Mr UD loves it — as do many of their friends — and since he does the food shopping, we eat a lot of Joe’s food.

A longish article in Fortune tries to explain the market’s appeal.

Who’s a fan of Trader Joe’s? Young Hollywood types like Jessica Alba are regularly photographed brandishing Trader Joe’s shopping bags — but Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor reportedly is a fan too. “What’s not to like?” says Costco (COST, Fortune 500) co-founder and CEO Jim Sinegal. “They’re very good retailers, and we admire them a lot.” Visit a Trader Joe’s early in the day, and there are senior citizens on fixed incomes shopping for bargains; on weekends and evenings a well-heeled crowd takes over. Kevin Kelley, whose consulting firm Shook Kelley has researched Trader Joe’s for its competitors, jokes that the typical shopper is the “Volvo-driving professor who could be CEO of a Fortune 100 company if he could get over his capitalist angst.”

But Mr UD hates Volvos.

Whenever UD worries that the currency of the title “Professor” has been devalued, she reads articles like this one in USA Today, about the styling of the latest Mercedes-Benz model, and heaves a sigh of relief.

“The new CLS points the way forward for the future perceptible design idiom of Mercedes-Benz”, explains Professor Gorden Wagener, head of design at Mercedes-Benz. “At the same time it takes its inspiration from the great tradition of stylish, refined sportiness which has always been a feature of Mercedes coupés.”

If Mercedes-Benz thinks it’s a plus to put “Professor” in front of the names of its designers (this guy’s predecessor was also Professor), I guess we’re still prestigious.

… remarkable candor.

Joan Gussow, locavore, is interviewed in the New York Times about reconstructing her garden along the Hudson River after floods.

The NYT writer quotes from one of Gussow’s memoirs, in which

[Ms. Gussow writes] that, to her surprise, she did not miss her husband [after he died], or even grieve for him.

“I kept experiencing it as a strange liberation from things I hadn’t known I was imprisoned by,” she writes.

… the literary critic, has died.

The New York Times.

… [H]e almost invariably tied what he wrote to a recurring central concern of his: what the English literary critic Lawrence S. Rainey, writing in the London newspaper The Independent, described as “the conflict between the human need to make sense of the world through storytelling and our propensity to seek meaning in details (linguistic, symbolic, anecdotal) that are indifferent, even hostile, to story.”

For instance, in his best-known book, “The Sense of an Ending,” Mr. Kermode analyzed the fictions we invent to bring meaning and order to a world that often seems chaotic and hurtling toward catastrophe. Between the tick and the tock of the clock, as he put it, we want a connection as well as the suggestion of an arrow shooting eschatologically toward some final judgment.

Yet, as he pointed out in “The Genesis of Secrecy,” narratives, just like life, can include details that defy interpretation, like the Man in the Mackintosh who keeps showing up in Joyce’s “Ulysses” …

From the New York Times obituary for Bernard Knox:

The O.S.S. later sent him into northern Italy for an equally dangerous mission with the Italian underground, and it was there that he rekindled his passion for the classics. Holed up in an abandoned villa, he discovered a bound copy of Virgil and opened it to a section of the first Georgic that begins, “Here right and wrong are reversed; so many wars in the world, so many faces of evil.”

Professor Knox recalled, in “Essays Ancient and Modern,” “These lines, written some 30 years before the birth of Christ, expressed, more directly and passionately than any modern statement I knew of, the reality of the world I was living in: the shell-pocked, mine-infested fields, the shattered cities and the starving population of that Italy Virgil so loved, the misery of the whole world at war.”

He continued, “As we ran and crawled through the rubble I thought to myself: ‘If I ever get out of this, I’m going back to the classics and study them seriously.’ ”

Or no, wait. Leadership.

… there was an

… insurrection among [Harvard psychologist Marc Hauser’s] staff… “[When] Marc was in Australia, [said an informed source], the university came in and seized his hard drives and videos because some students in his lab said, ‘Enough is enough.’ They said this was a pattern and they had specific evidence [of research fraud].”

Background here.

Not a peep out of Harvard all this time. They seem to have retracted one of his papers… or gotten him to retract it or something… But otherwise, three years after strong evidence of fraud on the part of one of its highest-profile faculty members, Harvard’s doing and saying nothing. Only because someone at Harvard leaked a letter about it to the press do we know anything.

The cover-up is beginning to look as bad as the scandal.

Ellen Schrecker, in Forbes, describes the process whereby tenured professors become contingent instructors who in turn become internet traffic directors.

She begins with a story.

… California State University’s Bakersfield campus decided to cut costs by replacing all the sections of the remedial mathematics course in the fall of 2009 with an online computer program overseen by a single instructor. Unfortunately substituting the Internet for personal contact with a classroom teacher proved disastrous, especially for the 700-plus ill-prepared undergraduates who needed intensive work to bring their math skills to a college level. When these students took their final exams only about 40% passed, compared with a 75% success rate the prior year.

