In a recent Slate essay, Rebecca Schumann, a visiting assistant professor of German at Ohio State University, demonstrates tidily the alleged lure of academic life: ‘Who wouldn’t want a job where you only have to work five hours a week, you get summers off, your whole job is reading and talking about books, and you can never be fired?’
editorial
We go to print almost exactly on the tenth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, a historic crime that perfectly illustrates Auden’s point, given the unctuous, oily rhetoric of that time cloaking all the war’s most grotesque atrocities in the vocabulary of humanitarianism.