By the time I took my seat at [TechConference] on Monday, I had already seen its host’s logo 51 times. The name was printed twice on my conference badge, five times on the lanyard holding that badge, 16 times in the conference agenda, nine times on the side wall of the conference’s main hall, and finally all over the 20-logo tessellation on the stage background. (A giant wooden statue outside the front door spelled out its initials, but we won’t count that.) As I sat down for the first panel, heavy synth-and-bass beats shook the speakers overhead. It was the conference’s theme song. The only lyric: The conference’s name, [...]

The eggheads do complain about their annual conference of eggheads put on by the Modern Language Association. So boring, one has been told, so exhausting. It's crass and awful! The annual dread among those who have ascended to the glories of tenure is flavored strongly with guilt, too, because the MLA is also famously thronged with newly-minted Ph.D.s vying for the fewer and fewer tenure-track jobs on offer. Guilt, nerves, pressure, careerism and the sad foundering of humanities scholarship in our times!

This year the conference was held in Los Angeles, so I popped over there in order to see for myself how terrible this powwow really is, [...]