Reader mitchellporter asked me to talk about positive thinking, and I’m happy to do so because I’ve been pondering the issue a lot recently.

Nothing in life is as much under our control as our inner world. It’s not completely under our control, of course. If you have a splitting headache or stomach cramps, your inner world will be grim. Also, the building blocks for our inner world come from the outside. You can’t have the subjectivity of a 16th-century peasant. Or of a person who grew up in a large household if you are an only child. Or of a native speaker of Japanese if you don’t know a word of the language. But you can build all sorts of edifices with the building blocks you got handed out at birth. Or, rather, at conception because your subjectivity begins to form from that instance.

There’s quite a lot of creative freedom in how you arrange your inner building blocks and how you re-arrange and chisel them throughout life.

Life is the story we tell ourselves and others about it. Any experience you have is yours to arrange into a story. Tragic or happy, bereavement or success, it’s all about how you tell it to yourself. Positive thinking is a way of re-orienting yourself from the story of how you are a victim, a loser, a miserable person and nothing ever goes your way into a story of how you are a winner. You can feel like one in the midst of the harshest situations because how you feel is up to you.

I suspect, for example, that I might not be just as beautiful as I feel. But so what? Compared to half a century of feeling movie-star gorgeous, what does it really matter? I could have spent this time, decades really, shrinking like a snail over my Yeti hair, visible stomach, and a weirdly shaped head (thanks, mom, for believing the old woman tale that newborns need their heads molded manually). All of that energy that I could have poured into squirming over my imperfections, went to other things.

I have a friend who was recently diagnosed with stage-four cancer. She’s luminous. Her life is full and amazing. And of course, it took a lot of work. She went to a monastery to get direction from a monk. She worked on it like a plantation slave but she recovered her peace of mind. She found her purpose in being there for other people, works of charity, prayer, and study of the lives of Orthodox saints. If anybody has an excuse to feel miserable, it’s this woman. But she’s the happiest person I know. And again, easy it wasn’t. But the effort is worth the prize which is a well-ordered, radiant inner life.

Let’s all do the following exercise. Let’s take one story from our lives when something bad happened to us and retell it as something positive. And then repeat the story to ourselves until it becomes one of our inner building blocks.

I have so many questions:

Literacy starts at home. pic.twitter.com/8qNixx5Gxn

— U.S. Department of Education (@usedgov) March 19, 2026

In the end I had to go beyond serving as a wedding general. The person who was supposed to give closing remarks didn’t show up. I had spent the whole panel decorating my journal, answering emails, measuring my blood sugar, and texting with a friend about the Orthodox retreat where we are going on Saturday. Then all of a sudden, the organizer says, “could you please please please do the closing remarks because Gemma can’t get here?”

I had to come up with a way to connect two literary criticism talks with one on children’s picture books, and another on sociological research into experiences of foreign language teachers. And I did. On the spot. It was so good. Everything got connected to everything else and I fake praised the wokest talk in a way that demolished its woke premise. People were taking notes it was so good.

There was a tradition in tsarist Russia to invite a general to a wedding. If you had a general among the wedding guests, it conferred status on you. Retired generals picked up a nice side income by attending the weddings of complete strangers for a fee.

I’m a wedding general at this conference in Portugal. I don’t do anything. I just sit there, snoozing. My name appears on the program and the poster, and that’s the extent of my involvement. Unlike a tsarist general, I don’t charge a fee. Yet.

The reason I got involved is because the organizers, whom I don’t know from Joâo, really wanted me to participate. I have such a packed schedule that it was easier to say yes than explain why not.

“The Iranians had a fatwa against developing nukes,” Joe Kent announces as proof that Iran wasn’t on the verge of developing a nuclear arsenal.

This is comedy gold, people. I’m moderating a conference in Portugal in a few minutes, so I can’t finish the video now but even the first ten minutes are priceless.

I watched the beginning of Tucker’s interview with Joe Kent, and I bemoan Trump’s clinical incapacity to hire intelligent people.

Before Democrat readers perk up, please remember that Biden hired a crossdresser who stole luggage for the nuclear waste office, so let’s not get too smug on either side.

Kent said something along the lines of “even if Israel attacked Iran, we could have back channeled it to the Iranians that, hey, it wasn’t us.” He had time to think about it, although I’m sure that he’s not very familiar with the concept of thinking, and he came up with this kindergarten level lisping childishness? “It wasn’t me who did it, Mommy, it was Johnny.” Iran has bombed UAE and Bahrain who clearly “didn’t do it.” So what? How did it help them to not get bombed?

Two administrations, and he keeps hiring these absolute meatheads. Then he has to fire them and they pout up a storm.

The International Studies people painfully need me. Currently, their course is a mixture between Duginism and wokeism. It suggests that people must aim to be global citizens in a multipolar world and welcome climate refugees while hoping for the rise of China at the expense of the US.

I’m throwing away everything, including the textbook. Which text would you suggest as the main book for the course? It’s for next spring, so I have a lot of time.

Kudos to my children on their bedtime-delaying tactics. One of them asked, right at 8 o'clock, why the First World War started. I 100% fell for it.

— Tristin Hopper (@TristinHopper) March 17, 2026

My kid’s go-to is, “Mommy, can you tell me that story again about how you were completely normal during COVID?” The story lasts practically longer than World War I, and I can’t resist the need to share it.

Obviously, peaches are gone from my life forever because of diabetes but I am and always have been like this husband. The “save it for the kids” woman will guilt-trip everybody into infinity with her litany of sacrifices. No peach on the planet will make a child as happy as a content mom who isn’t a sacrificial victim.

Just eat the stupid peach, woman, and stop congratulating yourself for your self-denial because it’s totally fake. I’m not particularly young, to put it mildly, yet I remember women of my mother’s generation go on and on about this stupid last peach. A different continent, a different century, yet women still priss up all over the place about the damn peach.

A minor professional gripe I have is that, in the past, when one used to do book reviews, one would receive an actual copy of the book in the mail. Now all you get is a stupid .pdf. How exactly is one supposed to read and underline a .pdf? This is reviewing for academic publication. I need to do a lot of leafing back and forth and underlining. Also, one chooses books to review because one hopes to use them later in one’s scholarship. And I simply can’t use anything for research that isn’t a real book on paper. My brain refuses to process at the level necessary for this kind of work.

The physical copy of the book was a reward one got for reviewing. These book reviews don’t count as publications and are, of course, uncompensated. One does them as service to the profession. In other words, one does them out of the goodness of one’s heart and to keep things going in the field. Getting the book in the mail was a little bonus in a task that is otherwise academic charity. Academic books cost upwards of $100 each, and such things as book money for professors are long dead in most places.