… an old post of mine about one of his poems.
… an old post of mine about one of his poems.
“Is it caring for people’s different experiences and making sure no one is mistreated because of them, which I will always fight for?” [Pete Buttigieg] said in a forum at the University of Chicago earlier this year. “Or is it making people sit through a training that looks like something out of ‘Portlandia’? …. [This] is how Trump Republicans are made.”
[T]he gunmen positioned themselves on elevated ground in a wooded area and fired down at the crowd. Some partygoers returned fire, which may have prevented further injuries.
[Danish PM Mette] Frederiksen emphasized that while individuals have the right to practice their religion, democracy must take precedence. “God has to step aside. You have the right to your faith and to practice your religion, but democracy takes precedence,” she told Danish news agency Ritzau.
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The Danes are probably going to extend their full face ban to schools and universities; the PM is also working to shut down prayer rooms there.
The police chief can come out with all the horseshit he likes about isolated incident/no threat to the neighborhood, but groups of armed teenagers hiding behind cars while gunfighting on your street – and don’t matter none if your street is a hoitsy toitsy historic district – is A THREAT TO THE NEIGHBORHOOD. Any idiot knows that.
And isolated? Like, don’t worry cuz it won’t happen again?
Let’s see. Elmwood Park SC has twenty Airbnbs, one of which hosted this mass shooting. Neighbors have tried hard to rid the place of short term rentals, but SC seem to like these as much as it likes guns.
Guns, guns, guns. Among the best states in the union to stockpile and shoot ’em. Jest about the best state to kill/die from ’em. Tykes can strut around openly carrying ’em on their way to kiddie party shootouts. It’s a fuckin way of life.
Now yall wanna add that the long hot summer is upon us, which brings out much more bangbang.
“No motive is known at this time” lolololol. Motive. You’d think the cops would have some knowledge of the phenom.
… or else.
The Indiana Bible College has caught hell for plagiarizing (it seems a clear case — listen to two performances) Auburn University professor Rosephanye Powell’s The Word was God.
Instead of doing the Christian thing and taking it down, IBC has sued Powell for defamation. And the beat goes on.
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UD thanks Andrew.
‘As for Trump, I find it difficult to hold him morally responsible for anything. He’s a creature of appetite and instinct who hunts and feeds in a dark sub-ethical realm. You don’t hold a shark morally responsible for mauling a swimmer. You just try to keep the shark at bay—which the American people failed to do.‘
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Dark sub-ethical realm is beautiful. It’s very very good writing. Maybe all the way to poetic.
It’s banned in Cameroon, Chad, the Republic of the Congo, Gabon, Tunisia, China, Kyrgyzstan, Sri Lanka, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. There are also tons of partial bans, in Muslim and non-Muslim countries. Burqa bans have regularly been upheld by the courts.
In short, however you personally feel about the burqa, its restriction has become a routine and largely uncontested part of the life of many countries and territories, and discussions about banning, or further banning, are ongoing in lots of locations.
It’s a thing, babe, in Morocco as much as in Italy.
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Now, UD‘s own US, largely because it’s so large (most people here don’t ever encounter burqas), hasn’t had anything to say about burqas; but, well, England. Now England…
England’s the big holdout; no burqa bans here!
Many of its neighbors, as we see, have gone the total or partial ban route.
And at the very least, these neighbors don’t consider mere debate about the burqa to be an abomination. How can it be, considering what’s going on in the world with the garment? Do you really want to hold yourself snobbily aloof from this widely shared/discussed concern?
Embarrassingly, yes. An MP brought the matter up in PM’s Questions the other day – the sort of thing one would expect to happen, and one would want to be prepared for – and got a fierce appalled Lady Bracknell put-down from the PM and others.
I mean how dare you. How dare you.
It is amusing – embarrassingly so – that England continues to feign indignation that anyone, anywhere, would have the nerve…
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Here’s the deal. The story is now all over the British press, which means the latent unhappiness in much of the population with full facial veiling is now being made manifest.
Dig. You’re supposed to shut up about the burqa and keep it out of the press precisely because the moment you break the uncomfortable national silence about it, millions of Brits will realize that now that you mention it they are quite unhappy with the thing.
I mean, uh, strong majorities, when asked, support a ban.
It’ll be interesting to see whether the government’s attempt to strangle vox populi through incredulous contempt will work.
‘[The garden’s director] once saw a man taking pods off the cacao trees, and when he confronted him, the man’s justification was that he’s a taxpayer and Brookside Gardens is publicly funded.‘
‘A man who overdosed on fentanyl in an Indiana Planet Fitness was dead inside a tanning bed for days before his corpse was found.‘

Twenty years old, spectacularly armed, with a long criminal history featuring repeated apparent efforts to kill lots of people gathered in public spaces, he was apparently one of the treetop snipers in Hickory NC who shot into a large house party. He’s so young, so precociously accomplished, and he lives in such a gun-lovin’ state, that UD sees far more slaughter from this li’l guy. His kill rate remains poor, true; but each outing teaches him something, and I’m sure he’s got far more murder in him. Best of all, he’s a team player — doesn’t go anywhere without fellow shooters.
… whose fall has pulled on the heartstrings of all New Yorkers. Recall this 2022 NYT paragraph:
He got rid of two jets and placed his 280-foot superyacht on the market for $106 million. Princeton University, to which Mr. Perelman had pledged $65 million to go toward construction of a new residential college, announced in 2021 that the building would no longer be named in his honor when he failed to meet the original payment schedule.
Things have only gotten worse since then. A fire at one of his homes so damaged five of his paintings that he has made a claim for their full value with his insurer. The insurer notes that there isn’t any damage.
Perelman in his reply points out that they have lost their “oomph” and he wants $410 million.
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Ah, the good old days.
In 2012, a volunteer firefighter who responded to a call from the Creeks, the investor Ron Perelman’s 58-acre estate in East Hampton, discovered that Perelman had constructed or renovated many buildings without permits, including a 5,800-square-foot habitable barn, a 4,200-square-foot carriage house, and a small synagogue. Attorney Leonard Ackerman, who represented Perelman and has been involved in many big Hamptons land-use cases, likes to say that he practices “forgiveness law.” For Perelman, forgiveness at the Creeks meant ripping six bedrooms out of the carriage house, tearing down part of a cabana, and revegetating 70,000 square feet of illegally cleared wetlands.
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