August 15th, 2016
UD’s friend and former student, Gabe Muller, who works for Atlantic Media Strategies…

interviews Diane Von Furstenburg about her experience as an immigrant to the United States.

Here they are, after the interview.

IMG_20160621_170138

July 26th, 2016
Finally decided to face the heat and walk to the Garrett Park Post Office.

While there, UD visited the family brick.

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And her father’s brick.

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July 25th, 2016
Lush Life.

In rain and one hundred degree heat

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everything grows. Like lawn mushrooms.

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June 29th, 2016
“Clean as a whistle and…

… ready for love!”

UD sang this line repeatedly after Dr. Pollack, this afternoon, congratulated her on her incredibly clean colon. She was just coming out of anesthesia, and of course UD would, just coming out of anesthesia, sing.

She got the words wrong. It’s “Fit as a fiddle and ready for love.”

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

This was her first screening colonoscopy. What can she say that hasn’t already been said by better writers.

She does turn out to have a tortuous colon.

June 29th, 2016
This summer, the Buddha’s looking at…

20160629_103051

Cardinal Climber.

June 18th, 2016
Snapshots from Home

It’s been a way arty week for UD: A local production of The Drowsy Chaperone featuring her cousin; Bloomsday in Chestertown; piano/violin duets at my place with my friend Annie (Saint-Saens, The Swan; Schubert, Serenade; a stab at Mozart, Sonata No. 7); and, at the moment, a photography exhibit in DC – ‘eighties pix of The Smiths. (Here’s the book.) UD was dragged here

20160618_183103

by her sister the Morrissey fanatic. (The photographer is the woman in the black dress/black shoes.)

The duets were initially nerve-wracking and then exhilarating. UD – a hopeless amateur at the piano – has never tried actually performing with another person, and Annie is a serious violinist. But UD accepted her invitation to play some pieces together, and it went pretty well. More importantly, UD experienced the great and somewhat astonishing pleasure of creating with another person celestial harmonies. She found herself thinking about a line from Albert Schweitzer — he recalls that when he was young something as simple as the two-part harmony in the song In The Mill by the Stream “thrilled me all over, to my very marrow, and similarly the first time I heard brass instruments playing together I almost fainted from excess of pleasure.”

June 14th, 2016
A beautiful evening in UD’s side yard.

Foreground, pretend bull.

Background, real deer.

Click for details.

deertwo

June 10th, 2016
Buddha Crowned with a Broken Robin’s Egg…

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…that I found along one
of my paths this afternoon.

June 9th, 2016
UD’s Cousin Karen Performs…

… this weekend…

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… in The Drowsy Chaperone.

Performance times here.

(You last saw her in
this commercial.)

June 8th, 2016
UD’s Back Garden

20160608_093306

Click on it.
Forgive the blurriness.
I was in a hurry.
Deer sometimes charge people.

June 8th, 2016
La Kid in the Urban Jungle

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The Garfield Park Conservatory.

On her way to Ireland.

June 4th, 2016
Phallus Rubicundus Exhibiting…

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…quite the erection along
one of UD‘s garden paths.

May 20th, 2016
La Kid and UD spend an afternoon at …

IMG_9396

… the Newseum, after a
robustly expensive lunch
at The Capital Grille.

May 19th, 2016
Irises in Front of Our …

photo(30)

… Cambridge house.

Photographer: Joanna Soltan

May 13th, 2016
UD’s sister…

sings.

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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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