October 29th, 2023
La Kid, on her way to a Halloween party…

… in London.

She’s Barbie.

July 18th, 2023
La Kid Reports from Business Class.

She forgot to list Windsor, for a work gathering.

The rest of it was meeting up with friends, attending a wedding,

and exploring Lisbon, which she’s been wanting to visit.

July 15th, 2022
Update, London, La Kid: Her 5-Star Life.

Background here.

Yesterday, a friend’s wedding in Kew Gardens.

Gawd.
April 14th, 2020
Margaret and the Monkey Puzzle Tree.

There I am, foreground, in a little white sweater, pacing the tree with my siblings. It’s 1960. We lived in London that year, but this moment has us in Sea Palling, beside an eerie old holiday house our parents had rented.

I remember little from that long ago, but distinctly recall crawling in and out of the strange hidden little rooms and crevices of the Sea Palling house on dreary days when we couldn’t walk the beach.

This woman for awhile mapped every monkey puzzle tree she could find in England, but no Sea Palling tree appears in her search engine. Is this one still there? They live for a thousand years and grow to over a hundred feet. This one looks to be about thirty feet. If it exists, it’s massive.

I’m in love with the name Sea Palling. Like pure music, it means everything and nothing — I mean, the words pulse with significance, yet when you actually look at them together they’re semantically silent… The town used to be called only Palling – Victorians attached “sea” in a bid for tourists – and could have meant anything even at the beginning. No one, that is, can tell you what the name of the town means. The two words compressed seem to become one – seapalling … appalling? The sea palling, fading in power or beauty, its waves receding… Or in a deathly (funeral pall) way, the sea whitening, blanching, as when Blake describes

How the Chimney-sweepers cry
Every blackning Church appalls
.

August 28th, 2019
Can’t quite get a grip on this news coming in, but…

PROROGUE! What a great word. Describes the current American government beautifully, but I think its meaning here is different.

June 28th, 2018
Results: Yesterday’s London Auction of Two of Our …

Fangors.

August 9th, 2016
La Kid, in London on Business, Attends a Production of “Guys and Dolls” and Afterwards…

… hangs out with its star, Rebel Wilson.

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The child does get around.

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

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