Some news items leave me at a loss for words. Here is an article about people who are criticizing Wikipedia for having masculine design:

“It’s aesthetically very masculine in its design,” Stierch told us. “Its community, like so much of the early Internet, has been male dominated, and I think when a lot of people—men or women—look at Wikipedia these days, they see it as a source for information but have little interest or excitement in contributing to it.”

As a counterpoint, Stierch offered up the fact that women tend to dominate other online communities, making up the majority of social media users. She said it’s a matter of choice about how to spend one’s time online, at that fewer women are drawn to the cold, technical, and argumentative environment of Wikipedia.

So if you are a woman who is drawn to cold, technical, and argumentative environments, I have news for you: you are a man.

As I keep saying, no male chauvinist has been able to be as offensive to me as some feminists manage to do on a regular basis. I mean, where the hell do you get off, policing people’s femininity on the basis of how “cold” or argumentative they are or like their environments to be? Is there a worse stereotype of women than that we are all warm and compliant?

And another question: where should I take my cold, argumentative self to stop being censored for not being the right kind of woman?

A colleague who just got a verbal assurance that the tenure-track position she interviewed for is hers asked me what life was like on the tenure-track.

“Wait,” she said in the midst of the conversation. “Do you mean to say that you write these articles or a book without knowing if they will be accepted for publication? You know the entire time that this can all be just a waste of time? There is no guarantee of publication?”

When I confirmed, she stayed silent for a moment and then asked, “Are you sure you really understand how this works? Because the system you describe simply doesn’t make sense.”

A 27-year-old woman on television just said, “I don’t really want to have kids. I just want to be a Mom.”

It’s a very scary statement, if you think about it.

For many (and I mean, MANY) years, I had this very debilitating habit of going to bed after 4 am. And here somebody explains beautifully why I kept doing that:

I wonder whether staying up too late is this kind of neurotic suffering. I invented the practice at my first job, where the only time I felt safe was after I got home from work, and I wanted to extend the number of safe hours I had. I resurrected it here because the avoidance of a large part of the disappointing days, and the extension of the night-space in which one could be anywhere, made my indenture to the rural suburb and subjection to a breathtakingly unprofessional workplace less immediately obvious.

And for people who suffer from this problem for the same reason as described in the previous quote, here is a solution:

That isolated feeling. The only answer is to create an R1 bubble around oneself and live in it. This takes some effort.

Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant.

Finally, somebody is saying this:

The “omnipotent Israel lobby” is one of the hoariest chestnuts of political commentary, but maybe this news will remind people of a few basic facts about American politics. When “pro-Israel” policies are popular, as they usually are, lobbies that advocate for them appear unstoppable. But when the Israel lobby gets on the wrong side of public opinion, the magic goes away.

The need to believe that a tiny country that would not be able to survive for 10 minutes without a constant financial, military and political backing from the US exercises complete control over US politics is in no way different from the belief in a Masonic-Jewish conspiracy that secretly rules the world.

Here is one of my favorite posts on what it means to help people. I’m very proud of this one.

And here is a post on why my writing is so annoying.

A funny short post on abnormal women.

A post on the totalitarian nature of the suggestions by certain liberal economists.

People are still writing me angry denunciations of this review of a book about Maugham.

Funny true scenes from grad school life.

My second favorite stalker story.

My favorite princess. Disney should make a movie about her. A really scary, blood-thirsty movie.

What a beautiful mockery of pseudo-feminists and pseudo-progressives:

Sanagavarapu, whose Kickstarter project is called “Feminist Style,” is ultimately interested in a larger effort to subvert the mainstream messages in popular advertising. She points out that most companies rely on objectifying and sexualizing women in order to sell their products, and there’s a big opportunity for feminists to provide alternate options to challenge the status quo. In a video to promote her new effort, Sanagavarapu describes the idea as “leveraging the consumerist aspects of our society to create social change.”

I hope Sanagavarapu makes a ton of money exploiting the pathetic pseudo-politics of the stupid people who say things like “Companies sexualize women” completely seriously.

Unfortunately, some of the conservative criticisms of higher education in the US make a lot of sense. Here is one course a conservative website is criticizing:

In what must be an attempt to add insult to injury for its debt-laden, unemployed alums, Rutgers University has decided to offer a course called “Politicizing Beyoncé.” We hope the university doesn’t actually think the course furthers its supposed mission of educating young people, enriching their minds or preparing them for life.

In the early days of this blog, I ridiculed a scholarly conference on U2, and I stand proudly by the opinions expressed in that post. That was a conference, though, not a course for which students are expected to pay good money. I love Beyoncé because it’s impossible not to love her but aren’t the Departments of Women and Gender Studies enough of a joke already without filling their curricula with this kind of sorry stuff?

And there is more:

Lest you dismiss it as an outlier, the article also points to Georgetown’s course “The Sociology of Hip-Hop: The Theodicy of Jay-Z.” Add that to “Is Harry Potter Real?” and “How To Watch Television” on the growing list of courses it should probably be a felony for colleges to offer in exchange for student loan money.

I have been teaching college students for 12 years now, and I insist that this need to attract them to courses in the Humanities with sexy, catchy course titles exists only in the minds of educators who don’t believe that their disciplines are attractive enough without these silly, childish tricks.

I am yet to meet a student who would hate and fear any discipline as much as many professors detest their own fields of study.

If you think that the following is a collection of money to help Sink get elected, then maybe you are not ready to vote at all:

 

I’d be too ashamed to post this story as an “Oh, those evil Republicans” narrative. If anything, it makes Democratic supporters look stupid.

We’ve had our classes canceled because of a snowstorm. There isn’t a snow flake in sight, so the entire university decided to flake out and go home.

My Quebecois student and I shared a laugh over the Midwestern terror of the possibility that it might snow.