Say, you are intelligent but not extremely brilliant. You want to live the life of the mind. Or, rather, what you imagine that life to be. Mostly, you really want tons of free time and comfortable pay coupled with the status of an intellectual authority. Suddenly, there arose in the West a number of societies wealthy enough that they could afford to have a sizable group living precisely this kind of lifestyle. It was a historical glitch, as we can now appreciate, that so many people could afford to live this kind of life. This is all now going away. And the paradox of the situation is that the group that was able to come into existence and really enjoy this status and material conditions was responsible for putting an end to this glitch.

While the glitch still existed, though, all of these people who wanted to enjoy academic life had to produce articles, books, and conference papers for tenure and promotion. The idea that everything in existence is bad and needs to be subverted offers an endless supply of material. You don’t have to think much or come up with an argument of your own. Take any work of literature, painting, event of history, political system, etc and condemn them for being what they are.

Incidentally, “everything should be constantly subverted and replaced” is one of the foundational ideas of neoliberalism. Academia became the servant class and the wrecking crew doing the demolition work of neoliberal change. Until neoliberalism started saying, “ok, thanks for all the help, but now is the time to replace you, so bye.”

No nation-state means no large middle-class means no mass higher education means we revert to the status quo of before the glitch. The work of the intellect will continue and some people will live the life of the mind but their number will be dramatically reduced. That’s not a bad thing.

What will they think and write about?

Finally, we will get to the answer in the next post.

What a great question. It’s one of the best ones I’ve ever received. As all good questions it is not necessarily very easy to answer. Let me try to think it out right here to see if together we can arrive at an answer.

I can roughly subdivide university scholarship in the humanities of the mass-education time period into two eras. These areas would be pre-neoliberal and neoliberal. If you’re tired of this terminology, which I can absolutely understand, let’s refer to them as the pre-1968 and post-1968 eras. By 1968 I refer, of course, to the leftist revolution that swept the world and cleared the path for the grand economic reformatting that began 10 years later and is still ongoing.

In the pre-neoliberal era, university scholarship in the humanities—and again, I repeat, that I am speaking specifically of the era of increasingly mass education that did not begin until the very late 19th century—had two main directions of interest. One was supporting the existence of the nation-state by way of establishing the national literary canon, defining the national history, exploring the specific political structures of the nation-state, etc. The second direction was, to put it in simple terms, figuring out how things work. What makes works of literature enjoyable? Which political system is the most rational? Which events of history had the biggest impact and why? These are very important issues to ponder but their big defect is that their reach is limited. They do not provide an infinite number of people with an infinite amount of work.

At the beginning of the massification era, these two directions managed to provide enough to say, to write, and to publish for the few people in higher education who did research. But then more people wanted to join the field of intellectual endeavor. They needed something to write about. They needed what we today would call a hack that would break open for them an infinite cache of possible subjects of exploration. They found it in the way of thinking that prizes the destruction of every familiar category above everything else.  This way of thinking has many names because today it is so dominant and omnipresent that is very hard for us to give it a specific name. It has become part of every single one of us. I call it in neoliberalism. Other people call it cultural Marxism. But there are many other names.

I know how much everybody hates long posts, so I will continue this one later. Thank you, the wonderful person who left the question, because I am really loving it.

People can’t leave toilets alone. They keep fussing with the concept of a toilet, arriving at the most bizarre iterations. At a restaurant in Quebec City today, I saw the most insane set-up so far.

You enter the toilet through a door and see that it has some stalls with doors. In the same space where people are waiting for their turn to enter a stall, there are urinals. Here’s what it looks like:

The restaurant is popular, and there’s always a group of women of all ages mulling in front of the stalls, waiting their turn, washing their hands, looking in the mirrors. Can you imagine a man who’d whip out his penis and start using the urinal right there? Why wouldn’t the women call the police? We were at that restaurant with my 16-year-old niece. Who but the most unhinged pedo would use the urinal? Thankfully, everybody at the restaurant was normal and nobody used the urinals. But imagine how bad the situation can get if just one weirdo comes there to eat.

Even without the open-air urinals, the set-up is dumb. Men don’t want to hang out with women in front of the toilet stalls. Women don’t want to emerge from a stall and see men hovering around. As a result, there were no men at all in the vicinity of that toilet. I have no idea what men do for their needs but that restaurant has no accommodation for them.

