Dissertation Quotes

Sir, I think you need to read this,’ he said, nervously handing over the mainframe’s dissertation of its own wellbeing.

The truth is, everyone likes to look down on someone. If your favorites are all avant-garde writers who throw in Sanskrit and German, you can look down on everyone. If your favorites are all Oprah Book Club books, you can at least look down on mystery readers. Mystery readers have sci-fi readers. Sci-fi can look down on fantasy. And yes, fantasy readers have their own snobbishness. I’ll bet this, though: in a hundred years, people will be writing a lot more dissertations on Harry Potter than on John Updike. Look, Charles Dickens wrote popular fiction. Shakespeare wrote popular fiction—until he wrote his sonnets, desperate to show the literati of his day that he was real artist. Edgar Allan Poe tied himself in knots because no one realized he was a genius. The core of the problem is how we want to define “literature”. The Latin root simply means “letters”. Those letters are either delivered—they connect with an audience—or they don’t. For some, that audience is a few thousand college professors and some critics. For others, its twenty million women desperate for romance in their lives. Those connections happen because the books successfully communicate something real about the human experience. Sure, there are trashy books that do really well, but that’s because there are trashy facets of humanity. What people value in their books—and thus what they count as literature—really tells you more about them than it does about the book.

I sincerely want to use her knowledge to help me with my dissertation.

I once asked a young dissertation writer whether her suddenly grayed hair was due to ill health or personal tragedy; she answered: “It was the footnotes”.

Didier once told me, in a rambling, midnight dissertation, that a dream is the place where a wish and a fear meet. When the wish and the fear are exactly the same, he said, we call the dream a nightmare.

I am so fond of tea that I could write a whole dissertation on its virtues. It comforts and enlivens without the risks attendant on spirituous liquors. Gentle herb! Let the florid grape yield to thee. Thy soft influence is a more safe inspirer of social joy.

Mary had typed one line to finish her dissertation – ‘So a life’s work was finally complete’. As an afterthought she had written in pencil, probably after her dissertation had been assessed: ‘What was the red stone that Samuel Fowler disposed of?

What's a dissertation?" "If Satan gave you instructions for writing the book report from Hell, it would closely resemble those of a Ph.D. dissertation.

She did in her own heart infinitely prefer boobies to clever men who wrote dissertations.

You're just as much an outsider as I am. I've read your dissertations." "You have?" She's surprised. "Believe it or not, I can read too." I shake my head. "It's like everyone forgets I only missed one question on the Institute's slangsmarts test." "Ew. You missed a question?" She wrinkles her nose as she picks a practice razor from a bench. "I suppose that's why you weren't in Minerva.

Yo! You’re my dope dealer not my thesis adviser. If I wanted your opinion about my dissertation, I’d have asked for it, Motherfucker!

I Used the Word 'Negro' and I was Firmly Corrected

But when you talk about Nabokov and Coover, you’re talking about real geniuses, the writers who weathered real shock and invented this stuff in contemporary fiction. But after the pioneers always come the crank turners, the little gray people who take the machines others have built and just turn the crank, and little pellets of metafiction come out the other end. The crank-turners capitalize for a while on sheer fashion, and they get their plaudits and grants and buy their IRAs and retire to the Hamptons well out of range of the eventual blast radius. There are some interesting parallels between postmodern crank-turners and what’s happened since post-structural theory took off here in the U.S., why there’s such a big backlash against post-structuralism going on now. It’s the crank-turners fault. I think the crank-turners replaced the critic as the real angel of death as far as literary movements are concerned, now. You get some bona fide artists who come along and really divide by zero and weather some serious shit-storms of shock and ridicule in order to promulgate some really important ideas. Once they triumph, though, and their ideas become legitimate and accepted, the crank-turners and wannabes come running to the machine, and out pour the gray pellets and now the whole thing’s become a hollow form, just another institution of fashion. Take a look at some of the critical-theory Ph.D. dissertations being written now. They’re like de Man and Foucault in the mouth of a dull child. Academia and commercial culture have somehow become these gigantic mechanisms of commodification that drain the weight and color out of even the most radical new advances. It’s a surreal inversion of the death-by-neglect that used to kill off prescient art. Now prescient art suffers death-by acceptance. We love things to death, now. Then we retire to the Hamptons.

Aus einem Buch abschreiben - PLAGIAT. Aus zwei Büchern abschreiben - ESSAY. Aus drei Büchern abschreiben - DISSERTATION. Aus vier Büchern abschreiben - EIN FÜNFTES GELEHRTES BUCH.

Frosting isn’t a good medium for lengthy dissertations on fate.

I am so fond of tea that I could write a whole dissertation on its virtues.

To superficial minds, the vices of the great seem at all times agreeable.

For your Bildung you should choose the most difficult and splendid problem, but as subject for a dissertation choose no more than a very limited and remote corner.

Librarians wield unfathomable power. With a flip of the wrist they can hide your dissertation behind piles of old Field and Stream magazines. They can find data for your term paper that you never knew existed. They may even point you toward new and appropriate subject headings. Their knowledge extends beyond mere categories. They cannot be confined to disciplines. Librarians are all-knowing and all-seeing. They bring order to chaos. They bring wisdom and culture to the masses. They preserve every aspect of human knowledge. Librarians rule...

Take as much care with words expressing your sentiments as you will crafting your doctoral dissertation.

This book is merely a personal narrative, and not a pretentious history or a philosophical dissertation. It is a record of several years of variegated vagabondizing, and it's object is rather to help the resting reader while away an idle hour than afflict him with metaphysics, or goad him with science.

When our passive feelings are almost always so sordid and so selfish, how comes it that our active principles should often be so generous and so noble?

Not one word about proposals, no matter how much she pushes,” I told my friends. “No matter what she says or how loud she cries, don’t try to throw that up as a distraction.” Gabriel’s lips twitched. “I don’t think it’s going to be that bad. It’s one woman against five supernatural creatures... And Zeb.” “You laugh because you haven’t heard my mother’s thirty-minute verbal dissertation on appropriate seasonal flower choices. We’re better off letting her yell at us for being dirty, premarital fornicators.

As sci-fi writer Theodore Sturgeon said, 90 percent of everything is crap. But science fiction has not been forgiven for its crap. The reason is that science fiction inherently distrusts the 'eternal verities' on which literature graduates base their doctoral dissertations. Literature departments were uncomfortable with that. But things change.

Everything that can be said with words can be contradicted with words, so what’s the point of dissertations, novels, literature? Or put another way: whatever we say is true we can also always say is untrue. It is a zero point and the place from which the zero value begins to spread. However, it is not a dead point, not for literature either, for literature is not just words, literature is what words evoke in the reader. It is this transcendence that validates literature, not the formal transcendence in itself, as many believe.

We must admit that our opponents in this argument have a marked advantage over us. They need only a few words to set forth a half-truth; whereas, in order to show that it is a half-truth, we have to resort to long and arid dissertations.

This is a repository of ideas, dissertations from geniuses, not a library packed with lies and fictions!

Tocqueville remarks on this in Democracy in America. “An American,” he wrote, “cannot converse, but he can discuss, and his talk falls into a dissertation.

Maybe my dissertation really had been as brilliant as he claimed, the truth was I remember almost nothing about it; the intellectual leaps I made when I was young were a distant memory to me, and now I was surrounded by a kind of aura, when really my only goal in life was to do a little reading and get in bed at four in the afternoon with a carton of cigarettes and a bottle; and yet, at the same time, I had to admit, I was going to die if I kept that up – I was going to die fast, unhappy and alone. And did I really want to die fast, unhappy and alone? In the end, only kind of.

It’s just surprising to meet a woman with two hundred lives to her name and find a history student with the world’s most boring dissertation in her pack and the softest brown eyes ever to paint crosshairs on a man’s heart.

An avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty. It leads men to stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the best of laws. He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates his duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.

The moral of the story is that once upon a time I wanted the whole world from everyone I met - sun moon stars, give me the whole thing, I want it now, I want it in perfect MLA style. And now? Now I know that the best you can ask of people is that they just - I don't know - that they just show up, do their part, treat people nicely, pay their taxes. Contribute something halfway decent to society. I'm not necessarily talking about contributing a dissertation, either. I'm talking about pulling you own weight and figuring out what it is you love and then doing it. Not just talking about it or waiting for someone else to do it for you, but actually honest-to-God doing the thing you're meant to do.

The rites of passage in the academic world are arcane and, in their own way, highly romantic, and the tensions and unplesantries of dissertations and final oral examinations are quickly forgotten in the wonderful moment of the sherry afterward, admission into a very old club, parties of celebration, doctoral gowns, academic rituals, and hearing for the first time "Dr.," rather than "Miss" Jamison.

Look. I know why you gave me that speech earlier today. I know you have an obligation to protect your vampires. But irrespective of the way that I was made, I have done everything that you’ve asked of me. I’ve taken training, I gave up my dissertation, I moved into the House, I got you in to see my father, I got you into the Breckenridge house, and I’ve dated the man you asked me to.” I pointed at the house behind us. “And even though I was supposed to get a few hours free from the drama of Cadogan House tonight with said man, I followed you here because you requested it. At some point, Ethan, you might consider giving me a little credit.” I didn’t wait for him to answer, but turned on my heel and went to the car. I opened the back door, climbed inside, and slammed it shut behind me. Catcher caught my gaze in the rearview mirror. “Feel better?” “Is he still standing there with that dumbstruck expression on his face?” There was a pause while he checked, then a chuckle. “Yes, he is.” “Then, yes, I feel better.

On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason is Schopenhauer’s doctoral dissertation, which he wrote in 1813,

What is your dissertation, Ilana Davita?” “Babel and Camus: Twists of Fate and Faith. Babel’s The Red Cavalry and Camus’s The Stranger.

I snorted. "I could write a doctoral dissertation on his 'charitable spirit.

Which meant she might as well return to a topic no man would ever bore of.Sex. "That concludes my overall dissertation on bedside manners before and after an encounter. Moving on to the last topic evolving around the setting of the bedroom. Would ine of yoy please define the purpose of a dildo and why a man should consider keeping one at his bedside at all times?

We get ourselves in trouble because it's a cheap way to get attention. Trouble is a faux form of fame. It's easier to get busted in the bedroom with the faculty chairman's wife than it is to finish that dissertation on the metaphysics of motley in the novellas of Joseph Conrad.

Franz shook his head. "When a society is rich, its people don't need to work with their hands;they can devote themselves to activities of the spirit. We have more and more universities and more and more students. If students are going to earn degrees, they've got to come up with dissertation topics. And since dissertations can be written about everything under the sun, the number of topics is infinite. Sheets of paper covered with words pile up in archives sadder than cemeteries, because no one ever visits them, not even on All Souls' Day. Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity. That's why one banned book in your former country means infinitely more than the billions of words spewed out by our universities.

That was all he had ever aspired to, with a wife thrown into the bargain, maybe, and a kid or two to go along with her. It had never felt like too much to ask for, but after three years of struggling to write his dissertation, Tom finally understood that he didn't have it in him to finish. Or, if he did have it in him, he couldn't persuade himself to believe in the value of doing it anymore.

When a doctoral student at Princeton asked, “What is there left in the world for original dissertation research?” Albert Einstein replied, “Find out about prayer. Somebody must find out about prayer.

A true scientist doesn't perform prescribed experiments; she develops her own and thus generates wholly new knowledge. This transition between doing what you're told and telling yourself what to do generally occurs midway through a dissertation. In many ways, it is the most difficult and terrifying thing that a student can do, and being unable or unwilling to do it is much of what weeds people out of Ph.D. programs.

The joy is in remembering; the pain is in knowing it was yesterday

grammar will tell you how to write; but whether to write or not, grammar will not tell.

Oh, wow. Thank you.” She smiled. “Now I’m actually a bit sorry that I can’t have you on my dissertation committee. Perhaps rumors of your cruelty have been greatly exaggerated.” His mouth twitched. “Maybe you just pull out the best in me?” She grinned. “Then maybe I should stick around. Just, you know, to save the department from your terrible moods?” He glanced at the picture of the failed Western blot in her hand. “Well, it doesn’t look like you’re going to graduate anytime soon.” She half laughed, half gasped. “Oh my God. Did you just—?” “Objectively—” “This is the rudest, meanest thing—” She was laughing.

