Sent the book to a publisher today. And to add to what I said in the previous post, I don’t exactly kill myself working. I don’t work past 3 pm. Except Wednesday when I finish at 1 pm. I haven’t graded or prepared class on weekends in years. But look at my productivity. I haven’t broken a deadline either in publishing or administratively ever. I’m editor-in-chief of an academic journal, and I’m equally effective there. Everything is graded the day of or the day after, at the latest.

I see colleagues work crazy hours and they are still stuck on that article from 2 years ago. And they are great people, very hard-working. But they aren’t doing it right. They aren’t filling the first bucket. They think that the first bucket is for whatever is left over after filling the third. But it doesn’t work like that.

You know how Ayn Rand said that before you are able to say “I love”, you need to be able to say “I”? It’s the same thing. You aren’t creating because you haven’t allowed yourself to say “I”. The I lives in the first bucket. You are feeding it leftovers and wondering why nothing satisfactory comes out of it.

Great questions today. Great, great questions.

It’s the same reason why childhood and adolescence last much longer today than they did in 1825. The world is more complicated. The subjectivation (meaning becoming your own person with a stable sense of self) lasts about a decade longer than it did 200 years ago. Learning anything that counts as a career (and not just a job) and brings status and money takes longer because everything that is valued has grown in complexity. Everything simpler has been automated or doesn’t count as a career.

How does this coexist with constantly reinventing yourself? I have bad news. Or good, if you are really neoliberalized. You need to be preparing for the new career while working full-time in the existing one. If you split your time investment in 3 buckets, this is what the result should look like:

A good neoliberal does not work an 80-hour week and fall asleep over a stale takeout burrito. That’s the life of a good neoliberal’s slaves. A good neoliberal does 3 hours of tennis a week and an hour of yoga / jogging daily, spends 30 minutes slowly preparing The Very Special Salad with The Very Special Drink, practices ukelele, meditates in a forest, and works in the short bursts between tending lovingly to himself. And achieves more than the slave does in 80 miserable hours. His career is to be himself and manifest this himself-ness in whatever area comes by without any specific one meriting emotional attachment. You can’t look at the time dedicated to any area as wasted if you spend most of it feeding the first two buckets.

If the left ever returns to power they will immediately open the border and start flying the entire population of Haiti into every red state as retribution

Not joking even a little https://t.co/JpiyMZ98Nw

— Auron MacIntyre (@AuronMacintyre) September 30, 2025

Not if but when. This will happen as certainly as the Sun rising in the East each morning. Absolutely nothing whatsoever has been done to dissuade the left from doing this.

There’s still time but at the moment it’s inevitable that this is exactly what will take place.

Well, there would have been no marriage at all under those conditions. Maybe I didn’t explain this before but the only reason I got married at 19 was to get my parents to stop harassing me. I grew up in an environment of relentless psychological abuse. I had not a shred of privacy. I was constantly invaded in every possible way. Last spring when I was preparing for surgery, the nurse said I had to remove my underwear. I threw a hysterical fit because I had learned since childhood to bundle up my genital area for sleep. Even to give birth it was a struggle and a half to remove my underwear. You only know if you know, and I pray that you don’t.

When I was growing up, there was no door to close when I went to sleep. No lock on the bathroom door. Not the tiniest space or occasion to not be observed and vilified for everything I was. I had to read my books in secret. I’m sure you’ve noticed what reading means to me. But I could only do it in complete secrecy. I couldn’t have friends, receive phone calls, be anywhere except at home and in school. I couldn’t have an unapproved facial expression or any emotion except gratitude and joy. I was called the most atrocious things for undergoing the normal puberty because it didn’t happen at the same age and in the same way as my mother’s had. I couldn’t have a bra because it drove my mother to fits of extreme rage. When I finally did acquire a bra, I had a whole elaborate procedure to conceal that I wore it. For several days each month we weren’t allowed to sneeze, chew, flush the toilet, or breathe loudly. And this is only the beginning. We were in a religious cult with no God. That’s what it was like.

What do you think all of these years of psychoanalysis are in aid of? Entertaining me?

If I had to fake-marry to get out at least physically, that was a small price to pay. But if I’d known that there would be no escape from that form of escape, I would have found a different way.

Understanding neoliberalism is actually not hard. Yes, there are many definitions, and volumes upon volumes have been written. But all you really need to get it are two words: freedom and choice.

Neoliberalism is the belief that you should be free from everything. From the hell that are other people, from unpleasantness, age, your physical nature, the past, the tradition, God. You should be free to choose. The only thing you are not free to choose is to stop choosing. Nothing can be left as-is, unmessed with. Nothing is to be accepted as lying outside of the human freedom to change it. And then change it again.

