The ongoing question this year is whether or not I'm planning to try for a Ph.D. sometime in the future. As I think I've told you before, this program is both a means of preparing for grad school and a sort of test to see if I actually like it.

So far, I think I do. Three things I like about grad school at the UChicago:

1. General unconcern for the amorphous high/low art distinction. One of the essays I had to read for today, Lauren Berlant's "The Theory of Infantile Citizenship," revolved around the author's reading of the third-season Simpsons episode "Mr. Lisa Goes to Washington." I don't necessarily agree with all her points, but I was impressed by her ability to combine scholarly focus with the critical eye of a fanboy.

The lecture on her today brought in the Daily Show and Colbert Report.

Meanwhile in my Culture and Politics class, students are writing about hip-hop, popular movies, etc. My own paper proposal � a comparison of the distribution of A-list bloggers with the geographical distribution of tech-focused cities described in "Technology and Tolerance" (.pdf) � met with approval after a brief discussion about statistics and sources.

(In hindsight I wish I'd taken AP stats instead of calculus in high school. If economics � or was it geometry? � was Graham's blind spot, this is mine.)

2. UChicago undergraduates. I've got classes with 19-year-olds and 26-year-olds, and I've given up trying to tell the difference at this point. Some of the best comments in my classes come from students who on closer inspection turn out to be undergraduates.

The only difference I've found so far (extrapolating from two or three cases) is that the ungrads here seem to have a certain earnestness about them that the rest of us lack.

3. Lastly, I like the intellectual atmosphere in general. The fact that one of the funniest things I heard last week was a fellow preceptee's mock-incredulous comment "So there's a real world after all?"

Or the communal gasp in Writing Biography when we realized that Prof. Weiner had hoaxed us with The Education of Little Tree and "What the Cytoscope Said," both of which she'd presented as autobiographies when she assigned them.

Or learning about J.L Austin from another student, just because a few of us were interested. There's slightly less dumbing-down here than I'm used to.

This is just half the story, of course...