So do you know what is hugely fashionable this season? The very thick opaque tights (50 denier and up) that you can see in this photo.

I’ve been wearing them for decades, and everybody always made fun of me, saying that they make me look like an Orthodox Jewish woman. And now my fashion sense has finally been validated by popular opinion. (For new readers: this is sarcasm).

Today I bought a bunch of these tights in all possible colors because all stores now carry them. I highly recommend because they are warm, they last forever, and they make even very indifferent legs look good.

Something that mystifies me is why many of my colleagues don’t let students keep their graded exams. They let the students see the grade and then take back the exams. The whole point of grading is that people could look at their mistakes and learn from them. The grade itself is meaningless if you can’t analyze what you did wrong.

I just spoke to a student who wants to do better on the final but she has no idea what her problem areas are because she never got a chance to study her mistakes on the previous exams.

These graded exams only clutter the offices. Why does one want to keep them?

Do you return exams to students and let them have them?

Does Richard Cohen even re-read the crap he writes? Does anybody?

Today’s GOP is not racist, as Harry Belafonte alleged about the tea party, but it is deeply troubled — about the expansion of government, about immigration, about secularism, about the mainstreaming of what used to be the avant-garde. People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York — a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children.

So people who need to “repress a gag reflex” when seeing biracial children are not racists?

I’m beyond disgusted right now.

What really doesn’t help and only makes things worse is to hear, “If only the doctors had done this, if only the nurses had done that, if only the hospital, if only the weather, and so on.”

It doesn’t help because I immediately imagine this alternative scenario in which Eric is alive. And then I have to face the realization that the fantasy didn’t work and he is still dead. I can somewhat deal with this as an established fact but not as a fresh realization.

All that this discussion of possible alternatives achieves is give people an illusion of control at my expense. They need “an explanation” to protect themselves from the fear of unexpected tragedies befalling them. So they engage in a symbolic reenactment of the days and months before the tragedy to convince themselves that it could have been avoided.

This strategy only magnifies anxiety, however. There is no possibility of making the fantasy real, no matter how many times you verbalize it. And as the terror grows, so does the need to hide from it behind the “if onlys.”

Yes, it is very human to do this. It is also very obnoxious.

I disagree with Stanley Fish’s arguments as to why the academic boycott of Israel is a bad idea. Fish believes that it is wrong for academics to engage in any sort of boycott whatsoever because it is not their business to be political.

I oppose the boycott of Israel, as well, but I’m actually very much in favor of the idea of boycotting in order to defend academia. We should boycott Bates College and Quest University for destroying scholarship and making a mockery of higher education. We should organize and protect our own, irrespective of where our colleagues are located.

Fish makes a very valuable point when he says that judging the goodness or badness of nations is a fool’s errand, a task that is so intellectually pathetic that it doesn’t suit academics:

The problem with this debating point is that it puts the emphasis on the wrong question — whether Israel is a good or bad country, and thereby implies that if it were clearly one or the other, the boycott would be clearly bad or good. But Israel’s moral status is irrelevant to the right question, which is whether academic institutions boycotting other academic institutions can ever be an expression of, rather than an undermining of, academic freedom.

I don’t believe in institutions boycotting institutions either. What I do believe is that academics should boycott all institutions of higher learning – including their own – which behave in ways that put academia in danger of extinction. One thing we definitely should not do is carry nationalism’s dirty water. All nations have done and continue doing horrible things. The moment you proclaim Israel as an especially “bad” nation, you declare that your own nation is somehow less bad. And no academic who has read at least half a book on any subject can seriously make that claim.

Nations come and go but we, the guardians and creators of knowledge, have existed long before the concept of a nation was invented. I need a passport because it makes traveling easy and not as an object of sappy worship. Participating in the game of “My nation is more moral than your nation” is an embarrassing activity I have no use for.

“Reality is what each of us thinks is happening. The rest is just statistics.”

What a great writer, people.

I’m working in sales today: peddling our department to prospective students. I have a sales pitch and all: “And if you pass the placement test, you will get credit for these courses completely for free! And the test is free, too!”

I can’t complain, though, since I only do about 4-5 hours of service per semester to remain in excellent standing. You’ve gotta love this university.

I wonder if the folks who make the argument that “The only alternative to posting job ads for one person with 5 PhDs in completely different areas would be to close down the department altogether. Is this what you want to happen?” are really that stupid. Surely, no human being with a functioning brain can fail to see the idiocy of this argument.

There is a plethora of alternatives to destroying the concept of a scholar who is a professional in her field in favor of hiring an army of sad Janes of All Trades who never stopped to acquire mastery of a field in their hurry to accumulate as many diplomas as possible. All of these perennially terrified folks who agree to teach French , Japanese, and microbiology at the same time are not the only alternative to closing down a few departments.

