My department almost got disbanded because we are a shitty, bad department of irredeemably clueless people. The Physics department got disbanded because they are worse. Of course, there’s austerity and there are our neoliberal administrators, that’s all true. But I can’t pretend that we don’t bear a large share of responsibility for this.

Yesterday, my colleagues engaged in a campaign of harassment against the new secretary, Julie, over textbook orders. Julie is a dream of a secretary. She is competent, efficient, experienced, and cheerful. There is a shortage of secretaries, and if she asks to be reassigned, other departments will snap her up in a flash. Julie told me that she’d worked for 4 other departments and there was nothing resembling this level of entitlement there. She didn’t put it that way because she’s not rude but the implication is clear. And I know she’s right. People were behaving like absolute shits towards her. For no reason and no gain. I spent the whole day reaching out to them individually and begging them to stop but to no avail.

Folks, this wasn’t one or two people who behaved this way. It was almost everybody.

“Why the hell are you asking me to assign a textbook for this course when I’m not teaching it?” ranted one colleague at Julie.

I got involved and very politely responded to him that, yes, he is, indeed, teaching this course. He insisted on teaching it. Which is why it’s in the schedule. That was published two months ago. And which he could have consulted before going off on Julie.

Do you think he apologized? Nope. “Ah, I forgot,” was his only response.

And on and on it went with people practically competing for the title of the most obnoxious pest in existence. Sending sheets and sheets of completely unreasonable demands that they know Julie isn’t authorized to meet.

This isn’t new. They were like this with the previous secretary, and I begged them for years to understand that we’ll be left without a secretary because nobody is obligated to put up with such attitude. I ended up prohibiting them from contacting the secretary at all and mandated that they send all communications for her to me instead. But my term as Chair is almost over and I can’t prohibit anything at this point, so they tore into Julie.

This doesn’t happen at other departments. I stopped sharing my stories with other Chairs because they don’t believe me when I tell them. They don’t have these problems with their faculty and think I’m inventing this. I can see it in the looks of polite withdrawal they give me, and I don’t blame them. To give a single example among a trillion, I allowed one colleague to work remotely because of her personal circumstances. I went against university regulations to do it. The Associate Dean turns a blind eye to this situation out of goodwill towards me personally. This goodwill is something I worked like a plantation slave to generate and never use to get special consideration for myself. I only use it to benefit others, like the remote working colleague.

But guess what? This remote colleague is throwing regular fits about not knowing what we discuss at faculty meetings. Which she chooses not to attend against every regulation. She lives 30 minutes away. She could attend them. She chooses not to, and I protect her from the consequences because she’s a mother and I just can’t avoid trying to be nice. I send her all of the documents I share at the meetings. She refuses to read them and then freaks out at me because she doesn’t know what’s in the documents. This person teaches severely underenrolled courses that are costing the university money, so it’s not like this is a hugely valuable specialist who can afford to be a nuisance.

A year doesn’t pass without somebody at the department threatening lawsuits against the university over something utterly ridiculous that they themselves caused. Is it that shocking that the administration wants to get rid of us?

The reason I’m sharing all this, besides needing to rant and lighten my emotional burden, is that there’s always agency. Austerity is real but we ran towards it like a professional track team and made it unavoidable that austerity will come for us first. If bad things are happening to you, is there any chance you could have caused some of them? That’s always an important question to ask. I clearly caused the situation with the entitled remote worker. It’s on me and my need to feel good about respecting her motherhood.

I don’t like this time of year because I’m in a state of constant busyness but nothing of value gets done. It’s endless bird-dropping tasks, emails, bickering with co-workers who get extremely particular about the most trivial things. Messages, messages, messages. Parsecs of emails. And if you don’t think emails are measured in parsecs, you haven’t seen my Outlook. People are storming my office. Everybody wants something. I barely have time to write. Weather changes are extreme, which is energy-sapping. The cat is obese (not our fault, we got her this way) and her mealtimes need attention. My aunt ended up at the hospital, and I’m getting updates every two hours. I have laundry that has waited to be folded for almost a week. It stares at me with mute reproach. All I want to do, in the meantime, is hide somewhere with a book.

