Picture this: It’s Christmas Eve in our new house, candles flickering like they mean business, everybody smiling the way people smile when they’re trying not to notice the slight smell of something burning in the kitchen, and suddenly I’m standing there, mid-shrimp-cocktail, explaining to a room full of nice, normal people why the American university has become this sad fluorescent terrarium where the lecturers, good, earnest lecturers, the ones who still believe in ideas, pace back and forth like zoo animals who’ve forgotten how to roar.

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