This is not an old post. It’s from today:

What do you think? Somebody is trying to get the royal family in trouble? Show them up as cruel dweebs who mock the suffering of the people? Nobody in the royal family actually writes this. This is an employee who can have all sorts of motivations.

The guy is a clinical moron. There is no equivalence between these countries at all. Britain and France are actual partners. Israel is an American project. Israel is completely dependent on the U.S. for its survival. The U.K. and France are not. Has anybody managed to inform JD who is actually in the G7? There was a G7 summit 3 seconds ago. Might there be a reason why Israel did not show up as a member? Why it would be deeply ludicrous even to consider such a notion?

What Vance is saying is a dream come true for Israel. It’s a massive promotion, and the dude is so unintelligent he has no idea what an enormous gift he is giving the very people he’s trying to demote.

Of course, we went to the very first showing. It’s a movie about how screens are bad for kids. Are you kidding me? We pre-bought the tickets weeks ago. The theater was full even for an early showing. It’s summertime, and parents are experiencing the unrelenting horror of screens all day long. The moon there was bound to be a hit. It’s a sweet, touching film, and it deserves the success.

Toy Story 5 a Disney movie, so there is wokeness. What are you going to do? That crap is everywhere. The anti-screen message fizzles out in the end with the idea that screens are fine, as long as you can alternate them with imaginative play and healthy socialization. This sounds good in theory but it’s not realistic. Screens are addictive and push out the alternatives. I’m an adult who only encountered a portable screen well after becoming a grown up. Yet every time I want to read, I have to force myself. It’s an effort. For me, of all people, reading is an effort because of screens. Nobody would be having any problem with this at all if people did not get addicted and could snap away from the screens easily. Brushing teeth is easy to quit. No parents on the planet are battling their children for “teeth brushing time”.

You can’t be a little bit pregnant. You’re either pregnant or you’re not. It’s the same with screens. Being around and not getting addicted is a pipe dream. Addics immediately go into a defensive narrative about how they “can quit anytime”, which is precisely how you know that they are addicts.

It’s a good children’s movie, though. I don’t think Disney had a really big success in a while, and I hope that this movie hits it big.

One of Chirbes’s friends was an atheist, married to a deeply religious Catholic woman. Their whole lives together, the husband pretended to be as religious as his wife. He didn’t want to hurt her, wanted to make her happy, so every day he would get on his knees and they would pray together. 50 years of daily shared prayers, of weekly mass, all out of love for his wife. The husband sacrificed his need to be right to the comfort of another person.

What can possibly be more deeply Christian than what this husband did?

I’m in my new office!

It’s smaller than my previous one and doesn’t have an exit to a veranda, but I really don’t care. It’s less open to the public, which is all I want.

The problem with the Iran peace deal is that it implies that Israel will abide by its terms. The U.S. is not managing, and never managed in the past, to keep Israel under control. I don’t know what can possibly save the deal from collapsing. It was good, though. The oil and the gas prices started getting very pleasant.

To avoid such debacles in the future, it would be great if the American government sought advice from qualified people who understand cultural differences and regional politics.

One thing I don’t get in Raphael Chirbes’s diaries is that he never seemed to struggle with what to read. Somehow, he always knew what he should be reading next. If only he could reveal his decision-making method, I would find that extremely helpful. There are so many books that require immediate reading that I feel paralyzed by the wealth of choices. Sometimes I don’t even read because I can’t decide what specifically I should be reading.

I am a typical Buridan’s donkey, torn between identically appealing piles of hay. Chirbes wasn’t a decisive person in other areas of his life. He was racked with doubt and goes on and on about his incapacity to make up his mind. I’m a lot more decisive, not to say impulsive, but in this one area I can’t figure out an organizing principle that would make book choices easier.

What Chirbes and I do share is the outsized importance with which we invest in reading. It’s not a thing that we do. It’s the thing. Everything else organizes itself around this thing. I’m not suggesting that everybody should be like that, God forbid, but some people are. It’s great to know that I’m not alone in this.

I have five days total left in the office (not counting the weekends), and I can’t wait to be free. People are driving me up a wall, as if there is a conspiracy to remind me why I don’t want the administrative job anymore.

I don’t even remember anymore what it feels like to not have to write absence request reports for every time I have an appointment and come late into the office. More importantly, I don’t remember what it feels like not to have to care about:

– anybody else’s low-enrolled courses
– unattractive classroom furniture
– forgetfulness
– conflicts with students and colleagues
– tantrums
– vendettas
– dysfunctions and dishonesties.

I have my good-bye ritual for the last day in the office all planned out. I will come in after hours, walk around, and then lock the doors behind me for the last time, knowing that I no longer have to care.

It’s simply that I’m very tired of people. People are not bad people, but there are more people than I need to be around me.

I’m reading the part of Rafael Chirbes’s diaries where he talks about the destruction of the regional cuisines of Europe. Chirbes was a lifelong foodie who edited a culinary magazine for many years. He says that the local rituals surrounding cooking and meal times that had been honed by centuries of the local climate, habits, and community traditions were wiped out within a couple of decades by mass migration.

The middle classes, he says, thought that going into raptures over curries and kebabs made them worldlier and more progressive. They accepted slop on their plates instead of the vibrant, interesting, local dishes because this bought them a self-image of well-travelled sophisticates. The writer lists the food-related rituals and dishes that were lost to the belief that global slop is better than local food art.

Trump ended up helping the Ukrainian war effort yet again by signing the Iran peace deal at this precise moment. Oil prices are dropping off a cliff just as Russia loses one of its main oil refineries. And also, of course, by removing the longstanding American opposition to Ukrainian long-range strikes into Russian territory. What we saw today, and yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that, we could have seen in 2022, 2023, 2024. We started seeing it only in 2025.

I have zero interest in whether Trump meant it or didn’t mean it. It’s impossible to know what’s in anybody’s head. Only the results matter. I’m liking these results.