Two different sets of philosophers have attempted to teach us this hardest of all the lessons of morality. One set have laboured to increase our sensibility to the interests of others; another, to diminish that to our own. The first would have us feel for others as we naturally feel for ourselves. The second would have us feel for ourselves, as we naturally feel for others.

Oh, wow. Thank you.” She smiled. “Now I’m actually a bit sorry that I can’t have you on my dissertation committee. Perhaps rumors of your cruelty have been greatly exaggerated.” His mouth twitched. “Maybe you just pull out the best in me?” She grinned. “Then maybe I should stick around. Just, you know, to save the department from your terrible moods?” He glanced at the picture of the failed Western blot in her hand. “Well, it doesn’t look like you’re going to graduate anytime soon.” She half laughed, half gasped. “Oh my God. Did you just—?” “Objectively—” “This is the rudest, meanest thing—” She was laughing. Holding her stomach as she waved her finger at him. “—based on your blotting—” “—that anyone could ever say to a Ph.D. student. Ever.” “I think I can find meaner things. If I really put myself to it.” “We’re done.” She wished she weren’t smiling. Then maybe he’d take her seriously instead of just looking at her with that patient, amused expression. “Seriously. It was nice while it lasted.” She made to stand and leave indignantly, but he grabbed the sleeve of her shirt and gently tugged at it until she was sitting down again, next to him on the narrow couch—maybe even a little closer than before. She continued glaring, but he regarded her blandly, clearly unperturbed. “There’s nothing bad about taking more than five years to graduate,” he offered in a conciliatory tone. Olive huffed. “You just want me to stay around forever. Until you have the biggest, fattest, strongest Title IX case to ever exist.

Establishing yourself as a scientist takes an awfully long time. The riskiest part is learning what a true scientist is and then taking the first shaky steps down that path, which will become a road, which will become a highway, which will maybe someday lead you home. A true scientist doesn’t perform prescribed experiments; she develops her own and thus generates wholly new knowledge. This transition between doing what you’re told and telling yourself what to do generally occurs midway through a dissertation. In many ways, it is the most difficult and terrifying thing that a student can do, and being unable or unwilling to do it is much of what weeds people out of Ph.D. programs.

Death will find me long before I tire of contemplating an evening spent in his company during which he enthralled a mixed audience consisting of a fur trader, a Cree Indian matron, and an Anglican missionary, with an hour-long monologue on sexual aberrations in female pygmy shrews. (The trader misconstrued the tenor of the discourse; but the missionary, inured by years of humorless dissertations, soon put him right.)

Dude, stop trying so hard.” She kneeled until she was at eye level with the cage. The mouse kicked around with its little legs, its tail flopping back and forth. “You’re supposed to be bad at this. And I’m supposed to write a dissertation about how bad you are. And then you get a chunk of cheese, and I get a real job that pays real money and the joy of saying ‘I’m not that kind of doctor’ when someone is having a stroke on my airplane.

Burden … began to read to the child in Spanish from the book which he had brought with him from California, interspersing the fine, sonorous flowing of mysticism in a foreign tongue with harsh, extemporized dissertations composed half of the bleak and bloodless logic which he remembered from his father on interminable New England Sundays, and half of immediate hellfire and tangible brimstone of which any country Methodist circuit rider would have been proud.

You are the sweetest man, Savannah inserted softly, her voice brushing at him. Echoing. Gregori frowned. Echoing? Close. He swung around, cursing in French, an eloquent dissertation that had Gary cringing. Savannah,however, simply took Gregori's arm and smiled up at him, the stars in her eyes dancing. She was like that.Distracting him and then slamming him sideways with her smile. With her blue-violet eyes with their accursed star centers. She didn't even have the decency to look repentant. Don't be angry, Gregori.I was lonesome in the house all by myself. Are you really,really angry? Or just a little angry? Her voice was soft, a siren's whisper, made of silk sheets and candlelight. Her long lashes were thick and heavy, a sweep of magic that caught his eye and held it there. It is impossible for you to be lonely when you are always running around in my head.

فكرة مين الي هيحضر مناقشة رسالتك قريبة اوي من مين الي هيحضر جنازتك...اونلي ذا ونز هو كير :)..الفرق بس ان مافيش في التانية جاتوه و ساليزون :)

she did in her own heart infinitely prefer boobies to clever men who wrote dissertations;

Die Philosophie des Hippolyte Taine. Dissertation, 1904

Mrs. Ramsay did in her own heart infinitely prefer boobies to clever men who wrote dissertations.

It is fascinating history,” I said a little huffily. All the library staff were well acquainted with my dissertation topic by now, but somehow no one was excited by it.

An incident which happened about this time will set the characters of these two lads more fairly before the discerning reader than is in the power of the longest dissertation.

Marx wrote his dissertation on Epicurus, and he was familiar with Greek thought. Aristotle, as you will see, provides a frequent anchor for his arguments.

through one hundred years’ worth of forgotten books and dusty master’s dissertations in the fields of history and folklore, through articles in defunct magazines, and amid brain-numbing

Those of you who have managed to avoid vacuuming don’t know what you’re missing: an onerous chore, yes, but also a fine opportunity—no less taxing than balancing your books or getting the footnotes straight on your dissertation or working out a kink in your golf swing—for practicing some of the skills you’ll need on the path. The person who can vacuum an entire house without once losing his or her composure, staying balanced, centered, and focused on the process rather than pressing impatiently for completion, is a person who knows something about mastery.

Later, several people in that room would reach for the same adjectives to describe me: sad, desperate, trying to preempt pushback at every turn. It was, one said, like I was defending a dissertation.

Somewhere along the line, she finally finished her dissertation, which argued that computer programs are like theater: they both have scripts, and neither perform, or are performed, the same way twice.

What is the root of the sin of sexual identity? Being a lesbian was not just a description of the kind of sex I liked to have. Being a lesbian encompassed a whole range of feelings and perception, character qualities, and sensibilities. It reflected the depth of my nonsexual friendships and the integrated community I wanted to build with women. Being a lesbian also reflected the kind of professor I was, the classes I taught, the books I read, and the dissertations I directed. I was all in. And, I was a jumble of emotions, because according to the Bible, what I called community, God called idolatry.

It’s more common for the students I’ve worked with to read too much than to read too little. They use reading as a distraction, or as a way to avoid having to think their own thoughts, or as a magic charm: “If I read everything in the field, then I’ll be able to write and be sure I haven’t missed anything.

A: Is this the copy that you read as a kid? E: Yes. Look at the edges--that turquoise color. It's lighter along the top, from where the sun hit it. Now look at this gorgeous color here, the long edge. Beautiful. Makes me nostalgic. A: For what? E: I don't know. The age of turquoise page edges. Somewhere there's a grad student doing her dissertation on the inks used in twentieth-century mass-market paperbacks.

Several years ago, upon completing a major part of this treatise, I decided that I had better shelve the thing, despite my deep conviction about the need for this dimension of open and frank dissertation in contemporary Vaishnava society. I was thinking that perhaps the best place for it would be in a grantha­samadhi. After all, Srila Prabhupada had requested me to write a book. He didn't say anything about taking it to the press. I thought it better to safeguard the peaceful prosecution of my bhajana by avoiding the likelihood of provoking certain anticipated institutional and interpersonal hostilities toward myself.

So I drew up a plan for my time for three years I would not bother with my university studies at all. Then, in my final year, I would put on a strenuous spurt, master the academic material and dash off some kind of dissertation.

Tell it, Fanny. About the crowds, streets, buildings, lights, about the whirligig of loneliness, about the humpty-dumpty clutter of longings. And then explain about the summer parks and the white snow and the moon window in the sky. Throw in a poignantly ironical dissertation on life, on its uncharted aimlessness, and speak like Sherwood Anderson about the desire that stir in the heart. Speak like Remy de Gourmont and Dostoevsky and Stevie Crane, like Schopenhauer and Dreiser and Isaiah; speak like all the great questioners whose tongues have wagged and whose hearts have burned with questions. He will listen bewilderedly and, perhaps, only perhaps, understand for a moment the dumb pathos of your eyes.

And I’m supposed to write a dissertation about how bad you are. And then you get a chunk of cheese, and I get a real job that pays real money and the joy of saying ‘I’m not that kind of doctor’ when someone is having a stroke on my airplane.

Her doctoral dissertation was to have been on the “saturation hypothesis,” a theory of her own devising which held that every word in a work of literature, far from having one or two most likely meanings, meant everything that any reader could make of it, and that each supposed meaning was of equal value to all others. This theory, she said, dovetailed with other current literary theories that gave more power to critics and less to writers, who tended to write with finite intentions.

All of the survivors I met had one thing in common with me and with one another: We had no control over the most consuming facts of our lives, but we had the power to determine how we experienced life after trauma. Survivors could continue to be victims long after the oppression had ended, or they could learn to thrive. In my dissertation research, I discovered and articulated my personal conviction and my clinical touchstone: We can choose to be our own jailors, or we can choose to be free.

Since the forthcoming write-up of my Ph.D. dissertation was much in my mind, it was the work of a moment to begin a solemn dissertation containing all the stigmata of academic turgidity about a substance which dissolved in water 1.12 seconds before you added the water.

A labyrinth -- that's Joyce's metaphor, too. Somebody could write a good Ph.D. dissertation on the metaphor of the labyrinth in James Joyce, Philip K. Dick, and Robert Anton Wilson. We all regard the universe as a maze that we're running around in and trying to figure out.

Maybe, one day, I would want to go back and finish my PhD, but today, I knew that I had come to the end of the line. One too many panic attacks, my first ever prescription for Xanax, and a dissertation topic that seemed perpetually out of reach had done me in. Screw academia.

History-writing to-day has passed into an Alexandrian age, where criticism has overpowered creation. Faced by the mountainous heap of the minutiae of knowledge and awed by the watchful severity of his colleagues, the modern historian too often takes refuge in learned articles or narrowly specialized dissertations, small fortresses that are easy to defend from attack. His work can be of the highest value; but it is not an end in itself. I believe that the supreme duty of the historian is to write history, that is to say, to attempt to record in one sweeping sequence the greater events and movements that have swayed the destinies of man. The writer rash enough to make the attempt should not be criticized for his ambition, however much he may deserve censure for the inadequacy of his equipment or the inanity of his results.

You’re supposed to be bad at this. And I’m supposed to write a www ajpdf com dissertation about how bad you are. And then you get a chunk of cheese, and I get a real job that pays real money and the joy of saying ‘I’m not that kind of doctor’ when someone is having a stroke on my airplane.

The lower middle class is petty bourgeois. These people seek their security in status; status in an organizational structure. They try to find a place for themselves in an organization which has a hierarchy in which they can count on moving up automatically simply by surviving. Some people still think that most Americans are active, assertive, aggressive, self-reliant people who need no help from anyone, especially the Government, and achieve success as individuals by competing freely with each other. That may have been true 100 years ago. It isn’t true today. Today more and more of us are petty bourgeois who snuggle down in a hierarchical bureaucracy where advancement is assured merely by keeping the body warm and not breaking the rules; it doesn’t matter whether it is education or the Armed Services or a big corporation or the Government. Notice that high school teachers are universally opposed to merit pay. They are paid on the basis of their degrees and years of teaching experience. Or consider the professor. He gets his Ph. D. by writing a large dissertation on a small subject, and he hopes to God he never meets anyone else who knows anything about that subject. If he does, they don’t talk about it; they talk about the weather or baseball. So our society is becoming more and more a society of white-collar clerks on many levels, including full professors. They live for retirement and find their security through status in structures.

Most of us would rather read than write. There is always another article to read, one more source to track down, just a bit more data to gather. But well before you’ve done all the research you’d like to do, there comes a point when you must start thinking about the first draft of your report.

God has always had within himself a perfect friendship. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are adoring one another, giving glorifying love to one another, and delighting in one another. We know of no joy higher than being loved and loving in return, but a triune God would know that love and joy in unimaginable, infinite dimensions. God is, therefore, infinitely, profoundly happy, filled with perfect joy—not some abstract tranquility but the fierce happiness of dynamic loving relationships. Knowing this God is not to get beyond emotions or thoughts but to be filled with glorious love and joy. If God did not need to create other beings in order to know love and happiness, then why did he do so? Jonathan Edwards argues, in A Dissertation Concerning the End for Which God Created the World, that the only reason God would have had for creating us was not to get the cosmic love and joy of relationship (because he already had that) but to share it.138 Edwards shows how it is completely consistent for a triune God—who is “other-oriented” in his very core, who seeks glory only to give it to others—to communicate happiness and delight in his own divine perfections and beauty to others.

