It’s tempting to forget him. But a man who successfully defends female genital mutilators, and who calls critics of circumcision Nazis is just asking for it. Here’s hoping he gets it, via his beloved friend Jeffrey Epstein.
It’s tempting to forget him. But a man who successfully defends female genital mutilators, and who calls critics of circumcision Nazis is just asking for it. Here’s hoping he gets it, via his beloved friend Jeffrey Epstein.
Some interesting commentary on the death of Epstein.
Party pooper! As ever, Les UDs are headed, tomorrow morning, for Big Meadows, in Shenandoah National Park, where they will lean back in their little blue beach chairs and count fireballs. Check out my Snapshots from Shenandoah category for last year’s trip. I’ll be blogging throughout this one, too, of course.
… UD‘s home, and she took a few photos yesterday to share with you.



… but it looks as though Epstein has indeed succeeded in packing up his troubles.
Suicide, which people famously call a permanent solution to a temporary problem, was in Jeffrey Epstein’s case a permanent solution to a permanent problem. As his fellow suicide, David Berman, put it, “the dead know what they’re doing when they leave this world behind.”
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Confirmation by the New York Times.
A rather less than satisfactory outcome to his personal eugenics/eternal life scheme.
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I guess this is what they call Suicide Watch at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan. Maybe at the Correctional Center “Suicide Watch” means you watch inmates commit suicide.
Here’s an immensely important witness/criminal who apparently tried to hang himself not at all long ago, and now presto? Really?
So either incredible neglect at the jail, or he bribed a guard, or he was killed (way unlikely, but conspiracy buffs will put this one forward for sure)…
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Will this take the pressure off Dershowitz, Richardson, Mitchell, Prince Andrew, Ghislaine Maxwell, Les Wexner, Glenn Dubin, Ehud Barak, and all the other cronies, pimps, and playmates? Chais pas, mes petites; chais pas.
But franchement, I kinda doubt it. Epstein’s lurid fate has intensified the global light being shined on him and his buddies.
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Or, as Lady Bracknell might put it: “To fail to kill yourself in a federal lockup may be regarded as a misfortune; to succeed mere weeks later looks like carelessness.”
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[S]tatistics show far and away, more likely to commit suicide are pretrial detainees and within the first few days or weeks of their detention … And that’s exactly where Jeffrey Epstein was. It’s only been a couple of weeks, if that, since he was held without bail. Since he had his bail hearing and bail was denied, but far and away, detainees, people awaiting their trial, and particularly people charged and convicted of sex offenses are at high risk of suicide, more than prisoners who have been convicted and serving their sentence, at supermax or minimum security.
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Bernard Kerik is gobsmacked JE was in solitary; his opinion piece strengthens my suspicion that Epstein paid off a guard.
… receives some legal backing in England, where a high court judge has turned down a request to reinstate an ISIS member’s citizenship.
The father of a British-born student who travelled to Syria to join Islamic State (IS) has lost a legal fight to keep his son’s UK citizenship after he was stripped of it by the former home secretary Amber Rudd in 2017.
Abdullah Islam had wanted his 22-year-old son, Ashraf Mahmud Islam, who joined IS aged 18 and is now being held in a Kurdish-run military prison in Syria, brought back to the UK to face justice and to be protected from facing the death penalty.
However, in the first case of its kind in the High Court, his case was rejected on Wednesday in a judgement which could set a precedent for other alleged British IS fighters and their wives who face or have had their citizenship revoked.
The judge’s remarks were scathing.
My posts on the issue can be found here (it’s the first seven entries).
… the list of university leaders settling their greedy asses on corporate boards and drawing big money from them for doing nothing (except cutting into their university time by going to Hawaii for corporate junkets) is very very long; and even though they keep getting caught failing to disclose their several, often conflicted, board seats, these people keep doing it cuz man you don’t know greed and how it can drive you! You can’t hope to understand!
The latest corporate board scandal comes out of already insanely scandal-plagued University of North Carolina system, with its fake classes and shit. Take a place that’s already in deep doodoo and drive it yet farther underground: This has been the mandate of new head guy William Roper, who jest can’t seem to ‘member all the boards – some of whom do business with his institution – on which he has settled his ass. The local lamestream media insists on sticking its nose into his affairs, looking at forms he’s failed to fill out, etc., etc., and he’s pissed – as pissed as Shirley Ann Jackson used to get when people called her out (she had her people call her critics racists). From the height of his ass-cooling dignity Roper has issued statement after statement and you know what? It’ll work. UNC has suffered few negative consequences because it’s a jock-sniffing academic joke; Roper will suffer few negative consequences for his greed and deceit. UNC is what it is and life – in all its glorious scumminess – goes on.
Les Wexner claims he was ripped off; but a lot of people want to know why he never pressed charges against a guy who stole $46 million from him.
Maybe it didn’t ultimately seem like all that much money to the man who introduced a twelve and a half million dollar bra to the lingerie market.
“In retrospect Sandy Hook marked the end of the US gun control debate,” Dan Hodges, a British journalist, wrote in a post on Twitter two years ago, referring to the 2012 attack that killed 20 young students at an elementary school in Connecticut. “Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over.”
Hey babe that pop POPOPOPOPOPOP pop pop POPOPOP is the sound of freedom!
And you ain’t seen nuthin yet. Wait til our 18 year olds with AK-47s organize. They’ll make Columbine look like a picnic.
Music to UD‘s ears: An ultraorthodox man demands that a woman sitting next to him on an El Al flight move because he refuses to sit next to women. Instead of letting him rant on and eventually force the woman to move, the flight director tells him what it says in UD‘s headline: Fuck off.
As long as Israel’s courts remain real courts (not guaranteed!), her heroine, Anat Hoffman, who with her organization brought the suit that forced gender equality on El Al, will keep winning virtually every case she brings, just the way she won this one.
Hoffman was on this particular plane; she witnessed the exchange.
I was proud to hear the flight director use the exact wording as promised by El Al in court. It was as if she were reading from the verdict itself, stating in no uncertain terms that the in-flight staff would not ask the woman to change her seat. If the staff had acted differently, and if they had, in any way, asked the female passenger to change her seat ‘for everyone’s benefit,’ I would have encouraged her to sue El Al. That passenger did not know it, but she had all of IRAC—a powerful ally—standing behind her.
Before the flight director finally issued an ultimatum to this man, other people on the plane began to pressure the woman to move, practically bringing her to tears. But, as UD‘s beloved Christopher Hitchens used to say, “Enough with clerical and religious bullying and intimidation.”

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