A New Endeavour: The Cooked Academic

Once upon a time, I blogged. In fact, it could be said that I blogged rather effectively; I was one of the folks who got in early on Psychology-social-media, and I had some decent luck with posts on "replication crisis" themes, while also sharing some decently popular ggplot2 tutorials.

Then, I stopped. I don't recall exactly when, and can only fuzzily recall why. But what I do remember is that it had stopped being fun.

Fast forward 10 years, and here I am: pretty decently burnt out for a litany of reasons, and about to start my first sabbatical. I'm eager for a new way to engage with work. I want to put my time and energy into things I am more confident will be helpful. I want to feel good about academe, again, in spite of the many, many reasons to feel cynical.

And so, I am going to try blogging again.

What am I going to blog about? What I don't want is for this to become a place where I mostly publicly ruminate about the things that drag me down in this line of business. And if I strafe into those topics, I'd like to find ways to channel optimism, or connect to constructive solutions.

What I do want for this "place' to be more fun, and light-hearted, while still having some utility for my academic community. Weirdly enough, I'm therefore drawn to using this blog to share content about something non-academic that I love: food and beverage. I love to eat. I love to drink. I love to cook. And while doing all of this, I love to find/make a deal. Everyone has to eat--including academics--and many of us enjoy the odd caffeinated or fermented beverage, and I not-so-modestly think I have good wisdom to share on those topics.

And so, on The Cooked Academic, you'll find a mix of content about cooking in real life, and being cooked (overdone, perhaps) in academe.

We'll see how long I keep this up, but for as long as I do, I hope you'll the content.