What I read in today's Times

• Epistemological modesty -- see the previous post.
• How to cook spaghetti — don't worry if the pasta pan is in the refrigerator filled with soup. Use a smaller pot. Hardly any water is needed.
• What was Wordsworth's sister like? A model of what a book review should be. Plus a picture of the author (Angelina Jolie lips and bedroom eyes) and Coleridge's fabulous description of Dorothy Wordsworth: "“If you expected to see a pretty woman, you would think her ordinary — if you expected to find an ordinary woman, you would think her pretty.”
• The Humanities are in trouble — The humanities include "languages, literature, the arts, history, cultural studies, philosophy and religion." (Sounds to me like the NEA should be a department within the NEH.) And this comment about my president by a professor at Columbia:

“He does something academic humanists have not been doing well in recent years,” [Mr. Delbanco] said of a president who invokes Shakespeare and Faulkner, Lincoln and W. E. B. Du Bois. “He makes people feel there is some kind of a common enterprise, that history, with its tragedies and travesties, belongs to all of us, that we have something in common as Americans.”

A "president who invokes Shakespeare and Faulkner, Lincoln and W. E. B. Du Bois." Oh, to have lived to see the day!