A monumental decision such as starting a family requires persuasive dissertations, licences, spreadsheets and field research. That's what I assumed until one night when we were lying in bed and, if I recall correctly, I asked Tracy if we were ready to have a family now, and she said sure. That was it.

I turn onto North Market Street to pass Thomas Wolfe’s house. I’d planned to do my dissertation on Wolfe. My advisor argued against it. Wolfe is all but forgotten now, she said, which seemed all the more reason to do it, so he would not be forgotten, or only, as Wolfe himself wrote, by the wind grieved. The

En effet, alors qu'il n'est plus possible d'écrire des dissertations savantes (ou même de la vulgarisation) soit sur l' "esprit des nègres" soit sur la "personnalité juive", il est parfaitement possible d'entreprendre des recherches sur des sujets tel que l' "esprit de l'islam" ou "le caractère arabe" (...).

It is noteworthy that in his meditations Marcus Aurelius mentions Fronto only once.(2) All his literary studies, his oratory and criticism (such as it was) is forgotten; and, says he, 'Fronto taught me not to expect natural affection from the highly-born.' Fronto really said more than this: that 'affection' is not a Roman quality, nor has it a Latin name.(3) Roman or not Roman, Marcus found affection in Fronto; and if he outgrew his master's intellectual training, he never lost touch with the true heart of the man it is that which Fronto's name brings up to his remembrance, not dissertations on compound verbs or fatuous criticisms of style.

Likewise, the division between popular and serious work was a scheme perpetrated by academics in need of creating a false pantheon of living writers when it became impossible to come up with fresh dissertation topics (to earn degrees and prestige) concerning the writers in the true pantheon, who had been analyzed to exhaustion.

I’d realised that romance novels, which were largely written by women for women, were social history documents about the way that gender roles had evolved over the last fifty years. I’d argue the case as I did when I defended my dissertation, that more than anything, romance novels are also unclaimed feminist texts. - Tom Greer

There never yet was any truth or any principle so irresistibly obvious, that all men believed it at once. Time and reason must co-operate with each other to the final establishment of any principle; and therefore those who may happen to be first convinced, have no right to persecute others on whom conviction operates more slowly.

Without entering here into a dissertation upon the historical romance, it may be said that in proper hands it has been and should continue to be one of the most valued and valuable expressions of the literary art. To render and maintain it so, however, it is necessary that certain well-defined limits should be set upon the licence which its writers are to enjoy; it is necessary that the work should be honest work; that preparation for it should be made by a sound, painstaking study of the period to be represented, to the end that a true impression may first be formed and then conveyed. Thus, considering how much more far-reaching is the novel than any other form of literature, the good results that must wait upon such endeavours are beyond question. The neglect of them—the distortion of character to suit the romancer's ends, the like distortion of historical facts, the gross anachronisms arising out of a lack of study, have done much to bring the historical romance into disrepute.

Government is a plain, simple, intelligent thing, founded in nature and reason, quite comprehensible by common sense [the Dissertation continued]. . . . The true source of our suffering has been our timidity. We have been afraid to think. . . . Let us dare to read, think, speak, and write. . . . Let it be known that British liberties are not the grants of princes or parliaments . . . that many of our rights are inherent and essential, agreed on as maxims and established as preliminaries, even before Parliament existed. . . . Let us read and recollect and impress upon our souls the views and ends of our more immediate forefathers, in exchanging their native country for a dreary, inhospitable wilderness. . . . Recollect their amazing fortitude, their bitter sufferings—the hunger, the nakedness, the cold, which they patiently endured—the severe labors of clearing their grounds, building their houses, raising their provisions, amidst dangers from wild beasts and savage men, before they had time or money or materials for commerce. Recollect the civil and religious principles and hopes and expectations which constantly supported and carried them through all hardships with patience and resignation. Let us recollect it was liberty, the hope of liberty, for themselves and us and ours, which conquered all discouragements, dangers, and trials.

Too many students, both graduate and undergraduate, think that the aim of education is to memorize settled answers to someone else's questions. It is not. It is to learn to find your own answers to your own questions. To do that, you must learn to wonder about things, to let them puzzle you--particularly things that seem most commonplace.

Her dissertation on Dutch women painters of the Golden Age sits unfinished in her apartment, a half-typed sheet of paper mildewing in the mouth of a Remington. It's been months since she worked on it and she sometimes finds herself staring at the machine's bullnose profile or the chrome-plated carriage return, thinking: Remington also makes rifles.

Because I wrote a dissertation on it. Love’s the strongest kind of energy. Katie and I loved each other. We couldn’t love each other in my world, and we couldn’t love each other in her world. But all that love, all that energy, it had to go somewhere. It went into that baby.” His voice broke. “Even if we couldn’t have each other, we would have both had him.

A careful fake is better than the truth. The truth lacks realism.

My advice to anyone with an unhappy upbringing: get over it.

In 1923 Churchill wrote Clementine ‘A Dissertation on Dining Room Chairs’ which stated that ‘The Dining Room chair has certain very marked requisites.’ It needed to be comfortable, have arms and be compact, and the back had to be ‘almost perpendicularly over the legs’.37 There also needed to be no fewer than twenty of them. Meals around the circular table in Chartwell’s

As a youth I enjoyed — indeed, like most of my contemporaries, revered — the agitprop plays of Brecht, and his indictments of Capitalism. It later occurred to me that his plays were copyrighted, and that he, like I, was living through the operations of that same free market. His protestations were not borne out by his actions, neither could they be. Why, then, did he profess Communism? Because it sold. The public’s endorsement of his plays kept him alive; as Marx was kept alive by the fortune Engels’s family had made selling furniture; as universities, established and funded by the Free Enterprise system — which is to say by the accrual of wealth — house, support, and coddle generations of the young in their dissertations on the evils of America.

During his first term as president, Jefferson spent $7,500—roughly $120,000 in today’s currency—on wine, and he is generally regarded as America’s first great wine connoisseur. (He might also have been America’s first great wine bore. “There was, as usual, a dissertation upon wines,” John Quincy Adams noted in his diary after dining with Jefferson in 1807. “Not very edifying.”)

I followed the chef to the circular herb garden with relief. Here were familiar plants with gentle smells: thyme, dill, mint, basil, and others equally benign. He asked me to identify the ones I knew and gave me a brief dissertation on their uses: Dill was good with fish, thyme complemented veal, mint went well with fruit, and basil was perfect for the dreaded love apples. He plucked two large mint leaves with purplish undersides, placed one on his tongue, and gave me the other. We came to rest on a curved stone bench in the middle of the garden, and we sat there sucking on fresh mint, him enjoying the breeze, and me awaiting the judgement that must be coming. He continued his lecture on herbs. He talked about the subtlety of bay laurel, the many varieties of thyme, and the use of edible flowers as garnishes.

But I think you’re failing to understand exactly what a dissertation is supposed to be. It’s not meant to change the world or revolutionize the way we think about anything. It’s meant to be a document that I can read and the rest of the committee can read to show us that you have enough understanding to warrant a PhD. That’s all. Once you have the PhD, once you leave here, or stay here and become a professor, that’s when your real work will start.

Natural gas, even more than oil, had become Russia’s most powerful tool in foreign policy. Oil trades freely, sloshing through the world’s economy; gas requires fixed pipelines, linking the nations of Europe to Russia. The network of pipelines, dating to the Soviet era, gave Russia clout and, with rising energy prices, the prospect of the wealth that Putin nearly a decade before had argued in his dissertation was the core of the state’s power. Ukraine,

It would be a perfect degree for Sara, since she had to balance her work in her family’s forests with her studies. The program was online-based with only a handful of physical classes—labs—each term. After three years of education in close partnership with industry organizations, students had to produce a dissertation and would receive a BA. A graduate from this program would be an academically educated forest owner who could take over a profitable family business.

. You get some bona fide artists who come along and really divide by zero and weather some serious shit-storms of shock and ridicule in order to promulgate some really important ideas. Once they triumph, though, and their ideas become legitimate and accepted, the crank-turners and wannabes come running to the machine, and out pour the gray pellets and now the whole thing’s become a hollow form, just another institution of fashion. Take a look at some of the critical-theory Ph.D. dissertations being written now. They’re like de Man and Foucault in the mouth of a dull child. Academia and commercial culture have somehow become these gigantic mechanisms of commodification that drain the weight and color out of even the most radical new advances. It’s a surreal inversion of the death-by-neglect that used to kill off prescient art. Now prescient art suffers death-by acceptance. We love things to death, now. Then we retire to the Hamptons.

(Love’s atopia, characteristic which causes it to escape all dissertations, would be that *ultimately* it is possible to talk about love only *according to a strict allocutive determination*; whether philosophical, gnomic, lyric, or novelistic, there is always, in the discourse upon love, a person whom one addresses, though this person may have shifted to the condition of a phantom or a creature still to come. No one wants to speak of love unless it is *for* someone.).

As long as I’ve studied vulnerability (which dates back to my dissertation research in 1998), I will always think that the very best example of vulnerability is saying “I love you” first. Talk about taking off the armor! Just thinking about that moment takes my breath away. Like many of you, I’ve taken that risk and had the indescribable experience of hearing “Oh, my God! I love you too!” And I’ve been on the shitty end of “Aww, thank you! But I think we’re on different pages.

Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right, from the frame of their nature, to knowledge, as their great Creator, who does nothing in vain, has given them understandings, and a desire to know; but besides this, they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge; I mean, of the characters and conduct of their rulers. —JOHN ADAMS, 1765, DISSERTATION ON THE CANON AND FEUDAL LAW

The tales of pure terror, of course, are completely naturalistic in their content, and must stand or fall by their merit alone. But what about the supernatural stories? Can we, the children of a scientific age, give any credence to these medleys of devils, ghosts, and other psychical invasions? There is only one answer: we can and do. We are dealing with stories, not with scientific dissertations. And if, as stories, they have the ring of truth, we'll believe them, as stories, implicitly. ("Introduction")

The period of general neglect of Eliot's poetry was one in which a revolution was occurring in the theory of interpretation. Existentialist, phenomenologist, structuralist, psychoanalytic, feminist, and poststructuralist theories appeared and stimulated dazzling conversations about how texts mean. Bloom, Miller, Poulet, Gadamer, Foucault, Lacan, Kristeva, and Derrida are just a few of the critics who have contributed to these conversations. These studies have enormous value for critics interested in Eliot. In the first place, they have popularized insights about language which are central in Eliot poetry from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" to Four Quartets. Anyone who doubts this should read Derrida "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" and follow up with a reading of part 5 of each of Four Quartets. In the second place, the studies in theory have created an audience that will be able to appreciate Eliot's dissertation and early philosophical work, an audience unthinkable a generation ago.

The task Gordan gave her was a truly daunting one: to develop the complete invariant theory for ternary forms of degree four. Whether Gordan had ever attempted this is hard to say, but one can safely say that Emmy Noether's work was the last word with regard to this problem. She was able to construct 331 associated covariants. After finishing this ambitious work and publishing it in Crelle, she passed her oral exam "summa cum laude", but later dismissed her dissertation as a piece of juvenalia (she once called it "dung").

For small erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught – nay, but the draught of a draughts. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!

Millett was the author of Sexual Politics, her dissertation at the communist hotbed Columbia University. It became a cultural juggernaut when published in 1970. There, she decried the “patriarchy” of the monogamous nuclear family. The book landed Kate on the cover of Time magazine on August 31, 1970, which dubbed her the “high priestess” and “Mao Tse-tung of the Women’s Movement.” Her angry book served as the bible, the feminist-Marxist manifesto, of women’s lib.645 The New York Times referred to Sexual Politics as “the Bible of Women’s Liberation.”646

Throughout history, the life of a businessperson always involves some risk; the higher the risk, the greater the reward. On the other hand, the life of an employee in any workforce involves minimal to no risk at all, resulting in a lifetime full of steadiness with little to no accomplishments during this lifetime. However, there is a crucial factor which can also be considered as a trait or characteristic that made many remarkable men and women throughout history reach high levels of their career paths, which is considered to be “success” in our modern world: Audacity.

The film libraries on some of these channels." Elmina said. "I swear. There was one on last night. I couldn't sleep. After I saw, it, I was afraid ro sleep. Have you seen Black Narcissus, 1947?" Eddie, who was enrolled in the graduate film program at SC, let out a scream of recognition. He's been working on his doctoral dissertation, "Deadpasn to Demoniac - Subtextual Uses of Eyeliner in the Cinema," and had just in fact arrived at moment in Black Narcissus where Kathleen Byron, as a demented nun, shows up in civilian gear, including eye makeup good for a year's worth of nighmares.

