I have observed no change in how students learn as a result of AI. There are some attempts to cheat but they are in the same scope as 10 or 20 years ago. People on social media report observing massive changes in retention or attention spans. I haven’t seen anything of the kind.

Students almost invariably use AI as a limited-function Google. They aren’t very good at using it. I’m not seeing anything even marginally different in students, let alone anything catastrophic. It’s enormously easier to teach Zoomers than Millennials but this is not related to technology.

I have no idea where people find all this massive cognitive damage from AI they keep talking about. In my teaching, AI has the most marginal presence imaginable. I teach a lot in the computer lab. I tell students “use anything you want for the assignment.” They almost always go directly to Wordreference.com or Reverso.com.

Yesterday, I took Klara to the kid’s gym, the playground and the bookstore. Throughout the trip that lasted almost 3 hours, she narrated, with a wealth of details, the story of a field trip she took with her class last year. After 3 hours of non-stop talking accompanied by vigorous physical exercise, she dropped into bed and was asleep within seconds.

Kids are hilarious.

After I posted the video of the toddlers, I saw online that people have a completely different interpretation of what they are seeing. For some, the whiny loser baby demonstrates tenacity and desire for achievement. As if people who wanted achievement sat on their butts wailing and trying to attract attention.

The video is likely AI but the reactions are very human. People assume that somebody who whines the most is the person who wants something the most. But that’s crap. The ones who really want work on it in quiet concentration.

The boys in the video perfectly symbolize the dynamic between me and my colleagues:

How one interprets this is a litmus test for one's view of society. https://t.co/YuCFJVRJ7Q

— Peter Boghossian (@peterboghossian) April 10, 2026

Even my very young students notice that the middle-aged female characters of recent works of fiction act in extremely infantile ways. I don’t bring up this topic at all to preserve the cleanliness of the experiment. The students notice and bring it up. This is especially clear in courses where we begin by reading 19th-century fiction where the heroines are strong, mature and make fun of lisping overgrown baby females.

We are reading a recent play where the female character is a 48-year-old woman who acts like an innocent, blushing ingenue. I didn’t choose the play for that reason. I’d be hard-pressed to find one where the female lead isn’t like that.

What I like about my Ukrainian Fulbrighters is that none of them tries to stay in the US after finishing their term. I like patriotism in people. And on a purely self-serving side, it’s a relief not to be pestered with endless questions about the immigration system and how to game it that Fulbrighters from other countries keep asking.

The Ukrainian Fulbrighters like America and are grateful for the experience but they are very clear on not wanting to live here. “I love my own country and I can’t wait to go home,” they invariably say. I like that.

We always do anonymous Chair evaluations this time of year. This year is my last so the evaluation doesn’t have any concrete impact. Of course, people could use this opportunity to write something nice. But that’s not how humans function.

Still, one person did bother to do the evaluation and wrote that I’m kind, patient and that my research is what justifies the existence of the department and the university. I’m shocked to have one well-wisher after six years in this role. It’s one more than I expected.

Yes, I’m very curious who it is but, again, knowing people, I’m certain it’s somebody for whom I never did any favors.

The cat is actually pretty smart. She always meows ferociously before jumping on my bed. It took her no time to figure out that I get lost deep inside my inner world and it’s not a good idea to make sudden moves around me. Or it is if you enjoy watching me freak out completely. Which the cat doesn’t because she’s not large.

I saw a lot of negative social media posts about this novel in the days before it was published. It’s weird to hate on a book that hasn’t even been published yet. How do you know it will be bad? There was a writeup about Transcription in some MSM outlet but you can’t believe what some talentless hack tells you about a work of fiction.

I read Transcription immediately after its release, and it’s a brilliant novel. It’s about a 90-year-old art critic Thomas. He’s a first-rate intellectual from Germany. He remembers Hitler, and his horror of Hitlerism and everything associated with it is such that Thomas brings up the next generation of men, like his son and his student, to be pathetic, pussy-whipped cucks. Thomas himself is plenty manly but he deprives younger men of their manliness because masculinity might lead to Hitler.

This is a metaphor for the entire Western civilization that has driven itself into such a state of shame and guilt over Hitler that it’s destroying itself. Is this an important subject to write about? I’d say it most certainly is.

The Amazon blurb for Transcription doesn’t mention any of it and makes the novel sound like some obscure navel-gazing exercise in pretentiousness. But it’s not like that at all. The voices of the two cucked men, Thomas’s son and student, are brilliantly rendered. The spectacle of utter disempowerment of very liberal men is on full view. They are constantly manipulated by women in the most pathetic ways. One of them has his second-grader daughter run circles around him because he just can’t act like a father and get a grip on himself. I haven’t seen a more bitter, honest depiction of how liberal parents turn their children into little neurotics.

If you want a fictional illustration of the theory of feminization, this novel is for you. It’s beautifully written. Yes, there a few paragraphs where Thomas speaks in a very abstract way that might be boring to read but just plough through them and you’ll be rewarded with pure novelistic gold.

I wrote about Lerner’s earlier novel The Topeka School before. I said that he was a talented writer but didn’t know how to create a coherent plot. I expressed a hope that, as he matured, he’d figure out how to link his beautiful vignettes into a meaningful story. My instincts were correct. Lerner has grown enormously as a writer, and Transcription is on a whole new level. People should stop bitching and start celebrating that we have such a talented author who is talking about things that matter in a novel that is a true work of art.

I don’t have time to read on paper right now because it’s the end of the academic year and of my term as Chair. So I listened on Audible. And they found the perfect voice actor with a feminized voice to render the cucked male characters. People, it’s so good. It’s “shoot it straight into my veins” type of good. It’s ecstatic, it’s a tour de force, it’s what literature should be. And it’s short with only 144 pages.

If you read it, please come back to discuss. We have a new literary genius in America. Life is good.

What men don’t understand about the mental load pic.twitter.com/93bj2ORGTF

— BlackSword (@Blacksword011) April 5, 2026

What this woman narrates about “mental load” is the perfect counterpoint to my toilet paper holders. She should be so happy that there are all these different types of milk and stuff. It’s such a wonderful thing to live in abundance and be able to choose all these great products for your family. She complains that thinking about milk occupies her thoughts too much but what would she be thinking about instead?

There is an incredible number of sources of joy in regular daily life. Doing things for your family, replenishing the supplies of beans or coffee, it’s so great because it means you have a family. You have people who need you. Instead of bitching and moaning and feeling sorry for herself, she could be in paroxysms of happiness. Everybody is alive, healthy, and eager to drink their milk.

These attitudes should not be encouraged. There should be a social taboo against whining about grocery lists. It’s undignified and unnecessary.