It’s been a month since the DOJ charged a high-profile University of Chicago professor with insider trading, and his university webpage remains fully, smilingly, intact. It’s the first thing that comes up when you Google his name.

They’ve put the dude on leave, but what to do about the fact that this now high-profile miscreant (he’s probably a miscreant; he seems to have been caught red-handed, and word is he’ll plead guilty) remains powerfully associated with a respectable university?

Rather than take the page down (you could do this; you could explain to the guy that it will come down until the case is settled), UD thinks it’s more straightforward to append a note to it:

Dr. Catenacci is on leave pending results of a conflict of interest investigation.

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UPDATE: He’s been oopsed.

Our friends and neighbors in DC sometimes ask us why we don’t subscribe to the Washington Post — why we subscribe instead to the New York Times.

In part it’s about the incomparable Sunday NYT crossword puzzle.

But for both Les UDs, it’s also because there’s only one newspaper where paragraphs like the one in this post’s title – a single paragraph from a long article which sensitively and minutely explores a tragic chapter in the life of a high-profile New Yorker – are routine.

There’s indigenous “story weaving,” and there’s weaving together an academic article by plagiarizing from eight sources.

Eight? As I’ve learned over years of blogging about plagiarism, the number is probably closer to twenty.

Particularly contemptible in this case is Sandra Delaney plundering multiple unpublished dissertation theses. Stealing from young people who’ve not even gotten a chance to have their voices heard is really disgusting. Kill them when they’re just out of the womb.

Brutal colonization among those who make their living denouncing colonialism. A commenter at Retraction Watch writes: “One of the most ironic cases of plagiarism ever.”

Well, no one better than University of North Carolina Professor Anita Louise Jackson to do that. She herself, in contemplating unique funding opportunities within the United States Medicare system, has earned many millions in personal compensation.

It was easy: She simply performed hundreds of unnecessary procedures on hundreds of hapless patients … some of whom must really have wondered why she felt the urge to stick balloons, repeatedly, up their perfectly healthy nasal passages.

But one has to pay through the nose for a megaMcMansion on a country club golf course… uh, I mean we the taxpayers have to pay through the nose for Anita Louise Jackson to live in a megaMcMansion on a country club golf course; and if it weren’t for those pesky lawyers at the Justice Department wondering why a dinky rural practitioner is “the nation’s top-paid provider of a special sinus-relief procedure,” all would be well: Our hard-earned tax dollars would go to maintain Jackson’s lifestyle, and the farmers of northeast central Carolina would continue to boast the clearest nasal passages in the world.

That’s the football.

On his favorite day of the year, Trubu gets a presidential shellacking.

But like his namesake King Ubu, he will bounce back jollier and jollier and jollier!

LOL. Bad boy. Bad, bad, boy.

David, December, Rehoboth Beach


How all occasions do evoke thee
My own Lord Hamlet.  Here, beside the sea,
With only Philly Airport contrails for clouds,
I slip on icy boards and say your name aloud,
Because everything evokes thee.  Those contrails:
Your father, who mapped the moon, regaled
Me with their chemistry and their meaning.
Your Swiss cousin, who never left off keening,
Sends text messages about your mysterious life.
After all these years I've heard from your wife
Who finally wants the books you left with me.
And there's my yearly visit to the tomb
Of your mad Ophelia.  That keeps the ghost in the room.

Beyond all these, your famous sister is another thread
That keeps delaying your entry into truly dead
For every end of year my ritual is to read
Her widower's account of how he freed
Himself, a little, from the long pain of her dying.
When he said the Heart Sutra her soul went flying.

"I had a distinct feeling of a kind of expansion
Emanating from the furnace into the room 
And beyond.  Something was being released
From Eve's body and expanding into space."

For me, for your memory, no such amazing grace,
No closing mantra, no sense of you unrestless,
Over on the other shore, life and deathless.

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Clear winter sunset now.

Ho! The horizon takes a roseate glow.
Pink's the sand where the whitelets flow.

