Well, let me start by trying to answer Mary F’s question first.  She says that it would be hard to deprivilege schools, because the trend to insisting on college degrees for jobs that don’t need them occurred more or less spontaneously.  It wasn’t legislated.  Private actors just decided to do that. But that isn’t exactly…

Okay, let  me see if I can straighten out a few things, FYI, so to speak. First, the public education systems in the US–and it is multiple systems–are such a wreck in most places routinely require at least some college, and often a college degree, for even mundane entry level positions. These include jobs like secretaries…

Hi. I know I’ve been out of the loop for a few days, but I have been Writing Things, and Writing Things takes precedence over the blog. Of course, the blog is also Writing Things, but it’s a different kind of Writing Things. And that’s how I end up getting confused. I want to present…

It’s fairly early on Monday morning, and I’m having a squiffy day. Squiffy days almost always start with work going badly, and today, yes, work went badly. One of the things I have  never been able to figure out about writing mysteries is  how to figure out if the solution is going to be obvious…

I think there must be some rule of nature that we haven’t discovered yet that explains why bemusing things always seem to come in clusters.  Weeks, or even months, go by, when nothing  happens that has anything like a quality of the unexpected, and then–there they are.  Six of them. The first of the tales…

Well, I walked right into it, so I shouldn’t be surprised. First, let me  note that the idea that adhering to reason and logic must mean rejecting the supernatural is a very new one.  It first crops up in the 18th century, and it only becomes automatic in the last sixty or seventy years. And it…

Well, that sounds portentious enough. But let me tell you before I start–this morning, the document I’m using for the latest Gregor did something rather dramatic, so that it now only wants to print in teeny tiny letters, and I’ve been unable to fix it.   This pretty much blew up work for the day. And…

Or some other platitude. We’re about to have another day of thunderstorms.  So I’m going to post this link http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Ave-atque-vale-7653 which came from Arts and Letters Daily. And I’m going to note that I’ve been thinking all morning that this connects to the Rig Veda and to classical Greek and Roman religion and to… Everything.…

This morning I find myself with a dilemma, and not the one I thought I was going to have. Yesterday afternoon, I sat down to read a book, or rather, a very specific edition of a very long book. The edition is Rig Veda, translated and edited for Penguin Classics by Wendy Doniger.  Doniger is…

I am having one of those days when everything about me is restless and distracted, which means writing did not go well, which means I’m In No Mood. This happens to me every once in a while and, as far as I can tell, has no significance of any kind, except that it bodes ill…