Dan Drezner Breaks it Down

Dan Drezner's mom calls and asks him if he's teaching this summer, which she asks every summer, requiring that he once again have the apparently impossible-to-understand conversation in which he says, "No, I'm not teaching. Yes, I am working." Being a tenure track professor myself, this really hit home. I feel like I'm constantly having to explain to people that I have a job and that I work, even though I'm not teaching. "Research" with the scare quotes is very difficult to understand as work unless you're in an environment requiring it, and being threatened to be fired if you don't do it.