Advice #1: PhDs, Leadership, Creative Writing, Christmas Gifts & Set Lists

Our Pulitzer Prize-referencing column returns

Hey, WE’RE BACK! The We Are Scientists Advice column, an entity that long predates this newsletter and was destroyed years ago by lawsuits (frivolous each) has been absorbed, resuscitated, and is now feeling well enough to shuffle around town a little bit, with the assistance of a cane. Don’t mind that it has a funny glint in its eye, and a crooked new smile — when you dig up a loved one and jolt them back to life, they come back different. 🐈

We know that the original column made a lot of people a lot of money, and we just want to say right out of the gates that with Mark II we’re moving the focus away from finance, stocks, horse-racing, etc. This will cause some consternation, no doubt, but please trust us. In the years since we shuttered Advice 1.0, we’ve done a lot of living, a lot of growing, and we’ve come to realize that there are a lot of things more important than money. Like, a lot of things. Like, eight. And we intend to focus on them.

As always, we welcome your requests for help — be they desperate or casual — at advice[at]wearescientists[dot]com. (Is that still a thing? Spelling email addresses all wonky so you don’t get spam? It seems like you get spam anyway. Let us know in the comments, if you’re up to date on this.)

Okay, not a great look — starting Advice Mark II by requesting advice. Sheepish emoji. What are you gonna do.

Hi guys,

Not so much advice, but, I was wondering if you would go on Nailed It as a duo. I feel like your combined sassy ‘tudes, and what I assume are your abilities to feed yourselves tasty treats (?) could really win at that sort of challenge. Chris pourrait parler en français avec M Torres, le roi de chocolate! It could be fodder for songs! Hilarity would ensue! Everyone wins!

Also, should I ditch my PhD program bc working full time, single mom-ing, and comp exam prep is really, well, not all that possible (PhD supervisor says ‘I should be reading 8 hrs a day. That’s a nope.) And for what? Being a doctor of something utterly useless would be cool, but… is it worth the extreeeeeeeme stress guys?

Trusting in your infinite sagesse,

Evi

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Evi, wow, a lot to digest! We’re going to “flip it, rip it, and take it in reverse,” as they often say on Nailed It(?).

Should you quit your PhD program? You’ve worked hard to frame your question so as to bias us toward telling you to quit. In a court of law that’s called “leading the witness,” and it can get a lawyer thrown off the case, or even disbarred (? Probably? If she does it enough?). Lucky for you, this is not a court of law, though our decisions are legally binding.

And you make a compelling case, even if you do it in a highly unorthodox way. You suggest that your chosen area of study is “utterly useless” and that pursuing it is causing you “extreeeeeeeeme stress.” You assert, furthermore, that balancing this commitment with a full-time job and being a single parent is “not all that possible,” which seems, prima facie, accurate.

But let’s really look at this. Because as you yourself admit, there’s a special coolness to being a Dr. of bullshit. If “cool” is the ineffable quality of pursuing whimsy, benefits be damned (or, ideally, absent), then what could out-cool pushing an academic boulder up an irrelevant hill? And 8 hours of reading a day is indeed a boulder! Never mind that you don’t intend to do it — that’s a lot of reading to supposed to be doing! It’s kind of awesome to think about how far behind you’re going to get. Based on the schedule you loosely outlined, you can’t be logging more than two or three hours a day in the reading nook, right? That means that after just a year in the program, you’re 1800 hours behind on reading! What’s cooler than showing up to defend your dissertation and warning the committee that they should go easy on you, cuz you’re a solid 5000 hours behind on reading? 😄

Look, we hardly know you, Evi, but it seems like you’re hefting some pretty heavy stones over there, and that one major source of strength is your sense of humor, which has an absurdist shade to it. We say keep fueling your inner fire by making the absurd choice to continue the PhD program. It’s certainly the cool thing to do.

Now, as to your first question, we’ll fumble toward an answer, but through a fog: we do not know what Nailed It is, and one rule we follow assiduously when writing this advice column is “Never Consult the Internet.” Indeed, that is probably our only rule, and so far it has fetched wonderful returns — forcing us in every case to look inward in order to answer questions that would send more cowardly advice columnists to blindly grope through misty thickets of Bing results.

