Yeah, and then we can just demolish the real one because of the “budget cuts, crisis, and the MOOC version of the chapel is the trend of the future anyway.”

I don’t know what you, folks, did today but I’ve been working on my book from 8 am to 3 pm with breaks for breakfast, tweets and posts. The result is 520 words added to the book.

The way my brain works, I need to interrupt the flow every 15 minutes or so by switching to a different language or medium. Otherwise, no writing happens. 

Now I will read (writing a book requires a lot of reading) for an hour, and at 4 pm family time starts. N and I will be doing a barbecue and then taking a long walk around the neighborhood. After that, we will light the fireplace and discuss, for the bizillionth time, how cute our first date was. It’s ridiculous how people in love never tire of narrating these really trivial stories to each other for years and decades.

In other news, I just looked out of the window and saw the ondatra swimming in the clear waters of the Ondatra Creek. It is beyond cool that I can see it from the window of my home office.

The Russian news announced that Putin just met with Nicolás Maduro and showed a photo of. . . Hugo Chávez. If it’s true that Putin met Chávez today, that’s cause to celebrate.

 The Russians are as funny as ever.

“On Monday, March 16, President Putin had several important meetings,” the newscaster declared yesterday and then proceeded to give details of the meetings.

If you don’t get why that’s funny, look at your calendar.

The Russians often use what they call “canned news.” Putin is supposed to appear on the news every day, doing something massively important. Since it’s not humanly possible to do something massively important every single day, servile journalists film newscasts in advance and hold them until the days when there is nothing new about Putin to show.

Of course, such a strategy often produces mistakes and then everybody gets a chance to laugh at Putin who experiences Monday, March 16 serveral days before everybody else does.

A friend of mine was talking to her cousin who lives in Russia. The cousin soon grew frustrated and exclaimed, “Well, it’s obvious that I understand politics better than you do, so stop arguing already!”

“How come you understand politics better than I do, given that I’m a professor of Political Science and you never even took a single class in this discipline?” my friend asked, genuinely confused.

“But I’m a man!” the cousin exclaimed. “So it’s obvious I understand politics better!”

My friend asked the cousin to explain how exactly his penis was helping him understand politics but the cousin got sulky and refused to continue the conversation.

Just remember that you’ve got to be awake and make a wish at 9 hrs 26 min 53 sec this morning. 

It’s an opportunity not to be missed.

– Watching the first episode of the first season of The Wire for the first time and loving it.

– Putin still hasn’t reappeared.

– This is the most productive spring break ever and it will still continue for 5 more days.

In an unexpected development, The Nation published a reasonable, intelligent article:

Abortion funds, which offer help paying for an abortion when Medicaid or insurance won’t, have become a thriving hub of grassroots feminism. They draw hundreds of activists, young and old, to donate countless hours to provide direct service and advocate for better funding for abortion. In the past few years, a number of the funds have quietly removed references to “women” from their messaging in order to be more welcoming to trans men and others who do not identify as women but can still become pregnant.

Oh, Lordy. Yes, let’s flush reproductive rights down the toilet in the name of a weird fear of using the word “women.” There is obviously no greater danger to abortion rights today that the word “women.” Just saying it aloud makes reproductive rights whither and die.

I’m going to argue here that removing “women” from the language of abortion is a mistake. We can, and should, support trans men and other gender-non-conforming people. But we can do that without rendering invisible half of humanity and 99.999 percent of those who get pregnant.

It’s not just a mistake. It is absolutely egregious that mentioning women and using the word “vagina” now has to be censored. The assault on reproductive rights victimizes women. Period. If anybody is upset by that, they should call their representative in the Congress and express their outrage about the rollback of reproductive rights. It’s not the word “women” that’s the problem. 

It is very curious how nobody is in any hurry to get rid of the word “men” in order to prove how inclusive and intersectional they are. In my Spanish classes, I routinely outrage students when I tell them that if an a group of a billion women there is a single man, according to the rules of the Spanish grammar that entire group becomes male. Every time I deliver this statement, there is an outburst of anger in the classroom that I use to direct the conversation to the issues of sexism. But it seems like there are people who believe this is not just an archaic language rule from an enormously sexist culture. For some, this is an attractive approach to reality.