There’s no off-ramp from this on the left side of the road. You can notice that the cult of freedom and choice has gone too far, that people are lonely, that many are miserable and drugged out, that life in general is becoming more uncomfortable. You can notice it but there’s nothing you can do because the moment you say, “no, that’s not working, let’s stop and go back to how it was”, you become the worst of all possible things, a right-winger.

Tony Tulathimutte is an extraordinary talent but he’s looking for an off-ramp on the left and not finding it because it’s not there. I have not yet found a better, more talented and poignant depiction of how neoliberalism devastates people’s lives than his novel Rejection. But he’s terrified of the solution. It’s right there, even on the purely narrative level the novel could have been closed out so much stronger. Instead, it dissolves into word games and the usual over-investment into the inflamed, belabored self.

A negative finding is as important as a positive one. Liberalism has no solution for the ills it created. No amount of talent can locate what is not there. The off-ramp is located on the right.

🚨 NEW: Keir Starmer will use his conference speech tomorrow to say he will rebuild Britain into a "new country"

"A fairer country, a land of dignity and respect. Everyone seen, everyone valued, wealth creation in every single community"

— Politics UK (@PolitlcsUK) September 29, 2025

Again, I have to ask, is Starmer mocking the Brits? “Everyone seen”, he’ll say exactly at the time when Britons are protesting against his plan to introduce a massive new surveillance regime.

Also, a new country? What if people like their actual country? Is it OK to like your country, or is it necessary always to try and create a new version?

People, I thought Joyce Carol Oates’ Fox was going to be my book of the year but the genteel Old World wordsmith Oates was slayed by this young dude Tony Tulathimutte. Oates is still brilliant but even she can’t do with language what Tulathimutte does. I want to finish his book, re-read it five times in a row and then possibly lick it. God truly loves me to have given me this book.

I have to issue two warnings, though, if people decide to read it.

One is that it gets very sexually explicit in stomach-turning ways. I had to skip 3 whole pages, and I’m a literary critic, I never skip.

The second warning is that unless you are young(ish) and terminally online, you’ll need a dictionary to understand parts of it.

This book is a novelistic rendering of Neoliberal Love. And it’s extremely funny. And talented. It’s so good that drops of linguistic ambrosia are practically dripping off its pages. It was long listed for the National Book Award that was won by the ideological propaganda slog James, which goes to show how stupid the literary establishment is. Rejection wasn’t even short listed, which is insane.

It’s generally believed that the very beginnings of a relationship are beautiful, romantic and tingly, and then everything settles into routine which is boring at best and dreary at worst.

In reality, it’s the other way round. The start of a relationship is uncomfortable and has to be borne with patience to get to the really good stuff. You have to do a lot of learning, self-editing, and self-explanation as you integrate the other person onto your life. Ten years in is when you get to the really amazing stuff. The wordless dialogue, the seamless taking over of each other’s burdens, the ease of handling the other’s intolerable affects. The discomforts of the beginning are only justified by the eventual arrival of the delayed bounties of permanent love.

This is why the endless scrolling through partners that we are offered as the most important expression of freedom is so depressing and miserable for everybody who tries it and is not a sociopath.

I’m inspired to write this by Tony Tulathimutte’s excellent novel Rejection which I mistakenly referred to as a short story collection yesterday. You only figure out it’s a novel on page 60, so I do have an excuse. I’m still reading the novel, which has been referred to as the first truly incel work of fiction, and will say more about it later.

Trump withdrew the prohibition on Ukrainian strikes on Russia. I don’t care about words, only actions. This action is good.

Here’s a very 😭 Russian vatnik:

❗️"Everyone is silent. HIMARS hit Belgorod, there is no power! Drones are striking Belgorod, Kursk regions. And Peskov is telling us how our economy is doing. What economy? People are being killed every day – Russian military z-bloggers are raising panic against the backdrop of… pic.twitter.com/L2jejIQL59

— 🪖MilitaryNewsUA🇺🇦 (@front_ukrainian) September 29, 2025

He says that Trump is copulating Russia both orally and anally which, strangely, he does not seem to enjoy as much as he should.

This raw footage at a Hooters restaurant raises a brutal question for police departments everywhere: policy or reality?

In the push for diversity, many agencies forbid pairing based on gender or physical risk. On paper, it sounds noble.

But on the street? Operational safety… pic.twitter.com/k382MVh5DG

— Desiree (@DesireeAmerica4) September 28, 2025

And this is a scrawny little dude. What if they had to arrest somebody with the body type of the guy in the green shirt?

Given that violent criminals are almost all men, it’s a very nutty idea to put women in the roles where they have to make arrests. This endangers the public and the women themselves. This insane practice should stop. 

And it’s not about pairing like the linked tweet claims. The brunette in the video should never have been accepted into this job at all. She is physically incapable of doing it like a paraplegic isn’t capable of being a professional dancer.