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
December 10th, 2016 at 7:28PM
I would have loved that experience and am happy for you.
Against the very unlikely possibility that you haven’t seen Werner Herzog’s “Cave of Forgotten Dreams” about the Chauvet Cave, I strongly recommend it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_of_Forgotten_Dreams
I can’t remember whether I saw it on Amazon or Netflicks.
December 10th, 2016 at 11:57PM
Greg: It’s on YouTube. I’m going to watch it tonight. Thanks for the tip.
December 11th, 2016 at 10:58AM
The audio goes on and off in at least one Youtube version. You might think, early on, that something is wrong with your settings. Don’t worry it will come back on. Perhaps some of the intermittent silence is intentional — I can’t believe all of it is — but the intermittent silence may actually enhance, if you are not annoyed and fiddling with settings.
There are so many possible meditative streams that one might follow from the cave paintings. One is the history of representational art. Of course these representations exerted no influence on the wide range of art, Western and otherwise, that one would see in Jansen. But it is illustrative of human capabilities and urges to represent, perhaps to represent in a beautiful or magical way.
One meditative stream involves western art and what one might call the big bang of realism around 1420, particularly in the Northern Renaissance.
Let me recommend a wonderful beautiful book on this topic, that might give pleasure in a grim time, David Hockney’s “Secret Knowledge” is the book I have in mind. Even if you don’t buy his thesis that optics –both lenses and mirrors –played an important role in this leap, the book is worth it for the beautiful pictures juxtaposed, and discussed. Hockney assembled a wall of images from about 1150 to the 1800’s and notes the development of various features observed with his artists eye. He is never breathless or oppressive in pushing his thesis, which in his view involves not one bit of denigration of the artists involved. They had to be superb to use the optics as he thinks they did. Nevertheless his comments on the faces, drapery folds, glint off armor, are worth reading even separately from their support of his larger views.
In any event there is a chance that the Hockney book would give you a great deal of pleasure.
December 11th, 2016 at 11:00AM
I visited Lascaux in ’62. Unfortunately I had misplaced my regular glasses, and had to wear shades.
December 12th, 2016 at 11:09AM
Mr Punch: Bummer. But shaded is better than not at all.
December 12th, 2016 at 11:10AM
Greg: Ordering the Hockney book now. Thanks.