The waylaid plans of men named Mike

I thought this week would see me get out in front of a couple of class projects. It looked like a relatively light week, since the Statistics mid-term meant there was no class Monday and not enough new material to warrant homework. Meanwhile, the business school at Harvard shuts down for this week, as its students vie for summer jobs (plum banking jobs, from what I hear). So I have no class there this week. But things never go as planned. In Cultural Economics we’re reading six papers on various aspects on what affects social trust, and those just take a lot of time. I realized I was behind on my Statistics reading (always light). There was supplemental material on Hamlet. Plus, we had our last class on Gravity’s Rainbow, and my group had to present its final thoughts on how it deals with theology. And I was writing something that was assigned in March, but not due until now. Ugh. It all added up to no huge blocks of time with nothing to do but read and write. I’ll have to get through that extra work somehow (or remember that I’m an auditor and technically not responsible for everything).

Darcy Frey gave a great Sounding on Monday, so good it made me stop and think, ‘wait a minute, how did I get to be a Nieman along with him?’ A good seminar this afternoon, built around the new edition of “From Slavery to Freedom.” Tomorrow, we get to have Seymour Hersh as our lunch guest. I can’t complain too much about time, with stuff like that going on.