One thing I find very endearing in Chiribes is how profoundly he loved and admired Germany. I’m also really into Germany and I can identify with his feelings for this country completely. After Spain, Germany was the country for which the writer felt the greatest affinity. He adored the nature, the architecture, the resilience of the German spirit, and, of course, the extraordinary philosophy and art that the country produced. I compiled a very long list of interesting German authors that I want to read from Chirbes’s diaries.

What’s particularly fascinating is that Germans returned the writer’s love for their country. Until the publication of Crematorio in 2007, Chirbes was not particularly known in Spain. His books were much more popular in Germany. I was his fan since the early 2000s but that was unusual. I kept mentioning him to other people, but the name never provoked any recognition even among professional Hispanists.

Germans, on the other hand, discovered Chirbes at least a decade before his compatriots. He was translated into German very eagerly and constantly invited to do readings, give interviews, or speak to large audiences. There is nothing particularly Germanic in his writing, yet there was clearly something, some shared wave length, a mood in common that made Chirbes so irresistible to German readers. I clearly have a deep affinity for the German culture as well, which is not surprising given that everybody on my father’s side of the family has German last names. I’m also massively into Chirbes. There’s definitely something here, my friends, but it’s not anything primitive or what one can observe superficially. The novels by Rafael Chirbes are a conduit between Spain and Germany.

Propaganda along I-80 in rural mountain west… pic.twitter.com/GSoAuUTvgr

— SLC Fatigue (@MarinasHammer) June 1, 2026

As an immigrant myself, I have to ask what kind of a moron thinks that it’s a good idea to put up this kind of billboards. The preachy didacticism nobody ever asked for is annoying. The point the billboard makes is extremely ridiculous and uneducated. This is so similar to the Soviet propaganda. All of those red banners with gold or white lettering that repeated the same tired old slogans, which neither the ideologues nor the public believed or took seriously.

The main difference between the political left and right at this moment is that on the right there is an effervescence of original thought and deep, insightful analysis. On the left, there is nothing but slogans. They’re always the same. They’re always an exact contradiction of reality. They’re boring, they lack in humor, and they’re unable to provoke anything other than boredom or annoyance.

This is from the novel Nothing but the Truth by John Lescroart published in 1999

Now again the clerk called out someone not his client—this time a young man who looked as though he’d been drinking since he’d turned twenty-one and possibly two or three years before that. Maybe he was still drunk—certainly he looked wasted.

The judge was Peter Li, a former assistant district attorney with whom Hardy was reasonably friendly. The prosecuting attorney was Randy Huang, who sat at his table inside the bar rail as the defendant went shuffling past. The public defender was a ten-year veteran named Donna Wong. Judge Li’s longtime clerk, another Asian named Manny See, read the charge against the young man as he stood, swaying, eyes opening and closing, at the center podium. The judge addressed him.

“Mr. Reynolds, you’ve been in custody now for two full days, trying to get to sober, and your attorney tells me you’ve gotten there. Is that true?”

“Yes, Your Honor,” Donna Wong declared quickly.

Judge Li nodded patiently, but spoke in a firm tone. “I’d like to hear it from Mr. Reynolds himself, Counsellor. Sir?”

Reynolds looked up, swayed for a beat, let out a long breath, shook his head.

“Mr. Reynolds.” Judge Li raised his voice. “Look at me, please. Do you know where you are?”

Donna Wong prodded him with her elbow. Reynolds looked down at her, up to the judge and his clerk, across to Huang sitting at the prosecution table. His expression took on a look of stunned surprise as he became aware of his surroundings, of the Asian faces everywhere he turned. “I don’t know.” A pause. “China?”

Those sweet innocent times of the 1990s when even a very liberal San Francisco author could make jokes like this.

A while ago, people tried to persuade me here on the blog that Ursula LeGuin is a worthwhile author. But every time I come across a quote from her, it’s unbelievably cringe. Here’s a completely random example that popped into my news feed:

The paragraph is so badly written that the idea of having to read a whole page of this is not appealing. But the so-called insight itself is also stupid. LeGuin confuses pain and happiness as states experienced by actual human beings and pain and happiness as subjects of literary work. Happiness is extremely enjoyable to the people experiencing it but it doesn’t offer material to create a work of art on its basis.

Today we went to the church, then to the park, then to the library. At home we cooked, folded laundry, played squishy kitties, read, cleaned the litter box, and worked on art projects. We were very happy doing all of it but there is nothing here for a plot of a novel or even the shortest of short stories. At the end of this very happy day, my husband and I are going to enjoy an episode of Breaking Bad not because we love pain but because we understand the difference between reality and fiction.

Also, people need to stop with the “banality of evil” arguments because they’ve been done to death and it’s time to move on.

I'm having a sort of split experience where on the one hand lots of my right-leaning mutuals say there's no way to work with the Dems bc it's impossible to make headway against Woke, while on the other a ton of people to my left are saying "that was a failure. let's adjust" https://t.co/pu9a14jCqE

— Jack (@tracewoodgrains) May 30, 2026

This is entertaining but I can’t imagine anybody with an ounce of gray matter willing to entertain the possibility that this adjustment is remotely sincere. What happened between 2012 and 2024 wasn’t a small innocent overreach that can now be corrected. It was a consistently expressed belief in the need to destroy the foundations of society that was aggressively and consistently put into practice.

People who are asking us to believe that this was an accidental overreach which they are now ready to undo are using the exact same method to make this argument that they originally used to unleash and maintain the woke movement. They are denying reality. They are gaslighting us by pretending we didn’t see what we very clearly saw. They did not change. They want everything and everybody around them to change beyond any recognition and keep embracing the most painful of changes that they inflict on everybody but they themselves want to be immune from change. They will not bend, compromise, or accommodate.

The second we believe them and give them a chance to demonstrate how they have adjusted, they are going to go from zero to a thousand, introducing policies that will make Woke 1.0 seem like child’s play.

Let’s not make that mistake.

The great Spanish writer Rafael Chirbes was from a working-class family that existed in such poverty that his mother had to send him to an orphanage as a child because she couldn’t feed him. When he grew up, he became one of the most well-read and brilliant Europeans of his time. Nobody in his family could begin to understand what it is that he did and what constituted the daily fabric of his life.

Sometimes something glitches and the most unexpected families produce a genius who is forever separated from his environment of origin by his out of place brilliance.

A Ukrainian drone pilot who participated in training NATO drone pilots says it’s very hard to work with them because they have so many regulations that they never manage to actually fly any drones.

“We can’t fly here, we aren’t allowed to fly there, the wind is too strong, it’s raining, we need 8 hours of sleep.”

The NATO soldiers are great. It is the structure of the entire system that has been infected by safetism and whiny mentality.

The full interview is here:

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.