It’s becoming increasingly hard to do sleepovers because children insist that they cannot fall asleep without staring at TikTok videos in bed until midnight. They are appalled by the idea of bedtime. They’re shocked that at our place Klara is usually asleep by 8:30 pm and they throw tantrums when I refuse to give them the wifi password. These are children in the 9- to 10-year-old range. They’re all from very religious, good families.

I am all for kids staying up late during a sleepover. We turn off the lights and they giggle and tell stories in the dark or with a flashlight under a blanket until the wee hours. I am really into that kind of thing. I don’t force anybody to be asleep during a sleepover at a ridiculously early hour. But they are not going to lie there staring at devices and neither are they going to roam the house until midnight because I’m human too and I want to have a life.

I was about to get a new appetizer at a restaurant today. I was going to have it instead of the main course and I thought, it’s just pieces of fried chicken. How bad can they be?

Thank every saint in the prayer book, I checked before ordering. The appetizer contained 141 grams of carbs. My eyes almost popped out of my head. And then I realized that people usually have a main course and probably even a dessert plus some sugary drink to go with the sugar chicken.

Today I attended my penultimate Chairs’ meeting. I have been going to these every two weeks for six years. At this point, I know exactly what everybody is going to say and at what moment in the meeting. I could write a script.

About 30 minutes in, the Chair of Social Work is going to say, “I don’t want to make this about myself,” and then will proceed to talk about herself for the next 30 minutes.

Almost immediately after that, the Chair of Criminal Justice is going to start to flirt clumsily with the Dean, while the Dean, who is very gay, is going to look extremely uncomfortable and disturbed.

The Chair of Mathematics is going to talk in a very quiet voice for a very long time about something utterly incomprehensible.

The Chair of Geography will wake up briefly and in a booming voice inform us that he is very unhappy with everything.

Thirty minutes before the scheduled end of the meeting, the Chair of Foreign Languages—that’s me, obvs—will get up and start crashing through the undergrowth on her way to the nearest exit.

For my upcoming sabbatical I got out of the gate flying. I’m still Department Chair and I’m teaching until the end of June but it feels like the sabbatical already started. I’m working on two articles that I’ve been wanting to write for a long time:

1. One is going to be on Chirbes’ diaries. I’m eager to write something where the word neoliberalism will not be mentioned or hinted at. Which I hope I’ll manage to do.

2. Another one is on the construction of neoliberal subjecthood in a book by Cristina Fallarás. So I won’t be completely bereft of opportunities to mention neoliberalism.

Both articles already have takers even though I haven’t written either one yet. Back when I was in my first year on the tenure track, we were revising the publication expectations for my department, I suggested that Full Professors should be expected to publish more than early-career academics. The colleagues who were Full Professors laughed me off, saying that it is just as hard to publish as a Full Professor. I had nothing but assumptions to support my point of view so I lost that argument.

Of course, now that I am a Full Professor, I know that I was absolutely right. It is enormously easier to publish. Even the most antisocial and curmudgeonly person becomes known after 20 years in the profession. People know the kind of stuff I write because they had many opportunities to read it. I still go through the blind peer review but I always have a bunch of people interested in publishing whatever I produce before it even materializes.

After I’m done with these two pieces, there will be one on the ecstasy of a neoliberal subject.

Chirbes was an absolute genius as a writer but he was infected by the same mind virus that is present in the heads of so many extremely intelligent people. He thought that any form of nationalism or patriotism was an inevitable precursor of fascism. He was so terrified of any expression of group allegiance that even seeing soccer fans cheer the home team made him fear a swift rise of a new Hitler. 

It is curious that the writer’s most passionate denunciations of patriotism appear in the same entries where he anticipates the spillage of neoliberalism into art. I’ve seen this reaction in many people. They agree that neoliberalism is bad but they believe that the proposed remedy of preserving the nation state is worse. “But Hitler” is a sort of a psychological defense mechanism which helps them accept neoliberalism.

Condemnations of Hitler have become the most anodyne respectable pastime. They are no longer about Hitler, however. They are about showing allegiance to the new affective regime. We will never crawl from under the neoliberal machine unless we understand how this avoidance mechanism works. We need to let Hitler go. We need to walk away from fascists, Nazis, and communists. It all happened and it was all in the past. We’re failing to notice the present because we’re so obsessed by winning rhetorical victories against what is long gone.

One of my favourite evo-psych factoids is that apparently a large majority of M/F couples arrange themselves with the male closest to the entrance to the cave (aka bedroom door), without even knowing they’re doing it. https://t.co/BnDrc3I4x3

— Ally Fogg (@AllyFogg) June 1, 2026

I don’t know from cave entrances. As a woman who has given birth twice, I am arranging myself as close as possible to the bathroom. No other factor has the slightest importance to me.

Few things in life are more powerful than the solidarity around the issue of bathrooms of women who have given birth.

Why do Americans get so butthurt about the fact that, outside of natural beauty, America is a pretty uninteresting cultural experience. If you’ve seen one American city you basically have experienced all America has to offer.

— sid 🌹🔆🇨🇦 (@lilbabygandhi) May 31, 2026

“Experiencing” culture is what tourists do. Nobody “experiences” culture or collects cultural experiences for Instagram posts where they live. America is the best place to live culture and produce culture. I’ve spent all day today reading Chirbes, taking notes, walking around and thinking about what I read, looking up the references that the writer gives in his book. I’m paid to do pretty much only this until January.

To live and create culture, you need material conditions and a certain way of life. I live in a small American college town. Everything closes by 10 p.m. There is nothing to distract me from culture.

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.