What I didn’t like about the movie “Single White Female” is something it shares with many American films. In the last 20 minutes, the movie completely falls apart. Everything that we learn about the characters up to that point flies out of the window. A succession of very cliched scenes with standard facial expressions, screams, and gimmicks becomes tedious. I sat through that exact scene of two characters, a good one and a bad one, beating each other to a bloody pulp a trillion times before.

This is why it often feels that watching American movies is a waste of time. These filmmakers know how to create an amazing ambience. They do great characterization. The premise is often very good. But they can’t finish a story in a way that is not very boring.

I asked the IT to make changes to the departmental web page. The IT guy wrote back at 1:00 AM to tell me that he had completed the task. I had lodged my request during normal business hours. Yet I feel profoundly guilty that this poor dude had to work on my stupid task in the middle of the night on Friday. But then again, IT people might actually derive pleasure from working at night. Right? Or should I go on feeling guilty? Please help me decide.

I remember watching this movie back in the mid-1990s from the post-Soviet reality where I then lived and everything about it seemed entirely incomprehensible to me. The main character, a young woman named Allie, wants a husband and a bunch of kids but her fiancé is a cheating piece of garbage. She half-heartedly attempts a life of an independent New York businesswoman. Of course, she ends up inviting a psychotic serial killer into her life and all sorts of crazy things begin to happen.

Even back in the 1990s it was clear to me that the movie betrayed a profound anxiety over the lifestyle that the young women depicted in it were trying to live. It is also clear what creates dysfunction in their lives. The only positive male figure in the movie is Allie’s gay neighbor and he is unavailable as a potential life mate. Men are insensitive, lecherous creeps, the movie tells us, so young women are forced to engineer their lives around that vacuum.

We all know how Allie’s story plays out in our era but the movie is definitely worth watching because it depicts that old New York of myth-making and a thousand movies and books. I never lived in New York but I feel nostalgia for the city that still exists in these old movies. It was a crazy yet magical place. The knowledge that everything we see in Single White Female is gone is not easy to process. The movie is based on a novel but I was never tempted to read it because the visual memory of the city, its buildings, its environment, and its people is a lot more powerful than words.

For everybody who is also missing their Dad tonight:

I answered one survey from my local state rep who is a former colleague and, of course, a Democrat. Exactly 3 minutes later, I received this:

Yes, it’s stupid to answer these surveys. But I’m in a mile-long line for an oil change. Plus, I wanted the state rep to know that her idea of “fighting to preserve women’s rights” is extremely unappealing to me as a voter.

Speaking of Talarico, he should be commended for providing excellent comedic relief to everybody who even marginally follows politics.

On our last night at the spa in the north of Quebec, a group of rowdy men next door to our suite was yelling and cheering well into the night. My sister, who is usually very stringent about protecting her customer rights, called reception to complain. However what they told her immediately changed her outlook.

“It’s okay”, she said happily. “These are hockey players celebrating the win of their team.”

That’s how I knew that she was now a true Canadian, and I find that very endearing.

JUST IN: Senator Elizabeth Warren urgently calls for AI regulations to prevent a “permanent underclass”

— Polymarket (@Polymarket) May 27, 2026

There is no doubt in my mind that these regulations will be limited in their entirety to ideological supervision of AI-generated content. Most AI tools are already woker than a BLM riot but there is never a limit on how far leftist ideological conditioning can go.

By the way, college professors in the Humanities who have the biggest number of issues with AI cheating are very left-wing. The kind of texts that they want students to produce are precisely the type of swill that AI generates most easily. I don’t have problems with AI in the classroom because I don’t expect students to create lists of politically charged talking points. I don’t want either left-wing or right-wing propaganda from them. What I look for is an actual thoughtful engagement with literary texts. AI is not helpful with that so they don’t use it. Exactly zero assignments that were handed in to me this semester were AI-generated. Each essay and composition that I received had a very appropriate and expected number of language mistakes. Each piece of writing also represented original and often very interesting thinking on the part of the students.

I issued no AI policy in my teaching this semester because it was unnecessary. AI is useless for the kind of work that I expect students to do.

Children in a sex education class in Germany were instructed to design a brothel “for everyone” as part of their course… The children, aged between 13 and 15, received the assignment at the Cardinal von Galen Gymnasium in Kevelaer, a small town in North-Rhine Westphalia close to the Dutch border with a population of just 28,000. The community is most known for being a religious pilgrimage site for Roman Catholics, who descend upon the town once per year to honor the Virgin Mary.

German Children Given “Inclusive Brothel” Assignment As Part of “Sexual Education of Diversity” Class

Details for the “inclusive brothel” assignment are posted at the link and they are even worse than the whole thing originally sounds. 

Homeschooling is illegal in Germany on the grounds that school attendance is crucial for habituating children to coexist with people from diverse backgrounds.

I recently discovered an excellent app that I want to recommend to everybody. It’s called Wispr Flow and it provides the best speech-to-text function I’ve ever seen. The contrast with the native Android speech-to-text could not be any starker.

One of the amazing functions of this app is that it automatically figures out what language I am speaking without me having to switch over or press any buttons. I write in a boatload of languages, switching between them constantly and without thinking, and it’s really great to have an app that can figure out what I’m doing without any additional effort on my part. Unlike the native Android speech-to-text, Wispr Flow has no problem with punctuation. It even figures out when to put a word in inverted commas or when an exclamation mark is needed.

I have no idea what feats of amazingness the paid version of this app does. I’m using the free version, and I already find it to be sensationally helpful.

A hilarious thing happened to me while using this app yesterday. I was doing my German exercises but I was still feeling crappy from my shingles vaccine. My German pronunciation must have been even worse than usual because the Wispr Flow app started writing down what I was saying in Russian. I find this extraordinary. The app knew that I was speaking in a Russian accent!

N says he’s jealous of the app because I’ve been going on and on about how much I love it so I will pipe down already. But it’s a great app.

I’m torn between envying the unclouded reality in which this person lives or despising him for his utter cluelessness:

If IQ is so useful why dont employers just give an IQ test for the interview and hire the highest scorers ?

— Eli (@elkelk) May 27, 2026

How is it humanly possible to have missed that this kind of test is illegal and that even mentioning IQ puts you in danger? It’s incomprehensible.