My friend Richard Hyde has started a weblog In Search of a Sense of Place.
I've always enjoyed reading the email reports he would send out and
encouraged him to share them with the larger public. Here's a sample of
one of Richard's entries from February 2, 2007:

I had just walked out of the Holocaust Museum,
where I was attending an academic conference on the great culture war
between fascism and communism in Europe between the world wars. A
couple of the morning presenters were pretty good, but the literary
critics were front and center for the afternoon. After a paper full of
words like 'transgressive,' 'essentialist,' 'inversions,' 'subversive'
and so on, and on, I had had enough. As I headed for the exit, I
remembered the comment of someone who dropped out of Yale’s English
Ph.D. Program: "It’s become the place where language goes to die."