I was assigned to evaluate a graduate student’s dissertation. In a turn that was unfortunate for both of us, she opened the presentation by informing me that people with the Narcissistic Personality Disorder are often stigmatized as cruel and incapable of empathy.

Of course, by the end of the presentation the student conceded that NPDs aren’t stigmatized as cruel but actually are cruel. And if anything, the general public severely under-stigmatizes this behavior.

The second presentation I had to evaluate started with the words “America was built by immigrants.” It took even more self-control on my part not to start screeching that the concept of an immigrant cannot be used outside of the framework of a nation-state.

I share with the Brits their annoyance with the American misuse of the word home to mean a house.

“In LA you can make $300,000 a year and still not be able to afford a home” is a sentence from a book I’m reading and it makes no sense until you remember that the author is clumsily trying to say that houses are expensive. But she makes it sound like people with these gigantic incomes are homeless.

I’m at the stage of busyness when I think, “OK, I have 10 minutes to watch some TV. No, I can’t. I’ll watch for 7 minutes.”

Then I spend 3 out of the 7 minutes trying to turn on the TV with the remote and wondering why my floor fan keeps turning on and off.

I think there’s a valid point about the rewards being much more fair for boomers than Millennials and Gen Z are getting, but a lot of boomers did actually work very hard. How many boomers “worked from home” in their pajamas? None https://t.co/8FMdDtGgVS

— Gary (@plzbepatient) March 30, 2026

True. During COVID, only the Boomer colleagues were all there at work in person. I’m eternally grateful because they were there in the trenches with me when nobody else was.

🚨 Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei: “We are so close to these models reaching the level of human intelligence, and yet there doesn't seem to be a wider recognition in society of what's about to happen … There hasn't been a public awareness of the risks.” pic.twitter.com/9OuiTem3ce

— Chief Nerd (@TheChiefNerd) March 30, 2026

I conducted an experiment which, I believe, is very illustrative of the kind of intelligence that AI has. I asked it to explain what a certain work of literature we are reading in class was about.

The result really puzzled me. I started figuring out what prompted the AI to produce this particular, very strange response. I figured out that AI found an interview with the author and developed his reply to an interviewer’s question into a mini-essay. This is something a human being wouldn’t do because we understand context. And we understand other humans. Of course, an author wants to talk up his own work. He’ll want it to sound more profound than it is. A human being with even a modest intellect that self-presentation by other humans who are trying to sell something needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Or, ideally, a few bushels of salt.

The really funny part is that this work of literature has a very descriptive title. You could figure out what it’s about without even reading it.

Reader XYKADEMIQZ suggested that I talk about the mystery genre books I’m reading, and I’m happy to do that. I’ve been disappointed with my recent findings in the genre, and here’s why.

What do you usually look for in a mystery? Twists and turns and a surprising ending, yes. But the surprise at the end is only valuable if it happens within a plausible story. If the surprise is that the murder inside a locked room was committed by a killer who developed a skill of walking through walls, that will be disappointing to readers.

There must be something in such novels in addition to plot twists. Writers like Ruth Rendell and Sophie Hannah, for example, have a brilliant insight into psychology. Each has a whole series of characters who illustrate different kinds of psychopathology. It’s clear that Hannah, in particular, reads widely in the field to make her characters plausible and fascinating.

Another possibility is to offer an insight into the intricacies of the American legal system. John Lescroart is such an author. His novels are interesting because their characters navigate the complexities of the courts that are realistic. Like Hannah, Lescroart clearly does a mountain of research before writing.

This is a sort of a tacit compact that a mystery author has with the reader. I’ll surprise you, the author says, and I’ll manage to do it without abandoning reality. The snake that bit a young woman in the English countryside in Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes mystery was a real snake that the girl’s evil stepfather had brought from India. It wasn’t a magical snake brought over by fairies. Fairies are a different genre.

Unfortunately, the authors of the recent novels I have read in the genre either don’t know or don’t care about its conventions. Jeneva Rose’s The Perfect Marriage and Whiskey Sour by JA Konrath heap one senseless surprise upon another amidst a stock of cartoonishly unrealistic characters. These novels are pure dopamine factories. They don’t offer any insight into the human nature. They give you no questions to ponder. All they give is a succession of dopamine hits.

I won a mystery box of 4 novels. Imagine my joy and excitement. Four novels! I was over the moon.

And then I opened the mystery box. Whoever the insane bastard is who put it together must never be allowed around books. Or people.

The mystery box contained four novels, all set during WWII and all featuring on their covers a woman standing with her back to the reader. Four female backsides during WWII. Is there a weirdo who would want to read four books in a row that are identical on subject and cover art?

I haven’t had a similar book-related letdown in years. I hate WWII novels ever since we were veritably persecuted with WWII content in the USSR. Plus, I’ve read five trillion novels about the Spanish Civil War. I’m so over war novels.

Can anybody suggest any interesting conversation topics? I’ve uncharacteristically got nothing because all my energy goes to not going off on people who are eating my brain out with a little teaspoon.

I use this notebook called A Life Sentence to write down one sentence about every day of my life.

It’s such a great thing because I can go back to any day that I recorded and remember the most important thing about it. The memories come back so vividly.

I highly recommend this practice. One can have many wonderful days simply slip one’s memory.

One thing that blows my mind completely is that the service sector in Ukraine is now better than in Europe or the US. Service was Soviet-type in the post-Soviet space up until 2005. My sister traveled back to Ukraine in that year and reported rude, contemptuous shop assistants and shamelessly defrauding waiters.

It was normal back then to charge a customer who ordered apple juice twice, for the juice and the apple. It was also normal to mock a customer’s appearance and mental capacity loudly and obnoxiously. It was normal to pretend you aren’t noticing a customer or laugh contemptuously in their face. This was the remnant of the Soviet era when shop assistants guarded the access to prized consumer goods amidst endless shortages and could afford to torture desperate customers.

Then it all magically changed, and today Ukrainians in Europe and America politely inquire why the service is so bad. My sister met with her Ukrainian colleagues, and they told stories about service in Ukraine that truly stun the imagination. I had no idea such dramatic improvement can occur so fast and on such a large scale.