OK, rant over. I have 30 minutes before I have ve to zonk out and I still haven’t done my daily Bible readings.

The owner of my YouTube channel says, “We need a positive title for the next show. People want positivity, good news, something upbeat. We need to come up with something like that.”

Two minutes before the taping, he sends me an image for the header. It says, “An illegal brutally murdered a student in Chicago.”

We, Russian-speakers are a grim, grim bunch.

Noelia Castillo Ramos, the Spanish rape victim euthanized because her rape made her disabled, was sold for organs before the euthanasia. Noelia was told she couldn’t change her mind on the euthanasia because her organs were needed by others.

It doesn’t look like Noelia’s rapists were punished in any way. They are free to rape more girls who can then also be sold for parts.

This is one of the stupidest ideas ever devised. Kids are too smart, too headstrong, to learn from a robot. Only people who've never taught in a classroom setting think that AI-bot-directed education will survive more than three days. https://t.co/8ulg0SbdoH

— Luther R. Abel (@lutherabel1) March 26, 2026

People are not getting it. Melania brought out a robot for visual effect. Nobody is going to send robots into classrooms. The robots will be on a screen. That the kids will watch at home. While jobless mom and dad are zonked out with their own screens right there next to them. And school buildings will house data centers.

My sister is part of a large global organization of entrepreneurs. They have a program where you gather a small group of entrepreneurs, and they become your life long buddies. A group holds monthly meetings where they share everything about their lives. Not just business but what happens in their private lives, too. They help each other grow as professionals, parents, husbands and wives, friends, etc. The organization sponsors trips where they do activities to advance their psychological health. The goal is to develop as a human being, not just a business person, within a small group of very close friends for life.

I have the deepest admiration, and not a small dose of envy, for this practice. I have to do all of this completely by myself, and I feel great yearning for this kind of collective experience of supported growth.

As I keep saying, I am deeply in love with Paul Kingsnorth’s book Against the Machine even though I disagree with much of it. In this post, I want to talk about one of the things with which I disagree. And it’s his foundational idea and not a minor quibble.

Kingsnorth says that the West deserves to die. It shouldn’t be saved. To the contrary, it should perish altogether. This is not my interpretation. He says this verbatim. The reason why Kingsnorth has given up on the West is that his understanding of it is very different from my own that I described here.

Kingsnorth believes that the driving force of the Western civilization is the idea of revolutionary change. Everything must be destroyed to create something new. Then this new thing must be destroyed to create an even newer thing. And so on. The West will end up destroying humanity unless the West falls apart completely. When that happens, Kingsnorth hopes, we will be able to go back to the pre-modern society of small villages and artisanal guilds living happily in communion with nature.

This prospect does not appeal to me. I know the numbers on infant mortality and women’s mortality in childbirth before the twentieth century. No amount of small villages and artisanal guilds can make the prospect of going back there attractive to me. I like modernity. I really like capitalism, which is another thing Kingsnorth despises.

Kingsnorth says that the West is colonialist by nature, and that this is bad. He would happily have continued being a leftie if the Left hadn’t gone corporate and statist. I don’t want this to put you off from reading the book. It’s a wonderful book. Kingsnorth has an amazing sense of humor. The book is beautifully written and very easy to follow. Just read it already. It’s totally good.

The United Nations General Assembly has voted to recognise the slave trade as “the gravest crime against humanity”…

The resolution – proposed by Ghana – called for this designation, while also urging UN member states to consider apologising for the slave trade and contributing to a reparations fund. It does not mention a specific amount of money.

The proposal was adopted with 123 votes in favour and three against – the United States, Israel and Argentina.

