For any of you hoping after the verbosity of this post that I'd make myself scarce(r) for a little while, you may be in luck. Like I mentioned earlier, in a few hours I'm headed off to catch a plane for Puebla, Mexico (via Detroit), where I'll be trying desperately to become a fluent Spanish-speaker by July 1st. I'll still be on the blog intermittently (expect Friedman-esque gems like "I only really understood how prescient my last book was when today I met a disabled five-year old child in rural Mexico who told me how much more he wanted neoliberalism than dinner"). But seeing as having the kind of experience in Mexico that would give me the slighest chance of not being unemployed a year from now probably rules out the kind of obsessive posting that marked, say, the time I should have spent writing seminar papers, I've invited a few friends to help out over the next six weeks. I'll let Matt, Alyssa, and Ruth each introduce themselves (Ruth has already foreshadowed a potential future post by choosing "Josh Smells" as her username) however they want. I'll just say that they're each exceptionally clever and incisive writers who've been recently blog-less, and I'm excited to see what they have to say here (and if any of them is willing to take the contrarian position that I do not, in fact, smell). You should be hearing from them soon. And if history is any guide, I won't be able to keep myself away for very long either...