Research

The evolving shape of a project (educational broadcasting history)

The evolving shape of a project (educational broadcasting history)

For the first time in my career, I’ve started receiving gifts that colleagues thought I’d enjoy related to a research project — i.e., they identify me with my current research into the post-1945 history of educational broadcasting in the United States, a project that is less than half a decade old. For an historian, that […]

Marginalized college radio: past, present, and future?

Not once but twice in the last century, major movements in radio policy marginalized a range of radio stations licensed to colleges and universities. In the 1920s, that marginalization was part of the disappearance of dozens of college radio stations. In the 1970s, college radio stations became divided into two broad segments: those who had […]

Single studies are good; literature is amazing

We can learn quite a bit from the surge of amateur epidemiology: It’s hard to be a good reader of a single study, and you don’t have to do that to learn from research. For almost half a year, I’ve repeatedly seen many well-educated, well-read people try to learn The Secret of Covid from individual […]

Yoda causality: Do, or do not. There is no why.

A few weeks ago there was a minor flamewar on Twitter about the alleged abuse of the term causality in various social-science fields, and after the destruction of a small galaxy or two, it ran out of fuel. But this semester I directed an undergraduate honors thesis that used a difference-in-difference approach to a policy question, and […]