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Why did she like me? Not an irrelevant question, because the certainty that she liked me, and that other cool people I’ve known have liked me, has been my only reliable evidence, through the years, that I must be an interesting person. When my feelings about myself take a bad turn, this is the one …

[...] What Maggie’s career had amounted to. The work she’d done had meant something to the world, and her teaching had meant quite a lot to me personally. But I could already see, from the professional perch I had just recently assumed, looking out across the future of my own burgeoning career and …

If these days most economists tend to dismiss “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” as either frivolous or deeply flawed, this is because they suffer from what I would call a failure of imagination. They think the sole purpose of writing is to convey information, and they refuse to acknowl…

Are you really going to mourn your kitchen? That’s what you’re going to mourn?

One upside to living in the apocalypse is that it puts your problems into perspective.

It’s not just a kitchen, though. The kitchen is metonymic.

And also, yes, I am allowed to mourn my kitchen.

“That you are personally not bound by your institution’s metrics and expectations for tenure, for example, simply because you find them archaic? That you are not fully aware that tenure assessments are at the discretion of the tenured faculty and require no explanation at all? Or that in embarking …