They could forget about college. Maybe they didn't want college anyway. Maybe they didn't want degrees and titles and weekend workdays. They could live lives unburdened by transcripts, certificates, licenses, applications, dissertations, diversifications, stocks and bonds and dividends, insurance and annuities and 401(k)s, fashion trends, pantyhose, stuffy suit coats, bow ties, boring parties where the humans squandered irreplaceable minutes on suffocating small talk and no one partook in Dionysian pursuits and everyone went home early feeling empty inside despite the excesses of the cheese tray.

Everett's approach, which he described as "objectively deterministic" with probability "reappearing at the subjective level," resonated with this strategy. And he was thrilled by the direction. As he noted in the 1956 draft of his dissertation, the framework offered to bridge the position of Einstein (who famously believed that a fundamental theory of physics should not involve probability) and the position of Bohr (who was perfectly happy with a fundamental theory that did). According to Everett, the Many Worlds approach accommodated both positions, the difference between them merely being one of perspective. Einstein's perspective is the mathematical one in which the grand probability wave of all particles relentlessly evolves by the Schrodinger equation, with chance playing absolutely no role. I like to picture Einstein soaring high above the many worlds of Many Worlds, watching as Schrodinger's equation fully dictates how the entire panorama unfolds, and happily concluding that even though quantum mechanics is correct, God doesn't play dice. Bohr's perspective is that of an inhabitant in one of the worlds, also happy, using probabilities to explain, with stupendous precision, those observations to which his limited perspective gives him access.

Encounter w/ strange man June 3, approx. 2 a.m. White, 5'9", slightly scruffy, shaggy brown hair. Ripped T-shirt, jeans, no shoes. Origin and destination unknown, believed to be night wanderer. I chewed on the end of the pen, wondering if I should include any other details. It had been too dark to tell what color his eyes were. His voice had been deep, with a rasp, almost... but I couldn't write that. If my body was found in the woods behind the house, and investigators were competent enough to do a forensic analysis of this notebook, I didn't want editorializing words complicating the narrative. Words like compelling, or god forbid, sexy.

The academic world, I knew, was small; full of friends and enemies, lightly smoldering conflicts that had been stoked by years of offhand remarks about one’s work, and sometimes, one’s character. Just a survey of the room identified the different cabals: tenured faculty who still sat with their aging dissertation advisors from ten, twenty, thirty years ago, ringed by their own current graduate students who, no doubt, imagined how their own acolytes would someday gather around them. Each group was like a constellation, intertwined, but also circling each other, always trying to gauge the size of the other orbits, the power of individual gravitational pulls.

However, the simple-minded Middle Ages used dramatic and picturesque methods to squeeze out the desired confessions: the rack, the wheel, the bed of nails, impalement, hot coals, etc. In the twentieth century, taking advantage of our more highly developed medical knowledge and extensive prison experience (and someone seriously defended a doctoral dissertation on this theme), people came to realize that the accumulation of such impressive apparatus was superfluous and that, on a mass scale, it was also cumbersome. And in addition . . . In addition, there was evidently one other circumstance. As always, Stalin did not pronounce that final word, and his subordinates had to guess what he wanted. Thus, like a jackal, he left himself an escape hole, so that he could, if he wanted, beat a retreat and write about “dizziness from success.” After all, for the first time in human history the calculated torture of millions was being undertaken, and, even with all his strength and power, Stalin could not be absolutely sure of success. In dealing with such an enormous mass of material, the effects of the experiment might differ from those obtained from a smaller sample. An unforeseen explosion might take place, a slippage in a geological fault, or even world-wide disclosure. In any case, Stalin had to remain innocent, his sacred vestments angelically pure.

These books you’re reading . . . I question your taste, Miss Twill.” She straightened the collar of his maroon coat. “I’ll read what I please, Mr. Thane.” “I have a suggestion,” he said with a wry smile, stepping away and glancing back at the sunset, which had already grown ruddier. “I have a dissertation on eighteenth-century Folding basics on interlibrary loan. It’s wonderfully dry and has all its nouns capitalized. I think you’ll enjoy it.” Ceony frowned. “You want me to study primitive Folding techniques?” “Only subprimitive,” he said, a smirk playing on his lips. “It never hurts to go back to basics, even if you think you know them.” “I do know them.” “Are you sure?” Ceony paused. “Is this a hint for my test?

When you have children, you have moved the center of your universe toward them. Whether by conscious desire or instinct, your first thought should be of them. Even if you are not sure about how you feel about your offspring because you have taken the creation of a new life so idly, you are in them; they are the ultimate legacy. To abandon them is to lop off your branch of the tree.

I'd attended a selective liberal arts college, trained at respectable research institutions, and even completed a dissertation for a doctoral degree. In our shared office, I'd tell new hires I was ABD, so they wouldn't feel their own situation was so bleak. If they saw a ten-year veteran adjunct with a PhD, they might lose hope of securing a permanent job. It was the least I could do, as a good American, to remind the young we were an innocent and optimistic country where everyone was entitled to a fulfilling career. To make sure they understood that PhD stood not for "piled higher and deeper" or "Pop has dough," but in fact the degree meant "professional happiness desired," and at the altruistic colleges of democratic America only the angry or sad ones need not apply.

Already the lecture is beginning to interest several dedicated people I know. One person who has promised to come (and bring several sharp friends, too) is a brilliant new contact I made during rush hour on the Jerome Avenue line. His name is Ongah, and he is an exchange student from Kenya who is writing a dissertation at N.Y.U. on the French symbolists of the 19th cent. Of course, you would not understand or like a brilliant and dedicated guy like Ongah. I could listen to him talk for hours. He is serious and does not come on with all of that pseudo stuff like you always did. What Ongah says is meaningful. Ongah is real and vital. He is virile and aggressive. He rips at reality and tears aside concealing veils. “Oh, my God!” Ignatius slobbered. “The minx has been raped by a Mau-Mau.

To keep awake at the awards ceremony the following day, I mentally thumbed through the pages of my dissertation and wondered if there was any way, here on the front line, to get it retyped. Too many trenches and sniper nests had left the pages soft and creased, and my section introducing the Pereyaslav Council had been splattered with blood when Kostia took a splinter wound across the back of his neck. He hadn’t been badly hurt—he stripped off his jacket and offered up his neck so I could stitch the cut myself, disinfecting the needle with vodka so he wouldn’t have to register at the medical battalion—but my poor dissertation, like Bogdan Khmelnitsky, had been through the wars . . . I snapped out of my musing when it came time to deliver my own (short!) speech of congratulations on behalf of 2nd Company.

A stack of Hawlatis on a ring-stained coffee table conjured the ardent recycler I’d broken up with two months before. Also on this table were an open can of Wild Tiger and a porcelain ashtray made to look like a crumpled Camels pack, completing a sort of Kurdish bachelor-pad tableau that inevitably led to comparisons with my own hermitic home life. But for a few moments there, distracted by the ashtray’s uncanny verisimilitude, I did succeed in not thinking about my singleness, nor about my dissertation, nor about when I was going to learn the results of my latest grant application and not about the long drive to Baghdad my parents and I were intending to make the following day—I was not even thinking about the drift and worthiness of my thinking—and I suppose another way of saying all this is I was happy.

Usually, rebellions are about saying: We are sick of the way things are— we want to create something new! What happens here, though, is: let’s accept the prevailing order— since we have suddenly realized that it is already subversive. If you feel uncomfortable about the state of things— just keep quiet! As it turns out, things are organized so rationally that resistance happens to be built into the status quo— all we have to do is realize it! Accordingly, pornography will do its own fighting for us since, in and of itself, it challenges the masculine hegemony, transforms society and reshapes our desires! (We must read at least one academic dissertation in order to understand this, however.) The purpose is not to initiate a revolt, but to legitimize the status quo. Saying that something has ‘subversive potential’ in this context is to give it a stamp of approval— not to demand action.

The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies. Appeals founded on generalizations and statistics require a sympathy ready-made, a moral sentiment already in activity; but a picture of human life such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment. When Scott takes us into Luckie Mucklebackit's cottage, or tells the story of The Two Drovers,—when Wordsworth sings to us the reverie of Poor Susan,—when Kingsley shows us Alton Locke gazing yearningly over the gate which leads from the highway into the first wood he ever saw,—when Harnung paints a group of chimney-sweepers,—more is done towards linking the higher classes with the lower, towards obliterating the vulgarity of exclusiveness, than by hundreds of sermons and philosophical dissertations.

I too was very busy. Thinking. I had decided to write a novel. It would be a big book, Tolstoyan in scale, Joycean in its ambition, Shakespearean in its lyricism. Twenty years hence, the book would be the subject of graduate seminars and doctoral dissertations. The book would join the Canon of Literature. Students would speak reverentially of the text, my text, in hushed, wondrous tones. Magazine profiles would begin with The reclusive literary giant J. Maarten Troost . . . I had already decided to be enigmatic, a mystery. People would speak of Salinger, Pynchon, and Troost. I wondered if I could arrange my citizenship so that I would win both the Booker and the Pulitzer for the same book. To get in the right state of mind, I read big books—Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie, Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, Ulysses by James Joyce (okay, I skimmed parts of that one). I read King Lear. Inexplicably, Sylvia thought I was procrastinating. And

His dissertation topic had been “The Influence of the Classical Tradition upon the Medieval Lyric.” He spent much of the summer rereading the classical and medieval Latin poets, and especially their poems upon death. He wondered again at the easy, graceful manner in which the Roman lyricists accepted the fact of death, as if the nothingness they faced were a tribute to the richness of the years they had enjoyed; and he marveled at the bitterness, the terror, the barely concealed hatred he found in some of the later Christian poets of the Latin tradition when they looked to that death which promised, however vaguely, a rich and ecstatic eternity of life, as if that death and promise were a mockery that soured the days of their living. When he thought of Masters, he thought of him as a Catullus or a more gentle and lyrical Juvenal, an exile in his own country, and thought of his death as another exile, more strange and lasting than he had known before.

Christine Gray wrote in her remarkable 1986 PhD dissertation, Thailand: The Soteriological State in the 1970s:   Any study of contemporary Thai society must account for the U.S. influence on that polity and the mutual denial of that influence. Thailand’s relationship with the United States is complex, heavily disguised and, in many instances, actively denied by the leaders of both countries...    In many cases, it is difficult if not impossible to determine the extent of American influence in Thailand. Thailand is a nation of secrets: of secret bombings and air bases during the Vietnam War, of secret military pacts and aid agreements, of secret business transactions and secret ownership of businesses and joint venture corporations. This is precisely the point; the American presence has taken on powerful cosmological, religious and even mythic overtones. The American influence on the Thai economy and polity has become a symbol of uncertainty, of men's inability to know the truth.

My dear mother: I have received everything in the way of food and necessaries in life unfortunately, too, your letter, which made me feel very wretched. Really these dissertations on Christianity and on opinions of this man and that as to what I should do and ought to think on the subject should no longer be directed to my address. My patience won't stand it! The atmosphere in which you live, among 'good Christians', with their one-sided and often presumptuous judgements, is as opposed as it possibly can be my own feelings and most remote aims. I do not say anything about it, but I know that if people of this kind, even including my mother and sister, had an inkling of what I am aiming at, they would have alternative but to become my natural enemies. This cannot be helped; the reasons for it lie in the nature of things. It spoils my love of life to live among such people, and I have to exercise considerable self-control in order to not react constantly against sanctimonious atmosphere . . .

Fr. Joseph is member of the missionary religious community located in the Diocese of Marquette, MI that enjoys the ecclesiastical approval of his local bishop and the added endorsements of two bishops of the Detroit Diocese. As an international association that promotes the Church’s mystical tradition, the missionary community provides solo-wilderness retreats at the CCL (Companions of Christ the Lamb) spiritual center that spans well over 1,000 acres of verdure in the village of Paradise, MI. Those interested in making solo-wilderness retreats to deepen their union with God’s Divine Will may contact Fr. Joseph at soulofjesus@juno.com.  Fr. Joseph is presently completing a dissertation on the writings and doctrines of the Servant of God Luisa Piccarreta at the Pontifical University of Rome. He is the author of five books on mystical and dogmatic theology, the initiator of international Divine Will communities and instructor on the proper theological presentation of the mystical gift of Living in God’s Divine Will. 

