All the cool kids are doing it, so... my 2014 in review

I've seen a lot of other people (mainly writers I follow on Twitter) doing this, and I thought it might be a nice exercise to remind me of what I accomplished over this year. (Reminding yourself of accomplishments is often recommended for people who only seem to remember what they didn't do.) I'll abstain from linking to everything (besides the books), if only because I've mentioned most everything here in earlier updates.

BOOKS

I had two books out this year (one of which was written this year), The Virtues of Captain America: Modern-Day Lessons on Character from a World War II Superhero in February from Wiley Blackwell and The Illusion of Well-Being: Economic Policymaking Based on Respect and Responsiveness in September from Palgrave Macmillan, along with the normal assortment of affiliated blog posts (and a few radio interviews for the Cap book).

For next year, I signed a contract with Wiley Blackwell for a new book on superheroes and philosophy, and I'm pursuing a chance to write another. Meanwhile, I have plans to write books on individualism for Palgrave and judgment for Stanford sometime later. Also, I postponed my contracted book on law and social economics for Palgrave that was due this year; I plan to return to that once the books above are completed (by the kind graces of my editor!).

This year I put together an edited book, Law and Social Economics: Essays in Ethical Values for Theory, Practice, and Policy, from papers presented at the Association of Social Economics sessions at the ASSA conference in January as well as the Law and Society Association meetings in May, which will be published next March in my "Perspectives from Social Economics" series from Palgrave.

I also worked on three other edited books: one on economics and the virtues (co-edited with Jennifer A. Baker for Oxford); a two-volume set on the insanity defense for Praeger; and a co-edited four-volume collection of essential literature in social economics for Routledge (for which I'm curating the volume on philosophy).

Finally, I signed on to edit a new book series from Rowman & Littlefield International on ethics and economics, for which I plan to edit the first book (on ethical issues with economic policy and regulation). More on that soon...

ARTICLES AND CHAPTERS

In terms of shorter articles and chapters, I seem to have written ten (or eleven):

1. A journal article on Cesare Beccaria and law-and-economics (published)
2. A policy paper for the Mercatus Center on happiness measures (published)
3. A chapter on retributivism and law-and-economics (forthcoming)
4. A chapter on teaching ethics using Marvel's Civil War storyline (forthcoming)
5. A revised chapter on law-and-economics for a companion to social economics (forthcoming)
6. Encyclopedia articles on retributivism and the lex talionis (forthcoming)
7. A comment on a journal article about consent in libertarian paternalism (forthcoming)
8. A chapter on nudges in health care (under revision, tentatively included)
9. An article on the ethics of antitrust law (planned for a symposium)
10. An article on externalities (submitted for a special journal issue).

I also started writing a chapter on Kant and virtue in economics for the book I'm co-editing for OUP and an article on judgment (my presidential address for the Association of Social Economics, given at the ASSA meetings in January and normally published in one of the association journals later that year).

So far, I've agreed to write four new book chapters next year—one on the ethics of work, one on positive psychology and policy, and two on libertarian paternalism—and one article for special issue of a law-and-economics journal on Beccaria.

PRESENTATIONS/LECTURES

I gave a number of talks this year, including the Law and Society Association in Minneapolis, the American Philosophical Association (Eastern Division) in Philadelphia, the Petrie-Flom Center at Harvard University, an antitrust symposium at Philadephia University, an invited talk on Captain America at Wagner College on Staten Island, and two invited talks on Kant and economics in Norway.

I also withdrew from two conferences: the Law, Culture, and Humanities conference in Virginia and the "Oneself and the Other" conference in economics and philosophy in Strasbourg. I had my reasons; nonetheless, I regretted both.

For next year, so far I am giving two talks at the ASSA meetings in early January, and I've agreed to speak on nudges in Switzerland in April, well-being policy in England in July, and (tentatively) the ethics of work in San Diego in May.

BLOGGING

Once again, this past year I didn't blog as much as I wanted to. I had eighteen posts at Psychology Today, including some very successful ones on dating, adultery, and sexless marriage (the last of which was the subject of a featured collection headlined by four of my posts). I blogged less at Economics and Ethics and The Comics Professor, although I did contribute several posts of substance at both.

Outside my own blogs, I had several blog posts stemming from The Illusion of Well-Being hosted at the LSE British Politics and Policy blog, as well as an op-ed post on happiness policy, based on my Mercatus article, at U.S. News & World Report's Economic Intelligence blog. Finally, I was involved in launching and editing the new blog for the Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture series (though I've yet to write for it).

ON A MORE PERSONAL NOTE

I still managed to watch a lot of movies (mostly classic films from the 1930s and 40s) and TV on DVD (including the whole runs of Friday Night Lights and Grey's Anatomy), read quite a few books, and kept up with my regular comics (about 15 per week).

Finally, just today I reached a milestone in my comics fandom: I finished reading every issue of Fantastic Four from 1961 to today—and I can't wait to do it again. If only one of my planned superhero-and-philosophy books were about them! But I will do something, sometime... or it'll be clobberin' time for sure.