Raritania
Saturday, April 20, 2024
"Paying Your Dues"
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Where the right to a position or some other such good is concerned people often speak of having "paid their dues." One might tak...
When Should a Blogger Call it Quits?
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As I have remarked in the past on this blog (and elsewhere), blogging seems to me an activity in decline as the way in which people use the ...
Peer Review in the Age of Automated Scholarship
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I have personally been on both sides of the peer review process, in more than one field. I thus know something of not just its virtues but i...
The Crisis of Academic Publishing
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These days we are hearing quite a bit about the turmoil within academic publishing--the explosion of dubious journals, the article processin...
Of the Term "NIMBY"
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I have never cared for the use of the term "NIMBY" (an acronym for "Not In My Back Yard"), which is typically as a sneer...
Of the Word "Pundit"
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The word "pundit" is ultimately derived from the Sanskrit word "pandita" meaning "learned." Today, however, ...
Writers Write About Writing
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It is notorious that fiction, not least that fiction produced by Hollywood, rarely depicts work in a convincing way, even when the depictio...
Those Lives in Which Chance Plays No Part
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In Lost Illusions Balzac remarks that "there are lives in which chance plays no part"--such that those "despair[ing] of a li...
Book Review: Harold Coyle's
Trial By Fire
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Like the other authors who became really Big Names in the techno-thriller field , Harold Coyle made his name with Cold War stories, starting...
William Thackeray's
The Luck of Barry Lyndon
: A Few Reflections
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Today, I suppose, Thackeray's reputation rests above all on his novel Vanity Fair . Still, if his earlier The Luck of Barry Lyndon is l...
A Few Thoughts on Stendhal's
The Red and the Black: A Chronicle of the Nineteenth Century
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I acknowledged in the discussion of literary realism in my recent book on modern literature that the term is used in different ways, and eve...
The Degeneration of Classical Education
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The "Classical" education is, of course, largely a thing of the past, certainly in its more substantive forms--and not at all surp...
Of "Caveat Emptor"
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The Latin tag "caveat emptor" is commonly rendered in English as "Buyer beware." The term is usually taken to indicate...
An Education Befitting a Fourteenth Century Gentleman
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Told that a student has attended an expensive private school--let us make it an expensive private school in continental Europe--and there ha...
Of Bitterness
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When spoken in reference to a person the word "bitterness" denotes an individual's anger or disappointment over some aspect of...
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