“You can’t believe everything you read, especially when it’s a memoir. They’re not the most reliable narrators, the people who pen their life stories based on recollections. Sometimes they have an agenda and the whole, unvarnished truth just doesn’t fit in as neatly as a writer would like.” It’s a sign of a severely deficient education system that adult people need to be reminded of this but, sadly, they do. First-person narrators are unreliable by default. So yelling, “This autobiography is based on lies” is kind of childish.

I don’t know if anybody here is following the great “It’s Probably PhD Me” blog but I highly recommend if you don’t. The author is a really admirable person and a talented writer. The posts form a very Austenesque narrative and should be read as novel chapters rather than stand-alone pieces. I hope the author considers publishing them as a novel one day.

“Mount Holyoke College, an all-women’s school, announced in a campus-wide email that the Theatre Board has cancelled its annual production of the “Vagina Monologues.” The board has decided to retire the feminist classic as it is not “inclusive” enough to those who identify as women but do not have vaginas.”

The invention we have all been waiting for: in-bed computer desks.

[Spanish.] A very interesting article on the Muslim community of the French city of Marseilles. Read this instead of the endless discussions on the “no-go zones.”

“Marriage, at its core, is about recognition. Recognition is why we put on the fancy tuxes and beautiful gowns. It’s why we publish marriage announcements in newspapers. It’s why we invite friends and family to witness—to recognize—the relationship. Recognition is why we wear engagement rings and wedding bands.” Seriously? Neurotypicals are too bizarre. It  would have never occur to me that this is why they do all of it. But yay for same-sex marriage right, of course.

You’ve totally got to know that the weird people who believe Sarah Palin’s youngest child is not really hers are still going on with their investigation. I’ve been following their travails for years and they are a very funny bunch.

“An Alabama middle-school principal has asked students to bring in cans of food they could use as projectiles against school shooters.” Well, we should all be happy the kids weren’t asked to bring in hand grenades. This is progress already.

It’s seriously insane but check it out: “With these GIFs, Boehner aims to explain to Millennials and sub-Millennials why President Obama’s tuition-free community college proposal is a very bad idea.” If I were a “sub-Millenial”, I’d be very offended.

“The rise of the right-wing echo chamber is not simply a sign that our education system has failed — though it is also that — but for those who have ears to hear, it represents people crying out for the real satisfactions of the intellectual life. The fact that they’ve had to make do with a cheap substitute is not an indictment of them personally so much as of the forces that prey on their intellectual curiosity and the society that rendered them so vulnerable to that predation in the first place.” I don’t agree with anything in this post but it’s very well-written and engaging. Highly recommended.

“John Ellis “Jeb” Bush? Mitt “Mitt” Romney? Uh-uh. It’s Fred Thompson’s nomination for the taking. .” I agree that this is very bizarre. With all his massive faults, Putin, at least, is not introducing himself as “Vova.”

“Pretty soon your mom might not be the only one nagging you to quit smoking or lose weight—and it won’t stop at nagging.” This is a very powerful and concise explanation of why people overeat and smoke. The rest of the article is a lot less interesting.

“I also think it’s interesting that so many people seem to be reacting with the kind of hysteria we saw after 9/11 to the Charlie Hebdo killings but managed to keep their wits about them after the Boston bombing.” Because it’s cartoonists, you fool. Quiet, nerdy people with a geeky sense of humor. How much easier it is to identify with them than with the weirdos who ran marathons, seriously?

How to ruin a date with an academic.

Does Putin have a future in the Balkans? “The Balkans are weak states, have considerable sympathy for Putin’s agenda, and in several cases already have pro-Russian groups just waiting for an extra push to turn into rebel movements.”

A great explanation of why evolutionary ethics is stupid.

“There is necessarily going to be something arbitrary about fruitful education, because the whole point of it is for young minds to learn that there is such a thing as objective fact; that their feelings are not fact.  The content of what it taught is much less important than the necessity for young minds to internalize this lesson.  Otherwise, they really do become trapped in their own minds and unable to find avenues to liberate themselves.”

Great portraits of naked men.

Gun owners participate in a simulation of the Paris massacre.

A small excerpt from a rant of a person who confuses having mental disease with having a political opinion: “Given the growing swaths of destruction, brutality and murder that are the product of State power in recent years, and of Western State power in particular, one might have thought that moral approval and encouragement is the last thing one would choose to gift to the monsters who lead those States, at least if one seeks a better world that is significantly more compassionate and caring than the world in which we now live. And note how cheaply the States in question purchased this gift.”

“You know I used to believe that the Right was utterly fucking crazy when they talked about how the liberals tend to embrace objective evil if it’s cloaked in the veil of oppression. But now that I’ve seen the liberal reactions to Muslim oppression of women and now Charlie Hebdo and secularism, you know what? The Right was fucking, well, right  — a little, at least.” Yes. Oh, yes, yes, yes.

Russians are planning to erect a monument to Stalin in the Crimea (link in Russian). Of course, Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars are finding this extremely offensive but that’s kind of the whole point.

A middle-aged black man in a battered old truck stops his car by the sidewalk in a beautiful all-white suburb. Big shiny SUVs and sedans filled with white people also stop. Now the movement is blocked in both directions. White pedestrians stop to stare.

“I apologize, is this the right way to Walmart?” the black driver asks leaning out of the window. 

The white drivers and pedestrians remain completely silent. Nobody moves.

“Am I going in the right direction?” the black man asks again and again. His voice becomes pleading. “Is this how I go to Walmart? Please? Does anybody know?”

The drivers and the pedestrians stare straight ahead. Nobody moves. Now the black driver looks like a scared bird trapped in his truck. 

“I just wanted to. . . Am I in the right. . .” his voice trails off. After a few moments of complete silence, he drives off. 

The movement and the chatter of a warm sunny day that just happens to be a holiday resumes.

It’s hilarious that the people who are freaking out about American Sniper and writing screeds on how evil it is are so often the same ones who loved Imitation Game. Both movies are about exactly the same thing: the transformation of warfare and the changing discourses on war. The protagonists are tortured by the same questions arising from the same power to kill from a distance when your victim doesn’t know you exist and might have done nothing wrong whatsoever.

War is leaving the realm of massification and is becoming individualized. That’s what these movies are about.

I hate discussions about inequality because they are so useless. All that anybody ever says about the issue is, “Tax somebody who isn’t me.” And then there is a bunch of very silly arithmetic exercises to carve out that somebody so that it doesn’t touch me and leaves me feeling self-righteous.

47%, 1%, 10% of imaginary evildoers who just have to be taxed to make everything magically right are simply a fantasy that many people mistake for political convictions.

Abortion rights, an issue that has long been at the center of the feminist struggle, has been utterly transformed by today’s realities. Government is no longer an institution that guarantees this basic human right.

Today, the main guarantor of abortion rights is the website cheapairtickets.com.