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Montana: The Last, Best Place You See Before Blowing Your Brains Out.

Suicidal impulses can last only briefly, but easy access to a gun makes the urges more difficult to survive. In Montana, 67 percent of suicides in 2022 involved a gun, according to the Times analysis. Nationally, guns were used in about 55 percent of such deaths.

But in a place where guns are embedded in the rugged, frontier ethos, there is little political will to prevent people who are at risk of harming themselves from owning a gun. 

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Montana. Increasingly known to demographers as Morticia. It is of course UD’s view that the accomplishment of apocalyptic state suicide rates indicates a death-wish – a romance with the brain-blaster world-enders that have been enigmatically smiling at you from your bedside and from the movies since you were a kid. Whenever you’re impatient with yourself because of your latest bad bout of boozing, whenever the America-is-complete-shit rants of your heroes Trump and Vance make you despair, thar she blows! With her come-hither gleam guaranteeing an end to your convoluted, entirely unsatisfying, world-conspiracies. They’re just not adding up. It’s just not making sense. You fear your neighbors; your wife doesn’t get you. You’re sleepwalking through life and it’s time to stop walking and just sleep. No one cares if you blow your head off because no one from the state legislature all the way down to your family and friends is doing anything about your personal armory even though it’s obvious you’re WAY fucked up. You’ve never forgotten the look of absolute peace in the eyes of the first doe you killed when you were eight. I’ll have what she’s having.

Margaret Soltan, September 29, 2024 11:27AM
Posted in: suicide

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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

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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. ...
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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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