As a follow-up to our discussion about remote work, I want to say that the only reason I agreed to be department chair is because I wanted to write more. I knew I could write more but I needed somebody or something to tie me to a chair. Balzac reputedly asked to be tied to his armchair to be able to write as much as he did. I don’t know if this story is true but I knew it was what I needed.

And it worked. I’ve been mega productive because I’m obligated to stay in the office a certain number of hours each day including in the summer and there’s nothing to do except write. So I’ve been writing up a storm.

Things have now changed in that my husband started to work 100% from home, so I’ll be forced to come to the office even when I stop being chair. This way I’ll keep writing like a monkey on crack for the foreseeable future. But none of this – the barrage of articles, the Ukrainian book, the resulting awards and TV appearances, the new book, etc – would be possible if I hadn’t engineered for myself the obligation to be in the office. Yes, some people have the inner discipline to be as productive at home as in the office. But they are a tiny minority. I don’t belong to this minority, which is how I know that the struggle is real.

P.S. As I was writing this post, I received an email that the advisor who inspired this whole discussion resigned her position today. I’m guessing she realizes that this is no life and moved on to something that will be less depressing than sitting at home alone all day. I’m very happy for her.

Folks, I’m losing it. Please help. What’s the word commonly used in business alongside “pivot”? It denotes the need always to be willing to change.

I was thinking about it yesterday and then today it escaped me completely.

I want to believe in the American justice system. I spent years as a new immigrant obsessively watching Law & Order. It’s a beautiful system, and we all need it to work.

Seeing these terrible, politicized prosecutions where the defendant is referred to in court not by his name but, again and again and again, as “the white man” is killing that faith. The wall-to-wall media propaganda that already influenced and terrorized juries in the past stacks the deck against anybody who is disliked by the aggressively BLMing chattering classes. And it’s particularly appalling that the same prosecutors who unleashed Neely on peaceful New Yorkers were punishing Penny for their own failings. Neely had been arrested dozens of times, most recently for violently assaulting a 67-year-old woman and shattering bones in her face. He was on that subway car, threatening to murder passengers. They all testified they were terrified. A mother was trying to shelter her toddler behind a stroller. Nobody cared about these peaceful, utterly blameless people.

The police that arrived at the scene while Neely was still alive refused to do CPR because he was dirty and icky. Once again, the system failed but Penny was blamed for a preventable death that police chose not to prevent.

The judge was playing so openly and shamelessly on the prosecution’s side that even the initially deadlocked jury realized what was happening and refused to participate in the sham. And the really sad thing is that we are all surprised. Nobody expected a New York jury to do the reasonable thing.

We are being deprived of the most basic services we want to count on. The police doesn’t police, unhinged drug addicts make going out in large cities unpleasant and dangerous. I was in Chicago for a conference a few weeks ago and I didn’t manage to leave the hotel for the duration because every time I stepped outside I observed scenes that made me want to head back to my room. And we are getting blamed for defending ourselves from the chaos that’s unleashed on us! We are told to sit quietly and apologetically while we are bathed in neoliberal gore (not my term but I like it). We don’t have money for mansions, gated communities and limousines that would protect us from this dysfunction. Yet we are lectured by those who barricaded themselves against the chaos about the unacceptable nature of our lack of eagerness to become its victims. We are bamboozled by stories of racial guilt to accept our dispossession.

But once, just once, 12 people in New York said, “no, we aren’t falling for it again.”

And that’s what gives me joy.

Folks, have you tried Claude.ai? It writes really well. Maybe a tad too exalted for my liking but really well. Like in, ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME HOW CAN THIS THING WRITE SO FUCKING WELL?

It won’t create content for you. But it can make the content you have sound a lot better.

A million times better than chatgpt for editing in English.

I anticipate a mass exodus of workers from writing / editing jobs.

P.S. Here is Claude’s rendering of my preceding text, and I insist that I dominate because my version is still undefeated:

“Have you explored Claude.ai yet? The writing capabilities are genuinely remarkable—perhaps a bit grandiose at times, but undeniably impressive. The platform doesn’t generate content from scratch, but it transforms existing text with extraordinary precision. Its editing prowess makes ChatGPT look almost primitive by comparison, particularly when it comes to English language refinement. While the technology is extraordinary, it’s more of a sophisticated writing assistant than a wholesale replacement for human creativity. That said, its emergence could significantly disrupt traditional writing and editing workflows, potentially compelling professionals in these fields to rapidly adapt and redefine their roles.”

