God, I hate these inane “studies”, irrespective of what direction the “bias” they “find” lies:

2,100 Australian public servants participate in a gigantic resume experiment to assess unconscious bias against women and minorities; finds that there is in fact bias in favor of women and minorities, and that gender-blind or race-blind assessments cause more whites and men to be hired.

It makes zero sense to extrapolate the biases of a tiny and highly eccentric group in a very eccentric country onto anything else. 

One can find a bunch of people somewhere to confirm absolutely anything at all. And then you word the questions differently and get the opposite result with the same group. The only value of this fake research is to confirm the dumb as dirt beliefs of some group or another. 

It’s funny but almost nobody speaks English at this Southwest Florida resort. Most visitors are from Europe. We hear a ton of German and the Scandinavian languages by the pool. There is also an Italian family and a group of cigar-smoking and rowdy Portuguese. And right now I saw a Czech couple walking next to the pool. 

And it’s not just our hotel. We went to the town centre and heard a lot of German, Dutch, Danish, and either Swedish or Norwegian (I’m not good at telling these two apart.)

What puzzles me is why Europeans travel so far and pay so much to come all the way to Florida when they have beaches much closer to them in Europe. 

Hans Fallada has been shunned by readers and critics because he didn’t leave Germany when the Nazis came to power. The reason why Fallada didn’t emigrate wasn’t, however, that he supported Hitler but simply that there are no other German-speaking countries in the world. And a writer can’t live outside of the language he writes in. 

For Spanish writers who went into exile after the Civil War, it was easy. They just went to Latin America. Same language, same culture, easy peasy. But for Germans it was the same as for Russian writers who left in droves after the 1917 revolution but then all ran back into Stalin’s arms because even the knowledge of what awaited them there couldn’t defeat the need to by surrounded by the language again. 

Oh. My. God. This novel, people, this novel. It was like somebody stuck electrodes into my mind and was sending pleasurable impulses directly to my brain. 

Fallada is not as well-known as he should be because he was one of the few German writers who didn’t emigrate when the Nazis came. His 750-page novel Wolf Among Wolves offered such a powerful condemnation of the Weimar Republic that Goebbels decided Fallada was all for the Nazis. Goebbels was a very superficial reader and thought that if Fallada was against the Weimar Republic, he must be in favor of whatever came next, namely Hitler. 

Goebbels started pestering Fallada to write an anti-Semitic novel, and Fallada kept promising to write it. But of course he had no intention of doing so. What Fallada really wanted to do was to write an anti-Nazi novel. He ended up having to hide in a lunatic asylum – which was no vacation given how Nazis felt about mentally ill Aryans – to put off Goebbels and gain time. 

Fallada did survive the Nazis and he did write his magnificent anti-Nazi novel Alone in Berlin. I read that novel as a kid back in the USSR. I wasn’t capable of fully understanding it then but I knew I was in the presence of something truly powerful. I’m exotically bad with names, yet I remembered Fallada’s for 30 years because he’d made such an impression. 

Wolf Among Wolves made me understand the Weimar Republic in the way that none of the history books and articles I read managed to do. Goebbels was a total dumbass if he failed to see that this novel shows the terrifying birth pangs of Nazism in a way that one isn’t likely to forget. 

It’s incredible writing, my friends, absolutely incredible. I’m starting another novel by Fallada immediately. 

Finally, I was going to spend hours upon hours swimming while N stayed with Klara. We walked into the water and saw bathers stand in a neat row, peering into the water. 

“Weird people,” we thought and kept on marching. 

We noticed large shades moving towards us in the water. 

“Fishies,” we smiled. “How cute.”

And then we finally saw that the multitude of huge “fishies” moving towards us had triangular shapes and long tails. 

When we realized what we were seeing, we cleared out of there in a minute. And thus ended my day of swimming. 

And yes, the exact same thing happened to us 2 years ago and one of us got bit back then. 

The really curious thing about the comedy job posting we discussed yesterday is that, aside from teaching 3 courses per year, the rest of the duties listed are useless busy work. None of it needs to be done at all. 

If you want to make your mark as a scholar, you can do what I’m doing. Read, think, analyze, discuss, write, rewrite, rewrite again, submit, publish, read some more, etc. It’s hard, it takes a lot of time, and it’s often painful as hell. 

Or you can skip all this bother and simply do what an aspiring medievalist did. Go to a conference and instead of delivering a talk that will stun everybody with erudition and insight, send out tweets about how the attendees who do give erudite, insightful talks are not diverse enough and must surely be white supremacists. And sexists. And xenophobes. 

And that’s it. You are famous. 

OK, I’m back to my reading now because I’m too old-fashioned for this sort of fame. 

I don’t find this in the least cute:

While Trump enjoys golf, former president Jimmy Carter, 92, is building homes for the poor. Mr Carter returned to work on a building site after being taken to hospital for dehydration, while President Trump kicked back at the US Women’s Open.

Why does Carter have to make a spectacle of himself and place his infirm old body in the way of people at the building site instead of simply donating money to the cause? What good can he possibly be on a site where people actually work?

I detest this kind of fake photo-oppy charity. 

People, you’ve got to help me out because I’m utterly lost. Is the following written as a joke? It sounds like a parody but the header on the website makes me wonder. 

You may think it is of no importance whether you gender your pets but why would you do such a thing to such an important member of your life? Pets cannot speak for themselves. They cannot tell you that they are being misgendered. It’s important not to make assumptions about what gender your animal is based off of its sex.

I’ll try to stop posting for today but I can’t promise anything because the world is full of wonders. 

Klara’s favorite book these days is from the charming Sophie the Giraffe series. I love the book, too, but every time the toy elephant in the book says “trumpety-trump”, the whole experience is poisoned for me and reality intrudes on my happy moment with my daughter and Sophie.