Day: April 20, 2018

What I love about the academic year being over (well, it’s not officially over for the next two weeks but I’m acting as if it were already over) is that we can now spend a lot of time together as a family. Usually N and I take turns on weekends taking Klara out so that I have time to grade, etc but now we can do things together. And Klara loves that more than anything ever.

Other than a short hour-long writing session, I won’t do any work on weekends at all until September. I’ll be like a regular person who doesn’t work on weekends. I ❤️❤️❤️ summer.

I’m at a late-evening student event, and my blood sugar dropped all of a sudden, which it tends to do every once in a while since my gestational diabetes experiences. And this is where it came in handy to have a whole car filled with baby food and snacks.

We have amazing student services, by the way, that organize a million fantastic events for students. This is one more reason why in-person education is real education, and online diploma Mills should go die.

Klara picked up some acorns at the park and gave them to me.

“Hide them in the nest, Mommy,” she said.

“Where is the nest?” I asked.

“It’s in your bra,” she explained.

She has noticed, of course, that like a typical Ukrainian peasant woman, I hide small objects like her pacis, toys, and even my cell phone in my bra and decided to call it “the nest.”

The rich are truly different.

Yes, they are.

There is absolutely nothing whatsoever you can do that is more anti-Russian than trying to force the OPEC not to raise the oil prices. The oil going up to $71 per barrel is a huge lifeline for Putin. I’m not saying that this is why the OPEC is doing it. I don’t know enough to conclude that. But I do know that the only real threat to Putin’s regime is if the oil dips to under $30. Which it almost did in 2014. The closer the prices get to $100, the stronger Putin gets.

These are facts of objective reality, and whatever theory we construct needs to take them into account.

This is a really poorly written, idiotic review in which the author blames “white Liberals” for her incapacity to understand philosophical essays by Zadie Smith and claims that making fun of Justin Bieber’s Twitter fans prevents “dismantling white supremacy.”

It’s hard to decide which part of something as ridiculous as this to quote, but here is a funny one:

But social media has raised the bar for a lot of our cultural conversations. For one: Philosophers and academics on Twitter bring rigor (and brevity) to pop culture analysis, making the premise for some of Smith’s essays feel stale.

You’d think this was a parody but I see people quote this piece with reverence.

The funny aspects of the review shouldn’t obscure to us how very racist it is. Zadie Smith is condemned for being too smart, too educated, too well-read, and too successful. We can be grateful that the author doesn’t use the word “uppity” but she does everything but to make sure the readers understand her meaning. I’m guessing the author is one of those “rigorous Twitter academics” and is wounded by Smith’s success.