Blogs

Book Review of The Psychology of Phubbing

By Mayukh Mukhopadhyay posted yesterday

BOOK REVIEW The Psychology of Phubbing, by Yeslam Al-Saggaf. Singapore: Springer Nature, 2022. XI+89 pages. EUR 54.99 (Softcover). ISBN 978-981-19-7047-4 People rarely notice the first small cut. In Al-Saggaf’s account, it happens at a dinner table, or in a car stopped at a red light, or on a couch at the end of a long day. A child is telling a story about school, something small but important to them, and the parent nods while their eyes slip downward. The phone lights up the face. The child keeps talking for a moment, then stops. Nothing dramatic follows. No argument. No raised voice. Just a pause that lingers too long, a ...

Book Review of Brain Tingles

By Mayukh Mukhopadhyay posted 2 days ago

BOOK REVIEW Brain Tingles: The Secret to Triggering Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response for Improved Sleep, Stress Relief, and Head-to-Toe Euphoria , by Craig Richard PhD (Author), Melinda Lauw (Foreword), Adams Media, 4 September 2018, 240 Pages, $15.51 (Paperback), ISBN 9781507207628 There is a moment described early in Brain Tingles when a simple sound does something strange to the body. A voice slows down. Fingertips trace a surface. The mind, restless a second ago, begins to soften. Sleep is not yet there, but anxiety loosens its grip. Craig Richard writes about this moment with care, not as spectacle but as ...

Book Review of Past Forward

By Mayukh Mukhopadhyay posted 3 days ago

BOOK REVIEW Past Forward: How Nostalgia can help you live a more meaningful life , by Clay Routledge, Sounds True, 5 December 2023, 224 Pages, $19.99 (Paperback), ISBN 9781683648642 A man watches his home burn in a California wildfire and says something that sounds like denial until it starts to sound like wisdom: the fire took the house, but it could not take the memories made inside it. It is a small moment, almost a throwaway line in the flow of a research-minded book, yet it lands with the blunt force of lived experience. People keep trying to save what can be saved, and when the physical world will not cooperate, ...

Book Review of Reader Bot

By Mayukh Mukhopadhyay posted 11 days ago

BOOK REVIEW Reader Bot: What Happens When AI Reads and Why It Matters , by Naomi S. Baron, Stanford University Press, 20 January 2026 (Available for Pre-Order), 292 Pages, $28.00 (Hardcover), ISBN 9781503643949 There is a moment in Reader Bot when Naomi S. Baron describes a college student who assigns an AI system to read a dense article and return a summary. The student scans the output on a phone while standing in line for coffee, nods once, and moves on. Nothing in that scene feels dramatic. There is no alarm, no sense of wrongdoing, no teacher peering over a shoulder. Yet Baron lingers on it because something quiet but ...

Book Review of Practices in Memory and Identity

By Mayukh Mukhopadhyay posted 15 days ago

BOOK REVIEW Trauma and Nostalgia: Practices in Memory and Identity , edited by Lucien van Liere, Srdjan Sremac, Amsterdam University Press (2024), Routledge (2025), 202 Pages, £92.00 (Hardback). ISBN 9789048559220, https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.11930990 The book opens with a small but unsettling scene. A television screen flickers in an Israeli living room during the First Gulf War. Gas masks sit beside the sofa. The broadcast mixes fear, routine, and a strange calm. The war is real, yet it is experienced through images, commentators, and familiar domestic spaces. What lingers is not only fear but also a curious longing for togetherness, ...

Book Review of The Worlds I See

By Mayukh Mukhopadhyay posted 17 days ago

BOOK REVIEW The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI , by Fei-Fei Li, Flatiron Books: A Moment of Lift Book, 02 September 2025, 336 pages, $18.48 (Paperback), ISBN 9781250898104 She is walking fast through a plain Washington hotel lobby, hearing her boots strike thin carpet like a metronome that has lost patience, trying to look calm while she feels anything but calm. In a few minutes she will sit at a witness table in the Rayburn House Office Building, her name printed in simple type, and testify about artificial intelligence, a topic that has suddenly become public property, fought over by lawmakers, ...

The studENT - To Everyone on the Academic Job Market

By Josh Wei-Jun Hsueh posted 18 days ago

(posted on behalf of @Sergio Rodriguez-Garnica , PhD representative ) We’ve collectively turned the job market into a kind of “monster,” but at its core, it is simply academic institutions looking for new colleagues and scholars offering their talent to those institutions. Yes, it demands energy and time, but it’s also a natural part of academic life. What’s worth remembering is that an academic career is a long journey. It unfolds gradually. If you stay engaged, keep learning, and remain open to growth, you’ll move toward the place you aim for, step by step. Think about how you got here. You advanced through years of study, courses, ...

Practitioner’s Corner: Learning Toward Co-Creation

By Josh Wei-Jun Hsueh posted 18 days ago

Practitioner’s Corner: Learning Toward Co-Creation (posted on behalf of @Paul Sanchez Ruiz ) For much of my own academic training, the relationship between scholarship and practice was framed in terms of translation. Research generated insights, and practice provided a setting in which those insights might later be applied. That framing remains useful, but recent conversations within the Practitioner–Scholars Committee have prompted me to reflect on its limits. Those conversations have increasingly centered on co-creation. By co-creation, I do not mean a formal method or a new label for engagement. I mean an approach to research in which ...

Book Review of The Promise

By Mayukh Mukhopadhyay posted 20 days ago

BOOK REVIEW The Promise: How an everyday hero made the impossible possible , by Arnold Dix, Simon & Schuster Australia (2025), 304 pages, $28.75 (Paperback), ISBN 978-1-7614-2916-3 . The book opens with a confession that feels almost like a warning. Arnold Dix tells the reader that they should not know who he is. He presents himself as a man who has worked quietly for decades, arriving at disaster sites, doing the job, and leaving without applause. This calm anonymity is shattered by a single event in late 2023, when forty-one construction workers are trapped inside a collapsed tunnel high in the ...

Book Review on The Routledge Handbook of Nostalgia

By Mayukh Mukhopadhyay posted 23 days ago

BOOK REVIEW The Routledge Handbook of Nostalgia , edited by Tobias Becker, Dylan Trigg, Routledge (2024), 592 Pages, £184.00 (Hardcover). ISBN 978-1-032-42920-5 The handbook opens with an image that feels strangely familiar. A soldier far from home, weakened not by wounds but by longing, begins to fade. In early medical writing, nostalgia was not a metaphor but a diagnosis, sometimes fatal. The editors return to this forgotten scene to remind readers that nostalgia once carried the weight of illness before it became a shared cultural language. This anecdote does more than offer historical colour. It sets up the central tension ...

Book Review of Children in Tourism Communities

By Mayukh Mukhopadhyay posted 25 days ago

BOOK REVIEW Children in Tourism Communities: Sustainability and Social Justice, by Marko Koščak, Mladen Knežević, Tony O’Rourke, Tina Šegota, Routledge, 2024, 228, GBP £145.00 (Hardback), ISBN 9781032448763 The book opens with a quiet scene that stays with the reader long after the page is turned. In a small alpine village shaped by seasonal tourism, a local child watches visitors arrive with cameras, skis, and expectations. The child knows the rhythm of these arrivals better than the calendar. School schedules bend during peak season, family routines adjust, and certain village spaces feel less like home and more like a stage. Koščak ...