So don’t count me off, just yet.

Cristina Fallarás offers no insight into her situation. Her book is not a philosophical treatise. It’s art. She gleans absolutely no understanding of anything from her four years of immiseration and lumpenization. At the end of the book, she eagerly recites the same old leftist slogans about climate change and the Catholic Church somehow causing her troubles. (If Spain isn’t within your range of interests and you don’t know if it’s true, here’s a hint: no, it’s definitely not the Catholic Church).

It’s a wonderful book, anyway. We need to imagine ourselves in Fallarás’s situation, we need to inhabit it in our imaginations. When bad shit happens, the worst part is to waste energy on wondering “why me? How could it happen? This is so unfair!”

Yes, there’s no insight but I can give you insight. Art, I can’t make, no talent.

I’m now going to go listen to the book for the second time.

Why are people downvoting my posts about the post-Soviet economy and the disappeared advisor?

I understand that you can disagree with my joy over the Daniel Penny verdict. But you can’t disagree with the story about the advisor because it didn’t happen to you. You can’t have an opinion?

Or are people downvoting for another reason?

I feel like a total fool for not reading Cristina Fallarás’s A la puta calle earlier. After Rafael Chirbes’s On the Edge, it’s the strongest Spanish crisis book.

When the working classes were devastated by deindustrialization and moving jobs overseas, workers suffered in silence. Deaths of desperation, opioids, collapse of family structures – this was all an object of study for the intellectual classes but not a personal, visceral experience.

In 2008-12 in Spain, the intellectual classes were hit by the same kind of dispossession. But unlike manufacturing workers, they can speak. They have a voice, an audience, and a skill to express themselves instead of self-destructing in silence.

Spain is ahead of the US or Canada in terms of neoliberalization. We haven’t yet experienced what the Spaniards have. We need to read Fallarás’s book and memorize it if we don’t want the same to happen to us. It hasn’t been translated, unfortunately. Probably because it’s too dark and disturbing.

I’m sorry but a nutrition bro being caught at McDonald’s with an anti-healthcare “manifesto” is really giving “we immediately found the passports of the 9/11 hijackers” vibes.

https://x.com/vocalcry/status/1866214455794659402?t=c9Zx0vIpykCQNP_lMyn1vQ&s=19

Because it’s not possible that he’s an idiot and a hypocrite, or what?

People have a very impoverished understanding of reality and it leads them to formulate conspiracy theories to explain the confusing, complicated world.

Working from home makes sense for highly organized individuals with extraordinary inner control. This is the tiniest of minorities. For everybody else, it’s a non-concept.

For years, I worked with this wonderful advisor, brilliant, competent, lightning-fast. It was a pleasure to direct students to her. Then she went remote and stopped answering messages. I was puzzled to discover that she still works for us. I literally haven’t heard from her in years. Her job is specifically to curate my department, so if I’m not hearing from her, nobody else is.

In the meantime, the second adviser assigned to us is doing the work of both.

So I’m with Elon here. If you want to stay home, quit the job and let those who do want to work show up.

One thing that shocked me in Cristina Fallarás’s book about losing her job and becoming impoverished is the complete absence of any men as active agents of family life in the story. There’s she, there’s her sister, her mom, they are all trying to figure something out to make ends meet. That there’s a husband and a father of her very small children only comes up when Fallarás shares that in the middle of the family’s floundering, the husband “traveled to Germany to participate in a literary event because he’s a writer.”

The family is at the stage of rationing food, and dude is … a writer? Not an Uber driver, house painter, cleaner or absolutely anything else that makes money but a writer who makes none? I’ve never heard of him, so it’s not like he’s a brilliant artist who didn’t want to sacrifice his art to menial labor.

Fallarás was fulfilling her part of the social contract and giving birth to children. Why wasn’t their father fulfilling his?

This happened back in the former USSR, too. Women hustled while men felt sorry for themselves and did nothing to inscribe themselves into the new economy. I always thought it was the legacy of WWII and Stalinism. But it looks like it’s the same in Spain.

I forget now who said that women always come out as winners in the neoliberal game. Fallarás is now well-to-do, famous, and married to a woman. Her ex-husband is languishing in irrelevance.

Fluidity is easier for women, it seems like.