Thanks to deep work, last year I only worked 3,7 hours a day 5 days a week (I didn’t count reading). In that time, I chaired my department with 9 different languages, taught, wrote a book and 3 articles, and did my translation work.

Deep work is a life-changer, my friends. Gone are the days where I graded or prepared classes on weekends or in the evenings. By the way, I always teach new classes because it bores me to repeat stuff. So it’s not like I’m skating on old material.

Highly, highly recommended. Once I finish out my term as Chair, I’ll drop it to 2 hours a day. That will be so cool.

From Freddie de Boer’s blog:

if you’re looking for something to meaningfully move your child around in the academic performance spectrum, to take an X percentile kid and make him an X+Y percentile kid, the answer is no, what you’re asking me about doesn’t work, won’t matter, isn’t worth it. Because outside of some very specific and rare scenarios like schooling a child who has received literally no formal education or removing a kid from extreme neglect or abuse, nothing substantially changes the average kid’s place in the performance spectrum. Academic outputs are dominantly student-side and uncontrollable, based largely on genetics, conditions in the womb, and the “unshared environment,” which is our awkward term for that big chunk of variation we can neither explain nor control.

That is absolutely 100% true. The reason to take a kid to robotics (if the kid really wants to go) or any other extracurricular is so that the kid has fun.

You can’t change a kid’s IQ. At all. But you can do something much more important. Imagine looking into a mirror your whole life and seeing a strikingly beautiful woman or a sensationally good-looking man every single time. Imagine living with a feeling that the world is conspiring in your favor, that everything will turn out just right for you because you are that kind of person. Who needs academic outputs if you can have that?

This is what we can give our children.

People get stuck on these stupid academic outputs like they can make anybody happy.

Putin’s interview with Tucker is precisely why I’m not very worried about Trump siding with Russia if he wins the election. Putin knows that Tucker is on his side, yet he repeatedly mocked the poor dude during the interview. “You are too dumb for a serious conversation, you are just an entertainer, I know your secrets, you have been rejected by the CIA.” That’s just how he is. He can’t control it.

Trump might make some overtures to Putin, sure. Then he’ll get mocked and humiliated, which will make him angry, and we’ll have him exactly where needed.

Trump and Putin are both undisciplined, reactive, and pouty. Such people are bound to aggravate each other easily.

And yes, Biden is half-dead, so that’s another problem.

Also, people keep saying, “Putin had an opportunity to make his case to American right-wingers. Why did he not use this chance?”

The answer is what I’ve been saying for years. Putin’s actions are internally motivated. His audience is in Russia. Everything he does is aimed at saving his life in Russia. Russians enjoy seeing Americans humiliated. So Putin gave them what they wanted. And this is just some boring old Tucker. Imagine the brownie points for humiliating a US president.

This is exactly what my Jewish friends in academia say. Why should I be shocked that this Corbyn dude repeats this conspiracy theory?

The human brain is fascinating. All of a sudden, I had a strong memory of a certain book by a prolific author. There was this powerful compulsion to locate the book on my Kindle. I did and discovered that exactly a year ago on that day I started reading that book but then something interrupted me and I never finished.

My brain knew it was the anniversary of the book’s abandonment even though I had no memory of that.

On another day, I felt ill and anxious for no reason. The idea of food was particularly repellent. I told a friend how I felt and she gave me a weird look. “Don’t you remember what we were doing on this day a year ago?” she asked. It turns out this was the anniversary of the day when we sat at a restaurant for 7 hours, waiting to hear from her oncologist. My brain enacted the anxiety and nausea I had felt exactly a year ago.

Look at El Salvador. It was a total shit hole (and I say it as a passionate advocate of the great Salvadoran literature). Crime rates worse than Chicago. OK, not that bad but still pretty sucky. Nobody had a good word to say about the country, least of all Salvadorans themselves.

But people got themselves together and elected a young president with fresh, innovative ideas. They didn’t get stuck on an old man who babbles incoherently like Putin, Biden or Trump. Now the crime rates have dropped dramatically, and things are looking up.

Or take Argentineans. They elected a 53-year-old dude who’s turning the country around.

Russians are used to worshipping the dead bodies of their politicians. They still queue up to stare at poor Lenin’s corpse. They’ll probably be rolling out a mummy of Putin to greet visitors a century from now. But what are we doing here in the US? Why did we embrace senility?

People keep saying there’s a cult of youth in this country. OK, where’s the youth? I’m not seeing any youth. Instead, we are caught between two Lenin-like products of taxidermy.

My Twitter thread is filled with guys yelling at each other, “No, your dude is more senile than my dude.” It’s embarrassing.

I hear that Putin bombed his interview with Tucker, Biden bombed his presser, and Trump just generally bombed.

It’s very sad when frail, mentally foggy elderly people can’t just retire already and let us all be.

Don’t worry, though. Once Trump gets elected, he’ll pass the amnesty bill and primary the Republican Congressmen who are currently resisting it. Jared “he moved the Embassy to Jerusalem” Kushner loves immigration.

Let’s all hope Ivanka doesn’t decide to trans her kids, or Babylon Bee’s prediction that Trump will choose Dylan Mulvaney as his running mate will come true.

No, folks, there won’t be any magic pills or omnipotent saviors. Everything we want will be achieved by a slow, painful, incremental grind.

Or not at all.

My progressivism has atrophied into utter insignificance. But the diagnosis is spot-on. I have zero interest in being loyal to an idea, party, or worse yet, a specific politician. Political partisanship is a low-IQ pastime.

I like this test. It’s very accurate.