A reader writes:

I am a Millennial woman and my new boss is a Gen X man. We have been butting heads a lot, mostly because I think he lacks the basic skills and competencies to do his job. My frustration has gotten to the point where I feel like screaming most days.

This past week I had to send him yet another email where I tried to politely and professionally explain that he was yet again doing something wrong. I had two people read it for tone before I sent it. This is the opening paragraph to the 10 paragraphs he sent in response:

“I think [Name] that you would benefit from learning about the unconscious and the psychological defense of projections and transferences that emanate from the unconscious of a person, especially one with a highly dysregulated nervous system. I am a human being too — I have done it and can do it (still do it at times) and that’s why I know about it experientially. It’s also why I speak to the need for grace often (as well as accountability). Believe it or not (and that is a literal statement because I really don’t think you can believe it at this point in your life), I extend a great deal of grace to you. But that does not mean I am going to take on crap that you are trying to offload on to me. Nor am I going to just be a wallflower as a director of an organization that needs to address its challenges. Because you have been working in an all-female environment for so long, it’s quite possible that you (and others) take the masculine energy that I at times emanate as a threat, when there is no threat. But you perceive it as so. I’m sorry about that and I can be mindful of behaviors but I am not going to sit in analysis paralysis while we try to adjust to the chaos left behind in the emotional wake of the Trump Train.”

The best part about this email is that he voluntarily cc’d the board chair on it. He tries to paint me as a hysterical, flakey, incompetent woman, which fell flat because I’ve worked with our chair, a man, for the last 10+ years.

A few weeks prior to this email, I had asked an external project partner if I could use him as a professional reference as he has had nothing but very nice things to say about the work I’ve done with him for the last 3+ years. The day after I received this unhinged email from my boss, that project partner called me and asked how my job search was going. I said “not great,” and he asked if I wanted to come work with him. We later had a two-hour long conversation, and I’m being offered a pay bump and an opportunity to oversee a really awesome project.

So, now I need to write my resignation letter to my boss. Due to our summer PTO schedules, I won’t actually see my boss for another 2.5 weeks, and I won’t be starting my new job until mid-August. When he gets back to the office, I would love to have a polite and professional response composed that burns this man and his “masculine emanations” to the ground. Can you offer me any advice on what to say?

P.S. I spoke to an employment attorney and because our organization has fewer than 15 employees, it’s not required to comply with federal anti-discrimination laws. I apparently don’t have a lot of legal rights in this instance. While this is bonkers, I am working to put together additional documentation for the board that will hopefully inspire them to fire him.

Eww, my skin crawls every time I try to read the paragraph he wrote to you. From the bottom of my heart, thank you for not sending the other nine paragraphs.

I don’t think the issue is this guy’s “masculine energy.” It’s that he seems incapable of engaging on actual work issues and instead wants to psychoanalyze you and conclude that you just don’t know how to work around masculine men because of all that estrogen you’ve been steeping in.

I don’t have any real context for what’s been going on in your office or what he refers to as “crap that you are trying to offload on (him),” and an effective response would probably require knowing some of that.

But in this case, you really don’t need to respond at all! You’re leaving. This isn’t someone who’s engaging in good faith or in a productive way, and you’re on your way out. There’s no reason you need to work toward a greater understanding with him so you can both move forward, and there’s little that indicates that would succeed even if you wanted to try. So why bother?

Your resignation letter itself should be bland and dry, as should all resignation letters. They’re not meant to have any meaningful content at all beyond, “I am resigning and my last day will be X.”

As for responding to his ludicrous email, if you respond at all, at most you should say, “This email is inappropriate on multiple levels, and you should not be applying this sort of explicitly gendered lens to work interactions. I do not think it will be productive to discuss this further, so I will leave this with BoardChair to handle from here.”

The post my boss said I’m threatened by his “masculine energy” appeared first on Ask a Manager.

A small reactor in Uppsala may hold the key to cutting the fertilizer industry’s massive carbon footprint—by harnessing the power of lightning. NitroCapt is a finalist for the 2025 Food Planet Prize.