One instructor, 700 students. Online. What could go wrong?

David Brooks, the New York Times columnist, wrote this last month about the “moral naturalists,” a group of evolutionary psychologists who argue that we’ve evolved an innate moral grammar, rather like Chomsky’s innate linguistic grammar.

He features the work of Harvard psychologist Marc Hauser:

… Hauser … began his career studying primates, and for moral naturalists the story of our morality begins back in the evolutionary past. It begins with the way insects, rats and monkeys learned to cooperate. By the time humans came around, evolution had forged a pretty firm foundation for a moral sense.

Yet now, with a heavy-handed irony that seems more the realm of fiction than real life, Hauser’s own morality is in serious question. He has taken leave from Harvard as a major investigation into his possible research fraud continues.

As far back as fifteen years ago, Hauser’s methods and results were being seriously challenged. He routinely seems to make claims about primate behavior unsupported by evidence, and has already retracted one influential paper.

“If scientists can’t trust published papers,” comments a fellow researcher, “the whole process breaks down.’’

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The subtitle of Hauser’s forthcoming book deepens the irony: Explaining Our Evolved Taste for Being Bad.

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UPDATE: Interesting to see that, back in ’06, Richard Rorty sensed some bullshit at work here.

The exuberant triumphalism of the prologue to “Moral Minds” leads the reader to expect that Hauser will lay out criteria for distinguishing parochial moral codes from universal principles, and will offer at least a tentative list of those principles. These expectations are not fulfilled. The vast bulk of “Moral Minds” consists of reports of experimental results, but Hauser does very little to make clear how these results bear on his claim that there is a “moral voice of our species.”

… [Harry] Whittington’s work was brought to widespread popular attention by Stephen Jay Gould in his 1989 bestseller Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History.

[F]ew would dispute Gould’s observation that, in his description of the Burgess Shales, Whittington had undertaken some of the most elegant technical work ever accomplished in palaeontology. Gould added that if there was a Nobel Prize in the subject, Whittington and his research team should be the first recipients.

… [Whittington’s removal as chair of a department during an administrative shakeup] probably came as something of a relief to [him], who was in any case too modest a man to care much about status.

His official retirement from the [Cambridge] Woodwardian professorship in 1983 made no difference to Whittington’s routine and he continued to put in a steady morning’s work at the Department of Earth Sciences every day until shortly before his death.

Of some 200 published papers, around 50 were published after his retirement, the last in 2009 shortly before his 93rd birthday…

Doug Fields said this last May when he resigned as president of the University of New Mexico faculty senate. He, like many other UNM professors, was protesting the wretched management of the university by its president, David Schmidly (long history here).

And he meant that thing about leaving. This article describes graduate students taking over much of the teaching, especially in math and physics, which have recently lost 25 professors “to higher salaries at other universities,” says the deputy provost. He doesn’t mention the no-confidence vote against Schmidly, the many sports scandals over which he has presided, his effort to give his son a high-paying job at UNM, etc., etc.

Several classes are being canceled as well.

Although it’s hard to confirm this from where UD‘s sitting, it does look as though an exodus of UNM faculty is underway. They’ve still got Mike Locksley, though.

Bioluminescence work on the side of 1200 U-Hauls.

… and mathematics.

Links here.

Since UD‘s very interested in – and about to teach a course in – beauty, she’ll have more to say about this film later today. She has to think about it. And of course she’s not going to be able to see it in the near future…

A new fatwa has overcome the prohibition of gender mixing in unsupervised areas among unrelated people: Women may now breastfeed men with whom they come into contact, thus creating a ‘family’ bond which makes the man and woman related and the contact permissible.

Although too old to teach under these circumstances, UD looks forward to reading Rate My Expressers.

Hard initially to get hold of her nipple; once locked on, very good.

Slow. Too much class time spent pumping, sucking. Female students look bored.

Plays favorites. Feedings should be fairer.

Talks endlessly about how much better she lactated when she taught at a more selective school.

Milk production fine, but men sleepy after, and professor seems unable to wake them. What are they teaching in ed school these days??

A Duke researcher’s questionable experimental methods seem to have inspired someone to look closely at his cv. On it, he claims a Rhodes scholarship he didn’t earn.

The Duke University School of Medicine has suspended a researcher and stopped patient enrollment in three cancer studies upon learning of reports that the researcher had overstated his academic credentials.

The lead researcher, Dr. Anil Potti, was placed on administrative leave, said Douglas J. Stokke, a spokesman for Duke, while it investigates allegations that Dr. Potti falsely claimed to have been a Rhodes scholar.

The article goes on to suggest that Potti has a habit of padding his cv.