Jeffrey Toobin brought out the pathos of just-convicted bad boy Tom Goldstein in this 2025 interview.

I choked up when Toobin described one Honda in Goldstein’s driveway where once there were two Bentleys.

The Chronicle of Higher Ed has a useful, confused article about Why It’s All Happening, especially to (largely male) academics. The author tosses his net in a variety of directions and catches some intriguing stuff (“gendered bullshit,” says one of his respondents), but UD thinks that a careful reading of the piece yields two dominant explanations, the first pithily summarized in my title by naughty and now dismissed from Yale Gelernter.

Call it the I’m an apeman
I’m an ape, apeman
Oh, I’m an apeman

theory, in which given freedom, privilege, privacy, money, whatever, a certain number of men will revert to Bill Belichick or Gene Lopwitz (“he had taken what he wanted.”). Aging wives with minds of their own represent, evolutionarily speaking, less stimulation than tractable teens, and if you think you can get away with it you’re maybe gonna go teenward.

That’s theory number one. Number two – I’ll call it Skank Sanctification – is associated with the man who was prez of GW when UD taught there, Stephen Trachtenberg, and also with Bard prez Leon Botstein. CHE quotes Trachtenberg:

Stephen J. Trachtenberg, who served as president of George Washington University from 1988 to 2007, is a hardened realist when it comes to [taking money and other goodies from people like Epstein].

“The people who have money are not always nice people,” he said in a recent interview.

During Trachtenberg’s tenure, the university’s endowment grew from $200 million to over $1 billion. As a fund raiser, Trachtenberg adopted the thinking of Cardinal Richard Cushing, who was the archbishop of Boston while Trachtenberg was an administrator at Boston University. Cushing told Trachtenberg: “You sanctify money with its use.”

Here the archbishop assures the university president that an alchemical cleansing of money takes place when the money is used for, say, legal payouts to victims of priests who rape children. The church has to date spent three sanctified billion on this.

A Jewish sanctification took place when Yeshiva University took Bernie Madoff’s money for its then president’s salary (one of the highest in the country) and other executive compensation. Trachtenberg has been a staunch defender of Yeshiva’s many not nice donors. Plus he made a heartfelt argument that GW shouldn’t rescind Bill Cosby’s honorary degree. He and similarly amoral Botstein model for their students a perfectly workable postmodern – and even pious – ethos: Ends, means, FUCK THAT.

Off he goes.

The COO of this hoitsy toitsy outfit (Meier/Piano architecture!) has been stealing hundreds of thousands from it for years. Nobody suspected cuz you know we’re fine, finely credentialed, people here. And yet if the museum had done a bit of due diligence they’d have found a college plagiarist (“Brady Lum, … an Honor Committee chairman … in late 1988, was accused of plagiarism.” Honor Committee!), and a guy (I think it’s the same guy) who, in a 2011 UVa speech, said

I have a simple message for you today – say “yes” to more in life.  That’s really all you need to know.

Say yes to the museum’s endowment! Even if you’re making almost $400,000 a year (I know – a humiliating pittance in Lum’s world), get your fingers in that pie! Yes! I’ll take it!

Emerald Fennell’s wondrously sicko “Wuthering Heights” is a real-time aesthetic parallel to the ever-elaborating Epstein/Mountbatten epic. She couldn’t have timed her exploration of our darkest urges more brilliantly: Her film pulses with the power of perversity, but does its thing playfully, as art will.

In the real world we cluck and cluck about famous greedy depraved self-destroyers. We pretend astonishment at each new twisted twist.

As in:

The Nurse Racheds among us gasp to find ICE Barbie melting in the arms of her sub! Before this, she was a perfectly normal person who shot puppies (Heathcliff hanged them).

Newly released audio from early 2013, part of a Feb 2026 release, features Epstein and former Israeli PM Ehud Barak discussing “gigantic” sums of money allegedly paid to [Tony] Blair for consultancy work, including a reported $11m/year from Kazakhstan.

Completely trashy is good.

Prince Harry … has always been “frustrated” by comparisons to his uncle. “It was never fair to lump them together,” an insider [said]. “Harry served his country, did the job well and never engaged in misconduct — yet lost security and housing, while Andrew was protected for years.”

Let Cecil Beaton’s terse eulogy for Evelyn Waugh be also the eulogy (he hasn’t died yet) for Andrew M-W.

UD loves Beaton’s clever statement, and was sorry to see, years after using variants of it in many contexts, that she’d been misquoting it. He actually wrote So Evelyn Waugh is in his coffin. Died of snobbery.

dear.

… the Texas school system.

Some worries up in Quebec about how Biker Boy blessings might have to get municipal approval if tighter secularism laws get passed.

Sorry, but UD’s loving the verbal fallout. Keep it coming!

Wishing does not make it so.