Entries from August 2006 ↓

Merlin Mann has another great post on email management and the utility of folders.  In short, folders can be bad if filing and organizing keeps you from doing work that actually needs to be done.
Since my first post on email management, I’ve made the switch to having just two folders in my email program, one [...]

On the list of things not to expect when visiting one of the largest departments in the Turkish government, being called a beautiful man and meeting an official who knows New Jersey better than you do are probably right at the top.

My trip to the Diyanet has been memorable from the get-go.  After I scrambled [...]

Tomorrow morning I’m catching an early flight to Ankara where I’ll spend a couple days interviewing people at the Presidency of Religious Affairs (Diyanet), one of Turkey’s two governmental institutions for administering Islamic religious life.
The Diyanet produces all the sermons I’ve been studying and is also responsible for sending imams to DITIB mosques in [...]

For the last three weeks I’ve been using something called “contingency management” to write more, and more consistently, than at any point in my entire life.  I now write an average of three pages a day (typed, double-spaced) during one 30-minute session.  I’ve also used this technique to jump start two projects that were stalled [...]

Kudos to Chris Uggen, professor of sociology and chair of the sociology department at the University of Minnesota for blogging about how he failed one of his Ph.D. qualifying exams as a grad student.
Yes, you heard right.  He’s a professor.  He’s chair of the department.  He failed one of his qualifying exams.  And he just [...]

Summer is not the best time of year to write about the stress of graduate school, but I wanted to share an email exchange I had recently with my friend Josh.  He finished his masters a few years ago, but the memory lives on.
Each of the following comes from a separate email.  Josh (in red) [...]

After spending a few hours at the Center for Islamic Studies yesterday I trekked back to the European side of Istanbul to meet with Ahmet Yukleyen, a recent PhD grad in anthropology from Boston University.  His dissertation was on Turkish religious communities and their understanding of Islamic activism in the Netherlands and Germany, so I [...]