"Halperin's final essay, "Why Is Diotima a Woman?", has inspired the title of my article. Here we have one of the great junk bonds of the fast-track academic era, whose unbridled greed for fame and power was intimately in sync with parallel developments on Wall Street. This is yuppie entrepreneurship at its height. It's scholarship skating on a gold credit card, sweeping up everything in its path and dropping it unsorted and uncomprehended in a heap in the boutique window. Its inner bonds too are junk: the logic is specious and its claims counterfeit. … Nothing is thought through or developed in a sensible, plausible way. All energy goes toward show, pretense, posing."