There’s a practice I follow to ground myself when I’m feeling overwhelmed. It comes from an unlikely place: bullfighting. (For our purposes, I’m going to set aside the cruelty of the “sport” and instead focus on the idea). It’s called querencia. In bullfighting, it’s believed that the bull is at its most powerful—not when it’s […]

When I left my tenured academic job, there was no goodbye party. No schoolwide email. Not even a quiet handshake in the hallway. One day I was there—the youngest tenured professor, top teaching evaluations. The next, I was gone. Deleted from the website. Email account deactivated. Like I had never been there at all. It […]