200 papers

According to the Washington Post, a tenured professor at the University of Chicago managed to produce more than two hundred papers in just nine months, largely thanks to generative AI, before fellow academics started raising questions. As such, I should perhaps not be surprised that I recently had to wait three months for a journal to even decide whether to send my manuscript out for review. Luckily, they did, so now I have one more article out there awaiting its fate.

Hopefully, I will have another one joining it next week, as Kalle and I are wrapping up our co-authored article on the board game När då då?. Compared with my work in environmental ethics, pedagogical research really is such a blissful world of encouragement and supportive comments. I mean, few people are going to object to students learning the history of political thought or being exposed to voices outside the established canon.

After spending six hours in the classroom, I stopped by Nordic Wellness for a quick gym session before making a massive carb-loading feast of pecorino meatballs and spaghetti, served with a glass of Argentinian red (as per tradition). Tomorrow, at 7:37 a.m., I will take the high-speed train down to Malmö, where the gun goes off at ten sharp at Ribersborg, sending me everywhere from Limhamn to Värnhem before eventually bringing me back to Ribersborg – hopefully with the clock showing something under three hours and thirty minutes.

Kennedy

After twenty years of blogging, I might be forgiven for thinking I have written things here on Rawls & Me that I in fact have not. Talking with Linnéa yesterday about the not-so-clear-cut distinction between democratic debate and foreign influence operations, I was reminded of a speech John F. Kennedy gave in 1962, which I was certain I had mentioned on the blog. I searched in vain, but I remember the quote as speaking directly to a democratic ethos that seems all but lost these days:

"We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people"

Much like Linnéa's wish to raise her kids as world citizens in a time dominated by chauvinism, many of my values (such as the idea that everyone on this planet deserves a reasonable material standard of living) would, I often feel, have been plain common sense sixty or a hundred years ago. But as the discourse has shifted, they, like Kennedy's words above, have come to seem almost like fringe positions, now that "safety" and group egoism have taken precedence over everything else.