An art gallery employee in Naples, Florida, spoiled my experience by asking where I’m from and, when I said that I’m from Ukraine, responding that he is from Russia. I can’t remotely understand people who think that this is important and laudable information to share at this historical juncture. I wasn’t asking him. He could have kept it to himself.

I never know if they are really this clueless or are putting it on.

Stupid fucks.

Self-awareness is truly the rarest of gifts. I somehow managed to miss that I have extremely conservative sensibilities when the evidence was plentiful. If I like a vacation spot, I will continue going to it and enacting the exact same routine there forever and ever. If in a new area I find a restaurant that I like, it will not even occur to me to check out other options. I will continue coming to the place that I liked first. I keep going to all the same conferences.

I like change at work because it entertains me, so maybe that obscured my conservative tendencies from me. But in everything else, I am a stay-the-course kind of person.

The funny thing is that I loved being department chair. I was massively into it. Enjoyed it all the time. And now I really love not being department chair. Every day of not being one is profoundly enjoyable. Based on my attitude, one would think that I hated it, but that’s not true.

Our vacation is ending tomorrow. We’ve been here since July 5, and I’ve read 6 books in this time. I have also been informed by my child that food and good don’t rhyme. Overall, these are excellent vacation results.

Tomorrow, as usual, we’ll experience the culmination of the vacation which is an obligatory visit to Naples, Florida. I love it like a Muslim loves going to Mecca. I can’t fully explain why, but I achieve great inner peace there.

Good news, my friends! Joyce Maynard has published a new novel, and it’s her best one yet. If you’re new around here, enter the words “Joyce Maynard” into the search box to find out all of the hilarious things I had to say about this writer in the past. To cut a very long story short, I think she’s gifted, but unfortunately she went woke several years ago and started publishing unhinged anti-Trumpian rants instead of novels.

In an excellent turn of events, though, Maynard found a way to break out of her sad ideological capture. She set her new novel titled In Wonderland in 1986, back when Maynard was much younger, had very conservative sensibilities, and was into babies, homemaking, and family life. Her gift immediately came back once she started writing about things she cares about and understands instead of politics which confuses her.

In Wonderland is a Bildungsroman. We all know that I avoid them because I’ve read way too many novels in this genre and can’t take them anymore, but Maynard’s coming-of-age novel is actually pretty great. The plot is great, even though it’s not particularly fresh. A fourteen-year-old girl from a dysfunctional, poor family comes to spend the summer with the family of rich acquaintances who are also dysfunctional but in a different way. The story is never boring, the characters are layered and convincing, and there is an important lesson in the novel. Teenagers need attentive, involved parents who remember that they are still children and do not try to treat them like friend substitutes. They also need some sort of an interest, a job, a sport, a very energy-consuming hobby to occupy them, or they’re going to get into utterly unnecessary trouble. The novel is set in 1986, but today it’s worse because trouble awaits a teenager on every device. Obviously, teenagers don’t need their parents to hover. But they most certainly do not need to be left completely to their own devices, especially on devices.

I’m making this novel sound preachy and boring, but I promise it’s not. It’s lots of fun to read. And it’s free on Kindle Unlimited. Descriptions of the summer of 1986 at a beach lake country house in Maine are so vivid that reading feels like going on vacation there. There are family mysteries, infidelity, dysfunction, and less than 0.04% of wokeness in the novel.

A perfect vacation read, highly recommended.

Today, Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani and Parks Commissioner Tricia Shimamura announced the launch of NYC Parks’ first-ever Parents’ Night Out, a free, one-night drop-off program that gives parents and caregivers the opportunity to enjoy an evening to themselves while children participate in supervised fun at select NYC Parks recreation centers across the five boroughs.

You’d have to torture me in very brutal ways before I’d contemplate something like this, but leaving that aside, what kind of a kid would agree to participate? A very young child would be terrified. A kid my daughter’s age wouldn’t want to go if her friends aren’t there.

The gay dude is childless, so I understand that he doesn’t get it, but I’m pretty certain Shimamura has children.

By the way, congratulations, Spain, on going to the finals! Now Argentina needs to win in the semis today, and we’re going to have my dream finals.

This is turning out to be an excellent summer. My friendly neighborhood cat sitter sends me daily pictures of the cat, alleviating my newfound cat-related neurosis. We are going back home on Friday just in time to prepare for watching the Sunday final.

I have finally received anonymous peer review reports on my book. To say that they are complimentary is to do them an injustice. I couldn’t even read them in full in one sitting because they made me feel shy. They refer to me as a brilliant visionary, which I kind of think I am, but it does feel weird to see it in writing. To clarify, the reports are anonymous to me, but not to the readers. Unlike with an academic article, with a book, the reviewers know the author’s name.

The readers are not only okay with the conservative aspects of my analysis. They are actually really into them. One reader’s report says that our field is an echo chamber where a bunch of people who consider themselves to be rebellious and counter-cultural spend decades repeating the same old accepted beliefs and gate-keeping any actually original ideas. This is so true. People have convinced themselves that it’s deeply rebellious to denounce endless sexisms, fascisms, and racisms, even though everybody else is doing it all day long.

I now have to prepare an author’s response to the readers’ reviews. For that, I will have to read two books that the reviewers assume I have read, and I haven’t. I always knew I should, and I’ve even had one of them on my Kindle for several years, but somehow it never happened. The publishers gave me three weeks for this, but I need to be done in two because the process has dragged out for long enough, and I really want the brilliant visionary book finally to be in print.

I also have a very hard deadline of September 15th on my article on Chirbes. And another one of October 1st for my talk in Spain. I usually give talks on things that I have already prepared for publication, but this time it’s going to be different. I’m doing something new completely from scratch. Then, on top of all of this is the actual project that I’m supposed to be doing on my sabbatical, which is different from all of the projects I just described.

Plus, since I’m no longer department chair, I don’t have to be worrying about anybody’s enrollment numbers or hiring. Things are really shaping up for this sabbatical.

But wait, there’s more.

A same-sex couple in Ontario, Canada, is suing their surrogate mother in Ontario Superior Court (filed May 2026) after she refused their request to abort the child at around 22 weeks gestation upon discovering a cleft lip (with possible cleft palate and a minor heart defect)

No, wait, there’s even more.

The child in question is 2 years old at the time of the lawsuit. The “parents” are suing the woman who gave birth against their wishes to the child they are now raising. They’re trying to get $600,000 out of the mother for “emotional distress”.

Once again, the child already exists. These horrible people have that poor child in their home. All the while, they find the child’s existence extremely traumatizing and in need of a gigantic financial remedy.

Surrogacy needs to be banned, always, everywhere, and completely.

“You don’t have to put in a lot of effort with your child because you lucked into having an easy kid.”

No, you factory-defective garden gnome. I have “an easy kid” because I work like a convict in the salt mines, pouring in the attention that makes her easy.

“Of course, it’s easy when your kid actually prefers reading to watching TV.”

Yes, you two-legged lawn chair. She popped out of the womb with a book of ancient Greek mythology. Some parents are lucky like that.