Well, that’s me. And as my profile page says:

Pictured: J. Goldberg’s cat Gracie and I practicing our game of “Say goodnight, Jonah.”

Yes, that’s really Jonah’s cat.

“What we have here is a failure to elucidate.”

“Is there a Final Draft for iPhone?”

“Hey, Skinny Tie, type faster, that act ain’t gonna break itself.”

“What am I doing? Trying to convince a bunch of ’wingers that a mass gay wedding of illegal immigrants should be the centerpiece of the GOP convention in 2016.…Eh, about as well as you’d expect.”

“Punch-linin’…like a boss.”

“Let me just call up my list of tie-bar jokes here…”

“I don’t always wear a watch, but when I do, it’s an analog.”

“‘It's a bright, guilty world.’”

“…shift, p, e, t, e, r, comma, y, o, u, space, a, r, e, space, n, u, t, s, period, post. Ok, done. Where were we?”

“Somebody go ask Steve Byrne if he knows how to get past Angry Birds Level 22.”

“Veronica Mars Kickstarter, five grand. Man. Never shoot craps with Rico Colantoni.”

“This chair still has a return tag on it… Oh, dear God, I gotta look up the overnights…”

“See this comment here by the guy in the dark with the cat, that right there is why you don’t leave comedy to amateurs.”

That was indeed my inspiration, Mollie, and thank you for the kind words!

Let’s go, Nats.

In last Thursday’s story, “Americans excited to visit ‘ball parks,’” the sport of baseball was repeatedly spelled bayspall. The number of ‘bases’ was given as five; the correct number is three. “Home plate” is a marker embedded in the ground, not a trophy awarded to the winner of the World Series. “Babe” Ruth was the popular nickname of George Herman Ruth Jr. (1895–1948), generally regarded the greatest baseballer of the early twentieth century, and not the African-American mistress of Brooklyn Dodgers owner Walter F. O’Malley as stated in the article. The Times regrets the errors.

I tend to characterize the problem in terms of a “mass aristocracy.” That is, we’re most of us now like the rich of old—wealthy enough that we’re mostly cushioned from the ill effects of our vices, so we indulge more. But like ye olde aristos, we end up with a comparatively greater cohort of wastrels, libertines, and casualties.

Well, if he really really really wants to be a historian, and he’s really really really good at it, go for it, of course. Otherwise, rethink or make sure to have a Plan B at the ready. Because the market for historians—outside of a few niche specialties like Islamic history—is shrinking, often drastically, not just because of faddish prejudices within the profession (like that against military history among professors of a certain age), while history departments continue to crank out more Ph.D.s than there are available jobs by a pretty wide margin.

And—especially if you think that higher education is an unsustainable bubble—consider things might get dramatically worse before they get better. It's pretty scary for those of us much of the way down that career path.

This blog covers the profession—particularly in terms of the market for Ph.D.s and what they can do with the degree—in great detail. It's a good starting point for anyone, though not for the faint of heart:

In the Service of Clio

Chinese history is replete with examples of (almost everything, but conspicuously) periods of longish apparent stability punctuated by sudden, violent collapses with enormous body counts—the Taiping Rebellion's being probably the most horrific example. The history is worth considering, not least as a guide to what the Chinese themselves may fear.

I'd have voted for Tim Raines. Twice.

Aw, hell, if I may be permitted a bit of un-Smithian inarticulacy. A wit and a marvelous virtual acquaintance. Dona ei requiem, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat ei. I'm glad I knew him and wish his family and friends every consolation, including that their grief is terrible in proportion to the great good fortune they had to know and love him. Bis demnächst, mein Freund.

Vivant Rahia! Happy Thanksgiving, Professor—and all.

Sorry for the lack of line breaks. Whenever I post from the mobile site, they disappear. There should be new paragraphs after "patrons." and "say."

Here's what a renaissance, in the sense of institutional and artistic florescence, requires that is conspicuously absent on the right: patrons.The caricature would have it that the right is philistine, and there may be some (relative) truth to that; and it's documented that the right gives more to charity, so there may be a question of priorities—the needy over the creative or scholarly, say.But whatever the reason, you don't get things like universities, tv networks, movie studios, and the other big levers to shift the culture without investing literally billions of dollars in them. The left has done this (often with the public fisc). The right hasn't, and will lag behind proportionally until they do.

Gern geschehen, Herr von Aue. Ich stehe zur Verfügung.

I'll see you guys around Arkansas’ time.

I think the abandonment of the men may stem from a desire to cover up what they were actually doing there. What that was, I don’t know. My friend Confucius over at the Gormogons (who doesn’t post here as much as he once did) thinks the same thing and has some guesses. He goes on at some length. Worth your time, I think:

http://www.gormogons.com/2012/10/benghazi-scandal-cover-up-defeat.html

Ah, Kermadec, we are kindred spirits. I was just about to explain it's a diæresis, which indicates the vowels are pronounced separately, rather than an umlaut which indicates the rounded pronunciation of the vowel. Now if I could just figure out how to classify it in “Spın̈al Tap”…