I received the following text at 8:46am on a Saturday morning. I’ve gotten similar ones every few weeks for a while. The number was from outside the U.S. Illinois Official Notice | Enforcement Warning Notice Document Number: IL-DMV-2026-0322 Your traffic fine is overdue under Section 19C-19.173 of the Illinois Administrative Enforcement Code. Statutory enforcement proceedings … Continue reading Scam alert!!!
Category: writing
Some books I read this year
Recently, I decided to try to read more and doom scroll less, to squeeze in an extra book in between the monthly selections for my book club, without which I would read far fewer books. I have many unread and half read books on my shelf, titles listed on my Notes app or marked “want … Continue reading Some books I read this year
AI for effort
I don’t really want to read another article about how generative AI is changing everything. But I do read many of them out of a sense of obligation. Working in higher education, overseeing several academic programs, I feel I would not be doing my job if I wasn’t at least familiarizing myself with the discourse … Continue reading AI for effort
#18 – october 21: lingering covid
I’m wrapping up my covid chronicles with this18th and final installment. Maybe I’ll revisit the topic later, when these pandemic times truly feel behind us. But right now, almost three years in, covid is still here and people are still dying everyday. Most of the world, however, is getting on with it, the booster shots … Continue reading #18 – october 21: lingering covid
#13 — february 14: J. Hillis Miller, a remembrance
I found out from a Facebook post that famed literary critic J. Hillis Miller had died of Covid on Feb. 7 at age 92. Professor Miller was my dissertation advisor at UC Irvine, where I was in graduate school for most of the ‘90’s. By the time I’d enrolled in his seminar, he’d been a … Continue reading #13 — february 14: J. Hillis Miller, a remembrance
Welcome to Contrary Frog
Image credit: “Another "Neighbor” by Usonian is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 There's a Korean folktale about a young frog who never listens to his mother, always doing the opposite of what he's told. Then his mother falls ill and before she dies, knowing her son, she asks him to bury her by the river … Continue reading Welcome to Contrary Frog
Why a blog? Why now?
Back in 2004, when blogs were everywhere, some friends and I started a group blog that would take the conversations we were having about politics, culture, and academic life into a more public realm, in a medium that was faster than academic publishing, slower than the news. Instead of sound bites and "hot takes" (before … Continue reading Why a blog? Why now?
Contrary Frog 