Something I heard my friend Amber say a long time ago on a podcast, and which has always stuck with me, is that there’s no such thing as a public apology. All real apologies are delivered in private.That always felt true to me. So, let’s call this an “embarrassed explanation.”Since I started this Substack in January 2023, I’ve (mostly) managed to keep up a pretty consistent schedule. I’ve had to miss a smattering of Sundays, here and there, when I had too many balls in the air, sometimes lining someone up to do a guest post and often just unlocking and old essay, but I don’t think I’ve ever gone two weeks in a row of posting nothing.That’s exactly what I did the last two Sundays, and I’m just barely going to get this up before midnight on the East Coast. Basically, a lot happened at the same time.

First, Bhaskar Sunkara and Mike Beggs and I are racing to meet a hard deadline to submit our book (the one being previewed here) to Verso so we can get a 2026 release date and it doesn’t have to get pushed back to 2027. On top of that, I’ve been traveling almost continually for the last two weeks—to New York for the conference for the 15th anniversary of Jacobin, to Atlanta for Ryan’s memorial service (goddamnit), back to California to stay with my parents for a few days, back home to Rosarito, and then almost immediately to Mexico City for an international conference of socialist, communist, and labor parties hosted by the Partido del Trabajo. That last one was great. I got to introduce Richard Wolff (we’ll run the video of that tomorrow on Give Them An Argument), and I met one of my all-time heroes (dissident Knesset member Ofer Cassif, who I wrote about here). I spent the flight back writing the lecture for this morning’s Capital Vol. 2 class, I got up, I taught it, and…I did the approximate human equivalent of automatically powering down to save battery life.

But, I promise we’ll be back next week with the long-delayed follow-up to the Liar Paradox essay. Check it out! Andy already made the artwork for that—a tribute to a classic Star Trek bit about paradoxes:

….and with that, I’ll draw the “embarrassed explanation to a close.” See you all next Sunday!

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