So, yeah, you can be a "senior" as an elder Millennial/young Xer in some departments as a result, I think.

Some of the weirdness is academia has a fairly extreme demographic contraction from the Boomer retirement wave because not only was it a i) big cohort that ii) worked later in our industry but iii) structural changes shifted the share of TT jobs in the field, altering career dynamics.

In general, I'd see it as "what service does the field ask of you?" Being asked to edit top journals or review external tenure files? You're considered senior in the practical sense of the word. Internally, I'd say it's defensibly defined as being associate level and certainly at being full.

And obviously expanding SCOTUS and reigning in the scope of self-defined powers of the court is fundamental to changing the long-term health of our democracy, imo.

Stop me if you've heard this one before: a mayor, a crypto marketer, and a music mogul walk behind bars...

That's a good idea. I usually jot down notes after each lecture based on the questions I got in class & after office hours visits for questions on assignment, then try to draw on them during revisions. But even just a QR code to a weekly comment box might be a better way for me to get better notes.

Anyway, I suspect way more electeds in state and local could be charged on corruption and would be investigated if there were more active newsrooms in more states and localities. If I was a corrupt politician, I'd be thanking modern social media for killing newspapers every day.

The theater in Albany I subscribe to is doing a run of that soon and I'm looking forward to it.

You're welcome. Things like this should definitely be more transparent and broadly known/shared.

Often departments will have particular journal expectations too (i.e., some number of articles in the top 3-5 PA journals). More multidisciplinary departments will allow flexibility on where you publish in ways that count as top journals (i.e., NVSQ/Voluntas for nonprofit ppl, JPAM for policy).