Sunstein’s admission is by far the most guilty in an academic setting. Sure, you’re a degenerate gambler and well-known lounge-lizard, but at least you haven’t succumbed to the all-pervading evil that is television. Your colleagues can reconcile your behavior by assuming you do these things to test the mathematical poker-beating routines you’ve been working on, and to indulge your inner anthropologist. But television!? Such an admission is the academic equivalent of owning up to one’s private baby-eating hobby.

Dammit. Fixed.

Look, college teachers, like politicians, are going to get in trouble if they admit to being at all interesting. What this poll shows is just that academics need to be very careful about their public images. But we knew that already.

There are plenty of professors who like dressing up in gender-inappropriate undergarments, using cocaine, kabbalah, shooting assault rifles, etc. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that on balance, academics have an above-average level of perversity and general weirdness. (Proof: they’re fairly imaginative people with loads of time on their hands.) But their continued employment rests on their seeming to be respectable.

Ah, but once you have tenure its all edible panties, firearms and blow.

Kabbalah is a guilty pleasure? from my perspective that is hilarious, in my mind it’s more like the type of thing elderly people would discuss pleasantly at luncheons just after going to church, and yes Mark, also just before going home and watching TV :-).

Count me as a friend of Deirdre.

What’s lame is when intellectuals (or anyone else) aspire to be “hip” and “edgy” — notions that are, rightly, wholly owned subsidiaries of the Coca Cola corporation. If algebraic geometers want to skydive nude into South American war zones on the weekends, that’s fine with me, but let’s not make it compulsory. Ninety-nine percent of worthwhile intellectual achievements are made by people who had the courage to swim against the tide of adolescent conformity that gave us fans of Hunter S. Thompson. Instead of trying to make academics fashionably interesting, it would be infinitely preferable to encourage and celebrate the independence of mind of those who don’t give a shit what anyone thinks is cool.

I’m another non-competitor in the coolness sweepstakes. But, frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn. My number one pleasure is reading. Listening to music is nice, too, but reading is more engrossing. Conversations with close friends are also entertaining and a genuine pleasure. Woo hoo!

Those inclined in that direction are welcome to demonstrate how edgy and with-it they are (do people still say “with it”?), but I hope they leave me in peace. Fortunately, most of them are too busy with their rambunctious activities to think to bother a middle-aged bachelor who neither smokes, drinks, parties, carouses, nor watches sports.

Is it time for my nap yet?

Couldn’t it be a guilty pleasure because it reveals how embarrassingly nerdy one is?

That line by Mark made me laugh out loud to almost no end.

If the secret is really guilty (not in the legal sense) most won’t admit it. Current academic politics simply don’t allow for admitting stuff like that unless you are in the protected class.

We can be even more specific. For instance if you hail from MIT, your favorite passtime might include secret techno-anarchist meetings on IRC using your hacker pseudonym. If you live in Stanford, the passtime might include smoking pot and eating Keewee.

If you are a big shot physicist who was born in the US, you might even be considered to be a viable candidate to advise secret military organizations like Darpa.

“I’m too cool to worry about being cool” is definitely cheating, kids.

Sheesh. Not only are academics lame, they can’t even answer simple questions.

The amusing thing is that Sean seems to have been the only one to really understand the question: what do you get pleasure out of doing which might be considered (by you or by others) to be wrong/damaging/declasse/perverted in some sense, which you might be (slightly) embarassed to admit doing?

A boring “guilty pleasure” would be something like “gorging on ice cream” or “watching soap operas”[*] or “reading Harlequin romances”, all of which are common and ordinary, but at least have some kind of stigma attached to them.

“Riding my bike” and “landscape restoration”? The people who mentioned those admit that they don’t even feel guilty about them.

To be fair, McCloskey’s answer is a sort of complicated rendition of “Something I keep trying to do even though I know I’m no good at it” (in her case, trying to learn foreign languages), which has a certain arcane perversity to it, I suppose. In a way, I think she has Sean beat: imagining that one should feel guilty about trying to learn foreign language is way weirder than imagining you should feel guilty about visiting Las Vegas (if admittedly far less salacious).

