I know of which Russell speaks all too well—and one of my best friends, not a political scientist, is going through the same hell at the moment… as, for that matter, was I not so long ago (not to mention, as I keep reminding myself, I didn’t even have a job offer until this time last year). There but for the grace of God, or at least the grace of KGM.

Incidentally, I made myself two promises last year: that I’d quit academia (or at least go and get an M.S. in statistics or survey research or maybe even a J.D.) if I didn’t get a tenure-track job for 2005–06, and that I’d get myself that social life I’d been putting off for the past decade-plus. I went 0–2—or maybe 1–1, depending on how you evaluate my social life (much better than in Oxford, but from a pretty negligible baseline)—but I’m not all that convinced that the first promise was the right one, since there’s nothing else I’d rather do than what I do now, even if the job security sucks. Thus I contribute to the collective action problem that leads to the proliferation of non-tenure-track jobs even at institutions that can afford them.