Update

Well, just so everyone knows, Nicholas has been home all this week, and everyone is doing very well, thanks to God!
In other news, I just finished reading the latest Tom Wolfe novel, I am Charlotte Simmons, last night. If you can stomach a lot of very foul language and some explicit, but certainly not titillating, sex, then I highly recommend this book. It is a carefully researched, fictional attempt to document life at America's top universities in the '00's, to document it in all of its sordidness, barbarity and idiocy. This makes The Closing of the American Mind look like a mild academic rebuke indeed. And the fascinating thing is Wolfe's own consciousness of his lack of moral ground from which to criticise. Most telling passage: '...collegiate was collegiate, but this was...indecent--immoral was the term that crossed his mind, but the very word had become obsolete. It had vanished from sophisticated conversation.' Bingo. The nail on the head.