Opinions, art, debate
Do you, readers, think it’s possible?
I want to be optimistic but I believe that without very specific efforts to disempower private equity this won’t happen. Blackrock and others are vacuuming up properties like crazy. But if anybody sees a positive path forward, please share your thinking.
Speaking about housing, year 2008 called and wants its market crash back:
To contribute to the ongoing discussion, I found a great meme about the groyper right:
One thing I really really hate about women is this:
Women are great but this one thing annoys the living bejesus out of me. I only want to be around women who are congenitally incapable of being in thrall to some imaginary critical voice that might not fully approve of their actions.
I have no idea how one develops this debilitating need to please some imaginary authority and the attending belief that if there’s one person on the planet who doesn’t fully approve of your actions you are going to drop dead immediately. But I do find it very annoying.
This is clearly why I have no friends.
At work, though, I prefer to collaborate with women. Women always have somewhere else they need to be. I love colleagues who want to be elsewhere because so do I. Lightning-fast meetings where everybody sprints towards the door the second there appears a small pause in the discussion are my thing. Women are great for that. I was on an all-female committee last week where we all arrived with very different proposals. In under 40 minutes, we discussed, agreed, and worded a joint proposal. Then we stomped towards the door like we had a newborn each far away, screaming for food. It was glorious.
Of the guys on display, the one I like is the author of the text because he’s funny.
Wait, is the shutdown over? What did I miss?
My 4 segments, accomplished while entertaining my kid whose school isn’t open today, did not allow for any awareness of the outside world.
Another productivity strategy is this. I have 3 intense projects going on. Two are research-related (articles with a hard due date) and one is bureaucratic. I need to strain every capacity to finish 2 of these projects by December 1 and one more by Christmas.
This is what I do to get a handle on the projects. Every day, I split the page of my notebook in 4 parts. Each part is dedicated to each of the 3 projects + 1 segment for health. Every day, I aim to fill each segment equally. There are several check-in points throughout the day. What have I done on segment one? What have I done for health? Segment four keeps looking sparse. What’s causing it?
Since I constantly keep each project within my field of vision, I’m free of the feelings of guilt that there’s something I need to be doing and I’m not. Less guilt always means more energy.
In his book Ahora y en la hora (2025), Colombian writer Héctor Abad Faciolince explains why he traveled to Kramatorsk, a city 20 km from the front lines, in 2023. It’s one thing to want to go and offer support and participate in cultural events, but what’s the point of visiting a pizzeria on the front lines? Abad’s adult children almost murdered him after they found out the risk their old Dad had taken.
Curiously, Abad’s children were the reason why he ended up almost perishing in a missile strike in Kramatorsk. The writer’s son and daughter are very left-wing. They were both past age thirty and decided not to procreate. Because climate change, because colonialism, because fascism. Because they were both infantile drama queens, in short. Abad felt that it was easier to die and not face the horror of his own children being… this. Obviously, he doesn’t criticize them in any way in his book. He’s a crazy Dad, completely in love with the silly old brats. But it’s such a sad story.
Still, Abad’s children aren’t completely immune to their father’s suffering. Or, at least, his daughter isn’t. Since Abad’s near-death experience in Ukraine, she gave birth to twins. The babies were severely premature, and Abad spent two months walking them around the hospital tied to his chest.
It ended well for the Abad family, and that’s always good.
My outfit for tomorrow:
Nobody can claim I’m slacking off on celebrating November.
More inflation is coming our way:
This is the reaction to the election wipeout on Tuesday. It’s a reaction borne of fear and panic. There’s not an iota of thinking behind it.
The story of Lance Twiggs is very interesting in what it tells us about the nature of masculinity. His lifestyle – the mold experiments, the gadgets, the collectible cards, the trinkets, the mess in the living room, the financial dependence – are those of a young, badly parented boy. He never became an adult man in anything other than his biological age and physical development. His forays into transgenderism and furrying are a clear sign that he knew he wasn’t managing to become a man.
“If I’m not a man, I must be a woman or am animal” was his logic, and it does make sense in a really warped way. He clearly perceived a mismatch between the form and the content of his self and tried to plaster the rift with adopting other identities and self-medicating with drugs.
We can pretend all we want that reality is infinitely malleable but it’s not. We have shied away from talking about the importance of male rites of passage, normal stages of masculinity, male communities and networks of support, and the result is a large number of young men who have no idea how to bring their minds into alignment with their bodies of grown men.
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