The bravo void

About this blog

As an evolutionary biologist and ecologist I was educated in aggressive, critical environments to be opinionated, incisive, and crushing.  To be taken seriously, it appeared, I had to attack and defend. As I met anthropologists, philosophers, and artists, I learned you can be kind and constructive at the same time; I enjoyed the elation of sharing my love and admiration of other people's work.  Not that anthropologists, philosophers or artists are always inherently positive: but the ones I was lucky enough to meet and work with were.  

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It is very uncommon to get and to give positive feedback in academia.  It was only when I got my position at the Muséum that a lot of people suddenly told me nice things about my work.  I was touched and surprised.  People also suddenly seem to assume that I am competent and have something to offer, in a way that they didn't before. In academia, we get constant feedback about how bad our work is from anonymous peer reviewers, journal editors, and funders who tell us our research is uninteresting, the paper we wrote is not the paper we should have written, our theory is unnecessary, our methods are fatally flawed, this is the biggest piece of shit they have ever ever seen, and we can't speak English.  Many academics I know become depressed or suffer bouts of low self-esteem and low self-confidence.  

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It is also easy to focus on all the published and funded work that seems bad and stupid, or to become angry about any of one's intellectual pet peeves in one's discipline.

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So I thought it would be good to counteract the admiration rift and the plaudit lacuna by talking about my all-time favorite papers.  I want to focus on contemporary authors, and to explain why I like these papers so much.  The point isn't to congratulate my friends or curry favour with important people: a personal message is probably better for that.  I want to create a space for talking about what I admire and love in the fields that I work and read in.  

If you want to contribute a review of one of your favorite papers, just contact me.

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If you want to read me talking about things I don't like, I also review books for the journal Biodiversity.  I like some of the books and dislike others.