Hi!

Its been almost two months since my last newsletter. The long gap is explained in part by the busyness of a semester when I’m teaching new two new syllabi and implementing my own custom LMS-replacement for the first time. I will have more to say about how that is going soon (very well! the workflow is very easy to keep organized and students have been navigating the system without too many problems), but I only have a little time today.

The big personal news, and the other reason I’ve been so preoccupied, is that we moved! Because we are having a baby this summer! And need a third bedroom! Through some miracle, we found a great old rowhouse in Petworth with office space, a finished basement, three bedrooms very close to friends, and for a rent we can manage. Moving absolutely sucks, I’ve done it 12 times since I was 20 and it just gets worse every time, but its done and we are settling in and ready for what’s next.

I have nothing but despair for the violence of our empire in decline. MAGA has become America’s destructive violent suicide cult run by the whims of a mad king—the shameful desperate path we’ve chosen as the declining global hegemony rather than a dignified decline. It didn’t have to be this way. Historians will look back at the ideologies of this moment: MAGA, MAHA, TESCREAL,DOGE Incels, Neo Nazis having millions of followers, moron comedians determining election outcomes, the weakest men you could imagine ranting about the warrior ethos and real masculinity, snake oil everywhere, wagers on mass death, and oligarchs gleefully profiting off of spreading all this hate and nonsense while using the surplus to pretend statistical prediction is intelligence, as the surface symptoms of a malignant social psychosis—a society that has become a deepfake of itself.

I don’t know how to bring together my own excitement for my growing family, my own personal hopes and dreams and love for those around me, with the national and global catastrophe. Of course, humanity will survive, empires fall and people keep living and working and teaching their kids, the end of imperial America is probably good for the world and for most of us, but fear and anxiety will dominate our lives for sometime and the horrors of this pathetic war are probably only beginning. Just be good to each other, and shut out the voices from the social media. Even though its what’s running our country (is anyone more online than the president and his followers?) its the psychotic symptom, we have to learn not to listen.