[Phone interview transcript between author Roorda & Vershawn A. Young, author of Your Average Nigga: Performing Race, Literacy, and Masculinity, a book based on his Ph.D dissertation] Now the subtitle, Performing Race, Literacy, and Masculinity, what does that cover? It covers the range of enactments in speech, in dress, in the way we behave, the way that we interact with other people. Basically, it is the range of enactments that black people have to go through to be successful in America. I call it the burden of racial performance that black people are required, not only by whites but by other blacks as well, to prove through their behaviors, their speech, and their actions the kind of black person that they are. Really, there are only two kinds you can be. In the words of comedian Chris Rock, you can either be a black person, which is a respectable, bourgeois, middle-class black person, or you can be a nigger. As Chris Rock says in his show, "I love black people, but I hate niggers." So . . . when a black person walks into a room, always in the other person's mind is the question "What kind of black person is this in front of me?" They are looking for clues in your speech, in your demeanor, in your behavior, and in everything that you do -- it is like they are hyperattentive to your ways of being in order to say, "Okay, this is a real black person. I can trust them. I'll let them work here. Or, nope: this is a nigger, look at the spelling of their name: Shaniqua or Daquandre." We get discriminated against based on our actions. So that is what the subtitle was trying to suggest in performing race. And in performing literacy, just what is the prescribed means for increasing our class status? A mind-set: "Okay, black people, you guys have no excuse. You can go to school and get an education like everybody else." I wanted to pay attention to the ways in which school perpetuated a structural racism through literacy, the way in which it sort of stigmatizes and oppresses blackness in a space where it claims it is opening up opportunities for black people.

It’s clear that writing is a useful skill for any designer. Yet apart from a final-year dissertation or research paper, graphic designers are not encouraged to write at design school. This is odd, since words are the designer’s raw materials, much as coal is the raw material of the coal miner. Designers often say they can’t write. This is also odd, since many designers have a verbal facility for sharp phrases and economical expression. Most designers are better with words than they realize. This shyness with written language is partly caused by designers believing that they need to do everything visually. There’s a fear that they are betraying their design skills if they exhibit language skills. Yet the ability to handle text is a priceless attribute. Just think how often we struggle to make coherent typographic statements when forced to work with clumsy language: think of all those tortuous line breaks and bad configurations of type that could be eliminated with a few text edits. The ability to suggest and make text changes can often rescue work from second-rate status.

As I got to know many of the engineers at Apple, I was somewhat amused to discover that almost all of them played an instrument. Of course coders and players would be fascinated and comfortable with the mathematical nature of music. I guess it was more unusual for a successful musician to suddenly commit to learning the alien skill of composing in code, but as the technology penetrated the public consciousness at large it couldn’t help but hook in a few players who would succumb to that, which lured me to music- creating something from nothing.

Eliot's own reflections on the primitive mind as a model for nondualistic thinking and on the nature and consequences of different modes of consciousness were informed by an excellent education in the social sciences and philosophy. As a prelude to our guided tour of the text of The Waste Land, we now turn to a brief survey of some of his intellectual preoccupations in the decade before he wrote it, preoccupations which in our view are enormously helpful in understanding the form of the poem. Eliot entered Harvard as a freshman in 1906 and finished his doctoral dissertation in 1916, with one of the academic years spent at the Sorbonne and one at Oxford. At Harvard and Oxford, he had as teachers some of modern philosophy's most distinguished individuals, including George Santayana, Josiah Royce, Bertrand Russell, and Harold Joachim; and while at the Sorbonne, he attended the lectures of Henri Bergson, a philosophic star in Paris in 1910-11. Under the supervision of Royce, Eliot wrote his dissertation on the epistemology of F. H. Bradley, a major voice in the late-nineteenth-, early-twentieth-century crisis in philosophy. Eliot extended this period of concentration on philosophical problems by devoting much of his time between 1915 and the early twenties to book reviewing. His education and early book reviewing occurred during the period of epistemological disorientation described in our first chapter, the period of "betweenness" described by Heidegger and Ortega y Gasset, the period of the revolt against dualism described by Lovejoy. 2 Eliot's personal awareness of the contemporary epistemological crisis was intensified by the fact that while he was writing his dissertation on Bradley he and his new wife were actually living with Bertrand Russell. Russell as the representative of neorealism and Bradley as the representative of neoidealism were perhaps the leading expositors of opposite responses to the crisis discussed in our first chapter. Eliot's situation was extraordinary. He was a close student of both Bradley and Russell; he had studied with Bradley's friend and disciple Harold Joachim and with Russell himself. And in 1915-16, while writing a dissertation explaining and in general defending Bradley against Russell, Eliot found himself face to face with Russell across the breakfast table. Moreover, as the husband of a fragile wife to whom both men (each in his own way) were devoted, Eliot must have found life to be a kaleidoscope of brilliant and fluctuating patterns.

Louis de Broglie, who carried the title of prince by virtue of being related to the deposed French royal family, studied history in hopes of being a civil servant. But after college, he became fascinated by physics. His doctoral dissertation in 1924 helped transform the field. If a wave can behave like a particle, he asked, shouldn’t a particle also behave like a wave? In other words, Einstein had said that light should be regarded not only as a wave but also as a particle. Likewise, according to de Broglie, a particle such as an electron could also be regarded as a wave. “I had a sudden inspiration,” de Broglie later recalled. “Einstein’s wave-particle dualism was an absolutely general phenomenon extending to all of physical nature, and that being the case the motion of all particles—photons, electrons, protons or any other—must be associated with the propagation of a wave.”46 Using Einstein’s law of the photoelectric affect, de Broglie showed that the wavelength associated with an electron (or any particle) would be related to Planck’s constant divided by the particle’s momentum. It turns out to be an incredibly tiny wavelength, which means that it’s usually relevant only to particles in the subatomic realm, not to such things as pebbles or planets or baseballs.

So the way to think about the problem is this. You and I and computers and bacteria and viruses and everything else material are made of molecules and atoms, which are themselves composed of particles like electrons and quarks. Schrodinger's equation works for electrons and quarks, and all evidence points to its working for things made of these constituents, regardless of the number of particles involved. This means that Schrodinger's equation should continue to apply during a measurement. After all, a measurement is just one collection of particles (the person, the equipment, the computer...) coming into contact with another (the particle or particles being measured). But if that's the case, if Schrodinger's math refuses to bow down, then Bohr is in trouble. Schrodinger's equation doesn't allow waves to collapse. An essential element of the Copenhagen approach would therefore be undermined. So the third question is this: If the reasoning just recounted is right and probability waves don't collapse, how do we pass from the range of possible outcomes that exist before a measurement to the single outcome the measurement reveals? Or to put it in more general terms, what happens to a probability wave during a measurement that allows a familiar, definite, unique reality to take hold? Everett pursued this question in his Princeton doctoral dissertation and came to an unforeseen conclusion.

For the nature of duration is such that a greater or lesser than a given duration can always be conceived, as is the case with number. You will perhaps insist that God has been from eternity and so has endured until the present, and thus there is a duration other than which a greater cannot be conceived. But in this way there is attributed to God a duration consisting of parts, which we have abundantly refuted when we demonstrated that there pertains to God not duration, but eternity. Would that men had thoroughly considered this truth, for then they might very easily have extricated themselves from many arguments and absurdities, and have given themselves up with the greatest delight to the blessed contemplation of this being.

This may be the time to address a problem that afflicts even experienced researchers and at some point will probably afflict you. As you shuffle through hundreds of notes and a dozen lines of thought, you start feeling that you’re not just spinning your wheels but spiraling down into a black hole of confusion, paralyzed by what seems to be an increasingly complex and ultimately unmanageable task. The bad news is that there’s no sure way to avoid such moments. The good news is that most of us have them and they usually pass. Yours will too if you keep moving along, following your plan, taking on small and manageable tasks instead of trying to confront the complexity of the whole project. It’s another reason to start early, to break a big project into its smallest steps, and to set achievable deadlines,

Palo Mayombe is perhaps best known for its display of human skulls in iron cauldrons and accompanied by necromantic practices that contribute to its eerie reputation of being a cult of antinomian and hateful sorcerers. This murky reputation is from time to time reinforced by uninformed journalists and moviemakers who present Palo Mayombe in similar ways as Vodou has been presented through the glamour and horror of Hollywood. It is the age old fear of the unknown and of powers that threaten the established order that are spawned from the umbra of Palo Mayombe. The cult is marked by ambivalence replicating an intense spectre of tension between all possible contrasts, both spiritual and social. This is evident both in the history of Kongo inspired sorcery and practices as well as the tension between present day practitioners and the spiritual conclaves of the cult. Palo Mayombe can be seen either as a religion in its own right or a Kongo inspired cult. This distinction perhaps depends on the nature of ones munanso (temple) and rama (lineage). Personally, I see Palo Mayombe as a religious cult of Creole Sorcery developed in Cuba. The Kongolese heritage derives from several different and distinct regions in West Africa that over time saw a metamorphosis of land, cultures and religions giving Palo Mayombe a unique expression in its variety, but without losing its distinct nucleus. In the history of Palo Mayombe we find elite families of Kongolese aristocracy that contributed to shaping African history and myth, conflicts between the Kongolese and explorers, with the Trans-Atlantic slave trade being the blood red thread in its development. The name Palo Mayombe is a reference to the forest and nature of the Mayombe district in the upper parts of the deltas of the Kongo River, what used to be the Kingdom of Loango. For the European merchants, whether sent by the Church to convert the people or by a king greedy for land and natural resources, everything south of present day Nigeria to the beginning of the Kalahari was simply Kongo. This un-nuanced perception was caused by the linguistic similarities and of course the prejudice towards these ‘savages’ and their ‘primitive’ cultures. To write a book about Palo Mayombe is a delicate endeavor as such a presentation must be sensitive both to the social as well as the emotional memory inherited by the religion. I also consider it important to be true to the fundamental metaphysical principles of the faith if a truthful presentation of the nature of Palo Mayombe is to be given. The few attempts at presenting Palo Mayombe outside ethnographic and anthropological dissertations have not been very successful. They have been rather fragmented attempts demonstrating a lack of sensitivity not only towards the cult itself, but also its roots. Consequently a poor understanding of Palo Mayombe has been offered, often borrowing ideas and concepts from Santeria and Lucumi to explain what is a quite different spirituality. I am of the opinion that Palo Mayombe should not be explained on the basis of the theological principles of Santeria. Santeria is Yoruba inspired and not Kongo inspired and thus one will often risk imposing concepts on Palo Mayombe that distort a truthful understanding of the cult. To get down to the marrow; Santeria is a Christianized form of a Yoruba inspired faith – something that should make the great differences between Santeria and Palo Mayombe plain. Instead, Santeria is read into Palo Mayombe and the cult ends up being presented at best in a distorted form. I will accordingly refrain from this form of syncretism and rather present Palo Mayombe as a Kongo inspired cult of Creole Sorcery that is quite capable

Inflation is not caused by increasing the fiduciary circulation. It begins on the day when the purchaser is obliged to pay, for the same goods, a higher sum than that asked the day before. At that point, one must intervene. Even to Schacht, I had to begin by explaining this elementary truth: that the essential cause of the stability of our currency was to be sought for in our concentration camps. The currency remains stable when the speculators are put under lock and key. I also had to make Schacht understand that excess profits must be removed from economic circulation. I do not entertain the illusion that I can pay for everything out of my available funds. Simply, I've read a lot, and I've known how to profit by the experience of events in the past. Frederick the Great, already, had gradually withdrawn his devaluated thalers from circulation, and had thus re established the value of his currency. All these things are simple and natural. The only thing is, one mustn't let the Jew stick his nose in. The basis of Jewish commercial policy is to make matters incomprehensible for a normal brain. People go into ecstasies of confidence before the science of the great economists. Anyone who doesn't understand is taxed with ignorance! At bottom, the only object of all these notions is to throw everything into confusion. The very simple ideas that happen to be mine have nowadays penetrated into the flesh and blood of millions. Only the professors don't understand that the value of money depends on the goods behind that money. One day I received some workers in the great hall at Obersalzberg, to give them an informal lecture on money. The good chaps understood me very well, and rewarded me with a storm of applause. To give people money is solely a problem of making paper. The whole question is to know whether the workers are producing goods to match the paper that's made. If work does not increase, so that production remains at the same level, the extra money they get won't enable them to buy more things than they bought before with less money. Obviously, that theory couldn't have provided the material for a learned dissertation. For a distinguished economist, the thing is, no matter what you're talking about, to pour out ideas in complicated meanderings and to use terms of Sibylline incomprehensibility.

