Like Pulling Teeth

A brief comparison:

• In the private sector, i.e., a "normal job," whether or not you actually get anything done at work is secondary to your presence at the workplace. As anyone who has worked at an office job knows, you can easily kill nine hours in your cube futzing around online and bullshitting with your co-workers, so long as your boss isn't there looking over your shoulder. The downside, of course, is that you actually have to be there.
• In academia, i.e., an "abnormal job," you don't have to be anywhere most of the time; you can spend up to four or five days a week sitting at home in your PJs if you're into it. There is no boss to look over your shoulder, either. The downside is that you only accomplish as much as you actually produce, up to and including the original scholarship that your whole meager career is ostensibly based on. It's a particularly nasty case of the "there's no point in cheating at solitaire" phenomenon.

I bring this up because I do not want to do another goddamn commodities in world history website. But I have to, and on COTTON at that. My first one, on coffee, at least had the virtue of being about something I'm deeply interested in. Not so with cotton; sure, it's great, it's soft, it brought underwear into the mainstream back in the eighteenth century, but its history is really, really bloody boring.