Fifty-two countries abstained, including the United Kingdom and European Union member states.

Well, at least the EU abstained, that’s something. What an incredibly stupid organization UN is. We should stop funding it or participating in its lunacy in any way.

I’m amazed by my Associate Dean. He is a man of truly infinite patience and kindness. Not remotely a pushover. The expression “balls of steel” was created for this guy. Machiavellian in his plotting capacity. But his reserves of patience are infinite. He has about 70 times more absolute walnuts total morons wonderful people and great intellectuals working under him than I do. Yet he never loses his patience. To give just one example, there’s a form several of us have to sign digitally. We’ve signed these forms for years, yet there’s been an endless exchange of emails about the form because we are just not managing to do it. Instead of telling us all to bite it, he filled the form himself and emailed it to us.

How does he do it? OK, he’s religious. But so am I! And it’s not helping. I told the priest at confession about my irritability. He started giving me instruction, and I immediately got annoyed. So that’s a work in progress.

I’m good when I have time to react. I meditate a lot by way of decorating my notebook. But my instantaneous in-person reaction is too fast. I have the words “wow, what an incredible moron you are” pulsating on my face like a huge neon sign before I can get a handle on myself.

By the way, there are two people on this planet who don’t know about my short fuse, moodiness, and congenital judgmentalism. And they don’t believe me when I tell them. These people are my husband and child. They think I’m the most even-tempered ray of sunshine that ever existed. So I’m not completely hopeless.

I just don’t love people enough, that’s the problem.

We have two courses that have been severely under enrolled both times we offered them. They don’t go towards any degree requirement. As a result, the Dean’s office decided not to offer them in the Fall. The people teaching these courses are understandably upset. They are not tenured, and the absence of these courses means they make less money. They started pressuring me to open these sections. I explained to them that this is not a decision I am authorized to make. There’s no procedure by which I can open any courses without the signature of the Associate Dean. I promised the colleagues to argue their case to the Dean. I immediately did exactly that and sent all of the paperwork. The Dean’s office informed me that they have taken the issue under consideration and will let us know the decision soon. I communicated that information to the colleagues involved.

Immediately after that, the colleagues organized a pressure campaign on me from the students. I started receiving dozens of messages, spamming my inbox. Teary delegations of students started showing up at my office and classroom and interrupting my teaching.

I wrote a very kind message to the colleagues involved, explaining once again that there’s nothing more I can do and kindly asking them to stop. As we all know, I have a bit of a temper. It took a lot of self-control to write a kind, polite message. This is the busiest time of the academic year. I’m drowning in paperwork and email. But I overcame my deep desire to call these colleagues absolute walnuts and egregious numbskulls. In response, they told the students to badger me harder. The obvious result is that I’m not motivated to do any favors to these colleagues at all.

My question is, under what theory of the mind do such people operate? These are both very middle-aged people, not excitable kids. They should have found out by now that the only way to interact with somebody on whose goodwill you depend for many different things is by making yourself agreeable. I have gotten an enormous lot of good stuff for my colleagues at the department by cultivating goodwill among the administration and support staff. I’ve smiled, I’ve been patient, I’ve thanked for every little bit. People are stunned by how much I managed to wrangle out of the cold, steely jaws of the administration. I’m naturally not given to any of these behaviors. I’m naturally grumpy, cantankerous, and with a tragically short fuse. But I overcome these inclinations because if I gave free reign to them, my department would be where the Physics department is now. Which is not in existence.

It is not my decision whether to open these sections. But it is 100% my decision whether to make the position of one these colleagues permanent. The next Chair is a very close friend of mine which is widely known. Am I extremely motivated to inflict the colleague who is being an absolute walnut and acting like a total brat on my own close friend as a permanent hire? Clearly, not. Why is she tanking her chances for a permanent job over something that cannot bring any gain? There’s got to be some reasoning behind it but I can’t figure out what it is.