Can you do interesting work/research with political ramifications and be a decent human being?

It seems like every time I’m nuts over someone’s work I eventually find out that this is not the case. Its a bummer.

dumb albums i liked a lot this year that came out in previous years

• Fred Thomas “Old News”
• Fred Thomas “Sink Like a Symphony”
• Fred Thomas “Everything is Pretty Much Entirely Fucked”
• The Lawrence Arms “Apathy and Exhaustion”
• The Lawrence Arms “Oh! Calcutta”
• Propagandhi “Supporting Caste”
• Nana Grizol “Love it! Love it!”
• Defiance, Ohio “The Fear, The Fear, The Fear”
• Matt & Kim “Sidewalks”
• Ming & Ping “Causeway Army”
• Knapsack “This Conversation is Ending Starting Right Now”
• The Gibbons “Hope, Inc”
• Descendents “Milo Goes to College”
• Heathers “Here, Not There”
• Sleater-Kinney s/t
• Team Dresch “Personal Best”
• Slingshot Dakota “Their Dreams are Dead, But Ours is the Golden Ghost!”
• North Lincoln “Midwestern Blood”
• Los Campesinos! “Hold on Now, Youngster…”
• Snowing “I Could Do Whatever I wanted if I wanted”
• Saturday Looks Good to Me “Every Night”
• Two Hand Fools “Who’s Driving?”

dumb albums i liked a lot this year

• Ages “Sleep on It”
• Wavelets “Athaletics”
• Lil’ Wayne “Tha Carter IV”
• Drake “Take Care”
• Frank Ocean “Nostalgia, Ultra”
• Chris Bathgate “Salt Year”
• City Center “Redeemer”
• Danny Brown “XXX”
• Direct Hit! “Domesplitter”
• Hunx & His Punx “Too Young to Be in Love”
• Spraynard “Funtitled”
• Two Hand Fools “House Parts”

Also the Banner Pilot minus all the chorus effect on the vocals. If that would be possible.

in no particular order. what cool stuff did i miss?

taking a break from a grant that is the worst thing that ever happened to me (in this case, though, how sweet has my life been?) to buy a bunch of books:

• Brian Fies “Mom’s Cancer”
• Adele E. Clarke and Virginia Olesen “Revisioning Women, Health and Healing: Feminist, Cultural and Technoscience Perspectives”
• James W. Green “Beyond the Good Death: The Anthropology of Modern Dying”
• Michael T. Taussig “My Cocaine Museum”
• Robbie Davis-Floyd and Joseph Dumit “Cyborg Babies: From Techno-Sex to Techno-Tots”
• Sharon R. Kaufman “And a Time to Die: How American Hospitals Shape the End of Life”
• Emily Martin “Bipolar Expeditions: Mania and Depression in American Culture”
• Ann Fabian “The Skull Collectors: Race, Science, and America’s Unburied Dead”
• Miriam Engelberg “Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person: A Memoir in Comics”
• Robert A. Hahn and Marcia C. Inborn “Anthropology in Public Health: Bridging Differences in Culture and Society”
• Evelyn Fox Keller “Refiguring Life: Metaphors of Twentieth-Century Biology”
• Siddhartha Mukherjee “The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer”
• Anatole Broyard “Intoxicated by My Illness”
• Paul Rabinow “Making PCR: A Story of Biotechnology”
• Harvey Pekar and Joyce Brabner “Our Cancer Year”
• Margaret Lock and Vinh-Kim Nguyen “An Anthropology of Biomedicine”