On vacation, N and I spend all day together every day instead of just a few hours in the evening after work. As a result, I get a chance to notice that he’s the perfect husband 10 times a day. It’s like he took classes on how to make a woman blissfully happy.

“You need to write a book on how to be the perfect husband to help out other guys,” I say. 

“Nah,” he says. “It won’t work unless one has a wife like you.”

Klara’s favorite game right now is learning different emotional expressions. 

I turned on Rachel Maddow as I packed and suddenly noticed that Klara’s was doing her enactment of an outraged expression (hands on cheeks, eyes wide open, mouth in an o shape) in response to Maddow’s tone of voice.  

Since she mastered outrage, she’s now fully ready for her own Facebook account. 

I was a total fanatic when I was an undergraduate student. If a professor mentioned a book, even in the context of “book X by critic YZ is worthless”, I immediately dashed off to check book X out of the library and read it. I counted down the days of each break because I couldn’t wait to get back to class. I once left a New Year’s celebration because I had a textbook on medieval literature waiting for me. Nobody had assigned it. I was reading it for fun. I read Juan Rulfo’s novel Pedro Páramo three times in a row without even looking at the translation until I somewhat understood it (this was less than 2 months after I began to learn Spanish). 

And I loved every second of all of the above.

If you don’t feel this way about your field, please reconsider doing a PhD in it. 

Yes, this is funny. I laughed. 

Now tell me, what’s uranium? Please answer on the spot, don’t think about it, don’t Google, and don’t answer if you are a STEM professor. How do you think people you saw at the store, the gas station, in the street today would answer? How many would answer exactly like this? 

If he speaks like me and you turn up your nose at him and me, meaning us, why should I be on your side and not his? Why should I care about your Russian scandals if you didn’t care about them either until 2 seconds ago? 

​A Jihadist attempted to flee Mosul in a disguise similar to a pantomime dame, but was caught when he forgot to shave off his beard and moustache.

He didn’t forget. He is hoping for a Eurovision win now that his career with ISIS didn’t pan out. 

After many years of suffering and battling the spell check manually, I finally installed the Russian and the Spanish keyboards. And life immediately got easier. 

Inertia, Clarissa is thy name. 

Berkeley canceled a talk by Dawkins (Schmawkins, Petrovkins, it doesn’t matter who) because of his “abusive speech on Twitter.” 

It’s shocking how fast Berkeley went from a stellar university that was respected all over the world to a place where nobody sees any problem with the argument that it’s not necessary to read a book once you’ve read a tweet. 
If I’m wrong, I’ll be happy to see a link to an article describing the massive protest against this cloying and degrading talk of abusive tweets. 

Hilarious! Now Fox News is shilling for Putin in the exact same words The NY Times, The Nation, and Co used to do it. They haven’t even tried to change the text of their propaganda handout a bit for a new audience. I’m sure the Kremlin has never dealt with a more accommodating mark than the US voters. They must be stunned at how easy it is. 

And hey, can you criticize them if you were eagerly consuming his very shit when your friends disseminated it?

Spicer resigned?

Lord, please, no. Now all we’ll hear is endless speculation of how this is THE END even though this time last year nobody knew who the damn Spicer was.   

What Russians have shared with the Europeans for the past 150 years is the fear that their culture might die. In the recent decades, both Russia and Europe have connected this fear to the anxiety over running out of people. Russians were led to the idea of human scarcity that imperils the very existence of their culture because of their stably shrinking population. Europeans arrived at this idea as a result of the “graying population” trends. 

To what extent the worry over a shortage of people who will carry the shared culture forward is justified is absolutely irrelevant. Whatever people fear is real enough for them. And they will act in response to this fear, trying to conjure up more people.

For Russians, “more people” can be squeezed out of the [quite correct] idea that culture stems from language. They declare that whoever is a native speaker of Russian is Russian irrespective of where they live or whether they call themselves Russian. The next step in this line of reasoning is that national borders mean nothing, and the Russian jurisdiction should reach wherever real Russians live. 

For Europeans, the idea of “us” doesn’t come from shared language or shared blood. It comes from the concept of soil. This is why there is all the drama around who gets to plant a foot on European soil. That’s why African migrants hang from the barbed fences in Ceuta and Melilla, hoping to touch European ground at least with the tip of their toes and become European the moment that happens. Civil Guards treat them like dogs, like animals, until migrants touch the “European” soil of African Melilla and become Europeans who suddenly deserve due process, rights, and public assistance. 

It’s a very magical concept of soil that is hard for me to comprehend because it’s very alien to me. I have no idea how culture is supposed to be transmitted through the soil. For me, culture is, first and foremost, language. But that’s probably because I’m a Russian-speaker.