1. The difference between a Doctor of Education and a PhD holder is that the former believes it is appropriate to quote Sandberg’s Lean In at a graduation ceremony while the latter disagrees and rolls his or her eyes.

2. One should never lose faith in humanity. When the President started sharing what sounded like a soppy ultra-patriotic story, I got scared. I needent have worried, though. The President is not an idiot and had not spent the last 20 years defending public education in state legislature for nothing. The story was neither soppy nor patriotic.

3. I can’t count in any language other than Russian. For some reason, the mathematical and the linguistic part of my brain do not connect. I also can’t count silently. So I had to count students in loud Russian, scaring them out of their wits.

4. Apparently, there is now a new tradition to wear the most outrageous shoes under the graduation robes. The part of the ceremony where students walk up for their diplomas looked like a shoe fashion show.

5. I’m now very tired and will spend the next 2 days in bed with a strawberry yoghurt mask and a book by Paul Ricoeur.

I’m a lead marshal in today’s graduation ceremony and I’m sitting at the gym, waiting for the students to don their regalia.
A student sitting next to me got his regalia a while ago and looks bored. He takes a book out of the recesses of his huge pants and begins to read it.

I lean in to sneak a look at what interests him enough to be read during graduation. He is reading Foucault.

If we produce at least one person per year who reads philosophy for fun, that’s already a lot.

Does anybody know what the opposite of gentrification is? I ask because I think this is what my town is experiencing. When I first moved here in 2009, there was a number of elegant, high-quality restaurants and stores that have been disappearing ever since.

There was a really chic restaurant run by an award-winning chef right next to my house. It closed down and a nasty buffalo wing joint opened in its place. A formerly elegant place with a great selection of wines and interesting food now serves pizza. A family run mansion restaurant closed down. A popular store selling original ornaments and hand-made jewelry from all over the world closed down, too.

The reasons for this transformation are neither demographic nor economic. We are a college town, and the people who live here are the same as 4 years ago. The demand for pizza parlors and buffalo wing joints is lower than that for elegant places. The only remaining stylish restaurant that serves things like foie-gras desserts and $200 wines is bursting at the seams. You have to wait for up to an hour in order to get seated on any Tuesday or Thursday, let alone on a weekend. So it isn’t the law of supply and demand that squeezes chic places out of our town.

The reason why all those elegant places closed down is not that they stopped being profitable. As the owner of the jewelry store explained, business was better then ever in the year before she closed her doors for good. The owners of these places simply reached a certain age and decided to retire on the money they’d made.

The young generation, however, only knows how to open buffalo wing places and has no idea how to run elegant establishments. The foie-gras place was opened last year by a couple that moved to the area from California. The local young people have no idea how to offer what the young Californians are offering even when there is a huge demand.

The Midwest desperately needs an influx of people with interesting new ideas and modern lifestyles. It isn’t the economy that brings us down. The real problem is cultural.

Suicide rates among middle-aged Americans have risen sharply in the past decade,

reports The NY Times.

From 1999 to 2010, the suicide rate among Americans ages 35 to 64 rose by nearly 30 percent, to 17.6 deaths per 100,000 people, up from 13.7. Although suicide rates are growing among both middle-aged men and women, far more men take their own lives. The suicide rate for middle-aged men was 27.3 deaths per 100,000, while for women it was 8.1 deaths per 100,000.

And these tragic numbers may actually be much higher:

While reporting of suicides is not always consistent around the country, the current numbers are, if anything, too low.

“It’s vastly underreported,” said Julie Phillips, an associate professor of sociology at Rutgers University who has published research on rising suicide rates. “We know we’re not counting all suicides.”

This is not a purely American phenomenon, and the article’s author makes a mistake when she tries to analyze it in terms of the US history. Just yesterday I posted an article that explains this as an international phenomenon. In all cultures where the consumption of anti-depressants is on the rise, the suicide rates soar. The reason is very simple: suicide is one of the side effects of anti-depressants. Contrary to the lies pharmaceutical companies tell us, suicide as a result of anti-depressant addiction is not rare. These statistics from a number of countries show that suicide as a result of anti-depressants is an incredibly frequent phenomenon.

People who spend their entire lives listening to the lies spread by pharmaceutical companies all day and every day end up believing this ridiculous idea that anti-depressants “help” one get over a difficult moment and find energy to solve his or her problems. Of course, nothing can be further from the truth, since it’s kind of hard to solve one’s problem after one has killed oneself of suffered permanent damage to one’s health as a result of consuming these drugs.

What are the alternatives to anti-depressants? you will ask. Well, thank the pharmaceutical companies for squeezing almost all treatments that actually help and have no side effects out of the country. Every time I write on the subject, a reader goes into literal fits of hysteria at the idea that somebody has dared to speak a word against his or her magic pills that have now become the foundation of many people’s identity. This is precisely what happens among scholars who try to look behind the idea that everybody needs to be medicated to the gills. I can afford to say whatever I like on my blog, but imagine what happens when one’s career is at stake. Scholars who dare to make the tiniest little sound against psychotropic medication suffer greatly as a result.

This is why we are all sitting here, pretending that this scourge is not destroying countless lives. This is why a journalist writes about the soaring suicide rates and pretends that the most obvious cause behind them does not exist. This is why even very intelligent people repeat like in robotic voices, “Anti-depressants save lives”, contrary to every shred of evidence in existence.

I will write about the alternatives to drugs later but I know it will be useless because the TV commercials are too strong and the identity-building potential of these meds is too seductive.