Reproductive Justice

From Dissent Magazine, here.

Interesting questions about universities, the humanities, Western Civ, religion, and the meaning of life, here.

Argues that the research ideal has robbed universities of the ability to address the big questions of metaphysics, and that the humanities can regain the authority to do so by reviving Western Civ.

I'm disposed to agree with a lot of the argument, but I doubt that in the end Western Civ courses will have the galvanizing effect he desires, particularly without recourse to religion; the poststructuralist critiques are too strong now, I think, to allow liberalism to return to the happy place it was in before it ate up its own values.

Apaglia pro homen, or Camille gives the girls a hard time

Camille Paglia, on men and sperm, here.

Best paragraph:

Aydemir belongs to the school of criticism that views everything in art, history, or culture as a "text," a slippery narrative that can be read like a book. The problems with this language-based style of analysis are, first, that its conclusions are already tediously contained in its premises and, second, that it makes a poor fit with subjects, such as sex, that overlap the physical world of concrete action. Predictably, ejaculation as Aydemir treats it accomplishes or supplies nothing but a descent into the murky waters of infinite subjectivity.