… 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.
************************
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.
I am a big admirer of Hervé Guibert, as I explained in my essay “Sade in Jeans.” What I like about Guibert is that he was tough. It seems to me that in the English-speaking world the problem in AIDS writing has been sentimentality — a tearful, victimized, medicalized approach to AIDS and not enough defiance, anger, gutsiness. I don’t want to name names, but we’ve had everything from AIDS deathbed weddings to angels descending.
Of course this has been vastly admired by most people, and I feel like a cad not liking it. But I don’t like its sentimentality. It’s not that different from the death of Little Nell in Dickens. I think people living through AIDS probably get a lot of consolation from that kind of writing. But I think, as literature, it’s dubious.
Right. UD was amazed to read, in an earlier article about a North Carolina mass shooting, that shooters were apparently positioned in nearby trees. She had trouble believing this ambush scenario, since virtually all paid-admission, bullet-riddled, house parties generate the bullets from inside the houses, as drunk guests get into gunfights.
But here you are to envisage an organized little army having climbed neighboring trees (lucky neighbor!) for a clean invisible shot into the party house. Wowsa. “[P]eople attending the party were also armed, and returned fire on the original shooter or shooters.” Wowsa!
******************
This is an unfolding, evolutionary history that UD has long written about. Whether school or party or lounge shooting, we’re going to see larger and more organized, more planned, mass attacks. We’re going to see return fire (at least eighty shots were released as armed guests hit back), turning these scenarios into protracted skirmishes with greater and greater injury/loss of life/danger to communities. We’re gradually going to realize that Americans consider this activity fun and exciting (an extension of the party, if you like), and that they need no motive beyond this to stage bloody little civil wars in our towns.
*****************
And listen. This ain’t quaint Hatfield/McCoy shit. Look what these sixteen year olds are packing. Look what Americans are packing.
Just steps from Harvard Yard, a group has been trying to … [make] space for [conservative voices] for years… It … has brought in speakers like … Adrian Vermeule, a Harvard law professor who has supported the idea of a worldwide Catholic theocracy.
************************
F-u-u-u-ck. Has that ever been done before? I mean a worldwide Catholic theocracy? Did I miss the years before 1054 when Catholics bestrode the globe?
Okay they were doing well in Europe then, but THE GLOBE? Has pretty much anyone besides Adrian Vermeule thought about, much less lectured, on this unprecedented SOOOOOOOPERWILD thing?
You thought the idea that gender is socially constructed was radical. What about A FOR REAL WORLDWIDE CATHOLIC THEOCRACY? Maybe in his most buried dreams Savonarola’s unconscious generated images of A WORLDWIDE CATHOLIC THEOCRACY of which he would be the SOOOOPERBUSY executive in chief, but I can’t think of anyone, outside of Vermeule (including anyone within the territory of the Vatican), capable in our time of producing and then sharing with everyone the idea that from Azerbaijan to Zanzibar everyone gets to be forcibly Catholicized.
Which may help one understand why viewpoint diversity institutes, like the one honored to have this fanatic share his superpower fantasy, remain somewhat in disrepute.
‘Following Trump Takeover, Kennedy Center Subscription Sales Drop 36%’
The arts institution has seen a $1.6 million year-over-year decline in subscription revenue, with theater subscriptions down more than 80% since Donald Trump’s takeover.
************************
My nephew, a spectacular singer (runs in the family), is in the Washington National Opera chorus, and will be part of their upcoming Aida. La Kid and I will be in the audience, but we wonder how many will be with us in the opera house. Will the troupe outnumber us?
Strange how everything turn turn turns. When I was a kid Bethesdans had to drive ten miles at night down the GW Parkway to see first-rate classical stuff at the Kennedy Center; since then, thanks in part to my uncle (my nephew’s grandfather), Les UDs have had a significant concert hall, Strathmore, a fifteen minute walk away.
Because of what Trump just did to the Kennedy Center, the significance of the Music Center at Strathmore has suddenly taken an enormous leap — several performers/productions that would have been in the city are now in the suburbs.
The suburbs that ain’t very suburban anymore. Seen downtown Bethesda lately?
Tens of millions of Americans have been shivering, AR-less, by their hearths, awaiting the court’s critically important decision on whether they can keep stockpiling semi-automatic rifles.
A local reporter chats with frightened, anonymous business owners along the deadliest stretch of Murder Beach. Most cite large numbers of menacing, armed, high teenagers as their least favorite thing about life on the boardwalk. The sense of menace, and the big police presence that scary people draw to the area, more and more discourages folks looking for a relaxed good time with their kids.
What sucks is there’s no solution. South Carolina prides itself on having just about the weakest gun laws in the nation, and I guess the legislature is working every day to make them even weaker. Says here SC also (natch) “suffers one of the highest rates of gun homicides in the nation,” but if it really were suffering it would take a look at laws insisting that every tyke in the state get a big effing gun and tote it around. Maybe it could tweak the laws so that armed teenyboppers stop bopping everybody.
It’s almost always an argument at a large private house party, almost always a paid admission party; and as the gunfights proceed, many bloodied screaming people almost always pour out onto the driveway, the yard, the street, and the neighbors’ yards. If there’s a continued exchange of fire (likely), pedestrians and neighbors had also better run.
When (five minutes later) forty police and emergency vehicles race to the location, many groaning dying bullet-riddled bodies greet them. This week’s mass shooting took place in cute l’il Hickory NC, and at least twelve high school students were shot. UD’s gonna guess the killer was a 17 year old guy.
It’s like a battle scene. It’s also like a movie, since reporters have also arrived, and they are watching and filming.
********************
Since the people who run the towns, cities, and states of this country know with total assurance that jammed late night paid admission house or boat parties, and of course jammed late night sleazy lounges, are prime mass shooting locations, you might wonder why officials don’t shut down/curtail open-all-night sleazy lounges full of local gun-bearing criminals. You might wonder why they don’t respond to neighbors’ complaints about the parties. Why do they wait for the gunfights and the dead bodies? Once they know what houses are being rented out to crazy gunnies, why don’t they shut down their business?
The answer is obvious. Gunlove in America looks the other way when children are massacred by known madmen with guns at our elementary schools; gunlove looks the other way every bloody Saturday night. Remarkably, most Americans really don’t care.
“[W]e don’t believe that this was random in a circumstance that might endanger the community.”
Also like clockwork, local authorities announce that hundreds of people running through your neighborhood, desperately trying to elude multiple AK-bearing shooters, in no way endangers your community.
Theme of this year’s Garrett Park July 4 parade is The Novel, and UD is going as Ulysses. I’ll be tossing lollipops that say READ ULYSSES to the throngs.
“To say it’s not a threat to the community is a big reach,” said [Jeremy] Evans.
I mean, on the most literal level, one or more people shooting wildly into crowds is an obvious threat to any local community; and in this latest case the police haven’t arrested anyone, so the threat remains.
And after all shooting is not uncommon in notorious Myrtle Beach and environs, so a general menace remains. UD can understand the comical tendency of local officials everywhere to declare, after big mass shootings/killings, that yay! our community is safe but yeah we keep getting these isolated, totally not dangerous events… but she’s with Jeremy Evans – a spot of honesty would help.
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