Raphael pulled out a paperback and handed it to me. The cover, done back in the time when computer-aided imagine manipulation had risen to the level of art, featured an impossibly handsome man, leaning forward, one foot in a huge black boot resting on the carcass of some monstrous sea creature. His hair flowed down to his shoulders in a mane of white gold, in stark contrast to his tanned skin and the rakish black patch hiding his left eye. His white, translucent shirt hung open, revealing abs of steel and a massive, perfectly carved chest graced by erect nipples. His muscled thighs strained the fabric of his pants, which were unbuttoned and sat loosely on his narrow hips, a touch of a strategically positioned shadow hinting at the world’s biggest boner. The cover proclaimed in loud golden letters: The Privateer’s Virgin Mistress, by Lorna Sterling. “Novel number four for Andrea’s collection?” I guessed. Raphael nodded and took the book from my hands. “I’ve got the other one Andrea wanted, too. Can you explain something to me?” Oh boy. “I can try.” He tapped the book on his leather-covered knee. “The pirate actually holds this chick’s brother for ransom, so she’ll sleep with him. These men, they aren’t real men. They’re pseudo-bad guys just waiting for the love of a ‘good’ woman.” “You actually read the books?” He gave me a chiding glance. “Of course I read the books. It’s all pirates and the women they steal, apparently so they can enjoy lots of sex and have somebody to run their lives.” Wow. He must’ve had to hide under his blanket with a flashlight so nobody would question his manliness. Either he really was in love with Andrea or he had a terminal case of lust. “These guys, they’re all bad and aggressive as shit, and everybody wets themselves when they walk by, and then they meet some girl and suddenly they’re not uber-alphas; they are just misunderstood little boys who want to talk about their feelings.” “Is there a point to this dissertation?” He faced me. “I can’t be that. If that’s what she wants, then I shouldn’t even bother.” I sighed. “Do you have a costume kink? French maid, nurse . . .” “Catholic school girl.” Bingo. “You wouldn’t mind Andrea wearing a Catholic school uniform, would you?” “No, I wouldn’t.” His eyes glazed over and he slipped off to some faraway place. I snapped my fingers. “Raphael! Focus.” He blinked at me. “I’m guessing—and this is just a wild stab in the dark—that Andrea might not mind if once in a while you dressed up as a pirate. But I wouldn’t advise holding her relatives for ransom nookie. She might shoot you in the head. Several times. With silver bullets.

Quant à l’oeuvre, les problèmes qu’elle soulève sont plus difficiles encore. En apparence pourtant, quoi de plus simple ? Une somme de textes qui peuvent être dénotés par le signe d’un nom propre. Or cette dénotation (même si on laisse de côté les problèmes de l’attribution) n’est pas une fonction homogène : le nom d’un auteur dénote-t-il de la même façon un texte qu’il a lui-même publié sous son nom, un texte qu’il a présenté sous un pseudonyme, un autre qu’on aura retrouvé après sa mort à l’état d’ébauche, un autre encore qui n’est qu’un griffonnage, un carnet de notes, un « papier » ? La constitution d’une oeuvre complète ou d’un opus suppose un certain nombre de choix qu’il n’est pas facile de justifier ni même de formuler : suffit-il d’ajouter aux textes publiés par l’auteur ceux qu’il projetait de donner à l’impression, et qui ne sont restés inachevés quer par le fait de la mort ? Faut-il intégrer aussi tout ce qui est brouillon, fait de la mort ? Faut-il intégrer aussi tout ce qui est brouillon, premier dessein, corrections et ratures des livres ? Faut-il ajouter les esquisses abandonnées? Et quel status donner aux lettres, aux notes, aux conversations rapportées, aux propos transcrits par les auditeurs, bref à cet immense fourmillement de traces verbales qu’un individu laisse autour de lui au moment de mourir, et qui parlent dans un entrecroisement indéfini tant de langages différents ? En tout cas le nom « Mallarmé » ne se réfère pas de la même façon aux thèmes anglais, aux trauctions d’Edgar Poe, aux poèmes, ou aux réponses à des enquêtes ; de même, ce n’est pas le même rapport qui existe entre le nom de Nietzsche d’une part et d’autre par les autobiographies de jeunesse, les dissertations scolaires, les articles philologiques, Zarathoustra, Ecce Homo, les lettres, les dernières cartes postales signées par « Dionysos » ou « Kaiser Nietzsche », les innombrables carnets où s’enchevêtrent les notes de blanchisserie et les projets d’aphorismes. En fait, si on parle si volontiers et sans s’interroger davantage de l’« oeuvre » d’un auteur, c’est qu’on la suppose définie par une certaine fonction d’expression. On admet qu’il doit y avoir un niveau (aussi profond qu’il est nécessaire de l’imaginer) auquel l’oeuvre se révèle, en tous ses fragments, même les plus minuscules et les plus inessentiels, comme l’expression de la pensée, ou de l’expérience, ou de l’imagination, ou de l’inconscient de l’auteur, ou encore des déterminations historiques dans lesquelles il était pris. Mais on voit aussitôt qu’une pareille unité, loin d’être donné immédiatement, est constituée par une opération ; que cette opération est interprétative (puisqu’elle déchiffre, dans le texte, la transcription de quelque chose qu’il cache et qu’il manifeste à la fois); qu’enfin l’opération qui détermine l’opus, en son unité, et par conséquent l’oeuvre elle-même ne sera pas la même s’il s’agit de l’auteur du Théâtre et son double ou de l’auteur du Tractatus et donc, qu’ici et là ce n’est pas dans le même sens qu’on parlera d’une « oeuvre ». L’oeuvre ne peut être considérée ni comme unité immédiate, ni comme une unité certaine, ni comme une unité homogène.

After this manner conceive that a flatterer differs from a friend: for it often happens to both that they engage in the same employments and the same associations; but the one differs from the other in use, in the end, and in the disposition of the soul: for the friend considers that which appears to him to be good to belong also in common to his friend; and, whether this proves to be painful or pleasant, he partakes equally of it with him; but the flatterer, following his own desires, conducts the association to his own advantage. The friend desires an equality of good, the flatterer his own private good. The one aspires after equal honour in virtue, the other after superiority in pleasure. The one in conversation desires an equal freedom of speech, the other servile submission. The one loves truth in association, the other deception; and the one looks to future emolument, but the other to present delight. The one requires to be reminded of his good actions, the other wishes them to be involved in oblivion. The one takes care of the possessions of his friend, as of things common, the other destroys them, as being the property of another. The company of a friend in prosperity is most opportune, and in calamity is most equal; but a flatterer can never be satiated with prosperity, and in adversity he is never to be seen. Friendship is laudable, flattery detestable; for friendship attends to equality of retribution, but this flattery mutilates: for he who pays servile attention to another through indigence, that his wants may be supplied, so far as he does not receive an equal submission in return, will reprobate the inequality. A friend, when his friendship is concealed, is unhappy; on the contrary, a flatterer is miserable when is flattery is not concealed. Friendship when tried is strengthened, flattery is confuted, by time. Friendship requires not to be corroborated by advantage, but flattery cannot subsist without profit; and if men have any communion with the divinities, the pious man is a friend to divinity, but the superstitious is a flatterer of divinity; and the pious man is blessed, but the superstitious is miserable.

I no longer remember which psychiatrist wrote a dissertation demonstrating that the assassins hadn’t lost their moral bearings: they knew how to discern Good and Evil; it was the sense of reality that was missing. In their eyes, the victims did not belong to humankind;

The aporia that marks like a thin crack the wonderful order of the medieval cos- mos now begins to become more visible. Things are ordered insofar as they have a specific relation among themselves, but this relation is nothing other than the expression of their relation to the divine end. And, vice versa, things are ordered insofar as they have a certain relation to God, but this relation expresses itself only by means of the reciprocal relation of things. The only content of the transcendent order is the immanent order, but the meaning of the immanent order is nothing other than the relation to the transcendent end. “Ordo ad finem” and “ordo ad invicem” refer back to one another and found themselves on one another. The perfect theocentric edifice of medieval ontology is based on this circle, and does not have any consistency outside of it. The Christian God is this circle, in which the two orders continuously penetrate one another. Since that which the order must keep united is in point of fact irremediably divided, not only is ordo—like Aristotle’s being—dicitur multipliciter (this is the title of Kurt Flasch’s dissertation on Thomas), but ordo also reproduces in its own structure the ambi-guity that it must face. From this follows the contradiction, noticed by scholars, according to which Thomas at times founds the order of the world in the unity of God, and at times the unity of God in the immanent order of creatures (see Silva Tarouca, p. 350). This apparent contradiction is nothing other than the expression of the ontological fracture between transcendence and immanence, which Christian theology inherits and develops from Aristotelianism. If we push to the limit the paradigm of the separate substance, we have the Gnosis, with its God foreign to the world and creation; if we follow to the end the paradigm of immanence, we have pantheism. Between these two extremes, the idea of order tries to think a difficult balance, which Christian theology is always in the pro- cess of losing and which it must at each turn regain.

Writing a dissertation is very much like being in a long-term relationship: there are likely to be some very good times and some perfectly dreadful ones, and it’s a big help if you like what you’ve chosen.

Your personal character is your strongest asset and, potentially, your most taxing liability.

For most of us, it isn’t heresy or rank apostasy that will derail our profession of faith. It’s all the worries of life. You’ve got car repairs. Then your water heater goes out. The kids need to see a doctor. You haven’t done your taxes yet. Your checkbook isn’t balanced. You’re behind on thank you notes. You promised your mother you’d come over and fix a faucet. You’re behind on wedding planning. Your boards are coming up. You have more applications to send out. Your dissertation is due. Your refrigerator is empty. Your lawn needs mowing. Your curtains don’t look right. Your washing machine keeps rattling. This is life for most of us, and it’s choking out spiritual life.

Umberto Eco's first published book was the dissertation he wrote at the University of Turin, on problems of aesthetics in the work of Saint Thomas Aquinas.

That damned dissertation, stuck in the same place for over a week while he struggled to elucidate the connections between Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde, only to find the whole thing, even what he thought were his most original points, laid out, item for item, in a monograph over twenty years old. What was the point, he thought, of sitting in that stuffy library all day, every day, grinding out dozens of pages of useless “scholarly” prose, to be read by dyspeptic Frank Dunlop, and three other people in the department, and then buried forever in the stacks of the university library. Why was he wasting his time, his mind, his life itself. When he’d tried to explain what he was doing to Leah, one day when she brought him his lunch on a tray, she’d regarded him with a look of such utter incomprehension—not confused, not respectful, not derogatory, just uncomprehending—that he’d been paralyzed in his chair for hours after. Maybe hers was the legitimate, the reasonable, reaction to what he was doing, the reaction of anyone who knew what life was all about—that it wasn’t dropping into a chair each day, banished from the sun and the sky and the trees, to pound a tinny machine and clutter up sheets of paper. More and more, he had been feeling the urge to spend his time outdoors, to breathe the air off the water, to bask in the sun, even to run, barefoot, across the lawns and through the groves of trees.

beautiful things don’t always make the best subjects for papers. Number one, research must be original — and as anyone who has written a PhD dissertation knows, the way to be sure you’re exploring virgin territory is to stake out a piece of ground that no one wants. Number two, research must be substantial — and awkward systems yield meatier papers, because you can write about the obstacles you have to overcome in order to get things done. Nothing yields meaty problems like starting with the wrong assumptions.

Civilization is tolerance, detachment and humor, or passion, anger, revenge; culture is the entrance examination, the gas chamber, the doctoral dissertation and the electric chair;

You know who she was? My intellect. When I opened the door and there she stood, with her sassy red reading glasses and fitted skirt and leather bookbag, I thought, who the hell are you? Crouching into a defensive posture and looking at her warily out of the corner of my eye. Watch out, woman. To which she replied, I’m Lidia. I have a desire toward language and knowledge that will blow your mind. And I’m here to write a dissertation. Yeah. Right. Whatever. And anyway, where did you even come from?

