UD has been pursuing a couple of new interests lately, but her interest in this blog and the issues – university and non-university – that have evolved as primary to it, remains as keen as ever. So does her gratitude to her readers – for the links you send her, and for the comments you contribute.

A New York Times writer brings our cool calm collected American sensibilities to those hot-headed French.

… [T]he veil … especially exercised France since 1989, when three children were barred from attending middle school after refusing to take off their hijabs, setting off months of anguished, often hysterical public debate.

It was the first of countless “veil affairs,” and in this century successive French governments passed two laws: one from 2004 that forbids the veil (as well as the skullcap and large crosses) in schools, and another in 2010 banning full-face coverings such as the niqab in all public spaces. And the freakouts keep coming, most recently during a heat wave in France this week. After a group of women defied the city’s ban on the hooded “burkini” bathing suit at a community pool, a government minister for equality said the burkini sends “a political message that says, ‘Cover yourself up.’”

Really, those silly over-emotional French (and Austrians, Danes, Belgians, Latvians, Bulgarians, Spanish, Italians, Swiss, Dutch, Moroccans, Sri Lankans, etc., etc., etc.). have so much to learn from us.

At a time when there is so much actual injustice around us — third-rate schools, mass incarceration, immigrants dehumanized — it’s bizarre to see student activists inflamed by sushi or valorizing a shoplifter. This is kneejerk liberalism that backfires and damages its own cause.

… a $480,000 gift to an administrator fired almost as soon as he started is a drop in the bucket. Behold my recent Rutgers posts. Of course you and I know that the gift is rather in the way of a bribe not to disclose the institutional corruption the guy witnessed. I’m sure he’ll play along.

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

Not everyone plays along.

… lives it up with friends in Hawaii.

‘They [have] this sense that they [are] being watched and on stage and carrying the torch for equality and cultural change for girls and women.”

US soccer.

It little profits a for-profit thing

To make investments that incur a loss.

Match’d with clueless suckers, we mete and dole

Almost nothing, much-blessed by Ms DeVos.

[L]et’s examine why we should want a ban on niqabs. Canada is indeed an open and inclusive society. That quality is maintained and cultivated by the steady and full interactions between its citizens. The more we know each other, the greater our capacity for acceptance. The next time you pass someone on the sidewalk, in the park, even looking toward them from your car, notice how automatic it is to look toward their face, make eye contact and exchange acknowledgement.

This is how we “know” the “other” in our society. This is how our common humanity is transmitted. It’s called familiarity. Family. The visual exchange is absolutely powerful in sensitizing and personalizing all of us to each other’s rights and shared humanity.

The niqab prevents that from happening. It portrays anonymity and evokes uncertainty. It is an act of hiding, isn’t it? Consider for a minute whether there would be any argument at all if there was instead the religious interpretation that men should be wearing niqabs and not women. How many Canadians would be clamouring against a niqab ban in that case? I suspect that no country in the world would allow men to wear niqabs, regardless of religious claims. 

This brings the issue back to the gender of niqab wearers. Does anyone believe that it was women who decided to implement the stipulation that they should only be seen by male relatives, that they should be cloaked to all other eyes on the street? Or was it dictated by a patriarchal society that saw women as being subordinate to their husbands’ preferences? In various Muslim countries today, a woman cannot travel outside of the country without permission from a husband or father. Who originated that custom?

Sing it:

His son was failing on the SAT, woe-oh

Kid was never getting into USC, woe-oh

No one would have known that today was yet to show

A tragedy, woe-oh… surfin’ tragedy 

He’d pay for his kid to keep his head held high, woe-oh

He’d pay a quarter mill… the assistant coach would lie, woe-oh

Little did he know that today was yet to show

A tragedy, woe-oh… surfin’ tragedy 

Skilled at surfin’, he was the best

There wasn’t a wave he couldn’t finesse
Rick Singer told him he could do the same
With the bribe ’em into college game

The sun is setting on the Earth today, woe-oh

The tide as it sets seems to say, woe-oh

You should’ve stayed at home

But how could you have known

Your destiny was to be

Surfin’ tragedy, surfin’ tragedy

Dozens of Drivers Got Stuck After Blindly Following Google Maps Into a Mud Pit

Don’t make fun of the noble Grenoblers putting up serious resistance against local women who defy the law and wear burkinis to their city pools. I keep telling you and telling you that France, like Quebec, is a secular place – really truly actually legally and empirically secular. Doesn’t mean you can’t do religion there – means you can’t, in specific public settings, carry your kirpan, wear your burqa, demand sex segregation, etc. Remember the French opera company that stopped its performance until a woman in the front row, in a burqa, left? Mes petites, listen up: The French really mean it.

