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This beautiful black and white photo…

… of the building where UD covers monthly Town Council meetings for the Garrett Park Bugle reminds her why she loves her town, the town where she grew up. Like the train station (Image 4) down the street from UD‘s house, it’s small and beautiful and for UD at least very evocative – of stillness, simplicity, and long passages of time.

“It must be nice to live in a neighborhood that’s an arboretum,” writes a local blogger about Garrett Park. It is, and not only in the spring and autumn. In winter the trees are a delicate gray against the snow. In winter the town’s small wooden houses surrounded by big trees make it feel like a Japanese garden, a quiet island.

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

Yesterday, for the first time after Hurricane Sandy, I walked to the top of our property, a thickly wooded hill overlooking a plunge down to train tracks. We thought no trees fell during the storm, but here was a massive fall – a dead elm with so broad a bifurcated trunk I thought it was two trees. As I lopped through smaller branches, most of the wood I saw was hollowed and rotten, home to generations of critters. Dry dusty vines looping around the trunks gave them a Southern Gothic feel. The vines came loose in my hand. I raked the logs and leaves that covered a path I’d made through the woods. Now, with some climbing, you can get to the end of the yard.

Margaret Soltan, November 3, 2012 11:05AM
Posted in: snapshots from home

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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

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Anthony Grafton, American Historical Association

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

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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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