Every school that participates in these abuses has an army of useless administrators, a crowd of overpaid bureaucrats, a huge money drain of a football team, etc. Why is there any talk of closing down departments when there are completely insane inventions of diseased minds like Office of Diversity and Chief Consultant in Intra-university Ethics?

Last week, my sister visited her alma mater, a formerly great and famous university that has recently been slashing departments, adjunctifying like crazy, and pestering the alumni with tragic stories of donations urgently needed to endure students had chairs to sit on in class.

In the course of her business, my sister has an opportunity to visit the headquarters of some of the richest companies in the world. However, she has yet to meet a CEO whose office decor would match in price and sophistication the offices of the university bureaucrats she visited. These countless “guidance counselors”, clueless “managers of human resources” and other ignorant idiots sit in large, beautifully appointed offices and do precisely nothing all day long. In the meanwhile, this same university has closed closed down its literature programs and transformed what was left of them into a language school.

And you know which event inaugurated the process if destroying the literature programs? I can tell you because I witnessed it. It was the hiring of a person specializing in Spanish and German (at the same time). The logic is clear: if German and Spanish are so easy that they don’t even merit a specialization in one of them, then do such intellectually light-weight programs deserve existing at a university at all? Especially, when there is a bunch of bureaucrats dying for a raise.

So please stop excusing these hiring policies already. All you do is clumsily mask your terror of going anything to benefit scholarship and fight injustice. Your arguments in defense of such abuses make you sound like exactly what you are: a pathetic little weakling with zero intellect.

Last night we went to the theater to see a play called “Freud’s Last Session”. It turned out to be a studio theater, which is my favorite kind of theater in the world. In a studio theater, spectators sit huddled together in a small room and the stage is very close to them. We sat in the first row, and that meant we were practically on the stage.

This performance cost what five visits to a movie theater would cost but, unlike Hollywood movies, theater is art. It is very refreshing to see that there is still good acting on this continent.

The play was based on an encounter between Freud and one of the founders of literary studies, C. S. Lewis, in the last days of Freud’s life. In the photo, you can see what Freud’s study in the play was like.

Of course, Freud’s ideas were heavily diluted for general public but the play was still great. In the play, Freud and Lewis argue about religion. The audience in our St. Louis theater warmed up more to Lewis’s gushy and unconvincing preaching than to Freud’s defense of science and reason. That was to be expected, though.

We were so close to the actors that watching the play was a very intense experience. When Freud told of his mourning of his grandson who died in infancy, I cried. I hope it didn’t scare the actors.

Is a less progressive system of taxation in Canada’s future?

A hilarious example of really bad writing.

Even more proof that Rand Paul is not a libertarian.

A new runner-up for the title of the worst academic job offer ever. If there are any more spoiled pieces of garbage from Cornell who want to come here and defend this hell-hole of a college, can they please go and choke on their own shit instead?

“And if you try opening 2-3 Chrome windows with 20-30 tabs in each one, that piece of shit is like using Windows 95 on a 386sx with 4MB of RAM way back when. It crawls so slowly it might be going backwards in time.” Yes. That has become a huge problem for me. I thought I was doing something wrong but now I’m realizing it’s the nature of this browser. Maybe I should ditch the Chrome at this point.

“The negative side-effects of urban biking under the current transport regime are a case study in how individualized solutions (“You don’t like the bus and don’t want to drive? Ride a bike!”) are not solutions.” I agree completely. Urban bikers are an enormous problem in big cities.

The world has gone nuts. There is a bunch of people foaming at the mouth because somebody disliked a book and wrote about it. I often encounter such unhinged reactions to reviews I post. Somehow, for these folks, the statement ‘I disliked this book’ translates as ‘I hate you and deny your worth as a human being even though you are not even this book’s author.’

If you want to have some fun, go read these quotes from Sarah Palin’s new book. They are hilarious.

I agree with this blogger completely that making fun of somebody with obvious mental health issues is not cool. Even if that person is a public figure.

I so love this blogger. She is an enormous inspiration as a scholar and an exceptional human being.

“One imagines that because one cannot see how life is already completed that is requires rational or moral measures for its completion.   Condemn drone strikes or announce that racism is wrong.   Work to make sure life complies with your specifications.  It’s supposed to grow into the shape you’ve designed for it.”

This Orthodox deacon single-handedly redeemed the religion of my ancestors in my eyes, so let’s read his great post on the dissing of the Humanities.

A great definition of trolls: “Internet trolls are the amplified voice of common consciousness who tell you what major consensus wants to throw away, disregarding its value.”

This post demonstrates in great detail how co-dependency works. Scary shit, folks. It’s extremely hard to accept that co-dependents choose their sad existence but it’s true. they live exactly the way they want to live.

There is no “sex addiction.”

This is an uncomfortable truth that nobody wants to mention in all the cheesy and sappy gasping about “supporting the troops.”

I’m also curious why many people choose to move to Patheos. What does it offer in return for stealing your blog name and your hits?

I don’t even know what to say about this story of how the sciences have degenerated into complete insanity.