Her explicitly political statements set off a familiar firestorm about whether Ginsburg had “crossed the line,” sending the conservative blogosphere in particular into howling fantods.

It always did give me the fantods with them Egyptians staring at me from the walls, and to-day it's worse than a hearse!

And Sam’s panicked stasis, both social and professional, corresponds to a recognizable epidemic of the howling fantods in our nation’s graduate schools.