Still, at least none of them said “Lord of the Rings”.

Given his love of Las Vegas, I think Sean would be a natural to play the Frank Sinatra/George Clooney role in another remake of Oceans 11. ‘Eleven’ refers, of course, to the number of dimensions Sean uses to break into the casinos.

We should have a CV.com guilty pleasure thread!

mxracer652 @ 35 on riding a bike:

Yes, but where’s the guilt? Riding a bike is virtuous: it’s transportation without pollution, and it’s exercise. (And if you read the article, you’ll see that Jacob Hacker admits that “it’s not exactly a guilty pleasure”, thus treating the question as though it were something more like “What’s your favorite hobby?”)

This reminds me of a scene from David Lodge’s “Changing Places” (which then crops up again in Small World, now that I think of it) where a group of English Lit. profs play a game called “Humiliation” where you win by nominating a book you have not read, but which all the players have.

One minor character (ok, spoilers follow) is so desperate to win that he blurts out that he has never actully *read* Hamlet, which leads inexorably to him losing the respect of his department, the denial of tenure, and his banishment to the midwest from “Euphoric State”.

Somehow forcing academics to name their guilty pleasures seems to work in much the same way…

Beefing up a chainsaw or making fireballs with non-dairy coffee creamer is not a guilty pleasure, merely a geeky one (particularly if you preface the “boom” with a few remarks about surface-area-to-volume ratios). Singing along to Aqua’s “Barbie Girl” is a guilty pleasure: I wouldn’t admit that, even to my fellow BDSM-fetishizing, hallucinogen-abusing, Sandman-reading friends.

Some things we keep quiet because of good taste; others because of the statute of limitations.

Rich, we have a better word now for “shameless, self-referential moves.” It’s called “blogging,” and we heartily encourage it. (But it would have been too obvious to list as a guilty pleasure.)

I will forthrightly admit that one of my best Friday nights of recent memory (this was a warm evening in North Carolina, last summer) was cracking open a fresh copy of Zee’s Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell. And, of course, proofreading the manuscript of Zwiebach’s First Course in String Theory is a memory soaked through with sentiment.

The problem is that (a) nobody around me right now thinks that’s odd in the slightest way, and (b) I was just like this as a teenager too. I can’t feel “guilty” about it, because guilt was never part of my emotional context on such matters.

Doesn’t the incredulous (even disapproving) response to McCloskey’s lame pleasure at cracking a textbook perversely validate her? I mean, she’s right – now it is a guilty pleasure.

Reading this blog is one of my guilty pleasures.

Guilty pleasure: paying attention to popular culture. Man I loves me some Britney-bashing. Sure, plenty of other people do it, but are academics “supposed” to?

On the other hand, does it take the “edge” off it if I then use the pop-culture trivia as foddor for ridiculing Critical Theory? I’m still rather proud of my “queer reading” of “The Sign”, by Ace of Base.

Guilt is a useless emotion –

I think Greg Egan has hit the nail on the head. The culture of “coolness” is harming kids’ perception of how the world actually works. Witness the decline of the hard sciences in universities in the UK. I read SF as a kid, and thought maths was “cool”. I was thought geeky by my peers because of it. Still am, to some extent.

Incidentally, Greg, glad to hear you’re writing SF again, looking forward to “Incandescence” next year. I think I have just about all of you books, including “An Unusual Angle”.

Well, I’ve been known to read novels by people like Greg Egan – but I can’t think of anything else off-hand. Where’s my “angel” smiley, goddammit?

I think I may have the worst guilty pleasure for an academic – tests. I actually enjoy taking and acing a nice, challenging test. Nothing too grueling, mind, but a good couples hours of test is a thrill and its invigorating to come out knowing that you effing owned that thing.

What makes this one so bad is that it leads to ostracism both by your peers and the general populace.

What I find pathetic about most of their responses is that they’re all of the “job interview question” category: “Well, sir, I’d have to say that my greatest weakness is just working too hard and loving the company too much.” Give me a break.