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UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Thursday, November 08, 2007

Irregular Hours... 

...is a blog that doesn't seem to have been too active until recently. Its author, a journalism student, writes quite well. A post describing Mike Wallace's visit to Fordham University concludes:

'Students came forth slowy, tentatively, with questions. But by the end of the 60 minutes, Wallace was the one conducting the interview, doing what he still does best: putting people in the hot seat, and by God, making them squirm...

Perhaps the most stunning part of the discussion was the point at which Wallace began to press students about death. "Where do you go when you die?" he asked the group of undergrads, standing three steps away from his silver-haired wife. "When a leaf falls off a tree," he said, "is it conceivable that that's what happens to us—we just crumble?" He waited for a response. "C'mon, I'm ninety," he said. It was typical Wallace: disarming, honest, unafraid. Only this time, he didn't dig deep for an answer—not in this crowd of twenty-some-things. He simply drew a coda, letting himself trail off: "Crumble like a leaf..." And every hot seat in the room went cold.'


Not all of this prose is perfect. But, by God, she nails the ending.