So they’ve closed the pool rather than allow the women to parade their religious sensibilities there. They’ve fined the women too.

A large and growing number of townspeople pledge to go naked at the pool if there’s a recurrence of the problem, and this seems to UD a sound idea.

… as in “Sierra Tucson is the best residential depression treatment center,” but UD has long used the phrase to name something she noticed – perhaps felt is better – years ago, on visiting the vast house of some relatives, a married couple. Like UD, they grew up in middle class Jewish Baltimore and every year when young attended messy noisy happy jam-packed seders in narrow city row houses where cheap wine freely flowed among children and adults.

Having made it, her relatives now floated in a house whose high-ceilinged dining room sat forty people who never materialized, and whose cellared wine lay stacked as in an above-ground cemetery. They knew their neighbors (acres away in a treeless field) only in the territorial way of worrying about whether these people’s extensive lawn projects impinged on their own extensive lawn projects (recall Rand Paul’s serious injuries when one of his neighbors attacked him in a roiling dispute over grass clippings).

Home is so sad, wrote Philip Larkin; but in this poem he’s describing the sadness of having tried but failed to create a comfortable and meaningful domestic space – which is to say, having tried to make a happy life. The house started as

A joyous shot at how things ought to be,

Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:

Look at the pictures and the cutlery.

The music in the piano stool. That vase.

The pathos of Larkin’s house lies in the joyous shot at beauty and depth it obviously tried to be, if you look at its carefully and lovingly chosen pictures and music and vases. The cold pastoral of my relatives’ house lay in it having been conceived and elaborated as pure status display.

UD thought back on that house when she read Robert Shiller on the bohemoth waste of the big house. Shiller understands that “[h]aving a big house is a symbol of success, and people want to look successful,” but, as another finance person, Ellen Weber, notes in the same article, megamcmansions are “ludicrous.” Both she and Shiller are appalled not only at the economic stupidity of this sort of investment (many houses in my local megamcmansion region, Potomac, Maryland, are going begging; and I guess it’s tough all over) but at all the dead air inside it. Weber:

[F]amilies are shrinking. … More and more of our stuff is stored electronically; we should need less storage for it. There’s also a tendency to buy houses with big yards that most people do not use but end up spending lots of money paying someone else to mow and maintain.

Shiller:

[W]e don’t need elaborate kitchens, because we have all kinds of delivery services for food. And maybe you don’t need a workshop in your basement, either. You used to have a filing cabinet for your tax information, but now it’s all electronic, so you don’t need that, either. And bookshelves, for people who read a lot. We have electronic books now, so we don’t need bookshelves anymore.

From another article on the subject:

[M]edian house size has increased by some 1,000 square feet over the past 50 years. At the same time, the average size of the household has fallen as people have fewer kids than in earlier generations, [Wharton real estate professor Benjamin Keys note[s]. “For the houses that don’t fit the families, the prices are going to have to fall.” Add[s] [Dowell Myers, a public policy professor]: “The millennials seem to have a taste for living more sparsely. They don’t want as much furniture. They don’t want as much space.”

Dead space, and depressed people. If you listen, you can hear them singing: Is that all there is?

Ronald S. Sullivan Jr. could be talking about Oberlin College. But he’s talking about Harvard’s capitulation to students seemingly unable or unwilling to understand the rights of accused people to legal representation. Sullivan is representing the vile Harvey Weinstein; because of this, students demanded that he be thrown out as faculty dean of one of the school’s residential houses as he made students feel “unsafe.”

Sullivan writes that he is “willing to believe that some students felt unsafe,” but UD ain’t willing. It is beyond pitiable to fear that a vile person’s attorney is going to hurt you, and UD‘s going to go on record believing that any undergraduate woman impressive enough to get into Harvard (assuming she got in legitimately…) simply can’t be that pitiable. UD does these trembling babes the honor of assuming that their real motive is to keep national attention focused on the issue of sexual abuse, and they saw an opportunity here.

The kiss of death for longtime UD favorite, Elizabeth Warren. It’s going to be close to impossible for her to dig herself out of the “she’s an intellectual” hole.