Just so you, folks, understand what I’m dealing with, here’s a real-life story. I have two people at my department who really love a certain classroom. They love it so much that they refuse to teach anywhere else. Every year they drive everybody nuts with their demands to be assigned that particular classroom.

The problem is, they also want to teach at the exact same time. But there’s only one classroom they both insist on having. So today they came up with a plan and unveiled it to the administration. Here’s the plan:

1. They will both teach their different courses in that classroom at the same time.
2. The classroom is to be split by means of a “portable room divider.”
3. An additional teacher’s table with a computer should be brought in.
4. An additional screen should be placed on the wall.
5. And the pièce de résistance of the whole proposal – prepare for it – the windows in the classroom should be boarded up. Don’t ask why. I didn’t because I’d rather not know. Based on my experience, no joy happens when you start asking why.

You realize, I hope, that many other people teach in this classroom, so apparently, this entire set up should be taken down immediately after this one joint session. And then put up again. And then taken down. And then … And so on in perpetuity.

Welcome to my life, my dear friends.

I haven’t been to Quebec City and completely forgot (or never noticed) how much it resembles San Sebastián, my favorite city in Spain.

I could have come here the whole time instead of traveling so far for the same thing.

I’m at my niece’s dance competition in Quebec City. Her team is winning, so we will head over to the showcase in a couple of hours. I’m very fortunate in that her dance is hip hop because it’s the only music I like.

We’ve seen some extraordinary teams today. There are choreographers who are seriously talented. My niece’s team is the best but it’s a very tough competition.

I strongly believe that people drop last names of Russian authors because they think this makes them sound more intellectual. Here’s an example:

Overall it's solid but I just do not think Beloved, Madame Bovary, or The Great Gatsby belong in the top 11 novels of *all time*. Like, if you've read Chekhov or Dostoevsky, you simply would not put put Gatsby over them, you just wouldn't. pic.twitter.com/SOmfPIXrDV

— Claire A 📚 (@CoffeeandIrony) May 17, 2026

Chekhov most certainly didn’t write any novels. But “Claire A” doesn’t know this because she never read anything by him. Or, I would guess, by any other author on the list.

As for Madame Bovary, there wouldn’t have been any Anna Karenina without it. It’s a novel that inspired half of the European literature of that era. Not that a silly airhead who loves “Chekhov’s novels” would know any of that.

Pío Moa is insanely biased in favor of Francisco Franco. But mainstream narratives are even more insanely biased against. One would think that half a century after Franco’s death we could all calm down and discuss him without foaming at the mouth. But that’s not happening, and one has to scratch one’s way to some semblance of knowledge about the actual facts by reading different accounts and finding the middle ground between the extremes.

The glaringly obvious thing that nobody in Spain is ready to discuss is why the country was stuck between Franco and Stalinism and had to make that choice in a civil war. Why did things get so extreme? Why is the reaction to these events so overinflated almost a hundred years later?

Extreme forms of attachment to the past are an avoidance mechanism aimed at hiding from the present. This is true for societies as well as individuals. In Spain it’s not possible to discuss the civil war and the dictatorship in a dispassionate manner. People freak out and start spluttering. Pío Moa might be wrong on a bunch of things but at least he’s trying to have a normal conversation.

This is what they call a shrimp salad in Chicago:

One isn’t spoiled for choice in airports but this habit of offering a mountain of unshredded and unwieldy greenery is beyond my comprehension. How is a person supposed to stuff it into themselves? And why are the actual vegetables so marginalized? Are they the conservative minority of this dish?

I love airport exhibits because they are often very philosophical. An airport is a typical liminal space where you are in between different parts of your life, and this makes it the perfect place to think.

The Lambert St Louis airport has a photo exhibit that follows a real-life mystery. A cache of old photos was found at an estate sale in St Charles, MO. It featured a couple that, in the 1950s, traveled the world in a way that few people traveled back then. The photographer who found the cache placed them online and asked people to help him find out the identity of the missing couple. Who were they? Do they have any descendants? And why was the evidence of their unusual lives discarded like this?

Internet sleuths pored over the images and finally identified the adventurous couple. The final image of the exhibit features a terse message that solves the mystery.

“Hi. I’m their niece. I sold the photos at an estate sale” the message states.

The exhibit offers a very definitive answer to the question that rages on social media these days. Is it worth giving up on progeny to be able to travel more? The sadness of Harry and Edna’s discarded existence is answer enough.