It’s a Friday morning in Princeton when I find this gem in my inbox from a senior professor I know:
Subject: Not an easy e-mail to write ... Dear Max,
Your crackpot papers are not helping you. First, by submitting them to good journals and being unlucky so that they get published, you remove the "funny" side of them. ... I am the Editor of the leading journal...and your paper would have never passed.
This might not be that important except that colleagues perceive this side of your personality as a bad omen on future development. ... You must realize that, if you do not fully separate these activities from your serious research, perhaps eliminating them altogether, and relegate them to the pub or similar places you may find your future in jeopardy.
