I’ve been pretty absent from online spaces (and my own website) this year, mostly because, well: what a fucking year. Even setting aside The Horrors, it’s been thing after thing interrupting me. We have:
- January finding me moved to a new state and losing all my medication providers. Which I got re-established just in time for…
- March, when the U.S. government cancelled the grant that I’m employed under due to it being, and I quote, ‘woke climate change ideology’, which led to me having to spend the entire year writing new grants, a process further disrupted in…
- May, when a good friend-of-the-family and my only social contact in New Hampshire was, well, murdered, which the whole summer was spent dealing with and left me kind of caught by surprise in…
- September, when the university finally noticed the grant had been cancelled and informed me I was being laid off.
Thankfully, on the last front, we have worked like mad things and managed to stitch together 3-4 other, smaller grants into the semblance of a job - which is kind of funny in the sense that according to my C.V., I’m now wildly successful at getting money out of funders, and all because of Pete Hegseth!
It hasn’t all been bad: the job has (generally, admin aside) been good, I learned to drive and got my first car, I bought a house, I got a book contract, and I’ve been working on some papers in both AI and the history of medicine that are currently under review and I’m very excited about. But I’m hoping 2026 brings some unconditional good things, for a change.
So if I owe you an email or have been delayed on work, this is why, and I’m deeply sorry for being a bad correspondent, collaborator or friend! I hope the reader’s year has gone a bit more smoothly.