October 17th, 2016
Sure, it’s more than a little too-too.

But Chris Kluwe explaining to Donald Trump what gets said in actual locker rooms is pretty funny.

I was in an NFL locker room for eight years, the very definition of the macho, alpha male environment you’re so feebly trying to evoke to protect yourself, and not once did anyone approach your breathtaking depths of arrogant imbecility. Oh, sure, we had some dumb guys, and some guys I wouldn’t want to hang out with on any sort of regular basis, but we never had anyone say anything as foul and demeaning as you did on that tape, and, hell, I played a couple years with a guy who later turned out to be a serial rapist. Even he never talked like that.

August 16th, 2016
And I’m Waiting for Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

“They got Roger Stone and now they got Roger Ailes,” Hillary Clinton loyalist James Carville told The Daily Beast, not bothering to suppress a giggle over the rogue’s gallery of misfits that seems to be populating the Trump campaign. “I’m waiting for Dick Morris.”

DSK not only shares with several Trump operatives warm links with Ukraine; he will be able to reinforce Ailes’s advice on how to appeal to women.

August 11th, 2016
Breakfast, lunch, and afternoon.

On other campaigns, we would have to scrounge for crumbs,” says a senior Clinton adviser. “Here, it’s a fire hose. [Trump] can set himself on fire at breakfast, kill a nun at lunch and waterboard a puppy in the afternoon. And that doesn’t even get us to prime time.”

August 10th, 2016
Yikes. It really CAN’T buy you happiness.

While unexpected, the death [of the Duke of Westminster] has not come completely out of the blue.

“He was a depressive and had been unwell for many years,” a source tells The Daily Beast.

August 5th, 2016
UD’s Law School Colleague, Jonathan Turley, Takes You There!

From his USA Today article about the Rio Olympics:

[T]he IOC accepted pledges [from Brazil] that were almost laughable in their implausibility, like transforming the polluted bay into a model of water treatment purity in a few years. After pledging $1 billion to clean up its cesspool, Rio later announced it would cut that budget down to around $51 million. One Brazilian expert put it simply, “Foreign athletes will literally be swimming in human crap.”

August 2nd, 2016
La Nausée, Chapitre Deux

UD has already employed Sartrean nausea to evoke the feelings of many of us in this election cycle (go here); now the President of France, Francois Hollande, has made things more explicit.

Trump’s excesses, Hollande said in a press conference this afternoon, “make you want to retch.” The verb there was “vomir,” which makes all sorts of sense; but, expanding on his theme, Hollande also referred to said excesses giving him haut-le-coeur.

Who knew that in French the beautiful phrase high heart actually means ready to puke?

August 2nd, 2016
‘I sat next to an attractive woman who rang no bells. She was really not up for any kind of chitchat. Later, when I repeated the name I’d seen on her place card, Kelly Ripa, I learned that this was a deeply celebrated television artist; I felt bad that she had voyaged all the way down to Florida only to find herself stuck next to the wedding’s one nobody, and I understood her taciturnity and the pain that lay beneath it.’

A New Yorker writer remembers Trump’s most recent wedding.

July 20th, 2016
“Once, when she was in Paris with her daughter, Rachel, who is now an animal-rights lawyer in Denver, she peed in the garden of the Tuileries Palace at night.”

First sentence of a great short story in search of an author.

July 7th, 2016
“When I woke up 5 days later I didn’t remember anything. I thanked everyone at the ICU for my life, went home, and then slowly as the opiates faded away, remembered the trauma of the surgery & spent the first two days home kind of free-falling from the meds / lack of meds and the paralyzing realization that nothing matters. Luckily that was followed by the motivating revelation that nothing matters.”

Wonderful writing, post-op, from Sarah Silverman.

July 6th, 2016
But he’s TOTALLY into circumcision!

[Trumper Warning]

I’ve seen this guy hold his grandsons at a bris.

June 13th, 2016
Life in These United States

The company’s drivers expressed safety concerns that FedEx trucks were being stopped on the road by online pharmacy customers demanding packages of pills and that the delivery address was a parking lot, school, or vacant home where several carloads of people were waiting for their drugs, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

May 4th, 2016
“Trump proved that many evangelical voters, supposedly the heart of a True Conservative coalition, are actually not really values voters or religious conservatives after all, and that the less frequently evangelicals go to church, the more likely they are to vote for a philandering sybarite instead of a pastor’s son.”

