David Laurence
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David Laurence
@davidlaurence.bsky.social
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Enact PhD population control or expand employment horizons beyond academia? A problem for English and other modern languages since 1969, and a debate, still unresolved, from that day to this.

profession.mla.org/outside-the-...
November 26, 2025 at 1:10 PM
Absolutely, it is free to read. And yet: where on this screen would a person ordinarily think they need to click to read the gift article? Where does a reader in fact need to click to read the gift article?
Screenshot of the screen a reader reaches when clicking through to a gift article in the Atlantic.
September 22, 2025 at 5:58 PM
Barbara Johnson, after Mallarmé, on “the things that come up when one tries to defend obscurity” (“Bad Writing”).
. . . division between the crowd and the writer, the crowd’s refusal to think there could be obscurity inside everyone, the scapegoating of anyone who suggests otherwise and the paranoid vigilance about it, the accusation that incomprehensible writing is the cause of incomprehension. But the real mystery is why “I don’t understand it” should condemn the author rather than the reader, or at least, as Mallarmé goes on to say, should not amount to a suspension of judgment.
April 3, 2025 at 4:35 PM
Michael Wood, reviewing Stanley Cavell’s Pursuits of Happiness in the New York Review of Books, 21 January 1982:
December 6, 2024 at 2:39 PM