Paid to read books

"I get paid to read books!" This sentence - always with the exclamation mark - is the easiest way to identify a new humanities gra...

Holistic's winners and losers

Miss Self-Important has a post up on affirmative action and holistic admissions. WWPD readers may be familiar with my apparently bizarre st...

"'Another gem'" UPDATED

Do your teach (at any level)? Do your friends teach? If so, half of your Facebook feed probably consists of anecdotes from class, cute snipp...

Mansplaining and Impostor Syndrome

There is an academia-specific mansplaining-anecdote blog . If you are female, feminist, procrastinating, or the trifecta, there goes your da...

When the hottest German is a Jew

So Guy de Maupassant and Paul Bourget not only share space in my dissertation, but also had the same Russian-Jewish lover. The rest of the a...

Mont Oriol, Part II: the perils of mésalliance

Maupassant kind of redeemed himself, maybe. I ended up really getting into the novel , which given the vaguely nauseating scanned computer-s...

Of lost time

I know you are under the impression that a PhD that focuses on the themes of inter(text)uality in medieval basket-weaving would be a surefir...

Mont Oriol Part I: up to page 100 of the defective, unprintable PDF

Don't try this at home, kids, but I picked a dissertation topic before I knew if there would be enough sources to swing it. I mean, I di...

Sticks and stones

A day late and a dollar short, but this kind of only could be posted today. Bear with me: -My first reaction to head-on-a-stick-gate : Yeah,...

One last email from the university before the world ends

Spent far too much time last week trying to track down my lost winter-wear, returning to the lost-and-found when I was told to return, and t...

Scrubbing the surfaces

Strange as it may seem, the semester appears to be over. Graded, read over evaluations (seems I'm a better teacher than I was when I...

Ends with a whimper

Today was the second-to-last day of class, aka the review session. For this reason, the train I normally take, which normally gets me to the...

Posted from a coffee shop

Found via the usual via - as in, I'm no longer sure - an interesting post  (part of a series) about "hipsters on food stamps."...

Biohazard

Breaking with a long policy of I-don't-bring-food-to-class, I, yes, brought food to class. But nothing I, like, baked.  It was for vague...

The day thus far UPDATED

-Car and train trouble, both likely weather-related, but somehow made it to class on time. -Not just in time, but with time enough to inhal...

Gettin' philosophical

One of my favorite college instructors, philosophy professor Eric Schliesser, posted the following dilemma : Let's imagine a "frien...

A safe space

Amherst is evidently one of several elite colleges incapable of properly dealing with sexual violence. Going by what I've read and my o...

Still against "holistic"

To new readers, to readers not as tuned into the inner workings of my mind as I am: When I say I'm not a fan of "holistic" in...

Own-damn-self

One of my favorite bloggers has returned for a moment, to express her dislike of the phenomenon of women posting a photo of their kid - not...

Guilty as (over-)charged

Long, long ago, when I was a young'un, a recent college grad and newish grad student filled with energy and dreams, I wrote somewhat di...