So, under the assumption that Nailed It is a show that asks contestants to undergo protracted torture sequences like being covered in honey & nailed to a wall next to an ant bed, no, we wouldn’t go on as a duo. Keith would consider doing it as an individual — a “solo” artist of pure pain, if you will — but Chris is 100% out, based on already being squeamish around needles, even needles used to put life-prolonging medicines into his bloodstream, never mind needles designed to test his stamina in front of a live studio audience.

Advice please!! About… leadership? And how to achieve your dream?

(Neil Stewart)

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Neil, thanks for the softballs.

Leadership is simple. Attila the Hun said, “To command is to compel through fear,” and that does work, but keep in mind, too, what Mary Poppins showed us: “just a spoonful of [garbled] helps the mini-men grow down.” In the scene where she says that, Poppins’s young charge Barrelstone has been misbehaving — rolling his fathers’ whisky barrels into the canal and in the attic bonfiring his cigars — and she tries to lead him to a healthier rapport with papa. She fails, hilariously, but the lesson for would-be leaders is serious: clarity is imperative. Little Barrelstone had no clue what exactly Ms. Poppins was threatening when she marble-mouthed her famous line, so even though she had turned beet red and was scowling viciously and trembling, the boy wasn’t very afraid.

In short? Be lucid with your threats. That is the secret to effective leadership.

Achieving your dream, it turns out, also involves fear: your own. What is standing in the way of your walking right through the front door of your dream and inhabiting it IRL starting today? For most people, the answer is not the many obstacles one will encounter and negotiate on the road to Dreamtown — hard work, luck, intelligence, connections, capitalization — but the thing that keeps one’s legs frozen in place, refusing even to take the first step.

Don’t die a coward, Neil. You owe your great grandfather Attila the Hun that much!

Hey You Are Scientists,

I have a simple quandary that requires, no - demands(!), an answer so intuitive and complex that only you guys could possibly proffer it.

What the hell do I do about teaching kids how to write creatively? I’ve been an English teacher for 4 years and no strategy has ever worked especially effectively. These kids can’t even write a disturbing message on the bathroom walls in their own excrement. You should have seen it; incredibly dull and uninspiring.

Please help.

Eternal thanks,

I Am Educator

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Dear Ed,

Make your students start advice columns. Nothing flints the creative spark quite like sifting through the broken beams, shattered masonry, the crumbling foundation of another person’s rickety life. As to your excrement assignment: it’s possible you underestimated the torpefying effect of working closely with noxious, obscene materials. In the spirit of your literary endeavor, employ a little bit of metaphor and ask the kids to write down what they imagine would look good inscribed in poop on tile.

Good luck! And remember, your role is not to sculpt a beautiful, finished mind, but rather to warm the clay so that your student may sculpt his own.

Iawn cont! (sorry)

My question is - what the hell do I get my mother for Christmas this year? She says that I myself am a gift (I agree) but she has everything, even a penis shaped tea strainer. Any advice? Much appreciated. 

Eleri 

(Also, please come back to Caernarfon, we miss you)

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Dear Eleri,

Without using the internet, we can’t know what your (Welsh?) greeting means, but in the interest of keeping things civil, we’ll assume it’s “All hail!” or something along those lines. To which we reply, “Hail, hail, hail! Leave your boots at the door!”

When people ask us for gift ideas, which they usually do, we give them an affiliate link to a penis-shaped tea strainer, and they go away very happy. It looks like this is going to play out differently. We’re ripping up the script. We’re off the map. We’re feeling no insignificant amount of vertigo, and we might be about to puke. These are choppy, uncharted waters, there’s a high gale, and we don’t know how to operate a boat.

Okay, so… gift ideas. For your mother. But not a penis-shaped strainer. (You said she has one already? For tea or something?) Okay. No problem. There are other things. (Right? There are other things?) Ummmm… yeah. Oh! What about some kind of penis filter? Shaped like a penis, not a filter for a penis. This would be for herbs or tea, but then shaped like a cock. Does that seem like something your mother would like?

She already owns something similar? Right. And she really likes it?? Nuts! Sounds like that would’ve made a great gift.