Some researchers seem never able to finish, thinking they have to keep working until their paper, dissertation, or book is perfect. That perfect paper has never been written and never will be. All you can do is to make yours as good as you can in the time available. When you’ve done that, you can say to yourself: Reader, after my best efforts, here’s what I believe—not the whole or final truth, but a truth important to me and I hope to you.

In 1982 Abbas matriculated in the doctoral program at the Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow. The title of his dissertation was The Connection Between the Nazis and the Leaders of the Zionist Movement, 1933–1945. In 1984 he published his thesis as a book in Arabic under the title The Other Side: The Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism. In both works, Abbas wrote that the Holocaust was a joint initiative of the Nazis and the Zionist movement. He alleged that the European Jews who were killed were actually the victims of the Jews from pre-state Israel who were in cahoots with the Germans.5 In his words, “A partnership was established between Hitler’s Nazis and the leadership of the Zionist movement.… [The Zionists gave] permission to every racist in the world, led by Hitler and the Nazis, to treat Jews as they wish, so long as it guarantees immigration to Palestine.” Abbas wrote that the Zionists wanted as many Jews as possible to be killed. “Having more victims,” he wrote, “meant greater rights and stronger privilege to join the negotiation table for dividing the spoils of war once it was over. However, since Zionism was not a fighting partner—suffering victims in a battle—it had no escape but to offer up human beings, under any name, to raise the number of victims, which they could then boast of at the moment of accounting.” Abbas denied that six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. This too was a Zionist plot. “The truth is that no one can either confirm or deny

There’s a reason “dissertation” shares so many letters with “desert.” Both are lonely, boring places where dreams go to die. (Sorry, Arizona. You know I’m right. Turquoise jewelry can only do so much.) The first part of a doctoral program isn’t as isolating. There are more people involved in the coursework for the degree. You have professors, classmates, and a support network that moves you along. But once you’re finished with that part of your degree, you head out into the wasteland of your dissertation. Those can drag on for years and years because you’re the only one pulling yourself toward the finish line. How do you know it’s done? How do you stay motivated? How do you make it a priority when the rest of life gets loud?

Andy put the note in his pocket. “Much to think about,” he said out loud. This was a thing that one of their TAs had liked to say at the end of every class, back in undergrad. There’d been a certain intonation, and it had cracked Hannah and Andy up all semester. They’d said it to each other all the time. It had been the working title of Hannah’s dissertation.

Kilgore Trout was born in a hospital in Bermuda, near where his father, Raymond, was gathering material for a follow-up on his doctoral dissertation on the last of the Bermuda Erns. The sole remaining rookery of those great blue birds, the largest of all pelagic raptors, was on Dead Man’s Rock, an otherwise uninhabited lava steeple in the center of the notorious Bermuda Triangle. Trout was in fact conceived on Dead Man’s Rock during his parents’ honeymoon.

Gabor Maté, in his book In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, offered this definition of addiction, which I have used ever since I read it, even in my dissertation. “Addiction is any repeated behavior, substance-related or not, in which a person feels compelled to persist, regardless of its negative impact on his life and the lives of others.

A handsome, cosmopolitan forty-three-year-old, Gebhardt had been a decorated World War I flying ace, serving in the squadron of Manfred von Richthofen, the legendary “Red Baron.” Following the war, he had earned his doctorate degree in political economy from Frankfurt University with a dissertation on “The International Trade in Machinery.” After a brief teaching stint, he had gone into business, earning a fortune in the automobile and locomotive industries before establishing a highly successful import-export firm that specialized in “exchanging German raw material for American commodities.” Charming, cultured, fluent in several languages, he also harbored political ambitions and had hopes of being named German ambassador to the United States—a fair expectation, given his close friendship with high Nazi officials, particularly Hermann Göring, a fellow Richthofen pilot during the Great War.9

Avec M. Charlier, avec les livres, j'avais fini par croire que pour être philosophe il suffisait de procéder à deux opérations simples : d'abord choisir un terme abstrait, ensuite le faire précéder, comme un nom roturier d'une particule, du mot « idée ». Disserter sur la nature, c'eût été rester dans les Belles Lettres ; méditer sur l'idée de Nature, c'était déjà philosopher. Quand nous serions capables de faire tenir ensemble dans leur opposition l'Homme et la Nature, nous aurions conquis nos galons de dialecticiens. La philosophie était une activité noble garantie par la noblesse de ses objets.

Statistical analysis and consulting has always been at the core of the SilverLakeConsult.com, basically it have a dual focus, supporting research in the education and business sectors. For our PhD dissertation candidates and faculty pursuing journal publication, we provide editing, consulting (both qualitative and statistical), and research support services which indicate statistical analysis and expert testimony along with high-end academic consultation and editing services.

Levi’s wrestling bears or climbing trees or whatever he does up there. Daniel’s making beer and ferrying Rusty to ballet class. Seth’s doing the paperwork and trying to stay out of trouble. Caleb’s in California, hiking part of the Pacific Crest Trail before he starts working on his dissertation this fall.

the first is the Austrian historian Rolf Bauer, whose book The Peasant Production of Opium in Nineteenth-Century India was published in 2019. The second is Matthew Wormer, an American, whose dissertation, titled ‘Opium, Economic Thought, and the Making of Britain’s Free Trade Empire, 1773–1839’, earned him a PhD in history from Stanford in 2022.

Holy fuckballs. You know what this means, don’t you?” Alistair raised one fine, dark brow. “That we’ll be having acrobatic sex for several centuries, at least?” Nate whacked Alistair lightly on the chest. “No, you stupid lizard. It means I’ll finally have time to read all the books! Not to mention finish my dissertation.

a step forward is the realization that the problem must be posed differently in order to be resolved. Students writing their doctoral dissertations under my supervision are often surprised that after three years of work, the content of their thesis is not the solution to the problem posed at the outset. If the problem had been well posed, it wouldn’t have taken three years to solve it.

most Obligers can’t self-generate outer accountability; they must find true external sources. They need accountability to feel real. As one Obliger put it: I respond poorly to “gimmicky” accountability. If someone is holding me accountable as a way of doing me a favor and helping me to achieve a goal, I know I have no real obligation to that person. When I was working on my doctoral dissertation, I had frequent check-ins with my thesis adviser—but never had much progress to show. We both knew I was behind, and my adviser was disappointed, but I knew that my lack of progress didn’t matter to her career. There were no consequences for her, just for me. In the end, the only thing that helped was to find another person in the same program who was struggling with the same procrastination problem. We’d hold each other accountable—and I knew that if I dropped the ball or didn’t show up, then my partner would lose the feeling of accountability and stop working, too.

The organization presented here, however, works for many student research projects. Keep in mind that advisors, committee members, and potentially external reviewers will evaluate the final proposal on clarity, content, and whether specified guidelines are met. The following is the content and organization I recommend: 1.   A cover page, which contains the title, your name, committee member names, and the date 2.   An introduction to the problem describing the general scope of the project and why it is important 3.   A literature review synthesizing prior research and describing the theoretical framework of your research 4.   Specific objectives or research questions and hypotheses (when appropriate) your proposal addresses 5.   A detailed description of your research methods, including data collection and analytical approaches 6. Project significance and implications 7.   An annotated time line for the anticipated completion of the research 8. An alphabetized list of references 9. Appendix (optional)

Proposal Writing Activities

How do you supervise a student's dissertation when you, as the (PhD) supervisor, can't write or publish a paper?

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M. Romains had taken many journeys in his country’s interest and at his own expense. He had talked with the statesmen of fourteen European lands. Three years ago he had traveled to Berlin and delivered a lecture under government auspices. Brownshirted leaders had been summoned from all over the land to hear him, and one of the top-flight Nazis had said to him: “You know, no private individual has ever been received like this in Berlin.” The philosopher-novelist had also been welcomed by the King of the Belgians, who had discussed frankly that country’s attitude to the gravely threatened war. As M. Romains told about these matters, you couldn’t doubt that he was patriotically in earnest, but also you couldn’t help feeling that he was intensely impressed by his own importance. His plan was the one known as le couple France-Allemagne, and it meant reconcilation with Germany, by the simple method of giving the Nazis whatever they demanded. For example, he had had the idea that the Allies should have got out of the Saar without the formality of a plebiscite. Lanny happened to know that Briand had been trying to work out some compromise on this question as far back as ten years ago; but apparently M. Romains didn’t know that, and certainly it wasn’t up to Lanny to correct him on his facts. The philosopher-novelist seemed to have the idea that the Saar settlement had been a matter between France and Germany, and that the plebiscite had taken place under French military control, whereas the fact was it had been a League matter, and French troops had been withdrawn nine years before the plebiscite was held. Among the members of that attentive audience was Kurt Meissner, who had met the Frenchman many years ago in Emily’s drawing-room. Evidently he had put his opportunity to good use, for it was just as if M. Romains had sat in a seminar conducted by the Wehrmacht’s agent, had absorbed the entire doctrine, and was now giving an oral dissertation to demonstrate what he had learned and get his degree. His discourse embraced the complete Nazi program for the undermining of the French republic: warm protestations of friendship; unlimited promises of peace; the sowing of distrust of all politicians and of the entire democratic procedure; and, above all else, fear of the Red specter. The Reds kept faith with nobody, their country was a colossus with feet of clay, their army a broken reed upon which France persisted in trying to lean. The republic had to choose between Stalin and Hitler; between an illusory military alliance and a secure and enduring peace. The words burned Lanny’s tongue: “M. Romains, have you ever read Mein Kampf?” Of course, Lanny couldn’t say them; but he wondered, how would this somewhat self-conscious idol of the bourgeois world have replied? Lanny recalled the Max Beerbohm cartoon in which a drawing-room fop is asked if he has read a certain book, and replies: “I do not read books; I write them.

Early on in your career, when you’re an individual contributor, you’re graded on the volume and quality of your work. Then one day, all of a sudden, you’re a manager. Let’s assume you do well and move up to manage more and more people. Now you’re no longer paid for the amount of work you do; you’re paid for the quality of decisions you make. But no one tells you the rules have changed. When you hit a wall, you think, I’ll just work harder—that’s what got me here. What you should do is more counterintuitive: Stop for a moment and shut out the noise. Close your eyes to really see what’s in front of you, and then pick the best way forward for you and your team, relative to the organization’s needs. What’s neat about OKRs is that they formalize reflection. At least once each quarter, they make contributors step back into a quiet place and consider how their decisions align with the company. People start thinking in the macro. They become more pointed and precise, because you can’t write a ninety-page OKR dissertation. You have to choose three to five things and exactly how they should be measured. Then when the day comes and someone says, “Okay, you’re a manager,” you’ve already learned how to think like one. And that’s huge.

When a society is rich people don't need to work with their hands; they can devote themselves to activities of spirit. We have more and more universities and more and more students. If students are going to earn degrees, they've got to come up with dissertation topics. And since dissertations can be written about everything under the sun, the number of topics is infinite. Sheets of paper pile up in archives sadder than cemeteries, because no one ever visits them, not even on All Souls' Day. Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity. That's why one banned book in your former country means infinitely more than the billions of words spewed out by our universities.

If you want to know why modern man has settled on a base-10 number system, just spread your hands and count the digits. All creatures develop a number system based on their basic counting equipment; for us, that means our ten fingers. The Mayans, who went around barefoot, used a base-20 (vigesimal) number system; their calendars employ twenty different digits. The ancient Babylonians, who counted on their two arms as well as their ten fingers, devised a base-12 number system that still lives today in the methods we use to tell time and buy eggs. Someday a diligent grad student doing interdisciplinary work in mathematics and the history of film may produce a dissertation demonstrating that the residents of E.T.’s planet use an octal number system; the movie shows plainly that E.T. has eight fingers. For earthbound humans, however, the handy counting system is base-10.

Think Phrasal. This is an area where just about every business needs more work. Words are powerful, but more words are not more powerful—they’re often just confusing. Understand that in your company’s internal business and in communications with your customers, dissertations don’t necessarily prove smarts. In fact, they tend to drive people away. Though many writers never seem to grasp the point, using intelligent words does not necessarily make you appear smarter. The best way to make yourself or your company look smart is to express an idea simply and with perfect clarity. No matter who your audience is, it’s more effective to communicate as people do naturally. In simple sentences. Using simple words. Simplicity is its own form of cleverness—saying a great deal by saying little. Apple’s website is a primer for intelligence in communications. There is a cleverness in writing that runs throughout, but much of the feeling of Apple’s “smarts” comes from its brevity and straightforwardness. In a world where too many people are trying too hard, Simplicity can be extremely refreshing. The same can be said for product naming. Simple and natural names stick with people, while jargon and model numbers do not. If you wish people to form a relationship with your product, it needs a name people can naturally associate with. Product naming is one area in which Simplicity pays immediate returns.

