Flannel's many returns, and other items

-I don't think there are enough articles about the woes of academia. By way of forcing a connection between the two latest, while Eileen Pollack's story is plenty interesting and at times quite convincing, I'm not sure Exhibit A of sexism is one's professors not encouraging one to pursue a doctorate. In my experience - and this is kind of what Pollack finds - this just isn't something professors do, and why? Because academia's a risky choice - yes, even in STEM fields, perhaps there all the more so, considering the amount of money someone with such skills could make elsewhere. It's like converting to Judaism - you have to be turned away, but persist.

Of course there isn't spontaneously this interest in pursuing a PhD distributed equally across the population (thus the noticeable overrepresentation of grad students whose parents hold PhDs in the very same field), so there's still the argument that even if outreach to undergrads isn't the norm, it needs to happen with respect to some populations, women among them. Which again, perhaps so, but wouldn't the appropriate thing to do be to steer the kind of women who might have gotten physics PhDs but it never occurred to them into management consulting, say, and away from gendered-female floundering? How much of the diversity issue in STEM academia comes from the fact that if you're talented in one of those areas and from a marginalized population, you might be more tempted to convert those skills into something more lucrative?

-This is, I suppose, the standard defense of Jewish intermarriage, and it (indirectly) gets the essential right: intermarriage is the result of assimilation, not some kind of act of assimilation on the part of previously isolated Jews. All I'll add, in a busman's-holiday, contrarian way, is a reminder that high rates of intermarriage can evidently coincide with high levels of endemic anti-Semitism.

-How is flannel "back"? I ask because I remember (and have Uniqlo-purchased evidence of) the flannel revival of maybe four or five years ago. If flannel was so-very-now in 2009, isn't 2013 too soon for a new revival? Is this about a) shorter attention spans, such that we are now reviving things from a few years ago, or b) a different kind of flannel - the previous was hipster, farmer-chic, while the current version involves 1990s edginess gone Fashion. I've never known this to happen before - for a trend likely still in everyone's closet from the last time around coming back, but with a different framework.