It's two thirds of the way through summer 2015—so far, it's been an intense but good summer, with significant work done almost every day (except Saturdays, which are for the kids, and two short trips that nicely broke up the work).
Most of the work was on the book manuscript that I submitted to my editor yesterday morning. Having worked with me many times in the past, when she received my submission email she said, "I had a sneaking suspicion that not only would you hit your contractual delivery date, but you'd beat it." She knows me too well.
I was going to hold on to the subject and title for a while yet, but seeing as it's already available for pre-order on Amazon, the cat seems out of the bag. The book is titled Captain America and Iron Man: Fighting a Civil War of Principles, to be published by Sterling in early 2016, and it looks at the ethical decision-making and behavior of Iron Man, Captain America, and Spider-Man, during Marvel Comics' Civil War storyline (soon to be the basis of the film Captain America: Civil War). [UPDATE: Plans have changed—see here for more.] I decided to focus on the main characters rather than the political content of the storyline itself, which is well handled by the contributors to a forthcoming book edited by Kevin Michael Scott titled Marvel Comics' Civil War and the Age of Terror: Critical Essays on the Comic Saga, to be published by McFarland (and to which I contributed a chapter). Much more on this to come...
As I said, that was how I used most all of my time this summer, with the rest devoted in some minor paper revisions and departmental business. I did get a couple three-day breaks, one to see my parents in Chicago and the other to go to the 15th World Congress of Social Economics in St. Catharines, Ontario (near Niagara Falls). It was great to spend time with old friends in the Association for Social Economics and make some new ones, hear some fantastic presentations, and speak to the publishers in attendance about some exciting new projects.
With the book behind me (for the time being), it's time to turn to all of the things I all but ignored in the meantime, including writing and revising several papers, returning to some editing (including production work on Economics and the Virtues: Building a New Moral Foundation), and thinking about new projects. One month to go—I'll try to make it a good one!
By the way, my presidential address to the Association for Social Economics in January, "Judgment: Balancing Principle and Policy," is now available online (and, for the time being, is open access).
Also, I did manage to post a few times at Psychology Today in a small surge of activity at the end of June:
"Same-Sex Marriage Needed to Be Decided by the Supreme Court" (June 26, 2015)
"Marvel Comics' Daredevil Shows the Experience of Depression" (June 28, 2015)
"How John Steinbeck Convinced Me to Start a Writing Diary" (June 29, 2015)
(By the way, in reference to the last post, I did keep a writing diary in July, and I do think it helped me focus on the big picture and not on the temporary setbacks and disappointing days.)
Finally, I highlighted a New York Times interview with philosopher Dan Hausman (and added a little of my own thinking) at Economics and Ethics. (Otherwise, my intrepid co-blogger Jonathan Wight has done the bulk of the heavy lifting over there.)
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