The post A Swedish Fertilizer Innovation Changes the Equation appeared first on Roads & Kingdoms.

Paul Krugman writing the kind of stuff that would be way too shrill, aka true, for his former editors:

Zohran Mamdani’s upset victory in New York’s Democratic primary has created panic in MAGAland. Stephen Miller, the architect of Donald Trump’s deportation policies, waxed apocalyptic:

Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, declared that New York is about to turn into “Caracas on the Hudson.”

And Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama basically declared New York’s voters subhuman, saying:

These inner-city rats, they live off the federal government. And that’s one reason we’re $37 trillion in debt. And it’s time we find these rats and we send them back home, that are living off the American taxpayers that are working very hard every week to pay taxes.

These reactions are vile, and they’re also dishonest. Whatever these men may claim, it’s all about bigotry.

Miller isn’t concerned about the state of New York “society.” What bothers him is the idea of nonwhite people having political power.

Trumpism is an ethno-nationalist movement, based on white supremacy, patriarchy, and massive economic inequality packaged as equal parts traditional patriotism and anti-intellectual “common sense.”

It’s all Great Replacement paranoia, that has been around forever, with the replacements (great name for a band) being in turn and all at once the Catholics, the Irish, the Chinese, the Italians, the Jews, the Mexicans, and always always The Blacks and the Women Who Don’t Know Their Place.

And while Tuberville stands out even within his caucus as an ignorant fool, his willingness to use dehumanizing language about millions of people shows that raw racism is rapidly becoming mainstream in American politics.

Remember, during the campaign both Trump and JD Vance amplified the slanders about Haitians eating pets.

And now that they’re in office, you can see the resurgence of raw racism all across Trump administration policies, large and small. You can see it, for example, in the cuts at the National Institutes of Health, which are so tilted against racial minorities that a federal judge — one appointed by Ronald Reagan! — declared

I’ve never seen a record where racial discrimination was so palpable. I’ve sat on this bench now for 40 years. I’ve never seen government racial discrimination like this.

You can see it in the renaming of military bases after Confederate generals — that is, traitors who fought for slavery.

You can even see it in a change in the military’s shaving policy that is clearly custom-designed to drive Black men — who account for around a quarter of the Army’s new recruits — out of the service.

So racism and bigotry are back, big time. Who’s safe? Nobody.

Trump has been riding the crest of a massive reactionary wave for a decade now, and while that wave has many sources, THE key winds blowing the storm are racism and patriarchy. The 15th and 19th amendments, giving black people and women actual political rights, represent the biggest constitutional revolutions since the founding, since they fundamentally altered who “the people” of We the People were going to be, going forward.

Jack Balkin recently directed my attention to a 1922 SCOTUS case I hadn’t heard of, in which Louis Brandeis spent exactly one short paragraph shooting down a claim that the 19th amendment was illegitimate because it robbed the sovereign states of their sovereignty, by forcing them to admit into their polities foreigners, politically speaking, who were not part of the People, properly speaking. Brandeis’s argument consists of nothing more than noting that the 19th amendment is structurally identical to the 15th, and that the constitutionality of the 15th couldn’t be questioned.

The first contention is that the power of amendment conferred by the federal Constitution and sought to be exercise does not extend to this amendment because of its character. The argument is that so great an addition to the electorate, if made without the state’s consent, destroys its autonomy as a political body. This amendment is in character and phraseology precisely similar to the Fifteenth. For each, the same method of adoption was pursued. One cannot be valid and the other invalid. That the Fifteenth is valid, although rejected by six states, including Maryland, has been recognized and acted on for half a century. See United States v. Reese, 92 U. S. 214; Neale v. Delaware, 103 U. S. 370; Guinn v. United States, 238 U. S. 347; Myers v. Anderson, 238 U. S. 368. The suggestion that the Fifteenth was incorporated in the Constitution not in accordance with law, but practically as a war measure which has been validated by acquiescence, cannot be entertained.

