John Leo shares news from the cutting edge of on-campus student care: 

This has been a big year for sleep at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. The Shapiro Undergraduate Library cleared away some dusty and disposable books on the first floor and six cots were installed, offering weary students “a safe place for brief spells of restorative sleep,” or “naps,” as they are known in campus shorthand. These brief spells have been limited to 30 minutes, and the space, in a well-trafficked area on the first floor of Shapiro, was equipped with vinyl cots, disinfecting wipes, disposable pillowcases, and lockers.

Best not to linger on the need for disinfectant wipes. Or instructions to “wipe down the cot when you are done.” 

Detractors observed that throwing out all those books so that students could sleep during the day was an unfortunate bit of symbolism, particularly since most students… already had safe places for brief spells of restorative sleep, usually known as “dorms.”

However, even these comforts may be insufficient for our awfully fatigued thinkers of tomorrow. And so,

Last month, the university library started testing a MetroNaps EnergyPod (in English: a nap machine) that looks like a dental chair encased in a plastic egg and sells for just under $13,000.

Behold its magnificence. 

The EnergyPod comes with a hemispherical privacy visor “for additional seclusion,” an adjustable timer, and speakers, from which you’ll hear “specially devised rhythms to facilitate relaxation.”

It can vibrate gently and wake you up slowly to soothing music. Google and several colleges have them. St. Leo College in Florida has installed them in dorms so commuters can use them and dorm-dwellers don’t have to go all the way upstairs to take a nap. After all, what is college without a $13,000 vibrating nap machine?

If $13,000 vibrating nap machines sound a tad indulgent, it’s worth bearing in mind that the University of Michigan was noted here previously for hiking tuition, pledging fiscal responsibility, then spending $400,000 to relocate one tree.

Photographic evidence of Michigan’s sleep-deprived students and the terrible crushing pressures of academic life can be found here. Readers are advised that some scenes may be distressing.

Be strong. Take tissues. 

For newcomers, more items from the archives.

When the Onion is Redundant. 

Paul Krugman and Polly Toynbee are awfully concerned by how much you earn. Themselves, not so much.

When very well-heeled ‘progressives’ decry income inequality as at the very least something to be fixed, and fixed urgently, at what point can we expect the people saying this to act as if it were true? I mean, act individually, themselves, in accord with their own professed values and imperatives. Curiously, the most typical position is to do nothing whatsoever unless the state acts coercively against everyone, thereby deferring any personal action aside from the usual mouthing. And so inevitably that mouthing looks a lot like chaff, a way to divert the envy and tribalism they’re so happy to inspire in others: “Yes, I’m loaded, but look at those people over there – the ones who disagree with us – they have slightly more, or almost as much. Let’s all hiss at them.”

Clinging to the Teats. 

Gender studies lecturer Hila Shachar doesn’t think the public should have any say in how its money is spent.

Dr Shachar is careful not to explain the “contribution to society” made by her own work, or by the humanities research projects that were highlighted as examples of non-essential spending, including a $164,000 grant for studying “how urban media art can best respond to global climate change.” Or by the boldly titled research project Queering Disasters in the Antipodes, which hopes to probe the “experiences of LGBTI people in natural disasters” and ultimately provide “improved disaster response” to gay people, whose needs in such circumstances are apparently quite different from those of everyone else. The princely sum of $325,183 has been spent on this endeavour.

Their Mighty Brains Will Save Us. 

The Guardian unveils its hot and sassy trainee journalists. A snapshot of the nation and its everyday concerns.

There’s Emma Howard, 26, who studied English in Leicester and Strasbourg and lists her credentials as “community organising” and “having fun with other social activists,” which, we learn, “can mean standing on the street with placards.” “I think about power a lot,” says she. Podcast enthusiast Fred McConnell, 27, is the sole male in a group of ten and tells us that, “After university I headed to Afghanistan to produce multimedia for a skateboard charity.” As one does. And there’s Hannah Jane Parkinson, 24, who “performs poetry” and whose areas of expertise are “lifestyle and pop culture.” Ms Parkinson is “from Liverpool, but moved to Russia to drink vodka and play at being Lara from Dr Zhivago.” She moved again, to London, “for a great job,” one in which she “got to look at cat gifs.” “I couldn’t be happier at the Guardian,” says Ms Parkinson. “It’s where I always wanted to work.”

