Opinions, art, debate
Somebody sent a Q&A to point out that we have a position titled “Associate Director of Empathy, Humility, and Action .”
I didn’t know that.
I googled it, and it’s true.
I want to claw my eyes out.
This is the same university that got rid of physics because physics is outdated.
All day I’m writing, reading, and entertaining Klara. I have three serious research-related deadlines looming. But I’ve also soured on Klara’s current teacher, so I keep her with me a lot. And it’s great. Klara started writing daily action plans because you can’t be around me and not have a strong need to surround yourself with action plans. We went to the mall, and it’s an experience all by itself on Mondays.
The bad part is that I’m besieged by people who clamor for attention and try to break into my happy reading – writing – child bubble. The drama at work is mushrooming. It’s like people have lost all sense of proportion as to what’s reasonable. Classes are over, so why can’t everybody simply go away and leave me alone?
Yale tracked 3,635 people over the age of 50 for 12 years. People who read books for more than 3.5 hours a week lived 23 months longer than people who didn’t read at all. A 20% drop in mortality risk. From sitting on a couch with a book. They controlled for age, sex, race, education, wealth, health status, and depression. The gap held across every single one.
What I don’t understand about these studies is how they avoid confusing correlation and causation. People who read a lot are of a different social class than those who don’t. They are more likely to take care of their health. They won’t drink gallons of soda. They won’t engage in dangerous activities. The study controlled for wealth but wealth doesn’t bring you into the intelligentsia.
Klara’s teacher took off points for the social studies test where Klara wrote that fresh air and exercise are better for children’s health than COVID vaccines. Then the teacher punished students who mentioned Trump’s name in class on the grounds that he’s so bad that she can’t allow him even to be mentioned.
She’s retiring at the end of the month, so it’s not some flighty young thing fresh out of college. I knew that something wasn’t right because the books she kept assigning were about the Holocaust and how FDR saved America.
I should have held out on publishing yesterday’s photo of the tomahawk steak because today I read the news that ads for meat have been banned in Amsterdam for some ludicrous woke reason. I could have used the photo to protest against this Dutch silliness.
I’m rereading the diaries of Rafael Chirbes for my new research project, and I wonder what he would have thought about the trajectory of the Left. Chirbes believed that one of his greatest callings was to be a food writer. He was a man of the Left before the Left ditched the working classes and embraced the life philosophy of fussy rich spinsters. The bans on eating meat and smoking (both of which are a working man’s alternative to therapy) would have shocked the writer.
It’s N’s birthday today, and he shared this Tomahawk steak with Klara:
He’ll keep eating it for the next two days because it is so huge.
I had fish with bok choy. I discovered bok choy late in life, and now I’m obsessed with it:
N said that, since it’s his birthday, he wanted to try doing something unusual, such as talking. He told us a very long and detailed story about people who died while trying to scale Mount Everest.
The semester is over, and I’m free to concentrate on my reading and writing. This was a busy semester and it’s a great relief it’s finally done. I’m not going to be in a classroom until January 2027. I still owe a few meetings but I’m bringing my research there and ignoring everybody else completely.
We have the same push at our university, and it’s a very bad idea:
The University System of Georgia (USG) implemented a policy in 2025 that requires syllabi to be publicly posted onto university websites before registration…
USG says the change “aims to ensure that all students have access to the critical information necessary for informed course selection and successful academic planning.” … UGA professors are required to have their syllabi available before registration opens for fall courses, a change from the past two semesters in which they were allowed to wait until one week before courses began.
We are told the exact same thing in a way that is so identical, it’s weird. “Students need it! It’s critical information! Successful planning!”
I’m opposed but almost nobody else is so the measure will be introduced.
Here’s why I am opposed.
There are two types of professors. There are those who teach the exact same course for decades, recycling it endlessly and repeating the exact same thing over and over again. For these professors it will be extremely easy to provide their syllabi 6 months before classes start, which is what “before registration” means.
There are also professors who come up with new material, new course structure, new readings, and new lectures all the time. Professors like me. I’ve never taught the same course in an identical way. This measure exists for one reason: to get rid of innovative, interesting teaching. It exists to shut up people like me. We will be locked into one standard syllabus that will be vetted and posted and it will reappear automatically on the website every semester. If you want to do something new or innovative, you’ll open yourself up to complaints for not following the pre-approved, pre-posted class program.
What I really despise is how it’s justified by supposedly being in the interests of students.
Yes, “nationalism is bad”, what a fresh, complex idea. We have only heard it and observed its consequences for the past 40 years. Let us strain our brains to their utmost capacity to process this brilliant insight.
Is it humanly possible to be any more vapid? My cat is capable of greater insight than these “all-round intellectuals.”
Richard Russo’s writing is neatly divided into two different eras by year 2002. When he was a struggling writer trying to eke out a living from a patchwork of sad teaching gigs, he was a genius. He wrote about the destruction of the American working class throughout the 1990s. His novels Nobody’s Fool and Empire Falls are extraordinary. They are about male friendships, the crumbling down of working class families, and the consequences of the death of American manufacturing.
Then Russo became successful. His writing started to bring in good money, and he no longer belonged to the working class that had inspired his best writing. The writer became a wealthy, clueless twerp, and he now writes for smug, supercilious leftists who sit in their Cape Cod mansions and pout at the “racist-sexist” plebs.
In short, read the 1990s Russo but beware of everything he wrote this century.
I know we’re talking about novels but I also want to recommend Russo’s memoir titled Elsewhere. It tells the story of how the writer was completely controlled and endlessly persecuted by his freakish mother. His entire life was blighted by the terrible woman, and it is not surprising that he became far-left in his later life. The overbearing Mommy, who followed him around like a pitbull his entire life, simply ate his masculinity. Russo is from the kind of a broken home where the controlling mother chases away the father and turns the son into a pseudo-husband for herself. The memoir depicts this not-infrequent pathology in a clear and poignant way.
America lost a truly great author when Russo went woke. I never abandon hope, so I plough through every new book that he publishes. To say that they are terrible is the mother of all understatements. Russo tries to massage the characters from his talented novels of the 1990s into the Procrustean bed of critical race and gender theories. The characters in his woke-era sequels become cardboard cutouts and nothing of what they do or say makes sense if you remember how they were and what they did in the preceding novels.
Is it humanly possible to have worse political instincts than Vivek?
How can it even occur to him to say something like this?
Clarissa's Blog 