I read this very obscure Spanish novel last week, and now I’m desperate to talk about it. But it’s been silenced by critics for 50 years, so now nobody knows it exists. There’s nobody for me to talk to about this novel.

Then the program of my February conference is published. And guess what? The guy who speaks after me on my panel… will be speaking about this very novel.

I’ve only ever seen this scholar on a screen but we have this weird thing going where we end up reading the same books at the same time completely by accident. And now it happened again.

A reader’s life is full of the strangest surprises.

Turns out that the last two big mass shootings in California were carried out by retirement-age men. The Half Moon Bay shooter was a 66-year-old Chinese man and the Monterey Park shooter was a 72-year-old Vietnamese grandpa.

Is it some COVID-induced madness? Men this age didn’t use to run around mowing down people.

Ukrainian Railways – the one that manages to run trains on time during a war – got Boris Johnson to wear its promo hat that says “Carriage numbering starts from the head of the train.” Johnson is now appearing everywhere in the hat:

As a result, everybody wants the hat. Ukrainian Railways will sell lots of hats and make its trains even better.

Moral of the story: if you can’t get into their heads, get on their heads.