समाचार

According to the movies, death looks a whole lot like the Dmv.Beetlejuice (1988)

Applying to grad school can feel a lot like limbo. Like being stuck in a waiting room, clutching a call number with wingdings on it, praying you dotted all your i’s correctly. You’d be forgiven for thinking your curriculum vitae was being weighed on a scale against the feather of Ma’at, Egyptian deity of minimum Gpa requirements. It feels just about as esoteric.

Divine judgement, like academia, has a bureaucratic bent to it; an adherence to policy and procedure at odds with any human tendency towards sense-making. That’s a particularly humorous metaphor: that complex administrative systems are as inscrutable and baffling as divine ones, that something so nefariously human could be otherworldly. It’s a relatable, “so taxes are like, literally hell, huh?” The joke’s longevity extends at least as far back as Virgil’s Aeneid, where...