What do you do? I'm curious, because "higher ed professional" isn't a phrase I've ever heard used. One university at which I've worked did have an employment class called "professional and administrative" (i.e., status that isn't faculty or clerical.) Intriguing! You could be anything from, say a technical library…

The fetishization of TKAM drives me nuts. It's morally simplistic, ethnocentric, and dangerously paternalistic. It's rather shaming to reread as an adult only to discover that it's not the ne plus ultra of humanism. The good thing about rereading it is that it allows one the opportunity to reexamine whether it's…

Agreed. Also, adults have better cognitive skills.

What else do you reread every year?

"Grown up books"? Do you prefer having morals and lessons served up to you to making your own judgments? Not a fan of critical thinking?

People are starring this because their critical thinking skills stopped developing in middle school. Heaven forbid one reassess childhood assumptions. I'm an old, and many of my peers still list To Kill a Mockingbird as their favorite book. (This is shorthand for "I haven't thought about anything I've read since…

Something's not right with this explanation. No carrier would ship something of that value and not require a signature for delivery, and whoever fabricated the prostheses would have insured them. Also, judging by the shipping utility that comes up when I sell something 4 times a year on eBay, a message is…

Presumably, the sender would have insured the package, or at least required a signature for delivery.

I once came home from work to find multiple piles of fluorescent pink vomit and my greyhound Chatty looking fairly green around the gills. He had eaten the heads off of several dozen dried roses that I had in two large urns on the hearth of my fireplace (yeah, dried flowers, eww, but they had this nice sort of decayed…

Unfortunate phrasing in my previous post. To clarify: I didn't mean to imply that I wasn't a murderer because I hadn't had abortion. If I had, I still wouldn't be a "murderous piece of shit." I'd be a woman who had a legal medical procedure.

I don't see how advocating for accurate language makes me a "murderous piece of shit." What or who, pray tell, have I murdered (beyond unavoidable encounters with insects)? I've not had an abortion or coerced anyone to have one. If you're so anti-woman that using birth control is considered murder, I'm guilty as…

Not an "unborn baby"; it's a fetus. Using "unborn baby" is a tactic of the anti-choice movement.

Sentencing is scheduled for 9/3.

Because he wanted to shoot someone? I believe he testified he'd loaded that gun a few weeks earlier after his car was paintballed. Which I don't think would stand up under the Castle doctrine.

He hasn't been being sentenced yet—that's scheduled for 9/3. Although I doubt he'll get life, in theory he could—in Michigan, it's 15 to life for 2nd degree murder.

If I hadn't seen the byline, I would have guessed this was written by Andy Cohen. The similarity between this author's writing and his verbal style is uncanny.

She is indeed very fluffy, especially compared to my own sleek and lovely greyhound Pooka. I love Frida to death, but though that particular cross yields a very beautiful and sweet-natured dog, she's a handful. The high energy of a Saluki mixed with the, we'll be polite and call it "independent nature" of a…

My rowdy, affectionate Borzoi-Saluki mix adores cats. After a surgery where she had to wear a c-collar, the dog would trap my 18-year-old cat with it—kitty under glass—and suck on her ears. After this, I taught Frida to be extremely gentle with fragile old-lady cat, but because she now never gets enough kitty time,…

So both you and your husband were at the store, which means you weren't forced to limp your way out alone with your kid to go shopping. Why didn't one of you stay at home with the baby while the other went out? Preferably you, since a) you were on crutches, and b) you somehow think it's acceptable to express…

The same can also be said of women who marry serviceman in the US, or pretty much any country's, military.