Research as leisure activity

Article note: I'm a huge fan of this behavior. I have a bunch of complete or partial near-publication-quality thoroughly-referenced documents abut dumb shit I've become fascinated by over the years. Many of them have ended up at least in part on the internet somewhere, some that I haven't even done that with. Some of it is the trill of learning and formulating understanding (See the old 1997 William Gibson essay in Wired "My Obsession" which says it better than anything I could write). Reading other people's obsessive recreational research on topics is _also_ often the best way to get up to speed on a topic. ...And this is why I'm excited to be lining up a teaching position with some opportunity to kibitz in research and not a traditional faculty job, it's very hard to do actual honest research inside a tenure track career arc these days.