To be honest, that’s all we’ve got. Really sorry. It just seems like your mother already has our go-to, only gift idea. Shrug emoji.

Oh! Christ! Our MerchBit™ just zapped us! You could get your mom some W.A.S. merch! (Damn, we’re bad at business ever since we discovered the eight more important things…) Yeah, check it out, what about our brand new Deck of Wisdom & Judgment, a 78-card tarot deck illustrated by Mr. Keith Murray? Your mom would LOVE to score one of these decks. And there’s no way she already has it, because we’re in the process of printing them now! (Shipping in time for Christmas, though 😉 — here’s the UK store, and the US store.)

There’s a few cards typically associated with mothers and motherhood. Hot shit. Thank god for our MerchBit™! Oh, that’s another option: you could get her a MerchBit™. Every hour they gently zap you as a reminder to sell your stuff. If your mom has stuff she’s trying to unload, we really can’t recommend the MerchBit™ enough. We had become fucking awful at telling people about our beautiful merch (ever since we learned about the eight things) and now we regularly bring it up in conversations with friends, or when we’re meeting new people.

So that’s three great options, if you count the dick sieve. Which, yes: she already has one, but they don’t last forever, and we would hate to be your mom on the afternoon when she’s extra-jazzed for a cuppa — maybe it’s rainy and misty and chilly outside, and she just came in from a wet, muddy session in the garden, caked with sleet and mud and fingers stiff as carrots from the cold — and whoops, her tea strainer has fallen to bits, no longer even vaguely phallic. So yeah, first choice is a back-up tea cock. And if you want to get her two things, a W.A.S. tarot deck or a FIFA MerchBit™ are both great options.

Hello,

My wife and I will be attending the show at Brewdog in Las Vegas. Do you happen to know what the set list will be? If it isn’t already, can After Hours be included? 

Also…want to join us for our reservation at Best Friend? It’s delicious!

Joseph and Brittany Kruchten

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Dear Kruchtens,

You guys really don’t get it, do you? You want us to play After Hours? Why not! Maybe then we’ll have somebody from the audience hold a hula-hoop in the air so we can each jump through it and get rewarded with a treat.

Are you nuts, Kruchtens?

If we get up there in Vegas at the new BrewDog complex on December 3rd and play After Hours, our most popular song, any respect we have in this industry goes straight down the tubes. We’re artists, Kruchtens, not circus seals.

You don’t see Radiohead playing Creep, do you? You don’t see Kings of Leon playing Sex on Fire, right? Did Glass Animals play their cover of Mr. Brightside last time you saw them?

No! Because these are artists. They are not slot machines (hi, Vegas!). Or if they’re slot machines, they’re, y’know, realistic ones, so you lose pretty much every time. 🍒

If all you want is to hear our hits, go see a We Are Scientists cover group! BrainTrust MasterBand do a great job, and those gals are guaranteed to play After Hours. (Plus Nobody Move, Great Escape, Rules Don’t Stop Me, Buckle, Cut My Own Hair, and all the other too-obvious bangers we don’t ever play.)

Us? We’re going to focus on the new stuff, the deep deep cuts, probably a few improvisational rock fusion instrumental jams, and then a surprisingly early finale, followed by no encore. After that if you want to chat, you can find us at the bar… 15 feet behind the red VIP rope. Just hand a note to the security guy and he’ll get it to us.

Thanks, Kruchtens! See you soon! And, oh, Kruchtens?

PSYCHHHHHH, of course we’re gonna play After Hours! 😮‍💨 Come on! What the fuck?? Does a bear shit on the floor, if he accidentally gets locked inside? Do Glass Animals close every show, religiously, with their Mr. Brightside cover? Yes and yes!

We Are Scientists play the hits, Kruchtens. Never doubt it, and accept no substitute. (BrainTrust MasterBand sucks!)

See you at Best Friend, whatever that is, at whatever time you’re going to be there 🤝

Submit your requests for advice to advice[at]wearescientists[dot]com and you may be included in a future edition of this column. You also may not — life doesn’t come with guarantees. But honestly, your chances are pretty good: not that many people are sending in requests lately. Guess everything is going really well out there for most folks? That’s cool. But if you’re one of the troubled few, the tiny cohort that Progress left behind — hit us up. 💞