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Erik Baker
@erikmbaker
I teach history of science & labor at Harvard. Proud
@hgsuuaw
alum, associate editor
@thedrift_mag
. Writing MAKE YOUR OWN JOB for
@harvard_press
.
tinyletter.com/erikbakerJoined June 2019
1,288 Following
5,772 Followers

Erik Baker’s Tweets

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Erik Baker
@erikmbaker
Some news! I am writing a book for Harvard University Press, titled Make Your Own Job: The Entrepreneurial Work Ethic in Modern America. It's about how self-help writers, management theorists, and policy experts remade our ideas about work and success in the 20th century.
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Erik Baker
@erikmbaker
My friend and former debate coaching colleague observes that this guy could have also derived the idea for this stunt from the plot of the new M Night Shyamalan movie
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Erik Baker Retweeted
Glory Liu
@miss_glory
So proud to be a supporter and organizer for this union. LET’S DO THIS.
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HAW
@HAWorkers
We’re proud to announce the campaign to unionize non-tenure-track faculty and researchers within Harvard University—we are Harvard Academic Workers - UAW! We unite ~6000 workers across all 12 Harvard schools. 🧵
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Circular logo with "Harvard Academic Workers" written along the top and flask and books in center
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Erik Baker
@erikmbaker
You won't want to miss this one, featuring our most eye-popping cover yet!
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The Drift
@thedrift_mag
🚨🚨 Issue Nine approaches! To receive a print copy, subscribe by Thursday. thedriftmag.com/subscribe/ Feat. @jameson_rich @nancykorifera @tbfxdonnelly @loracorkelley @p_somayajula @bentarnoff @MagogodiMakhene @anniierau @zaintkhalid @GifGordon @organizejs @davidrkadler
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Erik Baker Retweeted
kob
@kljungz
It's high time that Harvard NTT faculty and postdocs see the financial benefits and protections that come with unionization. Along with
@harvarduwu
, we'll soon be a wall-to-wall unionized university.
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HAW
@HAWorkers
We’re proud to announce the campaign to unionize non-tenure-track faculty and researchers within Harvard University—we are Harvard Academic Workers - UAW! We unite ~6000 workers across all 12 Harvard schools. 🧵
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Circular logo with "Harvard Academic Workers" written along the top and flask and books in center
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Erik Baker
@erikmbaker
Proud to be a public supporter of Harvard's newest union - because every worker deserves a union, and because I would really, really like not to be automatically fired
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HAW
@HAWorkers
We’re proud to announce the campaign to unionize non-tenure-track faculty and researchers within Harvard University—we are Harvard Academic Workers - UAW! We unite ~6000 workers across all 12 Harvard schools. 🧵
Show this thread
Circular logo with "Harvard Academic Workers" written along the top and flask and books in center
53
Erik Baker
@erikmbaker
I feel very lucky to have had mentors in grad school who really understood this, and who became part of that support community rather than trying to turn me into a Mini-Me
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Erik Baker
@erikmbaker
People got mad at
@zeithistoriker
for making this point because they felt it devalued their expertise, but it's true that the biggest thing that grad school at a fancy private school gets you is free time and community to support independent reading
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Erik Baker
@erikmbaker
The implication of this, by the way, isn't just that it's wrong to imagine elite universities shoving Marx and Foucault down students' throats, it's that there's no special sauce at these places, no magic secret curriculum you have to be accepted to know about
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Erik Baker
@erikmbaker
Of the names on this list, I was assigned Foucault once as an undergrad at Northwestern and twice in grad school at Harvard (one more time as non-required "recommended" reading). None of the others, ever.
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cummunism
@comradesanchez
y'all are going through graduate programs *not* being assigned Marx, Foucault, Hall, Braudel, Rubin, Derrida, etc. ... ?
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Erik Baker
@erikmbaker
This is why late-period Lynch gives people so much trouble, because the movies insist overtly on the fact that *everything* in a narrative film both "really happened" and is "just imagined" simultaneously
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Erik Baker
@erikmbaker
"Dream sequence" is not my preferred way to conceptualize it but it's always wild to me how defensive people get at the suggestion that something in a movie didn't "really happen." I have bad news for you!
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Tom Gara
@tomgara
Just saw Tár for the first time, and I’m sure it’s mostly that I instinctively trust @Bernstein on everything, but the final act is clearly a dream sequence? Like, it barely even pretends not to be?
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Erik Baker
@erikmbaker
Unfortunately I think the Cybertruck is gonna sell incredibly well: 1. Republicans love spending money on right-wing media heroes 2. Its inadequacies as a truck don't matter because most truck buyers don't need a functional truck 3. It is designed to make men feel like Batman
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Erik Baker
@erikmbaker
It's funny because as someone who wrote a dissertation about managerial tyranny I should be the target audience for this sort of thing but instead it just rings even more hollow
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Ariel Ron
@arielronid
Foucault made Foner write about Reconstruction?
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Erik Baker
@erikmbaker
So you have a situation where the project of making the US into a functional bourgeois republic a) would improve a lot of people's lives and b) is embraced only by a small minority of mainstream politicians. Hard to know how to slot the socialist left into this state of affairs.
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Erik Baker
@erikmbaker
A lot of confusion on the American left stems from the fact that the US is totally defective *as a bourgeois republic*. It's a failed democracy and its capitalism is utterly stagnant. And most of the political spectrum is dead-set against fixing it.
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Erik Baker
@erikmbaker
A pundit will write the most braindead take you've ever seen in your life and the replies will all be dudes with display names like "Dr. Mason Gatsby, M.D." saying stuff like "Thank you good sir; this brings to mind George Orwell's critique of 'Big Brother' in his novel 1984"
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