Kenan Malik’s blog is being banned in Pakistan. It’s their loss because he’s a super talented fellow. Example:

‘Those who claim that it is ‘racist’ or ‘Islamophobic’ to mock the Prophet Muhammad’, I added, ‘appear to imagine, with the racists, that all Muslims are reactionaries. It is here that leftwing ‘anti-racism’ joins hands with

rightwing anti-Muslim bigotry.’

Yep. I’ve only been saying this for ages.

The nicest words in the English language currently are, “No, don’t get up, we are going to the park, and you keep resting.”

People are mistaken, however, if they see this phenomenon as ideological. It’s purely a labor issue. White-collar workers and the creative classes are preparing weapons to start fighting for jobs. Blue-collar workers fight for jobs by chanting “No to open borders!” and doing everything that accompanies it. And white-collar workers create less tangible yet so much more prohibitive borders.

When I tell N the recent news about people getting fired for saying something fifty years ago that contradicts the half-baked dogma of the last 5 seconds, he says, “It’s a good thing I don’t talk a lot!”

And it’s true. The best way to stay employed is to avoid expressing opinions, joking, posting anything online, and ideally just to keep silent for the entirety of your life until you are ready to retire.

There is no constitution, no law, no freedom of speech guarantee that can defend one from unhinged crowds ready to pounce on anybody who can be revealed as a sinner against the fresh iteration of dogma. This is also a manifestation of ageism because the longer you live, the more the dogma mutates.

I used to go to the zoo a lot when I was a kid. And even though I loved the idea of an outing, like all kids do, I didn’t like the zoo. Animals were kept in really small cages, and I’d spend the entire day feeling bad for them.

Animals in the St Louis Zoo aren’t kept in cages, as we discovered on our first visit today. We’d been wanting to go for a while but it was always way too hot to take a toddler. Today was the first day all summer when you can be outside for over 3 minutes without fainting, so we went. The goal was to find elephants because Klara wanted to show them her favorite toy elephant.

The elephants turned out to be a lot smaller than I remembered from the Ukrainian zoo. Is it a different kind of elephant or do I remember it as enormous because I was a child and it looked bigger?

There was also a kid railroad, and we had to go because Klara is massively into trains. The kid railroad is a lot worse than the one we have back in Kharkiv and even than the toddler railroad in Southwest Florida. The train spends so much time in tunnels that it’s more like a subway. Klara didn’t even want to make more than one trip, and usually it takes at least 3 trips to make her happy.

The best part of the experience for me was that I found cotton candy, which I haven’t had for over 30 years. Everything at the zoo is extremely well-organized. Nobody organizes kid-friendly experiences like Americans. Even Canadians don’t do it quite as well. But there were way too many people for me to enjoy the whole thing. In our town, I’m never surrounded by this many people. I used to love being in a crowd in a big city but after 15 years in sparsely populated tiny towns, I lost both the skill and the enjoyment.

So now I need to stay in bed for 2 hours, read Vargas Llosa, and eat cherries to recover.

Let’s share our go-to dinner ideas, the ones we use when we have no time and energy to cook. Mine used to be boiled hot dogs with mashed potatoes but hot dogs cause diabetes, so I gave them up.

The current go-to is the one I came up with the help of my sister who is not into cooking as much as I am into it.

I dump a bunch of vegetables – asparagus, broccoli, baby carrots, Brussels sprouts – into a baking sheet and place them in the oven. Fifteen minutes before they are ready, I put in another baking sheet with one of those slabs of salmon they sell at Sam’s for $16. The salmon doesn’t even need to be salted, so there’s zero prep.

It’s dinner and lunch for two days.