That's wonderful -- so strong and true. The world is lucky to have all three of you.

The Goldilocks of Bothsidesism | Los Angeles Review of Books Robert N. Watson investigates Thomas Chatterton Williams’s “Summer of Our Discontent: The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse.”

My review of a controversial new book about US politics over the past 5 years is now up on the Los Angeles Review of Books site. Please have a look at:
lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-...

The guy whose Trump University went bankrupt and owed its students $25 million for defrauding them thinks he should be micro-managing our country’s top-ranked public university (UCLA) and the world’s top-ranked university (Harvard) – and destroying them (and their life-saving research) if resisted.

But, NY Times headline writer notwithstanding, these "stops" (which are much more than stops) are precisely NOT "indiscriminate." They are targeted racial discrimination!

(Attn. NYTimesPitchbot!)

Aren’t these the same "conservative" judges who made it illegal for college admissions to consider an applicant’s race, despite the fact that Black/Latino/Native Am applicants are disproportionately likely to have endured burdens and obstacles that the average white applicant wouldn’t have endured?

That 2-second glimpse of Trump grimacing sourly at the moment Carlos Alcaraz won the US Open reminded me of Hitler seeing Jesse Owens dominate the Olympics. I guess Trump was rooting for a big very white Sinner to beat a guy with one of those, you know, drug-smuggler names.

Or touch any doorknobs.

We’re Finding Out More About What Using A.I. for Writing Does to Your Thinking. The Timing Couldn’t Be Worse. Writers, teachers, and anti-fascists can tell you: Originality is the point.

My piece on why people should fire their AI ghostwriters is up on Slate at slate.com/life/2025/06...

We got brand(s), Nell!

From my 2019 book: "The strong tradition of academic freedom in the United States, which confers far greater liberty from government control than in most other countries, seems to have made US universities by far the best in the world." At least 3/4 of the top unis by most surveys. Now canceled.

Also Team Trump: If you educators don’t do EVERYTHING to protect a historically oppressed race (such as Jewish Americans), including punishing anybody who laments the agony in Gaza, we will destroy you. You have an obvious obligation to teach the right attitude on such politically charged stuff! 2/2

Trump: If you educators try to do ANYTHING to protect a historically oppressed race (such as Black Americans), or even teach their history, we'll destroy you financially and any other way we can! How dare you teach people some supposedly right attitude on such politically charged stuff! Yet..

1/2

My spouse just asked me if Nell Scovell was part of that family I knew from my Boston years, because she had a great Bluesky post about peanut butter.

I love this site. It so often captures the problem so deftly.

Historical perspective on the attack on our universities (from my 2019 book, "Cultural Evolution and its Discontents"):

Careful there, little Fleance!

Sounds like J. Alfred Prufrog!

Okay. I lean the other way, but I appreciate the Bluesky tone and content of intellectual disagreement!

You're right in line with the great Philip Larkin's poem "This Be the Verse"!

But the rest of the line isn't compatible with your theory. What would he say. "I have been sixteen here...thirty years"? And, in F1 and all early Quartos except the faulty Q1 we're then told that the skull of Yorick, who Hamlet says he played with as a boy, was buried 23 years ago.

Sorry, but I believe that scene tells us Hamlet is 30. (And Burbage, presumably the first Hamlet, was then in his early 30s.) I agree that that doesn't feel right on stage. But maybe the point is that Hamlet is stuck in a very extended adolescence, waiting for the coronation that Claudius steals.

Loving the climate under these skies, and my dogs agree!

Sorry, it's so awful, because they deserve everything that's good and they know how to love being alive. But they also loved you, and remember that you gave them the kind of life that makes dogs joyous and fulfilled.