At the dance lesson, a parent brought a plate of cookies for the kids and left them by the door. I carried Klara straight by the plate without taking any because there had already been Hershey kisses, a lollipop and Welch’s from other kids.

Very calmly Klara showed me her little palm and pointed her finger at the middle.

“Right here, mommy,” she said.

“Right here what?” I asked.

“Cookie goes right here,” she explained. “Put the cookie right here.”

So of course I had to go back for the cookie.

I already let Klara down twice because I didn’t realize I needed to bring gifts for the kids at the dance lesson either for Christmas or for Valentine’s. I can’t screw up one more time. So please, folks, tell me, when is the next gift-giving occasion. Easter? When is it and what’s appropriate to give?

A person on the job market in my field is bitterly complaining that at the job interview all of the questions were in Spanish. This candidate’s conclusion is that this means that the profession is horribly corrupt.

Yes, those corrupt bastards. How dare they expect that a professor of Spanish wouldn’t mind speaking in Spanish.

Now I have really seen it all.

I have discovered a cure for post-tenure blues. It’s called “becoming active in service to the profession.” I was moping and moaning until I became an Assistant Editor for a scholarly journal and got into the leadership of a scholarly organization. Now I have new problems to solve and new tasks to complete every week. And it’s work that brings tangible results and immediate, clear rewards. Plus, it makes me feel competent and important.

The New York Times has truly outdone itself in shitty reporting:

Mr. Navalny’s team scoured social media accounts belonging to a 21-year-old Belarus-born blogger, Anastasia Vashukevich, who posted videos in 2016 that showed Mr. Deripaska sailing on his yacht around Norway with a deputy prime minister, Sergei E. Prikhodko. At one point, Mr. Deripaska appears to be explaining to the blogger why relations between Russia and the United States are so bad.

The “Belarus blogger” is actually a prostitute. The videos she posted are not of the oligarch “sailing on his yacht with a deputy prime minister” but actually of the three of them having sex. This piece sounds like the oligarch was being interviewed by a journalist on his yacht when the reality is that this was a sex orgy during which a leading Russian politician got covertly filmed while ordering the oligarch to blackmail Manafort. The prostitute claims she was gang-raped. The neo-Nazi Navalny broke the story in the Russian media. Even more hardcore Russian neo-Nazis took it and conducted a series of breakthrough reporting on the corruption that originated in Russia and spread across the ocean.

There is a million juicy angles here yet the hapless NYTimes reporter makes it about Internet freedom and YouTube. It’s incredible. I understand that mentioning Manafort might be tricky but orgies, prostitutes, pickup artists (who are also a huge part of the story), gang rape, neo-Nazis, a Russian minister having sex with an oligarch! And all you talk is YouTube? Words fail me.