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When a society is rich, its people don't need to work with their hands; they can devote themselves to activities of the spirit. We have more and more universities and more and more students. If students are going to earn degrees, they've got to come up with dissertation topics. And since dissertations can be written about everything under the sun, the number of topics is infinite. Sheets of paper covered with words pile up in archives sadder than cemeteries, because no one ever visits them, not even on All Souls' Day. Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity. That's why one banned book in your former country means infinitely more than the billions of words spewed out by our universities.

Friedman’s version diverged from the general departmental approach. Rather than being a closed community, Money and Banking was open to bystanders and visiting scholars. Unlike other workshop leaders, Friedman did not allow the featured scholar to present. Instead, he led a discussion through the paper, page by page. The overall gist of the workshop was simple, according to one participant: “prove it.” In this hothouse environment student research grew into papers, and then dissertations. For Friedman, the workshop became an essential forum to test, refine, and expand his ideas about money, while forming a school of rising scholars steeped in his approach to the subject.33 Friedman saw a direct link between his research, his students, and what he called “an aberrant tradition” of Chicago monetary economics, focused on the quantity theory of money. In a 1956 volume, he celebrated the “subtle and relevant version” of quantity theory developed at Chicago in the Depression era by Simons, Mints, Knight, and Viner. This version of the quantity theory, Friedman argued, was “a flexible and sensitive tool for interpreting movements in aggregate economic activity and for developing relevant policy prescriptions.” Here, he was no doubt referring to the 1933 Chicago plan, the department’s response to the Great Depression.

All told, the French made seven dives in Archimède during the first part of Project FAMOUS. When I returned home, I hunkered down for a final 10-month push to finish writing my dissertation, “The Nature of Triassic Continental Rift Structures in the Gulf of Maine.” My oral defense was another tense moment, with several faculty members tossing their toughest questions at me. But all the sacrifice paid off. I passed. I had my Ph.D. degree, and for the rest of my life, nobody could tell me that I couldn’t do it.

Paul’s letters, in a standard modern translation, occupy fewer than eighty pages. Even taken as a whole, they are shorter than almost any single one of Plato’s dialogues or Aristotle’s treatises. It is a safe bet to say that these letters, page for page, have generated more comment, more sermons and seminars, more monographs and dissertations than any other writings from the ancient world. (The gospels, taken together, are half as long again.) It is as though eight or ten small paintings by an obscure artist were to become more sought after, more studied and copied, more highly valued than all the Rembrandts and Titians and all the Monets and Van Goghs in the world.

Fight Hashimoto’s Hypothyroidism with Red and Near-Infrared Light Therapy Several studies have shown profound benefits of red and near-infrared light therapy for autoimmune hypothyroidism. This is one of the only treatments that has been shown to potentially reverse (or at least greatly slow the progression of) autoimmune hypothyroidism. A recent 2013 randomized, placebo-controlled study in hypothyroid patients demonstrated that in people who got near-infrared light therapy, thyroid function dramatically improved, and remarkably, that thyroid antibody (TPOAb) levels were massively reduced. Amazingly, 47% of patients were able to stop medication completely! Moreover, the researchers also followed up 9 months after treatment and found that the effects were still evident!116 They even published a 6-year follow-up, which basically said that even at 6 years, some of the benefits still remained, but periodic sessions were recommended to maintain all benefits.117 (To be honest, I don’t suggest red/NIR light as a one-time treatment that is expected to last long-term. For optimal benefits, most research indicates that sessions be done with red/NIR therapy at least once a week consistently.) A 2010 study found that red light therapy helped 38% of study participants reduce their hypothyroid medication dose, with a whopping 17% being able to stop taking the medication altogether!118 A 1997 study done in Russia included some data on people with autoimmune hypothyroidism who underwent a thyroid surgery. They found that red/NIR light therapy improved thyroid hormone levels enough that they required, on average, roughly half as much thyroid hormone medication.119 A 2003 study done in the Ukraine showed that red light therapy can decrease thyroid medication needs by 50-75% in people with postsurgical hypothyroidism.120 A 2010 Russian dissertation study gave red light therapy on the thyroid gland to a group of people with hypothyroidism and found that 17% of people could completely get off thyroid medication and 38% could decrease the dose by 25-50µg.121 A 2014 study used the light therapy for 10 sessions with 347 women with subclinical hypothyroidism. At baseline, the average TSH (thyroid stimulating hormone) was 9.1 mIU/L. (Note: Higher TSH is a sign of hypothyroidism). After ten sessions of light therapy, the TSH was normalized in 337 (97%) of these women. Their TSH averaged at 2.2 mIU/L after just 10 light treatments.

In my dissertation the novels I’d chosen were astonishing pieces of noisy art. White Noise and Almanac of the Dead and Empire of the Senseless - a book which I promise you, if you’ve never read it, will scrape your eyeballs

The truth is, what I wanted just then was the fantasy version of Hawaii. Rather than schlepping the few miles back to South Beretania Street for a no-frills dinner with the grandparents in front of the evening news, rather than watching Barack sit up late helping Maya figure out her tuition payment plan or talking with his mother about her perpetually-behind-schedule doctoral dissertation about the economics of blacksmithing in rural Indonesia, I would have loved to have sat, just the two of us, unhitched from all obligations in the velvet evening air on the patio of a nearby restaurant, drinking mai tais as the sky over the Pacific went from pink to purple to black. I would have loved, finally, to have tripped off a little giddily to some top-floor honeymoon suite in a hotel. That was how I’d dreamed about Hawaii, back in my office in Chicago as I’d submitted my request to take these precious vacation days off from work. That was what I was trying not to pout about as Barack rolled up the rattan mat and we began the long walk

As a literary critic, you want to criticize colonialism, capitalism, and racism and to study literature by people of color, especially Asian Americans. You tell your English department chair, one of the most famous American literary scholars in the country, that you want to write a dissertation on Vietnamese American literature. He gazes at you with mild concern through his glasses and says, You can’t do that. You won’t get a job. Perhaps true, perhaps not. But you are outraged. The right response is not to accept the status quo but hope to transcend it. If not today, then in the future. Your department, however, believes in tradition and the canon, requiring you to read Beowulf through Chaucer and Shakespeare, the Romantics and the Victorians, the realists and modernists, so you can talk to your entire profession.

No. I actually don’t know much about cars in general. But I saw an old Bel Air in a calendar once in our garage and have been a little obsessed with them ever since.” The response launches Thomas into a dissertation about classic cars, which I tune out as soon as I hear the word carburetor. Olivia hangs on his every word.

Jasleen Patel gave her a scowl for doubting her expertise. Jazz had completed her master’s degree in marine biology two years before and was finalizing her doctoral dissertation under Phoebe’s mentorship. Jazz had been one of Phoebe’s undergrad students and eventually her teaching assistant at Caltech’s marine lab. Since then, they had been working collaboratively for more than five years. So much so that Phoebe and Jazz became known as PB&J by most of their colleagues

But would they respect me here, if all I do is stick underneath the only Black professor in the program?” On the other end, Dr. Oludara heaved a sigh. “Ailey, why are you making things harder than they have to be?” “I’m not. It’s just—” “Ailey. Let me ask you something. Do any of your classmates invite you to their study sessions?” “No, ma’am.” “Are they even friendly to you?” “I mean . . . no. Not really.” “Then why do you give a good goddamn about what they think? You could have nothing but white folks on your dissertation committee, and your classmates still would have something to say. I’m sure they’ve passed around that you’re there on a quota. They love to accuse Black folks of taking their place. Even when it ain’t but one of us, and fifty of them, they don’t even want us to have that one spot.

Connie, in what I realised later was an effort to steer the conversation to where she needed it, mentioned that Fortean Times had reported that a moose shot dead by a hunter was later found to have amassed a considerable library of George Eliot novels, critical appraisals, biographies and poetry, and had been attempting to write a dissertation on how Eliot’s life could be viewed from the viewpoint of even-toed ungulates singled out for their lack of apparent good looks.

You’re one of those people from the past, like my dissertation advisor, torn by conflict between two ideals. But, in our age, conscience and duty are not ideals: an excess of either is seen as a mental illness called social-pressure personality disorder.

Ask a question worth answering. ▪  Find an answer that you can support with good reasons. ▪  Find good data that you can use as reliable evidence to support your reasons. ▪  Draft an argument that makes a good case for your answer. ▪  Revise that draft until readers will think you met the first four goals.

Writing a dissertation thus presents a set of very particular psychological and professional challenges.

Never claim credit for work that is not yours, and always give full credit

I read that the term "nostalgia" originated in a seventeenth-century medical student's dissertation, when he mixed the Greek work nostos, "return to the native land," with algos, "suffering, grief," to describe the madness of mercenaries who spent all their lives moving and trying to remember. It was classified as a potentially fatal disease. Isn't that crazy? To die from wanting to return. But I miss things that were never mine, want to return to a place, more of a feeling, that never really existed, and doesn't baseball always promise that there was once something more?

Maybe I should study them instead of crows, I thought, finding my smile as I reached our street. My all-but-dissertation could be on the communal behavior of a brood of old hens. FOR

In graduate school, early on, I once overheard a classmate talking in her office as I walked by. She didn't know I was there. She was gossiping about me to a group of our classmates & said I was the affirmative-action student...Rationally, I know it was absurd, but hearing how she & maybe others saw me hurt real bad...I stopped joking about being a slacker. I tripled the number of projects I was involved with. I was excellent most of the time. I fell short some of the time. I made sure I got good grades. I made sure my comprehensive exams were solid. I wrote conference proposals & had them accepted. I published. I designed an overly ambitious research project for my dissertation that kind of made me want to die. No matter what I did, I heard that girl, that girl who had accomplished a fraction of a fraction of what I had, telling a group of our peers I was the one who did not deserve to be in our program.

My words are my thesis, my actions are my dissertation, and my life is my philosophy.

Being accused of microaggression can be a harrowing experience. Manhattan Institute Fellow Heather Mac Donald relates in City Journal how an incident got out of hand at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2013. Professor Emeritus Val Rust taught a dissertation preparation seminar in which arguments often erupted among students, such as over which victim ideologies deserved precedence. In one such discussion, white feminists were criticized for making "testimonial-style" claims of oppression to which Chicana feminists felt they were not entitled. In another, arguments over the political implications of word capitalization got out of hand. In a paper he returned to a student, Rust had changed the capitalization of "indigenous" to lowercase as called for in the Chicago Manual Style. The student felt this showed disrespect for her point of view. During the heated discussion that followed, Professor Rust leaned over and touched an agitated student's arm in a manner, Rust claims, that was meant to reassure and calm him down. It ignited a firestorm instead. The student, Kenjus Watston, jerked his arm away from Rust as if highly offended. Later, he and other "students of color", accompanied by reporters and photographers from UCLA's campus newspaper, made a surprise visit to Rust's classroom and confronted him with a "collective statement of Resistance by Graduate Students of Color". Then the college administration got involved. Dean Marcelo Suarez-Orozco sent out an e-mail citing "a series of troubling racial climate incidents" on campus, "most recently associated with [Rust's class]". Administrative justice was swift. Professor Rust was forced to teach the remainder of his class with three other professors, signaling that he was no longer trusted to teach "students of color". When Rust tried to smooth things over with another student who had criticized him for not apologizing to Watson, he reached out and touched him in a gesture of reconciliation. Again it backfired. That student filed criminal charges against Rust, who was suspended for the remainder of the academic year. As if to punctuate the students' victory and seal the professor's humiliation, UCLA appointed Watson as a "student researcher" to the committee investigating the incident. Watson turned the publicity from these events into a career, going on to codirect the Intergroup Dialogue Program at Occidental College in Los Angeles. As for the committee report, it recommended that UCLA create a new associate dean for equity and enhance the faculty's diversity training program. It was a total victory for the few students who had acted like bullies and the humiliating end of a career for a highly respected professor. It happened because the university could not appear to be unsympathetic to students who were, in the administration's worldview, merely following the university's official policies of diversity and multiculturalism.

Then she drank a glass of water, switched on her computer, checked her e-mails, proofread the conclusion of her dissertation for the umpteenth time, chewed a nail, scratched her head, and when she had finally run out of displacement activities, she called Ulla