I have no idea why JD Vance is failing to notice that having his wife sit for these interviews is a bad idea. She doesn’t interview well. She doesn’t make a good impression. Her pregnancy is the perfect excuse to not have her participate. Not everybody needs to be a public figure. When people are going to vote in the primaries, they will vote for the candidate. We don’t need another pissy, pouty, Michelle Obama type inflicted onto the public discourse. We don’t need to hear from Usha at all.

I still can’t link to the tweet, but I listened to the clip, and it’s really bad.

The Russian propaganda channel is very obsessed with our reflecting pool:

It’s almost embarrassing how desperately the Russians have attached to the idea that something in the American capital might be imperfect. This is coming on the heels of Moscow going up in flames like a tinderbox.

This tweet offers the perfect encapsulation of Russians’ attitude to America. They are painfully, bitterly, woefully jealous.

For this research project, I spend hours and hours every day reading. This takes me back to when I was doing my undergrad in Montreal, and everything was dreamlike because all I did was read. For days now, I have felt very young and carefree.

Another similarity is that these books only exist on paper. I haven’t read so much on paper in years.

I’m also planning to watch some of the movies that meant a lot to Chirbes. He loved movies, but from what I’m seeing in the diaries, he was only interested in the films from the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. This is perfect because later cinematic production of Spain and France, which are the two countries the writer watched movies from the most, would be intolerable to me. Hollywood movies I only like from the 1980s and maybe very early 1990s.

I was asked in the Q&A to comment on Anne Hathaway’s geriatric pregnancy. There has been an active discussion of this on social media, but I’m not sure there is much one can say about it. When women get pregnant, that’s wonderful. When babies are born, that’s also wonderful. However, unless a woman is extremely wealthy, it is crucial to remember that not only getting pregnant, but carrying to term, giving birth, recovering from the pregnancy, and caring for the child is enormously more difficult on the physical level at age 40 plus. Enormously more difficult. Every year of a woman’s age adds to these difficulties exponentially.

Of course, on the psychological level, if everything goes right, it can become enormously, and I repeat, enormously, easier to be a mother as you get older. This is not necessarily the case. What I say is predicated on consistent personal growth in a woman. But if that growth is there, being the mother of an infant, toddler, and preteen in your forties and fifties is the best thing ever.

So, yay for Anne Hathaway. I wish her a safe pregnancy and a joyful birth. I don’t particularly like her as an actress. I think she has no talent. But I want her baby to be born healthy and happy, as I want every baby to be born healthy and happy.

I also want to mention that people get fixated on the difficulties of getting pregnant in one’s forties, when getting pregnant is not remotely the hardest part of a geriatric pregnancy and birth. For me, the most demanding time was not even the high-high-risk pregnancy that I experienced with Klara, but not being physically able to care for my infant as I wanted to in the first months. For those of us who are not Hollywood starlets and don’t have an army of servants, this can be the hardest part of a geriatric birth.

I didn’t know any of this when I nicknamed her Aloha Bimbo but it was clear that this is the kind of woman who would completely debase herself for some dude. People kept saying that she was a Russian spy, but she’s not a spy. She’s the female equivalent of pussy-whipped. Is there a word for that? A woman whose main goal in life is to be noticed by the trashiest representative of the male species, on whom she incomprehensibly fixates. This is completely beyond politics. It’s a psycho-sexual phenomenon that is not political in nature.

Chirbes also thought that Vargas Llosa’s best novel was The War of the End of the World. I feel deeply vindicated.

Curiously, Chirbes was not nearly as widely read in contemporary Spanish literature as I am. He read a lot of European modernists, such as Musil and Döblin, writers that I have never managed to force myself to read beyond the first dozen pages. In contemporary Spanish literature, he really admired Alvaro Pombo’s Contra natura that I discussed recently in this blog. He read a lot of Antonio Muñoz Molina, and his opinions on this writer were identical to mine.

Just so that people know for how much longer I will be torturing them with Riafeil Chirbes’ diaries, I have read and copiously annotated the first two volumes. I have one more volume left. It’s a thousand pages long. I’m right now at the point where Chirbes is finishing his novel Crematorio, which will finally bring him massive recognition within his own country. I love that novel and have published extensively about it. Being able to read a day-to-day account of how the novel was created gives me an almost voyeuristic kind of pleasure.

At the local water park, Klara was standing in line for an activity where you have to cross the pool by stepping on little inflated pontoons while holding yourself up with a cable rope. I stood next to her to make company.

A very young lifeguard thought that I was queuing up for the activity. To warn me that my age was inappropriate, he said, “I am sorry, ma’am. I don’t want to presume, and I apologize in advance, but this is for ages 16 and under only.” I congratulated the young man on his exceptional politeness and tact with which he delivered the not-unwelcome message that I was out of my teens.

It’s very encouraging to see this kind of politeness in someone so young. I would have done a much worse job at his age. American children and teenagers are the most polite I’ve seen anywhere.

I’m not familiar with this phenomenon of cheap apartments in very desirable locations that are only open for sale to people on a limited income who can buy the apartment outright for cash:

These properties are called HDFC. You’re not allowed to take out a mortgage on them. And you are not allowed to make over $150,000 a year. The only people I can imagine having $185,000 in cash lying around while not making that much money (for NYC, at least) are crooks. I mean, where do you get that amount in cash on a $150,000 income?

I asked AI, and it confirms the existence of the phenomenon but cannot explain it beyond spooling miles of woke platitudes. Does anybody have any insight into this?

A Freudian would say that the reflecting pool is a symbolic birth canal that is ready to birth liberals into independence and maturity. They are horrified by that possibility. Trump is their symbolic mother, and his efforts to expel them into independent thinking through the symbolic birth canal feel to them like an expulsion from a warm, murky, concealing paradise of gestation into the cruelly transparent clarity of adulthood. They’re trying to destroy the birth canal to prevent this expulsion.

I’m joking, of course, but it’s undeniable that the roots of the liberals’ feelings for Trump are not political but psychological. For a long time, I thought that he was their symbolic daddy. I was wrong. He is their symbolic mommy. Everything begins to make sense when you see it that way.

From an article in The Economist:

European football fans visiting America are discovering the mass affluence of the country’s suburbs. The wealth enticing holidaymakers troubles European elites. America, once a peer, seems to be racing ahead.

https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2026/06/18/europe-buys-the-future-america-builds-it

This is one of the most endearing effects of the World Cup travel. Europeans are discovering America and seeing what is possible. They will take this inspiration back home with them and will try to turn things around there. The standard of living in Europe is purposefully tampered down by extremely high taxation. A pernicious belief in the possibility or desirability of equality is forcing Europe to lag behind its own potential.