Dear Argentinean publishers:

you are idiots. See below:

The person whose face you put on the cover of Dostoevsky’s novel is not Dostoevsky. Neither is he one of the Karamazov brothers. This is the great (probably the greatest) Ukrainian writer Taras Schevchenko. Schevchenko was born to slavery and it took a group of dedicated writers a long time to buy the freedom of this poetic genius.

Confusing Dostoevsky and Schevchenko is like thinking that Borges and Neruda are the same guy. Hurts, eh? So now you know how I feel when I see this book cover.

Snowden’s Russian lawyer gave him a book by Anton Chekhov to help him learn about Russian habits and traditions. I love Chekhov but I worry for poor Snowden if he expects to find Chekhovian characters and situations in today’s Russia.

Another book the lawyer is giving Snowden is Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. According to the lawyer, Snowden might find it easy to relate to the protagonist.

Yes, Russians will give Snowden asylum but they will get as much fun out of him as they can. This is a culture that hides its intense hostility towards foreigners behind a mask of fake hospitality.

In the meanwhile, I’m about to provoke a small demographic crisis of my own because people lose all desire to procreate when they hear about the travails of my pregnancy.

I could be taken to schools as a contraceptive measure because PUPPPS makes my arms and legs look like I’m in the last stages of the bubonic plague. If that doesn’t scare teenagers into using contraception, nothing will.

Of course, physiologically it would be easier to go through this pregnancy if I were younger. I’d still get gestational hypertension and PUPPPS but I don’t believe I’d get gestational diabetes. Psychologically and emotionally, however, it really helps to be an older person. At 27, I’d be hanging from a chandelier with all this stress and making everybody curse they day I was born. But since I’m so much older and psychologically healthier, I am completely calm and even very funny.