Here we go again, again, again. It’s odd that this argument never seems to do any work, it just keeps recurring. It’s like listening to someone with a car stuck in the snow late at night, somewhere far down the hill – you just hear that rrrrrrr, rrrrrrrrrrrr, rrrrrrrrr over and over, as the wheels spin and never bite.

Chris at Crooked Timber links to an article in the Financial Times (by far the best he’s read on the subject, he says) on the anti-Muslim backlash in the Netherlands after the Van Gogh murder. All eager for the treat, I hastened to begin reading. Alas, one problem with the article leapt out at me in the first paragraph, and … Read the rest

Here’s the Economist getting into the act on the ‘US universities are leftist strongholds by a factor of 9 to 1’ issue, and like a lot of journalism that discusses the subject, leaving some important aspects out. At least I think so.

Evidence of the atypical uniformity of American universities grows by the week. The Centre for Responsive Politics notes that this year two universities—the University of California and Harvard—occupied first and second place in the list of donations to the Kerry campaign by employee groups, ahead of Time Warner, Goldman Sachs, Microsoft et al. Employees at both universities gave 19 times as much to John Kerry as to George Bush.

Yes but there might be reasons for that other … Read the rest

I’ve been meaning to comment on Mark Bauerlein’s splendid article on ‘bad writing’ and ‘theory.’ I only have a few minutes right now, so I’ll just quote a little by way of marking my place and then return to the subject tomorrow.

The cheap partisan spirit reinforces the point made by Dutton, David G. Myers, Katha Pollitt, and others that the jargon and bloat of theory prose excludes every readership but other theorists—a damning claim given that the theorists purport to labor for social justice. The theorists counter that the writing they do isn’t bad; rather, it’s challenging, and that challengingness is precisely what makes it valuable to society at large.

Yup, that’s how the theorists counter all right. But … Read the rest

Update: A report on the nun study. It’s interesting.

Women who scored poorly on measures of cognitive ability as young adults were found to be at higher risk for Alzheimer’s disease and poor cognitive function in late life, according to a new report by researchers at the University of Kentucky. The ground-breaking study of nearly 100 nuns found that the complexity of the sisters’ writings as young women had a great deal to do with how they fared cognitively later in life. Of the nuns who died, 90 percent of those with Alzheimer’s disease confirmed at autopsy had low linguistic ability in early life, compared with only 13 percent in those without evidence of the disease.

And another.… Read the rest

I knew there was a reason. I knew it, I knew it. Right – the next time someone tells me I’m an elitist and pompous and pretentious and a show-off and generally horrible and intolerable, merely because I accidentally use a word that one might not find in a five-year-old’s vocabulary – the very next time, I say, I will have an answer ready. It’s because I don’t yet have Alzheimer’s. Surely that’s a good enough reason! Surely even the most dedicated warrior for populism will recognize that not (yet) having Alzheimer’s is quite a sensible reason to use words one was foolish and malevolent enough to pick up by accident at some point. Surely. I didn’t mean to do … Read the rest