Glenn rewatches "The Paper Chase"...

... and muses about the lack of any real Kingsfields these days.

Would you want a Socratic professor? Would you want to be one?

The new NYT philosophy blog gets started by calling lawyers small-souled shysters.

Simon Critchley writes:

Socrates says that those in the constant press of business, like lawyers, policy-makers, mortgage brokers and hedge fund managers, become ”bent and stunted” and they are compelled “to do crooked things.” The pettifogger is undoubtedly successful, wealthy and extraordinarily honey-tongued, but, Socrates adds, “small in his soul and shrewd and a shyster.” The philosopher, by contrast, is free by virtue of his or her otherworldliness, by their capacity to fall into wells and appear silly.

The title of the post is "What Is a Philosopher?" and I'm thinking somebody who pretends to be self-deprecating while running down people who make more money than he does.

"hate audio books where women speak man's part."

This is a Google search that brought a couple readers to my blog — to a post that wasn't about being annoyed when female audiobook readers do the dialogue of male characters. But it's a good topic for discussion! I too hate the way female readers — especially the really dramatic ones — do male voices. They macho it up ridiculously. I have an audiobook of "Lady Chatterley's Lover" — read by Emilia Fox — and the male characters all sound so brutish. Some of that is in the text, but I'd like the text to speak for itself.

"No; my heart's as numb as a potato, my penis droops and never lifts its head up, I dare rather cut him clean off than say 'shit!' in front of my mother or my aunt... they are real ladies, mind you; and I'm not really intelligent, I'm only a 'mental-lifer'. It would be wonderful to be intelligent: then one would be alive in all the parts mentioned and unmentionable. The penis rouses his head and says: How do you do? -- to any really intelligent person. Renoir said he painted his pictures with his penis... he did too, lovely pictures! I wish I did something with mine. God! when one can only talk! Another torture added to Hades! And Socrates started it."

I'd rather try to figure that out without a woman trying to sound like the man who would say that.