Pun Salad

Periodically, I wonder when the institution of academia is finally going to collapse, when people are going to realize that they don’t want what we’re selling — or at least don’t want it as much as $20,000. Sometimes, I think some new tech company will come and do to us what Uber did to the taxi industry.

Particularly in recent years, though, I wonder if academia is going to self-destruct, and if I am presently watching the beginning of that process.

This might sound overblown. Academia has been around for centuries. No doubt it will continue in some form for centuries more, provided human civilization continues. But I think it might drastically shrink.

A much-shared video of an Ohio mom getting tased and handcuffed at a middle-school football game should be a reminder that turning everything into a legal matter is just begging for violent conflict. Once a desire—or even a good idea—is turned into a mandate enforceable by the cops, violence is only one disagreement away.

In watching the video, it's obvious that there was plenty of bad judgment going around in the open-air bleachers of Logan-Hocking School District that day. That goes for mask-resistant Alecia D. Kitts herself, rules-spewing school officials, and the Logan Police Department cops who escalated assertions of their authority over a minor dispute into a lightning ride.

Tobias has a good piece on Margaret Atwood contradicting herself on the inspiration for her dystopian novel, which has become an issue in the Amy Coney Barrett confirmation fight. More fundamentally, how does the dystopian novel about the subjection of women have anything to do about Barrett? She graduated from law school, won high-powered clerkships, became a widely regarded law professor and jurist, and now is likely to ascend to the highest court in the land. Her high-flying career — pursued while raising a family of seven — runs exactly counter to what is portrayed in the Atwood novel. Anyone who looks at Barrett and thinks “overweening patriarchy” is hopelessly disconnected from reality and needs to watch less Hulu.

Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo has announced plans to build the capital's first statue of a black woman who fought for the liberation of slaves on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe. On Saturday, the city hall inaugurated a park in honour of the woman.

"Paris is honouring Solitude, a Guadeloupean figure in the resistance against slavery by dedicating a park to her," Hidalgo said Saturday via Twitter as she inaugurated a park in Paris named after the iconic figure.

That the perfect town would lie somewhere in “Live Free or Die” New Hampshire, the first of the 13 colonies to declare statehood, seemed almost a foregone conclusion. In a country known for fussy states with streaks of independence, New Hampshire is among the fussiest and the streakiest. It’s one of only five states with no sales tax, one of two states that limit the governor to two-year terms, and the only state in New England that still allows the death penalty. (No one has been executed since 1939, but they like to keep their options open.)