COVID has lead to new forms of organizing...

One of which is co-writing. And by that I mean these long sessions where I get on skype with my co-authors for 5-6 hours at a stretch and work on a google doc together. It's pretty exhausting, and I dont think this way of writing (simultaneously, line by line, by consensus) would have been possible if I hadn't been locked in, without an office to go to during the day.

And thus begins year 2 of graduate school. I think its a bit trite to be yet another one of those grad students who waxes on about how their mind was blown by reading an impressive and challenging paper. I do think something like this is a useful exercise in writing, however. 

During my previous life as a data science consultant, I didn't have much occasion for long form writing, nor did I need to engage in much rhetorical gymnastics to convince people of the value of what I was doing. I was there, therefore they needed my help. So that's a muscle I need to exercise. And I am now in the social sciences, where the standard of writing seems impossibly high. Maybe its because I am just wrapping up readings for an upcoming class (Prof. Anna Kim, Seminar on Organizing in Time and Space), the last of which was Giddens' Consequences of Modernity. I'm feeling very, very small and insignificant right now.