There’s more, should you want it, in the greatest hits. 

Theodore Dalrymple on language and “austerity”: 

This is not a question of whether the economic policy followed by the government is the right one or not: perhaps it is and perhaps it isn’t. It is a question of the honest use of words. One would not say of a man who passed from smoking sixty cigarettes a day to fifty that he had given up smoking, or that he had exercised great self-denial. And one would not, or rather should not, say of an organisation that had balanced its budget once in fifty years (the British government) that it was practicing austerity merely because it had to borrow a slightly lower percentage of what it spent than it did the year before. This is to deprive words of their meaning… If reducing the rate at which you overspend and accumulate debt is called austerity, no one will dare go any further in that direction, though it were the right direction in which to go.

But all that “austerity” and all those “violent” “spending cuts” are, as Julia M notes, making our artists angry: 

Now a new group of British artists and musicians are hoping to use art, song, theatre and words, as well as social media, to combat the coalition’s austerity agenda.

No, you mustn’t. Remember how scared we were the last time our artists shook their fists at us. One of the protesting artists, the Occupier and “urban poet” Rob Montgomery, tells us, “My art is about what capitalism does to your heart, and the inner child in you.” His deep, visionary radicalism can be savoured here. He’s teaching us, you see. Because he knows so much.

And Jennifer Kabbany on yet another fake “hate crime” and its vain fabricator: 

I was trying to make a point… now everyone has ideas on what type of person I am. I am none of these things… I am myself, I am caring and kind.

One to add to the rapidly growing list of kind, caring psychodramas. 

As usual, feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. It’s what these posts are for.

We must pray for her safe return from the bosom of academia. 

For newcomers, more items from the archives.

The Humble Among Us. 

Novelist Brigid Delaney wants a nicer flat in order to write about those non-creative people. You, taxpayer, come hither.

As a member of our creative caste, Ms Delaney wants to capture the buzz and thrum of city life. She wants to inspire “recognition” and above all “empathy.” It’s just that she’d prefer not to empathise too much with those non-creative people. Say, by working for a living and paying her own bills. And who will write about those ordinary people and their non-artistic lives if we don’t encourage Ms Delaney and her peers to live way above their means, at our expense, in places they can’t afford? Places they can’t afford because what they create isn’t as vital to the public as they might wish.

Pearl-Clutching Pornographers. 

Campus feminists combat “male-centricity” by making unerotic pornography and rubbing eggs on their breasts.

As some readers may be intrigued by the notion of all-female feminist pornography, here’s a brief description: “It begins with a group of girls sitting around a library table taking their shirts off. As the film progresses, the girls engage in activities including kissing, rubbing eggs on their bodies and twerking around a chicken carcass.” The finished political opus, titled Initiation, also features the somewhat lacklustre use of a riding crop and extended scenes of floor-wiping. 

Militantly Nude. 

A San Francisco “nude-in” reveals more than intended.

Some may register a whiff of disingenuousness in exhibitionists accusing their critics of being repressive and stuffy. Exhibitionists may be eager to dispense with clothing in incongruous locations – say, a traffic island in the middle of a busy intersection – but they desperately need an audience, preferably one that’s embarrassed and unwilling. San Francisco is remarkably well-equipped in terms of nude-friendly clubs and amenities, including a nude beach and nearby nudist colonies. What’s revealing is that such venues weren’t deemed sufficient for our wrinkly radicals. And while I doubt many readers here are prone to fainting at the sight of withered genitals and subsiding buttocks, they may conceivably object to being made an accomplice to someone else’s psychodrama. As one young lady points out, “Unwanted exposure to scrotum is never okay.”

And I’m told it’s possible, if not wise, to while away an hour in the greatest hits, now updated.