Dear Power Line Readers:

Alas it has become necessary for me to take an extended sabbatical from Power Line. It’s a simple matter of becoming steadily overcommitted and needing to devote more time to overdue projects and upcoming demands on my time. I’m now just a month out from starting up again at Pepperdine University, filling the large shoes of the late Ted McAllister next semester, and I haven’t even started with the design and planning of the two courses I will be teaching. That takes longer to do than you might think. If you don’t really plan a course carefully, it can end up going like the nearby meme.

And then there are four long-form essays past deadline with various journals that are all half-written and need to be completed yesterday. And I need to start in on a major paper for a conference at City University of New York for early spring. And I have three book proposals that I need to choose from among (or more likely reject). It is very difficult to concentrate on these kind of longer-form projects alongside the demanding rhythms of day-to-day short form writing here. And there are still other things landing soon on my major task list.

Now, I suppose I ought to get a personal assistant to sort me out better. This weekend I turned up for an important gathering in Los Angeles a day early because I had put it the wrong day on my calendar.

On top of all that, some time in the next six to eight weeks I’ll be moving, as the long COVID-delayed renovations on my principal residence are almost finished at last. (Drone video to come in due course.) And that’s going to be an arduous undertaking all by itself. I’m lifting weights again in preparation for lifting moving boxes and furniture.

Don’t panic and not to worry: I won’t completely disappear. Most importantly, I’ll still get the Week in Pictures posted every Saturday. It has become quite easy to do because of all the contributions readers send me every week (thank you, suppliers—you know who you are out there). And I’ll also keep the podcast going. That has also become easier to do since we moved to a rotating host format, which means two-thirds of the time I just need to show up and needn’t do any heavy lifting.

And I’ll likely pop up on random occasions when something especially outrageous hits the news. But for the time being I’ll be pretty scarce and intermittent.