The tragic comedy of academia

Last night my wife and I went to watch the movie Footnote. It chronicles the tensions and competition between a father and son who do research in the same obscure field of Talmudic studies. The movie was made in Israel, is in Hebrew with English subtitles, and received an awarded for best script at the Cannes film festival.

The movie captures some of the silly ways of academia: pedantry, exclusion, ambition, stubborn idealism, ...
I found some of it quite humorous but some of it was a bit too close to the truth to be funny.

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