Finished reading Hoffman's The Dead Hand from kb's geopolitics list yesterday. I'm mulling it over, but heartily recommend. There's a lot in it echoing what I heard from older academics, and offers a sober look into Russian outlook/condition. From my perspective, and so far, the most relevant of the books on the list. Which I nearly finished after years of on-again off-again attempts, though doubt in ever getting through Zinn and Tuchman. It's not what they write about, but how they write, which grates me.

I took the teaching contract mentioned last month. Went over the syllabus, talked with the rest of the cadre. It's definitely nothing permanent, but it's nice to have that extra bit of income and autonomy/authority. Since the students will be mostly econ and 30-and-corpo-wants-a-paper IT folks, I opted for adapting the hands-on example-heavy method from Stroud&Booth's Engineering Mathematics. Time will tell if it was a good move, but I mostly want to make the class full of utility and comprehensible, but minimal on student pain.