Jack Lynch

Aw, shucks. Yer too kind.

Quick headshot photo session for college website.

Photographer: Can you relax your shoulders a little?

Me: I’d pay good money to be able to relax ANY part of my body right now.

An NJ Transit bus caught fire on the New Jersey Turnpike Tuesday afternoon. BREAKING NEWS

Still not as hot as my standing-room-only-with-no-AC NJ Transit commute yesterday.

It was gratifying to see someone engrossed in a hard-copy book rather than staring idly at a screen.

It was less gratifying to realize the bookworm was driving an SUV at speed through Newark traffic.

We shoulda just stopped making movies in 1926. Metropolis got it right.

Ah! Yes, that sounds plausible.

Mercy! That's recommendation enough for me.

Was I talking about Johnson and the Internet? Sounds like me, but I'm not sure which spot this was....

THIS IS BETTER ADVICE THAN ANYTHING RFK JR IS OFFERING

If you eat before meals a walnut or two dry figs, and some leaves of garden rue with a corn of salt, it will be a great and good preservative against the plague, and against all poison that a man eateth, the same being stamped and laid to the biting of a mad dog.

Work them well together. Make of this balls to hold in your hands to smell at."

You can't go wrong with this!

"How to Make Balls to Smell: Take one part of storax, one part of labdanum, half a part of cloves, some camphor, aqua vitae of spikenard, some nutmegs.Of all these make a paste with rose water, wherein you must dissolve some gum dragon and gum arabic.

Available at fine booksellers everywhere! Perfect for classes, for history-curious friends, for propping up short table legs! Give one to your sweetie to apologize for missing Valentine's Day! Buy a few for stocking-stuffers!

Cast your eyes upon this miracle of paper and ink, this embodiment of Enlightenment erudition! The gen-yoo-wine certified plague cures are guaranteed to protect you from this silent slayer, the scourge of the centuries!

Jacket illustration of Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year, with a baby nursing on a dying mother

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to experience a devastating pandemic that shuts down daily life and leaves a pall of death hanging over everything?

Well wonder no more! Celia 'n' me 'n' Danny D are here to tell you!

Related experience for middle-aged educators: "I'll impress my students with this hip, contemporary musical reference," followed by the realization that the band broke up when the students were four years old. One of them helpfully offers, "I remember my dad used to love that song."

We live in the best of all possible worlds.

John Trusler, laughs, at you, from 1766, when commas, were available, at a steep discount.

Because I'm a masochist (and sitting in silence while giving a midterm, but really, the masochism thing mattered more), I read the article. It's much worse than I imagined.

EDMUND BURKE! Can't remember which of his works addresses coffee drinks, but I'm sure it's in there.

And it’s one
Two
Three
What are we fightin’ for?

LIVE UPDATES Dow drops 800 points as stagflation fears grow with oil soaring above $100 per barrel: Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on March 5, 2026. Spencer Platt / Getty Images

For today’s 250th anniversary of Adam Smith’s Inquiry into Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, the founding work of modern economics published on 9 March 1776, we’re all getting a crash course (heavy on the “crash”) in the laws of supply and demand.

Coin used as Leeds bus fare was 2,000‑year‑old currency The coin was handed down to Peter Edwards from his grandfather in the 1950s.

This is the sort of thing a cashless society robs us of, the opportunity to try to get away with paying the bus fare in Carthaginian currency www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

can we at least bring back disco, guys in short shorts, moustaches, and actors with interestingly flawed faces and bodies

The missus and I are in the midst of scheduling a conversation with the financial adviser guy about retirement prospects. Yay!

Because I'm an experienced professional educator -- they don't make just anyone a extinguished perfesser, you know -- I've learned that, when you give a multiple-choice test, it really helps to include the correct answer among the options.

ouch

See also “white men aren’t getting academic jobs in this climate.” When the pool of jobs is statistically indistinguishable from zero….

A clock face featuring Bullwinkle saying “I’m so confused”

Remember: it’s “Spring upward, fall down.”

Yup.