Sunday Night Linkage
By - Aspazia has a very good and very important post about some of the hidden costs of being a female faculty member.
- A Kos Diarist gets on the selective but brilliant Sebelius-for-veep bandwagon. (Via–who else?–Ezra.)
- Wanker of the Week: Dr. Mrs. Ole Perfesser.
- Runners-up: The Ole Perfesser (see also. Oh, yeah, and this. Well, let’s be frank–everything he posted this week) and La Althouse.
- Speaking of which, someone should tell Linda Hirshman that Ann Althouse and Maureen Dowd cannot be generalized to the entire female electorate. (And some ask her to explain Joe Klein and Howard Fineman.)
- Lindsay: “It’s as if Fashion and Style is metastasizing throughout the paper.” Yes. Yes, it is.
- The Talking Dog interviews journalist Stephen Grey. Grey: “Well, certainly for those who witness it– the victims and the perpetrators or witnesses in the room– torture is clearly in no way a banal business. What struck me is the comment of an American military officer: he said that if we need to torture, we should do it ourselves and not hand the dirty work over to others– that is the coward’s way out. It is certainly striking how we can shut our eyes to what is being done in our name, and hide behind legal language and techicalities, indeed, to try to pretend that we are not torturing, when everyone really knows that we are. If you shove someone’s head under water and make them believe they are going to die by drowning– as a one former CIA officer described it to me– there is no question that this is real torture.”
- Mimi Smartypants sez that “I read the much-reviewed The Year of Magical Thinking and found it sort of blah.” This makes me feel less guilty–I have to admit that I couldn’t get through the first page of the Times magazine excerpt, had no interest in reading it after the 75 or so rave reviews published by that same paper, have no interest in seeing the play, etc. Maybe I’m just too frivolous to deal with death or something, but I dunno, sympathetic as Didion is I just didn’t see it turned into compelling art. There must be something I don’t get; I rarely make it to the end of her much-lauded NYRB political articles either.