(See my earlier post, complete with updates, and Brad DeLong’s original.)
Follow-up posts from:
Dan Drezner, James Joyner, Steve Taylor, Mark Hasty, Bryan S, Josh Cherniss. By the way, I entirely agree with all those writing that coffee is superior to diet soda. Well, good coffee is. But a) good coffee isn’t always available, and b) full coffee cups don’t fit conveniently into one’s jacket pockets or one’s bookbag. They’re prone to end in unpleasant ways, unlike a soda can. Sometimes I’ll drink bad coffee– more often than I’d like, really– because I need a sufficiently big hit of caffeine and good coffee is too far away. (I work in one of the only buildings on campus from whcih there is no indoor route to a cafe, and today’s high is 5 degrees– accordingly, I’ve only gone out for coffee once today.) But I’d rather drink a few Diet Cokes to hold me over, if good coffee will be available later on and the addiction’s demands aren’t overwhelmingly urgent.
When I was in college, I was endlessly charmed by the image of tweedy academics sitting around in the afternoons, playing chess over a glass of brandy and discussing great things. This seemed to me the life of the mind. I think there used to be more of that kind of thing– or am I being nostalgic for something that never was? I gather that the financial crisis of faculty clubs has something to do with the decline of that culture, which leads me to believe that the chess-and-brandy image isn’t entirely in my imagination. (There’s a chess room in our faculty club, but the median age of the players is even higher than the median age of club members, itself much higher than the median age of faculty, suggesting a change over time.) I can hardly imagine an academic life now in which there was an afternoon per week– much less every afternoon– so devoted. Who has time? The image seems as impossible to me as the three-martini lunch came to seem to people in business in the 80s and 90s– people who could barely take lunch at all, much less return to their desks seriously tipsy once it was done.
Just another sign of hecticness, I suppose– the replacement of a brandy-fueled academia with an espresso-fueled one.
Comments are closed.