Somebody asked me why I’m learning German if you can use AI or a digital interpreter app to talk “to anybody in any language.”

Here’s the thing, though. I’ve had people stick their phones into my face to try to talk through an interpreter app. When that happened, I immediately lost all interest in talking to them about anything. It’s tiresome, it’s yet another screen, it’s all constantly interrupted because you need to press this or that. The frisson of excitement that wow, I actually managed to have a conversation with an actual German, is gone. With the app, you can possibly get directions while traveling but you aren’t making any friends, let alone improving your intellectual capacity.

I don’t want a hundred superficial, stilted app exchanges in German. I want to become a German speaker. I want to grow a whole part of my personality that thinks, dreams and expresses itself in German. It’s extremely hard but it’s such an amazing adventure. It’s like what we talked about before. I don’t want an app to live my life for me. I like my life. I don’t mind that things get hard. It’s good to overcome. It’s good to confront hardship. And it’s really good to feel that for the first time you are managing to establish a real connection with another person in a new language.

The excuse for the apps is that “you can save so much time.” But to do what? Save time on exercising your brain, forming new neural pathways, having fun… to what end? What would I be doing instead if I weren’t living my life?

Happy Palm Sunday or Easter, and let’s remain human.

The problem is that people love slop. This is then justified through a populist suspicion of the hierarchical distinction of taste. But the solution lies not in creating an elite consumptive class but in the radical notion that people can be learn to unlove slop.

— Alexander Avila (@aretheygay) April 3, 2026

High culture was always and will always be enjoyed only by a tiny minority. Most people don’t have the IQ and the depth of subjectivity to understand or derive any pleasure from it.

We don’t need a solution for this situation just like we don’t need a solution to the fact that the overwhelming majority of the population isn’t physically capable of playing in the NBA. The idea that “anybody can be whatever they choose” is cute in middle school but it’s not based in reality. Most people (including me) can never become neurosurgeons, professional athletes, or opera singers no matter how hard we try. And that’s perfectly fine.

As to whether you can cultivate your taste in art, it’s like your taste in food. You can definitely improve your palate. You’ll always hanker for a boiled sausage that’s familiar from your childhood. So it’s possible to an extent without ever becoming a mass phenomena.

We should abandon the ludicrous idea that hierarchies are bad. This idea, and not “slop”, is the real problem. Hierarchies are good and important everywhere. At home, at work, in church, at school, everywhere.

A couple of months ago, I bought this package of boiled sausage at the Global Foods store.

But then when I wanted to eat it, it was nowhere to be found. Nobody else in the house has any interest in it, not even the cat. I was worried. I thought, dude, if I ate two pounds of boiled sausage and retained no memory of the event, this isn’t good. My blood sugars must be a lot less controlled than I think. Forgetting what you ate like this is evidence of being hypoglycemic. I was genuinely concerned. And sad to be deprived of the experience of eating the boiled sausage.

The other day, I spotted something bright colored under the driver’s seat of my car. And yes, it was the lost boiled sausage. It must have rolled out of the shopping bag on the way home from Global Foods. And stayed there, sad and uneaten. Fortunately, the wrapping is very hermetic. We’ve had a few scorchers recently and…. you can imagine.

I have three big events next week, none of which I want to attend. My mother in Canada is threatening to MAID herself out of spite. I won’t be able to go to Holy Week services on Tuesday or Friday. Both at work and at church people are bickering like they get paid to do it. If I hear one more complaint about the placement of the panikhida table, I’ll blow, and then somebody else will need an urgent panikhida. There’s so much to do at work, I feel like a deer in highlights. So today I put on a pink skirt with heart appliques and took the 67 all the way to the Global Foods store for two packages of boiled sausage. And a bunch of very healthy stuff too including pine cone jam for my husband, of course. So now I feel better.

The newspaper of record doesn’t know what the letters in NATO stand for. We have truly arrived at heights of egregious incompetence.

There’s a whole bunch of people responsible for putting out the paper, and none of them caught it? I’m very interested in hearing what their salaries are to publish this absolute slop.

When Klara was a baby, she would watch me and N have a conversation and then make gurgles at us in the most conversational tone imaginable. She probably thought, “The large warm creatures routinely look at each other and take turns to make a series of noises. I should do that, too.”

I often feel like that when people make obligatory conversational noises at each other for no practical reason whatsoever.

Around year 1985, the literature of developed countries began to feature female characters whose only dream was to attach themselves to a man who’d treat them like a baby. They very aggressively didn’t want to have a baby because they wanted to be the baby themselves. It’s been forty years but the genre of novels about middle-aged women pursuing the dream of being treated like literal babies by their male sex partners is still going strong. They buy adult-sized onesies, spend most of the day sleeping, pout, lisp, and throw the most vicious tantrums when told that it’s time to grow up.

Before then, novels about extremely childlike women whose only ambition is to be babied by often very random men were not a thing. Dickens has one such character and makes it clear that an adult-sized female baby is a curse to any man dumb enough to marry her. Literature about women showed them being interested in life, relationships, marriage, writing, reading, growing, doing. But since 1985, there’s been an inundation of novels of aggressive female de-growth. This Story Might Save Your Life is a recent example. Its main character, a podcaster named Joy, tries to figure out which man can better accommodate her childishness but never considers that an infant in her mid-thirties isn’t very cute. Especially since she is rewarded for her behavior with immense riches and every possible comfort.

In this sense, the US literature is where the Spanish novel was 30 years ago and Argentinean 15 years ago. Spanish-language authors haven’t rewarded their overgrown babies with great wealth and general adulation since Claudia Piñeiro’s A Little Luck (2015). In the Anglophone world, self-infantilizing women are still in literary demand.

It’s so cool, people. I can pick up a novel in German and read it. And yes, it took 669 days to get here but this obviously wasn’t my priority this whole time. I have a trillion other things going on.

I feel a little like Clive James who is my role model as a literary critic, reader and polyglot.

Nothing compares with the feeling of learning a new language and reading your first novel in it, feeling that a new faucet of yourself is being created with every sentence you read.

It’s this novel and not another one because I picked it up for $1 at the university bookstore and the language is very clear, so I can read it with not a lot of effort.

After years of accusations that my Spanish and English are too Germanic, I have finally embraced the charge and am becoming a speaker of German.

Donald Trump has privately asked cabinet members in recent weeks whether he should replace his director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, venting frustration that she shielded a former deputy who undercut his rationale for war with Iran, according to two people briefed on the discussions.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/apr/02/trump-tulsi-gabbard-intelligence-chief

Finally! Aloha bimbo has got to go. Dumb, useless, zero achievements. Seriously, what exactly did she achieve in her job in all this time? She lisps, bats her eyelashes and does jackshit.

Me and my childhood friend Ira, now a nurse in Israel: