My 2016 Summer Trip: Scotland

"What did you do this summer?" is generally a first-day-of-class kind of question, but I will take the chance to answer it in detail here.

I don't generally travel far and wide during the summer. I'm a homebody, which means I enjoy staying home and working or doing things that count as working but are actually fun.

This summer, however, I went to Scotland to the Edinburgh 2016 Symposium of Mexican Studies and Students.

Yes, that is a pineapple. (No it's not, it's a thistle.)

I gave two oral presentations; one about conflicts of interest in Mexico, and another one, which I worked on with two colleagues, about corruption and the energy sector in Mexico. If you're curious about what I said, we can get some coffee and talk about it.

My example to explain conflicts of interest involved Lady Gaga.

Besides the academic stuff, I took the chance to do a bunch of other cool stuff, which I will list below:

"The fabulist who changed journalism" by Mike Sager

"The influence of Cooke’s transgressions runs through the corpus of modern journalism like blood through the circulatory system, leaving no area untouched. Racial and sexual diversity in the newsroom. The use of unnamed sources. The responsibility of editors to question reporters’ stories—should all writers be considered guilty until proven accurate? The responsibility of writers to fact-check their own stories. The pressures of working on deadline and being judged by one’s output. The perils of literary journalism. And the perils of human frailty—what responsibility does an institution have to look beyond a person’s résumé and into his or her psyche?"

Read the whole article here.