There has not been a greater obstacle to gender equality than women’s incapacity to control their reproduction. For millennia, this has been THE problem women everywhere encountered on the road to freedom. Just like the message of “Black lives matter” should not be watered down by the ridiculous “All lives matter” response, the message of “Women’s reproductive rights matter” should be allowed to exist on its own:

Once you start talking about “people,” not “women,” you lose what abortion means historically, symbolically and socially. It becomes hard to understand why it isn’t simply about the right to life of the “unborn.” After all, men get pregnant too!

If it’s OK for several major languages to refer to a group as masculine just because there is a single man among a billion women, then I’m sure the world won’t end if, in the context of reproductive rights, a couple of men have to “suffer” the intolerable burden of being called women. 

The war on the word “women” goes to extreme lengths and ends up twisting itself into hugely idiotic contortions. If there is a difference between this position and the tantrums idiot MRAs throw because the word “feminism” makes them feel queasy, I’m failing to see it:

One organization tweeted that one in three “people” has had an abortion—actually, if we’re talking about people, it’s more like one in six. When the actress and feminist advocate Martha Plimpton organized an abortion-fund benefit lightheartedly named “Night of a Thousand Vaginas,” some activists were outraged, because some trans men don’t like that word (“birth canal” or “front hole” are favored alternatives to the V-word). Trans men should refer to their genitalia however they like, but it’s hard not to feel that there’s something seriously awry when women, who only got to call their genitals by the proper term in public a decade or so ago, are supposed to stop naming them in order to avoid offense.

The sulky narrative of “hurt feelings” is once again trumping the really desperate need for genuine political activism.

But thank you, The Nation, for finally publishing a meaningful article. Maybe I will renew that subscription after all.

And I’m not talking in any silly metaphoric sense. I mean, literally, my name means “immigrant.”

Do you know how I always say that the only collective identity I recognize is that of an immigrant? Now I have found out the history of my last name and it has all been explained. 

As you know, I don’t have my father’s last name because it is very Jewish and living in the USSR with such an obviously Jewish last name was not a good idea.

However, the last name I do have isn’t really my mother’s last name either. The very Ukrainian last (and first) name of my Ukrainian grandfather was Russianized when he went into a military school in Russia in the late 1930s. The actual last name of my grandfather means “a refugee, an immigrant, a person who escapes.” And where was that part of the family escaping from? The structure and the history of the name tells us that they came from the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

My grandmother’s last name was also Russianized. Originally, it has Romanian roots. 

This means that everybody in my family on all sides kept moving to the East, generation after generation. And then I subverted that centuries-long family tradition by making a radical move to the West. But the need to keep moving that’s hidden in my name will keep propelling me forward.

People weren’t even allowed to keep their own Ukrainian names, both first and last. And by the way, both of these Ukrainian grandparents are Holodomor survivors.

And then the Russians keep asking, “But what good did that independence even do for you?” Do you know how hard it is to explain what good it did for the bizillionth time in a row (often to the same fucking person) with a polite and reasonable face?

So bye-bye, Russians*. And hello, my Romanian and Austro-Hungarian sisters and brothers.

* I have conferred the title of an honorary Ukrainian on N, so it’s all cool.

People are now saying that Putin is planning to resurrect on Easter to make his fans even happier.

Members of a fraternity at the University of Oklahoma were recently filmed chanting that they’d rather see a black student lynched than as a member of their clan. The now viral video of dapper, privileged white men shouting, “There will never be a nigger at SAE, you can hang him from a tree” reminds us of our greatest national shame. The chant has been roundly condemned as abhorrent. But after university president David Boren announced the expulsion of two students leading the chants, prominent legal scholars from the right and left have come to their defense. The university is a public institution, they say, and punishing the students for what they said—no matter how vile—violates the First Amendment’s commitment to “uninhibited, robust, and wide-open” discourse.

I believe that a much better response form the school would be to make a public statement saying, “We haven’t managed to keep our fraternities civilized, so they are disbanded forthwith. We apologize for sponsoring extremist organizations on campus.” Just throwing out those two individual pieces of garbage will solve nothing. If the university can’t make fraternities serve the cause of advancing academic goals, they have no business being on campus.

All of these vapid discussions about free speech, legal scholars, etc. are distracting everybody’s attention from the obvious solution: universities should be about education. Trying to make them about anything else leads to trouble.