Morale was very high, as it so often is in a community where tragedy is present.

Elizabeth Taylor, “Spry Old Character”

Human beings are so strange. We feel sorry for ourselves when things are great and flourish when they are bad.

Folk music in a Kyiv subway station:

Yesterday we had to sit for two hours and stare at a list of drop-fail percentages in our large intro courses. Calculus 1, Intro Bio, English 101, Intro Chem, Intro Psych, Intro bloody Theater.

The percentage of black students who drop or fail them is 85-90%. The percentage of all students taken together (including African-Americans) who drop / fail them is around 45%.

These are 25 large courses in very different disciplines, and the result is the same in all of them.

We were asked to explain why this happens. A Middle Eastern professor tried to venture an explanation but everybody was too horrified for him to continue.

We were sent home to think about our racism that makes us fail these students for bigoted reasons.

‘You are old enough to be her father,’ Muriel had once said; but those scornful, recriminating, wife’s words never sear and wither as they are meant to. They presented him instead with his first surprised elation.

Elizabeth Taylor, “Hester Lilly”

This is a great observation by Taylor. The wife here is projecting her own perceptions onto her husband and makes a mistake. He doesn’t feel humiliated by the idea of courting a much younger girl. He feels invigorated by it.

It’s humiliating for a woman to be with a guy half her age. But it’s not for a man. Women lose status from being the financial donor in a romantic relationship. Men gain status from it. I’m not expressing any sort of joy about this. I’m simply stating a fact.

And by the way, woke as Richard Russo has become, in his most recent novel he keeps slipping and honestly depicting how things really work. Men in the novel signal their readiness to enter into a relationship with women by doing things for them. They shovel snow, help to pay the rent, beat up an abusive ex, and take charge of a complicated relative. And women signal that they are interested by accepting these offers. Even Russo still knows that a woman who starts shoveling snow to impress a guy would scare the poor dude into another time zone.

Those end up being the best scenes in Russo’s novel because he doesn’t try to massage reality into weird shapes.

My Ukrainian instructor arrived today. Of course, I went over to her residence hall with gigantic bags full of food. But it’s so funny. She’s from Bakhmut, which was a small town, not fancy. I come over, and she says, “It’s so beautiful here.* I really love it. But could I trouble you to show me how to turn off this wind?”

She’s not used to the AC. To me the AC is sacred. I’d rather rip my beating heart out than turn off the AC in August. But I respect cultural differences, so I did the unthinkable and flipped off the air.

* Our student housing is stunning. It’s in the woods, and you can sit on a balcony, looking at a beautiful lake, surrounded by pine trees. I have never seen better student housing anywhere.

We get exactly the kind of journalism we deserve.

Here’s the op-ed in question, and I want to remind everybody that Kasparov detests Trump. This is not a partisan thing.

And here we go again with the “territory”. It’s not about “territory”, you incredible doofuses. It’s about people who live there. People who are sent to torture chambers, raped, get their children stolen. “Ceding territory” means leaving people to endure ethnic cleansing. Substitute “people” for “territory” in your statements, and everything will become very clear.

We are having the mildest, coolest summer since I’ve come to this region. We still have extremely hot days but we also have normal days. Kids haven’t been cooped up inside for months. In the evenings, they play volleyball in the backyard, which is normally unheard of in this area from May till late October. I’m very glad because usually they get prison pallor in summers.

I’m not saying this to make a political statement but simply to express gladness in response to surrounding reality. However, when I mention the nice weather to people on campus, the reaction is almost always a panicked “But this doesn’t mean there’s no global warming!!”

No, it doesn’t. I wasn’t saying it did. In fact, I was making absolutely no generalizations about the state of humanity. I was simply remarking upon something that we all know is a big problem in this region. Everybody who lives here knows that we have very specific geographic conditions that create the high heat / extreme high humidity problem. People who are healthy as horses start having blood pressure issues when they come here. It’s a bad local climate, and one should be able to mention it without being drawn into a debate on global climate.

People are so afraid of unorthodox acts of speech that they freak out when they suspect they are about to witness one. But even the fact that they jump with fear when a colleague says, “Hey, nice weather today” doesn’t help them see that something is very wrong.

Russo has removed himself from normal life to the world of faddy spoiled gits so completely that he lost all capacity to write about working people. His characters still dig ditches but they act rich. Money troubles are pre-empted by mysteriously appearing inheritances. Rich relatives come out of the woodwork. Lump-sum savings materialize unexpectedly. Hugely expensive works of art are accidentally found at scrap heaps.

Characters in Somebody’s Fool do mention “the recession” every once in a while but immediately get distracted and act like having a job is a whim you can drop whenever it suits you to have more leisure time.

This is a writer who really knew how to write about working people. He’s become a total “let them eat cake” type of person. It’s so sad.

It’s 2008. A small-town New England police chief of about 50 years of age is sitting in his car, thinking about how structural racism is causing crime in Black communities. They are overpoliced, this white cop thinks. If only somebody would defund the police.

This is how the third novel in Richard Russo’s Sully series begins. Russo is was one of the best American writers of our times. He wrote about the importance of fathers, male friendship, working class troubles. His Sully series was so good. The characters dug ditches, ribbed each other silly, went to diners, hid from debt collectors, made a mess of their lives, and then figured things out. Russo wrote about real life and real people.

But then he went woke.

And now Russo writes about white cops who sincerely believe in “structural racism” in 2008. And fret over it day in and day out. In 2008, I repeat.

Oy, I thought, ploughing through sentence after sentence about “white men and Black women” (original spelling), structural whatsisms, and “differences in Black and white time” (don’t ask).

I have followed Russo’s work for 20 years. I loved his writing. I don’t want to give up. So I kept reading his recent novel titled Somebody’s Fool and feeling like an embodiment of the title.

“At least there are no trans-affirming surgeries”, I kept saying to console myself.

Well.

Guess what?

Yeah…