This author is 100% right:

Eighteen months really marked a magical mental leap. It was like her mind reached out grasped a big new chunk of the world and ingested it (big proportional to her size; she’s still got a lot of world left to ingest), and she suddenly understood and could communicate all kinds of new things. She’s been like a qualitatively different creature ever since. I now recommend 18 months as the best turning point to all my friends with younger babies.

I have the same experience. Once Klara turned 18 months old, it became so much easier to take care of her because she dramatically expanded her vocabulary and can now simply tell me what she needs. 

Whenever she points and does the “uh-uh” thing that all parents dread, I say, “Use words. Tell me what you want with words.” 

And she says, “Ous-aye Covey park fing.”

And I immediately know that she wants me to take her outside to meet her best friend Chloe in the park with the swings. 

Or she says, “Wokie poong monkey binka.”

And I realize that she wants me to get yogurt and a spoon to feed her favorite toy monkey whom we will then wrap in a blanket. And we’ll also feed the blanket because Klara is very generous.

These are complex thoughts, and there’s no way I could just guess what she wanted. The pre-verbal pointing and grunting stage was hard. I never managed to guess anything right and constantly felt like a failure.

God, people, there was an act of terror in London? I had no idea. I feel horrible for publishing silly posts about shoes and pasta. 

British readers! This was very tactless of me but I honestly didn’t know. How are you doing? Are you ok?

What is happening? Links are welcome.

Now the administration is saying that we are not getting our cost-of-living increases until we hold a debate on whether department chairs are admin or faculty. I’m sure after that is decided, we’ll need to debate the meaning of life, and right after we figure that out, we’ll get the increases. 

Yes, it’s a shameless, union-busting delay strategy aimed at making people hate the union. 

I just tried garbanzo pasta, and I have no idea why people say it doesn’t taste anything like regular pasta. Maybe I have an undeveloped palate but I saw no great difference.

I will try it on our true pasta conoisseuse, Klara. Let’s see how she feels about it.

I just made $1,600 from Amazon Vine (you are allowed to sell stuff you don’t need after 6 months) and now feel fully justified in buying Camper shoes. Obviously, not with the whole amount. 

These ones are especially lovely:

Our chief administrator just rubs me the wrong way, folks. He sends out these long and confusing missives that are impossible to decipher and make no sense at all.

Take the most recent example of his poor command of the English language. It looks like today the verdict might come in in the case of a black man killed by a white cop in St Louis. This isn’t like the Michael Brown murder because here the victim was armed, he was fleeing the police, and he had firearm convictions before. I’m not offering an opinion on the case, though, because I haven’t been following it. 

What bugs me is that the top administrator in question sends out an email to faculty members saying that in view of the verdict coming in soon, he urges us to “recommit to treating everybody we meet with courtesy.” There is no explanation whom we didn’t treat with courtesy in his opinion and how the courtesy habits of a bunch of professors are to prevent cop killings in St Louis. He has no idea how to lead or what to say, so he copy pastes some silly admin stock phrase without even trying to make sure it relates to the actual events he’s trying to respond to.

In the meantime, there are reports from our black students who have been finding racist notes taped to their dorm doors. Does he have anything to say about that? Is there an investigation? Is he promising to punish the fuckers who did this? No, he keeps mum on the subject. 

My husband’s alma mater has gone utterly bonkers, in the meanwhile. See how they propose to “fund students’ education.” Pay attention, especially, to the cloying, idiotic language of these administrators. And these illiterate, greedy, ridiculous dumbasses are running (or, rather, ruining) one of the country’s leading schools. 

For everybody who doesn’t work for my university things have gotten better:

In 2015, median household incomes rose by 5.2 percent. That was the fastest surge in percentage terms since the Census Bureau began keeping records in the 1960s. Women living alone saw their incomes rise by 8.7 percent. Median incomes for Hispanics rose by 6.1 percent. Immigrants’ incomes, excluding naturalized citizens, jumped by over 10 percent. The news was especially good for the poor. The share of overall income that went to the poorest fifth increased by 3 percent, while the share that went to the affluent groups did not change.

I’m glad for everybody else, of course, but we are such an outlier at my school. At the height of the recession, we were hiring aggressively for TT jobs and had our best years. And now that everybody is doing well, we are in the toilet, the hiring is dead, the compensation stinks, etc. 

This goes to show that having a consistent philosophy of development and smart leadership is stronger than a recession. And having a dumb, rudderless leadership is stronger than any positive trends in the economy overall.