it's being put on. And they're going to wonder what you're really like, what you're trying to hide, and whether they can really tell from your performed you what real you will be like as a colleague. And finally, if you are you in an interview and do get a job, it's much easier to walk into your new position and not be "insecure, verbose, defensive and paranoid" because you know that your colleagues, that the people who among other things will eventually decide if they want to keep you around, know what you're about, intellectually, as a teacher and as a colleague. You don't then have to spend the next six years keeping up a charade. If they hired you, warts and all, intellectual quirks and all, then it's okay to keep being a little quirky in your work. So if you woke up today to find this in your inbox, or even if you are reading it for the first time by clicking on the link below, please, please don't follow this advice:

The 'Be Yourself' Myth

*steps down from soap box*