The time between Bachelor's degree and a PhD, the median time is over 11 years. So then you're still only on a tenure ladder, you're not tenured. So it generally takes 6 to 8 years after that to get tenure. So that's a very long period of what's essentially apprenticeship, of insecurity.

The way universities operate is the decision about what students need for the degree are... is the decision made by the faculty.

Sometimes people won't even finish a piece that you wrote, because they've already decided what it is that you want to say, and generally I, whatever I say in the first half of the piece, you should not assume I'm going to end up with, but they don't finish reading them. So, and people read fast and stuff.

One of the oddities about responses that you get to what you write, if you get a fair number of them, is that people have very different ideas of what you said.

There are limits, after all, to the idea of limits.

I do worry a lot about the time it takes for people to get a PhD, about the difficulty of finding employment, about the difficulty of getting tenure, and generally about the perception that undergraduates have, that this is a very high-risk career to get started.

A person whose financial requirements are modest and whose curiosity, skepticism, and indifference to reputation are outsized is a person at risk of becoming a journalist.