I dunno… UD can’t stand Trump, of course, but…

Doesn’t something hopeful lurk in Ross Douthat’s sentence?

May 2nd, 2016
‘In total, these three countries are home to 36 million Muslims. Yet there was scarcely any public opposition to the ban.’

As Europe struggles over banning the burqa, several African countries quietly, and with virtually no opposition, ban it. Others officially support a ban; yet others are actively considering one.

And what a shocker that women are expressing no opposition to surrendering this beloved garment.

April 28th, 2016
That Ole Devil Called Ted

[Former Republican House Speaker John Boehner] told an audience at Stanford University Wednesday that [Ted Cruz] is “Lucifer in the flesh.”

***************

More Ted commentary, in Rolling Stone:

Ted Cruz comes from the Ivy League and once clerked for William Rehnquist and cynically portrays himself as a down-home duck-huntin’ yahoo who doesn’t know that Jemmy Madison would kick his ass up and down Independence Hall for treating the First Amendment as a blueprint for a Christian theocracy.

***************
Ex-Cruz-Iating

An Exorcist Told us How to Rid Ted Cruz of Lucifer, Just in Case John Boehner is Right

April 24th, 2016
Sentence of the Day

An Oregon man is accused of tipping a prostitute with an exotic primate swiped from his own pet store along with stolen Girl Scout cookie money and a laptop computer.

« Previous PageNext Page »

UD REVIEWED

Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam.
New York Times

George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days.
The Electron Pencil

It’s [UD's] intellectual honesty that makes her blog required reading.
Professor Mondo

There's always something delightful and thought intriguing to be found at Margaret Soltan's no-holds-barred, firebrand tinged blog about university life.
AcademicPub

You can get your RDA of academic liars, cheats, and greedy frauds at University Diaries. All disciplines, plus athletics.
truffula, commenting at Historiann

Margaret Soltan at University Diaries blogs superbly and tirelessly about [university sports] corruption.
Dagblog

University Diaries. Hosted by Margaret Soltan, professor of English at George Washington University. Boy is she pissed — mostly about athletics and funding, the usual scandals — but also about distance learning and diploma mills. She likes poems too. And she sings.
Dissent: The Blog

[UD belittles] Mrs. Palin's degree in communications from the University of Idaho...
The Wall Street Journal

Professor Margaret Soltan, blogging at University Diaries... provide[s] an important voice that challenges the status quo.
Lee Skallerup Bessette, Inside Higher Education

[University Diaries offers] the kind of attention to detail in the use of language that makes reading worthwhile.
Sean Dorrance Kelly, Harvard University

Margaret Soltan's ire is a national treasure.
Roland Greene, Stanford University

The irrepressibly to-the-point Margaret Soltan...
Carlat Psychiatry Blog

Margaret Soltan, whose blog lords it over the rest of ours like a benevolent tyrant...
Perplexed with Narrow Passages

Margaret Soltan is no fan of college sports and her diatribes on the subject can be condescending and annoying. But she makes a good point here...
Outside the Beltway

From Margaret Soltan's excellent coverage of the Bernard Madoff scandal comes this tip...
Money Law

University Diaries offers a long-running, focused, and extremely effective critique of the university as we know it.
Anthony Grafton, American Historical Association

The inimitable Margaret Soltan is, as usual, worth reading. ...
Medical Humanities Blog

I awake this morning to find that the excellent Margaret Soltan has linked here and thereby singlehandedly given [this blog] its heaviest traffic...
Ducks and Drakes

As Margaret Soltan, one of the best academic bloggers, points out, pressure is mounting ...
The Bitch Girls

Many of us bloggers worry that we don’t post enough to keep people’s interest: Margaret Soltan posts every day, and I more or less thought she was the gold standard.
Tenured Radical

University Diaries by Margaret Soltan is one of the best windows onto US university life that I know.
Mary Beard, A Don's Life

[University Diaries offers] a broad sense of what's going on in education today, framed by a passionate and knowledgeable reporter.
More magazine, Canada

If deity were an elected office, I would quit my job to get her on the ballot.
Notes of a Neophyte

Archives

Categories