jacklynch000.bsky.social
Extinguished Perfesser of English at Ruckers–Nork; mooseophile; wine guzzler; author of many books, a few of them readable; harmless eccentric.
C18 British lit, dictionaries & lexicography, book history, political smartassery.
https://jacklynch.net
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There’s no subject under the sun, however monumentally important, that someone won’t warn us is a distraction from what REALLY matters. “They WANT you to talk about the nuclear war Trump just launched on Ontario! Keep your eye on the ball, people!” That’s just social media in 2025.
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Hays was “wearing thin,” I asked him to leave, I took away his Mandate that forced everyone to read Marcus Aurelius that nobody else wanted (that he knew for months I was going to do!), and he just went CRAZY!
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And fewer and fewer people can remember the days when email was something you looked forward to rather than dreaded.
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I like “no apparent national security expertise,“ as if there’s at least some chance a 22-year-old happened to acquire cabinet-secretary-level security expertise in his spare time.
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This should be a moment not only for Columbia but also for Middle States to stand up, because if they don’t every accreditor will do nothing but try to enforce DJT’s changing whims for the next three and a half years.
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Now, see, I would have thought caving to the administration’s every whim would have settled the matter once and for all. Who could have guessed they’d move the goalposts?
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Ugh. Amazon once gave me a middle initial (“W”) that followed me for years. Good luck getting their attention.
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You can have my semicolons when you pry them from my cold, dead hands.
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Let’s talk about a two-book deal.
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I’m drafting my proposal for Marx for Cats right now.
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Tell us more about life in the 1900s, Grampa!
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… who’s not currently employed by the administration.
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I had no idea such things were even possible. How did it get this far without backing of the board?
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They were often someone else’s hours of work, of course, but the point stands.
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Cut him a break! He’s just like Cecil Rhodes!
(Remind me never to let this writer come to my defense.)
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Buy one, get one free!
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I’ll add what I hope doesn’t really need saying: if they did have remedial math, that’s no sign of failure. The job of a college is to teach, not to admire how smart your students already are when they arrive.
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bsky.app/profile/jack...
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You’ve discovered the formula!
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(Though I do note Uncle Alfred worked for — [whispered while looking nervously in both directions] Stony Brook and Hunter.)
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All truly admirable! But maybe not the best person to lecture on social mobility.
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A friend notes Bell himself has a Harvard BA and Princeton PhD. He taught at Yale and Hopkins before returning to Princeton.
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His mother, a literary critic who did graduate work at Harvard, worked for years at The New Yorker, was a friend of Truman Capote, Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, and Elizabeth Bishop and had an affair with Dylan Thomas.
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I note that our great champion of social mobility had a father with a Columbia PhD who taught at Chicago, Columbia, then, for decades, Harvard, with a visiting gig at Cambridge. His uncle was Alfred Kazin.
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Not a quote; my smartass paraphrase.
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That’s because rich Chinese students are stealing Americans’ God-given university positions!
Frickin’ Yellow Peril panic in the NYT.
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“But because education is a zero-sum game, some white American students might face the ultimate shame of going to a flagship state university. P.S. I’m enlightened enough to admit they may have edible Chinese food in Ohio.”
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To think, they’re giving this plum job to a trans woman when hundreds of January 6th rioters and billionaire MAGA donors are being passed over entirely. There’s no justice in this world.
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Depends on your definition of “people.”
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“The deportation deepened the questions surrounding the Trump administration’s legal tactics.”
Does anyone actually have “questions” about their tactics? They seem clear enough to me.