I didn’t intend to take such a long break from writing this blog. (Sorry if anyone was waiting around.) But I’ve been working through a book manuscript slowly but surely, but slowly, and working on a new course, and tidying up various other larger and smaller writing and reading commitments — a couple of articles, a couple of book reviews, a prize committee, and thinking about future projects, and I am only able to write or even think about so many different things, or so many different kinds of thing, at once.

I’ve also been thinking about what the future of this thing — with its mix of academic complaint and historical anecdote, and its tangled relationship to what I’m researching or teaching or pissed off about at any given moment — could or should be. The only conclusion I’ve managed to come to so far is that, while there are probably better channels for some of the things I do here, I’m not done with it. Which means I’ll be posting more soon.