I went down a rabbit hole and discovered that the lawyer behind the anti-suffrage suit had published an article in the Harvard Law Review twelve years earlier, arguing precisely that the 15th amendment wasn’t really part of the Constitution, because it forcibly disenfranchised “the People” — meaning the white men of property — who had entered into the constitutional compact originally, without their consent or that of their posterity. (Note that this is a separate argument against the Reconstruction amendments than the “forced adoption at gunpoint” argument much favored by white supremacists over the years, which Brandeis rejects in the last sentence of the quoted paragraph, and which the author of the HLR article also doesn’t rely on).

The past is never dead. It isn’t even past, apparently.

The post That train’s never late appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

This is, as a Delaware poet once said, a big fuckin’ deal:

California lawmakers on Monday sent Gov. Gavin Newsom two bills to roll back a landmark law that was a national symbol of environmental protection before it came to be vilified as a primary reason for the state’s severe housing shortage and homelessness crisis.

For more than half a century, the law, the California Environmental Quality Act, has allowed environmentalists to slow suburban growth as well as given neighbors and disaffected parties a powerful tool to stop projects they disliked.

The changes, which were written by Democrats but had rare bipartisan support in California’s divided State Capitol, would allow many development projects to avoid rigorous environmental review and, potentially, the delaying and cost-inflating lawsuits that have discouraged construction in the state.

Democrats have long been reluctant to weaken the law, known as CEQA, which they considered an environmental bedrock in a state that has prided itself on reducing pollution and protecting waterways. And environmentalists took them to task for the vote.

But the majority party also recognized that California’s bureaucratic hurdles had made it almost impossible to build enough housing for nearly 40 million residents, resulting in soaring costs and persistent homelessness. In a collision between environmental values and everyday concerns, Democrats chose the latter on Monday.

“We’ve got to get out of our own damn way,” Mr. Newsom, a Democrat, said last week.

Discussions about changing the environmental law have repeatedly surfaced at the State Capitol over the past decade, only to be thwarted by opposition from environmentalists and local governments. This year was different.

Mr. Newsom threatened to reject the state budget unless lawmakers rolled back CEQA, which is pronounced SEE-kwa. Democrats were also aware that voters nationwide had blamed the party last year for rising prices.

To call CEQA “environmental legislation,” as the headline does, is at best incomplete. It was frequently used as a barrier against building infill housing that is clearly a net positive for the environment, for reasons that had nothing to do with environmentalism. And even to the extent that it has genuine environmentalist purposes, it was a 70s-style aesthetic/pastoral environmentalism that did not put nearly enough emphasis on climate change. It also came to represent one of the worst traits of late-20th-century liberalism — the idea that lawsuits and courts are better forums for policy than democratically accountable legislatures.

This is a major win and hopefully a harbinger of a west coast liberalism more dedicated to increasing state capacity than creating arbitrary veto points for wealthy property owners and work for lawyers.

The post California Dems finally beat back the NIMBYS appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

I am officially retiring today from the Voice of America and the United States Foreign Service. Thank you for coming along on our journey via the airwaves and on social media, while we reported from dozens of countries and at the White House and aboard Air Force One, during these past decades.

My time as an active correspondent abruptly ended four months ago when VOA’s top managers suspended me as part of its anticipatory obedience to the incoming USAGM politically-installed leadership. Two weeks later, nearly everyone at VOA was also put on administrative leave and VOA broadcasts, on air continually since 1942, were silenced by the U.S. government.

Thank you to AFSA and other labor unions and journalists’ groups, the Government Accountability Project and especially my successor as VOA’s White House bureau chief, Patsy Widakuswara, as well as the other named and ‘John Doe’ plaintiffs, for leading the legal fight against executive overreach and First Amendment violations. Many more are involved behind the scenes as part of the volunteer grassroots #SaveVOA campaign.

If you are also outraged about the wanton destruction of U.S. international broadcasting, please consider helping the most vulnerable of our colleagues, including hundreds of already-terminated contractors, by contributing to the USAGM Employee Association fund (a non-federal 501(c)3).

Non sibi sed patriae.

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