On Monday, I announced to the members of the Comparative Media Studies Community—our graduate and undergraduate students, staff, researchers, faculty, and alums—that I will be leaving MIT at the end of the current academic year to accept a new position at the University of Southern California. I have decided that the phrase “bitter-sweet” is inadequate for such a moment, prefering to adopt the phrase, “Brutal-Sublime” to capture the extreme highs and lows I feel at what is for me a significant transitional moment in my life. This turned out to be one of the most agonizing decisions I’ve ever had to make.