I believe in redemption. I believe it’s possible to realize that you did something terrible and sincerely repent.

But Chimamanda Adichie never apologized for participating in cancel culture mobs. She never apologized for hounding people who were, unlike her, poor and unknown. Driving somebody to attempt suicide. She never tried to rectify the damage. Never apologized, never retracted. She now doesn’t like cancel culture because it touched her. But what she herself did to others for absolutely no reason other than the desire to feel self-righteous remains unmentioned.

Does anybody know the evolutionary explanation of why little kids lie on their backs when they are unhappy? They all do it, and it’s like an instinct. Unhappy, boom, drop down. What’s the mechanism here?

A lot of stuff that little kids do becomes instantly clear when you look at the evolutionary advantage. As I always say, nothing teaches evolution like parenthood.

Since I’m on my Philip Roth kick, I decided to watch this movie based on one of his three best novels.

The movie is very disappointing, my friends. The story is sanitized of all complexity and reduced to “bad guys vs good guys.” This is unfortunate because Roth’s whole thing is that nothing is ever that simple and human beings are deeply imperfect. The filmmakers turned Swede Levov, the main character, into this angelic creature, the perfect father who has no life, no soul, and no existence outside of his love for his daughter. That’s definitely not the Swede of Roth’s novel. And it’s not any human parent on this planet, and thank God for that.

The movie completely erases Swede’s philandering, his second marriage, and anything in him that isn’t utter perfection. You couldn’t possibly find anything more antithetical to Roth’s way of seeing the world. The movie is completely anti-Roth. I have no idea how it’s possible to misunderstand the novel so badly.

I now want to re-watch The Human Stain. I watched it a while ago but was too mesmerized by Anthony Hopkins’ talent to notice much else about it.

I, for one, am very happy to hear that Victoria Secret is finally doing a major re-brand. They used to be a good store until they went in the direction of “a truck stop whore” aesthetic. I haven’t gone into a VS store in over a decade because they look extremely unappealing. Dark, dingy. I’d feel like I’m at that truck stop already.

Whorish underwear was a worldwide trend in the rich 1990s. Since then, things changed, and everybody rebranded, except for VS. This is a good, necessary change.