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‘Overall, I think Montgomery County is the most likely choice out of all the Amazon finalists, and that reflects the power of millennials and their desire for urban living.’

Whee.

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

“We combine rural, urban and suburban lifestyles,” County Executive Ike Leggett said after the finalists were announced Thursday.

What Leggett doesn’t say is that you can get all three lifestyles in the same house. Chez UD sits eight miles from a city, so I guess that makes it suburban. But the immediate world around UD‘s house has itself been urbanizing for years, and in fact it feels quite city-like almost the moment you step outside the barriers (dead end streets everywhere) and trees (GP is an arboretum) her town has created between it and urbanism.

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

Rural? Last night, while Les UDs were eating dinner, they heard one of their red foxes (there’s long been a den at the top of the hill behind our house) barking and screaming only a few feet away from them.

“Prepare yourself,” UD said to Mr UD. “I think you’re about to hear the squeals of a dying rabbit.”

And right away, there they were, the lurid last moments of a trapped animal. Les UD‘s looked at one another, mildly shocked and distressed, as the killing went on inches from their own Takeout Taxi meal. UD took the occasion to explain to Mr UD that while they can press three buttons and summon great feasts, the fox must find and kill her meal.

Anyway. Rural enough for you?

Margaret Soltan, January 24, 2018 4:07AM
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

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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

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Sean Dorrance Kelly, Harvard University

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Roland Greene, Stanford University

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Carlat Psychiatry Blog

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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

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Money Law

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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.
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[University Diaries offers] a broad sense of what's going on in education today, framed by a passionate and knowledgeable reporter.
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If deity were an elected office, I would quit my job to get her on the ballot.
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