Another little productivity hack is that the time on my computer is always set an hour ahead. Every day I receive a nice jolt of surprise when I realize I have an extra hour.

Milwaukee is such a decent place. At the airport, there’s a large used-books store where you can buy great literature for the flight instead of the usual overpriced magazines and motivational reads.

My haul:

If you aren’t reading Wallace Stegner yet, you should start. He’s phenomenal. I’m reading his The Angle of Repose, and I plan to clutch this collection of short stories to my chest while I’m reading the novel. Two Stegners at once, what can be better?

Loving your country means loving its literature. Stegner is some of the very best in American letters. He’s also a fascinating person, married to his wife for 59 years in a profound relationship that inspired much of his writing.

There’s more grading today, and this gave me a chance to listen to more Tucker. It’s fascinating that every show, every topic is led towards the idea that there should be a civil war. “This country can’t stay whole. The states are too different. The political factions are too distant from each other ideologically. How can we stay one country? We are clearly no longer one country. We are too different. These conflicts can’t be reconciled. We are too different. We aren’t one country.”

Everything else—the chemtrails, the mustachioed nun, the conspiracies—are background for this one idea advanced with the relentlessness of a metronome. Civil war, civil war, civil war.

I’m very glad I listened to several shows in a row because it’s easy to miss what’s really happening otherwise.

The grift is absolutely shameless. Musk’s X algorithm puts a post with 200 likes as major news because the post is pro-mass migration.

I’m very low-engagement on X but I routinely get way over 200 likes. It’s really not a big deal to get this number of likes on the platform. You can say “so true” in response to somebody’s tweet and get several times the engagement of this stupid post about Dubai.

I don’t get promoted by the algorithm, though.

I have never felt more understood:

I even remember what the essay was about: a denunciation of the horribly socialistic and twerpy Mexican author Elena Poniatowska. I had to rewrite the whole thing from scratch and got an A+ on it but the horror of that moment remains engraved on my brain.

So I listened to two 2-hour shows by Tucker Carlson and, OK, don’t judge. I had six 15-page research papers to grade. I have scared the students away from even winking in the direction of AI, which means I have to correct every article, accent, and conjugation. To be able to do it in one sitting (while I’m at a conference where I’m one of the organizers and trying to write an urgent article and managing the department in little breaks between events), I have to listen to something. Not a work of literature, obviously, but something that will keep me on point.

Yes, I have a weird brain that requires me to listen to something in a different language from the one in which I’m grading.

And so what I have to say is, Tucker is a very talented dude. Talented. The shows are great. He’s completely nuts, of course, but so talented. It’s a pity he got bitten by that demon. Because this talent plus a moderately sane message would be really powerful. He interviews complete duds and manages to make them sound better and more interesting than they could ever hope. One interviewee was some Armenian lady, embarrassingly coarse, but Tucker made her sound almost kind of not terrible.

I’m upset with that demon. The demon robbed us.

On the positive side, I finished my grading. In this one course. I have two more to go.

People, I most seriously recommend breaking up your projects in small bits and dedicating 30 minutes a day or so to each project. The moment I started doing it, I stopped flailing and feeling stressed. I cover a bit of each of my projects every morning, and there’s a definite feeling of advancing on all of them. The panic and the stress are gone.

I decided to watch Tucker Carlson’s show about Thomas Crooks, the guy who tried to assassinate Trump. Once again—and this is hilarious—the moment I switch on Carlson’s channel, everything turns into Russian. Carlson’s voiceover is in Russian, the ads are in Russian. I switch it into English but if I leave the site and come back, it’s all Russian again. None of this ever happens when I watch actual Russian-language channels on which I appear. Or Soviet movies on Russian-language channels. I’m telling you, folks, the algorithm knows.

In any case, the theory Tucker advances is based on two assumptions:

1. It’s suspicious that Crooks’s ideology changed dramatically during COVID. He was far-right as a teenager but then COVID hit, and he became far-left.

This assumption is grounded in a false theory of mind. Not only teenagers but middle-aged people (khm, khm) changed their political beliefs between 2019 and 2021. Leaving me aside, we all know people who switched sides during those years. We might ourselves be those people.

• 2. Crooks posted threats if violence on social media for years, and it’s impossible that the FBI wasn’t tracking him.

Again, this is based on a faulty engagement with reality. Go on any social network at any time, and you will find crowds and crowds of people running their mouths, posting every threat imaginable. The idea that the FBI can track all of these people is utterly insane.

From Tucker’s own reporting, it’s clear that Crooks was a weirdo who first adored Trump and then switched into hating him as intensely. That the authorities didn’t do anything about his radicalization is understandable because there’s a lot of angry online commenting and it’s unrealistic to expect the authorities to monitor every commenter when there’s tons of actual violent crime that doesn’t get solved.

On my American trips, I never stay at Airbnbs because I have a deep secret love for American hotels. I can’t explain it but there’s some magnetic charm in them. The Doubletree Hilton where I’m staying right now has a microwave, a fridge, and a machine to boil water so I can make my own tea. I can open the window, which is crucial for my well-being. A great, very quiet hotel. I never stay at the conference hotel because I like to put some distance between work and rest. Since I’m on the executive board, I’d feel like I’m constantly on call if I slept close to where everything is happening.

It’s comical how much tea I make during trips. My teas are fennel and chamomile-anise, so I can guzzle them by the liter.

EXCLU: A classified Justice Department brief authorizing strikes on drug-smuggling boats describes fentanyl as a potential chemical weapons threat, according to a House member and another person familiar with the memo. W/ @alexbward @mgordonwsj https://t.co/CAGGu9OVA7

— Lara Seligman (@laraseligman) November 14, 2025

Because it absolutely is. Fentanyl has been used as an incapacitating chemical agent in warfare and state terrorism by Russia. There are studies on this dating back to 2019. And who keeps the Maduro regime in place? Russia.

The WH is acting correctly in striking these boats and should continue doing so.