The Last Professors

The Last Professors by Frank Donoghue is a must-read for all humanities professors in the US. And, the story of their demise is so telling that it should be recommended literature for all academics. It is interesting to learn about all those books published and never read, about the debate on tenure (while it slowly disappears under the eyes of the debaters), about the companies that will soon own every bit of what universities produce, including their temporary staff, about the difficulty to defend certain intellectual values, and about how the better education will slowly but surely only become affordable to the rich. It is scary how the evolutions predicted in this book are rapidly coming true. (Example : Cameron in Britain, autonomous universities in France, rationalization in Flanders, ..)

Hygiene Freaks

Since hygiene is so high up on the list of worries of the westerners that surround me, it has become politically incorrect to say anything about the excesses that this leads to. Perhaps my fellows in culture will allow for the following comment though. Can the people that wash their hands in public bathrooms please close the fosset afterwards ? The running fosset in public bathrooms is becoming so frequent that I was forced to ponder what was at the origin of this widespread forgetfulness. Transforming myself into a hygiene freak for a second, I immediately came to the conclusion that the reason is that people wash their hands and then go to dry their hands, never to touch the dangerous bacterial environment of the fosset again. I recommend the movie [Safe] (by Todd Haynes) to those who insist on environmental evil.