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A publisher of one’s own

July 18, 2014

Self-published books are on the rise, to the dismay of onlookers who wonder what to expect from a sector where E.L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey—originally published as online fan fiction by a tiny Australian e-book company—appears to be the best of the lot. More than 391,000 self-published titles appeared in 2012, according to Bowker, the official ISBN-issuing agency for the United States.

Academics, meanwhile, inhabit a parallel publishing ecosystem: a constellation of university presses and journals that publish slowly, offer few economic returns, and subject all work to painstaking peer review. Scholars and publishing experts in the United States and Britain say self-publishing by academics remains a rarity.

Roger Whitson, an assistant professor of English at WSU, said he thought self-publishing books was an undertaking only tenured professors could afford. “Part of the reason why academics publish pre-tenure is that they want to receive credit for becoming a specialist in the field, and one of the main ways they see that happening is through peer review,” Whitson said. “For pre-tenure people who haven’t established a name in the field, academic publishing is really important.”

After receiving tenure, more academics are in a position “to experiment and demand more from different publishing models,” he said.

Whitson has self-published a book of his own: a collection of writing from his postdoctoral program at Georgia Tech. “I would never consider it a major publication of mine,” he said. “It was just something that was fun.” Whitson does not list the book on his CV.

Ancient baby boom offers lessons in over-population

July 1, 2014

WSU scientists have sketched out one of the greatest baby booms in North American history, a centuries-long “growth blip” among southwestern Native Americans between 500 and 1300 A.D.

It was a time when the early features of civilization—including farming and food storage—had matured to a level where birth rates likely “exceeded the highest in the world today,” the researchers report in this week’s issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Then a crash followed, offering a warning sign to the modern world about the dangers of overpopulation, says Tim Kohler, professor of anthropology.

“We can learn lessons from these people,” says Kohler, who co-authored the paper with WSU researcher Kelsey Reese.

Art intervention in Tri-Cities via new magazine

June 11, 2014

Peter Christenson

Magazine to feature photography and written word by local artists

A new print magazine called Null Set will give a whole new meaning to the art world, its publisher hopes.

Peter Christenson, assistant professor of fine arts at WSU Tri-Cities, said the magazine, designed and published in Richland, gives people a platform to express themselves creatively.

Christenson calls it a sort of hybrid book for interventionists.

“Interventionist art is a type of art-making that seeks to engage the public and often exposes or educates or influences the public,” he said. “Interventionist art is not curated or commissioned, and it is often subversive, rooted in the Dadaist movement of the early 20th century.”

The magazine will feature photography as well as the written word in art form, with submissions by local artists. It will provide opportunities for the public to engage in a broader art discourse and to collaborate, intervene, and actively contribute to the regional culture, Christenson said.

Find out more about Null Set

A new target for alcoholism treatment: Kappa opioid receptors

May 23, 2014

The list of brain receptor targets for opiates reads like a fraternity: Mu Delta Kappa. Until now, the mu opioid receptor received the most attention in alcoholism research.

A new study in Biological Psychiatry, led by Brendan Walker, WSU associate professor of psychology, used a rat model of alcohol dependence to directly investigate the kappa opioid receptor (KOR) system following chronic alcohol exposure and withdrawal. These findings provide researchers with a potentially successful path to developing new drugs for the treatment of alcoholism.

Why are so many pro basketball owners Jewish (like Donald Sterling)?

May 6, 2014

Tribe lured to hoops by economics, history, and love of game

American Jews’ overwhelming dominance of the business side of professional basketball slipped awkwardly into the spotlight April 29, when National Basketball Association Commissioner Adam Silver announced harsh sanctions against Donald Sterling, owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, at a press conference in New York. Silver levied fines and a lifetime ban against Sterling, who had been caught on tape expressing racist attitudes toward black people.

During the question-and-answer session, a sportswriter named Howard Megdal (who once wrote a book called The Baseball Talmud) asked whether the fact that both Silver and Sterling were Jewish had affected Silver’s response to Sterling’s racist tirade.

“I think my response was as a human being,” Silver said.

The interaction highlighted not only the predominance of Jewish ownership in the NBA but also the near-lack of African-American owners (Michael Jordan famously owns the Charlotte Bobcats). “People have difficulty talking about [the] conflicts, tensions, the differential privileges,” said David Leonard, associate professor and chair of the Department of Critical Culture, Gender, and Race Studies at WSU and author of the 2012 book After Artest: The NBA and the Assault on Blackness. “I think moments like this become a moment of anxiety for many in the Jewish community,” Leonard said.

“For much of the first half of the 20th century, Jews were very involved in basketball as players,” he said. “Especially among second-generation Jewish immigrants, this became a means of asserting one’s American identity, one’s physical prowess.”