One year ago today, I went on one of my Twitter rants about higher education in America. Along the way, it morphed into a rant about the disproportionate burdens we put on young people, as crystallized in the following tweet:

https://twitter.com/adamkotsko/status/404605167066034176

I’m not sure how it happened, but this tweet “went viral.” Within a day or two, it had over 10,000 retweets — unimaginably more than any tweet I’ve done, before or since. After a couple weeks, I was hearing from my students that a screen capture of the tweet had been posted on Tumblr and Imgur, with hundreds of thousands of pageviews. Since then, people have developed more elegant images with the quote. There are also slight variants from people who preferred not to use the retweet function, as well as many plagiarized versions.

Clearly nothing I ever write will have such widespread impact as this tweet. Not even close. And that feels very strange to me, because in my mind, it’s not a particularly good tweet. Certainly good for a brief chuckle, but if I were to compile a “greatest hits” list, it wouldn’t make my personal top ten by far. Of course, part of that might stem from the experience of virality itself. Within a couple days, I went from being excited to being profoundly sick of having this tweet thrown back at me every few seconds. When it comes up in conversation, I find that I can’t actually make myself recite the tweet out loud, opting instead to get out my phone and show them (an easy task since it’s almost always been retweeted or favorited within the last day or so).

I’m also not sure if I’ve received any benefit from this. Blog traffic has been flat this year, my book sales appear to be unaffected, and there hasn’t been a flood of applicants to Shimer College begging to study with the bathroom tweet guy. I did get a huge boost in Twitter followers, doubling my count within a few weeks — but after that initial burst, I returned to the same “slow and steady” growth curve I had experienced before. I’m not sure if any subsequent tweet I’ve written has even broken 100 retweets.

It’s all very inscrutable.

For a variety of reasons, including lack of conference funding and lack of any actual desire to attend, I am missing this year’s AAR/SBL conference, much as I missed last year and the year before that. Yet I can experience all the most exciting moments through you, my readers, if you share them in comments below!

An episode of Freaks and Geeks records the turning point. Mrs. Weir has lovingly prepared Halloween cookies, just like every year, and when the first group of trick-or-treaters show up, one of the moms shames her for her presumption. This more attentive mother has of course trained her children never to accept home-made treats — after all, someone might have slipped a razor blade into it! Only store-bought, individually wrapped candy can be guaranteed to avoid this scourge.

Literally no child has ever found a razor blade in their Halloween candy. The entire phenomenon was completely made up. A moment’s thought reveals that the very idea makes no sense. Who would even want to do such a thing? Wouldn’t it be easy to trace it back to the offender if they’re giving out their distinctive homemade candy all night long? But better safe than sorry, right?

The fictional razor blade in the Halloween candy is a kind of quilting point for all the paranoias that led to the loss of any freedom for the children of the white middle class. If they’re left to wander the neighborhood, someone might abduct them! Coming from the other direction: if they’re left with any unscheduled time, doing anything that can’t be slotted into an immediately recognizable section of the college application, their life chances may be thwarted. In either case, the parents are losing control of their activities and thereby their destiny — and only disaster can result. The helicopter parent and the razor blade in your candy are correlative phenomena.

It’s interesting, then, that Halloween has also become the most striking symbol of the white middle class’s arrested development, its perpetual adolescence. What was once a semi-formal one-night event has become a months-long celebration for kids of all ages! Especially the ones in their 20s and 30s! Lindsay of Freaks and Geeks had to summon up her uttermost resources of good-sportsmanship to play along with her mom and pass out candy, and she surely would have been absolutely mortified to wear a costume to school on Halloween. Now grown adults with jobs and fancy condos go on Halloween-themed pub crawls two weeks before the blessed day itself.

Who am I to criticize someone else’s fun, you ask? Well, if you must know, I’m a curmudgeon who was already old long before his time. I also think I’m always right. So those are my qualifications. Surely I’m not alone, though. Surely!

As most readers probably know, I have spent the last ten weeks in San Francisco, as The Girlfriend has a short-term job out here this summer. Due to a combination of financial constraints, the nature of our accomodations, and my very deepest personality traits, the summer has been more monastic than usual. Most days, I have had close to twelve hours to myself between The Girlfriend’s work and commute. While I’ve enjoyed getting to know the Bay Area better and while I assure you that we’ve hit some key highlights (Golden Gate Park, Angel Island, Berkeley, Oakland, wine country…), I imagine that for quite some time I mainly will look back on this summer as the most productive of my life. Since today was my last “working” day (and I shipped my books back home earlier this afternoon to make sure of that), I thought I’d share the highlights:

• I drafted, thoroughly revised, and submitted Creepiness to the publisher, and the text has now been copy edited and finalized. We’re still looking at potential back-cover blurbs, but things seem to be moving at a faster pace than for the previous two volumes.
• Just as I was finishing that, I received final proofs for the Italian edition of Agamben’s Use of Bodies, of which I have now produced a draft translation of the prologue, first major division, and first “intermezzo” — amounting to approximately one-third of the total text. I anticipate completing bibliographical work and doing some initial polishing on this segment before the semester begins, and hope (perhaps over-optimistically) to complete an additional third per semester this school year.
• Colby Dickinson and I worked to assemble a co-authored collection of essays on Agamben, which we are in the process of revising in dialogue with a publisher — this naturally has to wait until I’m back in Chicago and can meet with Colby face to face to complete.
• I have drafted and revised a proposal for The Prince of This World: A Demonic Reading of Christianity, the frequently mentioned “devil book” I’ve been planning for several years. I’m still waiting for feedback from another reader, but I anticipate being able to submit this by the end of the month.
• I developed a new course on Islamic thought for Shimer, covering a range of primary texts from Muhammad to the late medieval period — an almost totally new area for me, and something that was long overdue.
• I led a six-week discussion group over two early works of Agamben, Infancy and History and Language and Death, at the Bay Area Public School, which was attended by a really solid group of young autodidacts, as well as recording an interview over Agamben’s work for KPFA in Berkeley and facilitating the completion of Stephen Keating’s directed reading over Agamben.
• And last and probably least, I reviewed a journal article and a book-length manuscript.

On a more personal level, having over the last couple years watched all of the “modern” Star Trek series, I also completed a thorough study of the areas of the franchise least familiar to me: the original series, the animated series, and the movies. And given that I had the chance to play housewife this summer, I also took pride in taking my turn at cooking for The Girlfriend for a change.

And of course, in the spirit of my crazy CTA project, I got what I consider to be very good “coverage” on BART, “getting” 10 stops (with at least one additional stop planned for tomorrow).

It’s a serious question. I seem like just the kind of person who would be vegetarian, demographically speaking. I’ve even gone through periods of my life where I was functionally vegetarian much of the time and could easily have made the transition. Why not, then? Do I have a principled reason, or just a series of post-hoc rationalizations? Or is it something in between, something in my temperament that makes me resist taking the plunge?

First possible reason: a general distrust of very abstract moral principles, such as a blanket prohibition on “killing.” Continue reading “Why am I not a vegetarian?” →