Between the two, a table setting silver blue
Darkens to gray. Evoking you.

… on the morning after a dark violent snowstorm, precisely how precise the beach, ocean, and sky are now. The effect one sometimes has in this apartment of being on an ocean liner is more intense than ever – there’s even a sense of motion.

The white of the breaking, spraying tide merges with the white of the snow on the little dunes, and, with a full sun and cloudless sky shedding light so strong I can’t get a good picture of it from the balcony (this is a picture from earlier this morning), it’s … what? Pearlescent?

As for what one consciousness feels gazing at it — I’m thinking of a line from Harold Brodkey’s memoir:

Perhaps you could say I did very little with my life, but the douceur, if that is the word, Talleyrand’s word, was overwhelming. Painful and light-struck and wonderful.

… between yesterday’s balmy afternoon walk, where we were surrounded by runners in shorts and tees, and this morning’s frigid visit to the balcony. Les UDs are in heaven; they want to see the coast in all its moods, and this is their first snowstorm at the beach.

Not quite as dramatic as our buddy Peter’s frigid experience — On December 7 he endured some of the world’s roughest Antarctic seas to sail to the total solar eclipse (and then it was too cloudy to see it). But pretty effing dramatic.

Pic doesn’t capture the wind whipping the snow horizontal.

Texas comes crawling back to its big bad federal daddy. How disappointing. If Abbott had any balls, he’d let the whole state cough its guts out and die.

… tweet.

In the wake of Ghislaine Maxwell’s resounding guilty verdict, most people have their eye on the fate of sketchy Prince Andrew; but people like UD, who write about universities, are more interested in Jeffrey Epstein’s stable of Harvard girls (see this brief discussion), prominent among whom is the most peculiar Alan Dershowitz, Harvard’s highest profile emeritus, and a man accused of having sex on several occasions with an underage Epstein slave.

A most peculiar man. My headline is a sentence from the beginning of his book The Vanishing American Jew and ya know it makes me wonder what’s goin on what’s goin on…

On the simplest level, given Dershowitz’s lifelong gnawing ambition, you could argue this is a clever thing to say if you want to launch a best-seller that appeals to Jews of all stripes – the sentence squeezes into itself, and allows Dershowitz to identify with, every possible iteration of “Jew.”

You could be less cynical and applaud the man’s ecumenicism or something… But if you’re secular and you make a point of joining a raft of religious congregations it’s …. peculiar. Why does he do that? Does he actually attend (on a revolving basis?) each of them? Is he, at this late date (he’s 83) still at sea, bobbing from one religious practice to another?

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If you look at the ferocity with which he has, in his legal practice, defended female genital mutilators, and, more to the point, in his writing, defended male genital mutilators (he calls people opposed to circumcision Nazis), it’s clear that he’s really not out to sea at all; far from being secular, he fervently defends the most grotesque and fundamentalist of religious practices.

I mean, this isn’t just defense for the sake of money or attention – his heart’s really in it. Religious people who want to nick away at infant clitorises deserve the highest possible representation.

It’s hard to imagine a truly secular person convincing herself that female genital mutilation is a defense-worthy form of religious freedom. And since most decent people find FGM appalling, it’s hard to imagine any respectable attorney taking on the vile Dawoodi Bohra sect and its ways. But Dershowitz calls the millions of decent people opposed to male baby mutilation Nazis, and the millions of decent people opposed to female baby mutilation enemies of religious liberty.

No one with these views – views he forcefully writes about/acts upon – can comfortably be called secular. Not to mention his membership in four Jewish congregations.

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Most peculiar. And not to put too fine a point on it, but – does the fact that he stands accused of child sexual abuse seem not entirely out of line here?

Now that we’re done with Ghislaine Maxwell, we may be able to answer this question… “Harvard lawyer Alan Dershowitz vehemently denies wrongdoing but he has questions to answer. His primary accuser, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, stands by her story that she was required to have sex with him on multiple occasions.” Oh, and plus: I hope someone somewhere at Harvard is beginning to think about damage control.