We can see the war on rootedness in everything. For example, in academia it’s considered a point of pride to be a first-generation college student but definitely not to be a fifth-generation one.

Why, though?

Because it’s harder to be the former? But why is hardship a point of pride? “But I tried hard” is a childish argument. Only very immature people think that effort, and not the result, should be rewarded. Why don’t we celebrate the amazing achievement of families that manage to send several generations to college? Why is it a great thing to go against the family tradition?

Renaud Camus says that a farmer’s son who goes to university sets himself apart from his entire family. If his education is minimally successful, he’ll feel forever like an outsider in his own family. Similarly, a professor’s child who doesn’t pursue a college degree is set apart from her family. Why do we instinctively like these choices more than the ones made in accordance with the family tradition?

Because we have been trained like Pavlovian dogs to wince at tradition and celebrate rootlessness.

I now get these ads in every website I visit:

I started getting them after discussing with a Quebec senior the remedies she was using for her knee pain. In Russian.

Hopefully, soon enough the technology that is spying on us will figure out that not everybody talking to the Quebec senior about her knees is herself a Quebec senior with painful knees.

I keep waiting and waiting for at least one of these people to ask:

How come we knew that Biden was senile, BLM was crap, lockdowns were a bad idea, and COVID vaccines didn’t prevent infection SO MUCH EARLIER than they did?

Why aren’t they wondering how come everything their news sources dismiss as a “far-right conspiracy theory” eventually turns out to be true?

Why aren’t they wondering how come we knew all this stuff months or even years before they did?

Why aren’t they even a little bit curious?

I had a perfect day today and of course that includes buying books. For some reason, most of my haul is books in translation:

Did any important news occur? Does anybody have anything interesting to share?

This is my most recent exchange with N:

Yes, it’s always like that.

I’m on a nostalgic walk around Montreal, and here’s the building where I lived with my sister when we were both very young students:

Here is the very first classroom where I taught Beginner Spanish 1:

I was so terrified that my friend who was a large, burly Mexican guy had to carry me physically into the classroom. I’m not sure students learned much on that class but I learned an enormous lot.

And this is the bathroom where my very first Spanish instructor hid from me every morning because I badgered him with my incapacity to understand the differences between the imperfect and the preterite. Later, the burly Mexican dude explained it to me in two words on a bet. He won the bet and now I use his method to teach my own students. In any case, the bathroom used to be men’s but now it’s women’s and the men’s was moved where women’s used to be.

I apologize for sharing toilet art and, as compensation, here’s a photo of a beautiful Montreal skyscraper:

I couldn’t get into the room that was my office here at McGill because there’s construction in that area of our floor. I hovered around, scaring the construction worker who was there because this is very emotional and I surely look unhinged.

My mother is shopping for shoes. Suddenly she turns to me with a pained look.

“Please, I beg you, tell me honestly, am I dying?” she asks. “I don’t want to buy the shoes if it turns out I won’t live to wear them. That’s such a waste of money.”

“Well, we’ve got to bury you in something,” I answer.

Our humor is very dark. I wouldn’t make this joke to anybody who’s not one of us.

The social media are abuzz with the story of a guy who “swiped right two million times and only got one date.” They analyze his looks, prescription eye glasses, hobbies, and personal hygiene.

The only thing nobody seems to notice is the platform where it all happened. The guy was looking for dates on Tinder, a casual hookup app. Casual hookups are not interesting to women. Exactly like Ashley Madison, the cheater app, Tinder is full of bots. Very few actual women go there. These apps monetize the male need to believe that there are women who are men with vaginas.

Any woman, even if she’s massively obese, has very hairy legs or lacks an eye, meets much more demand for casual sex than she can possibly want. Women don’t need to make efforts to find casual sex. They need to make efforts to avoid it. A single woman’s entire life is fielding unnecessary, annoying offers.

We have all been brainwashed to the point that a well-meaning, nice dude wastes years of his life morosely swiping an app in hopes of finding something that doesn’t exist in nature. And there are no friends, family members or cultural products to tell him he’s chasing after a myth and it’s embarrassing.

A pregnant Georgia woman who was declared brain dead is being kept alive by ventilators because of the state’s law banning abortions, the woman’s mother says, telling local news that the family has no say in the matter. https://t.co/XHqbqCKv4g

— NBC News (@NBCNews) May 15, 2025

A normal mother would be on her knees to the people giving her grandchild a chance to survive. What’s wrong with people not to want to give the dead daughter’s progeny a chance at life? What about respecting the woman’s last wishes? She died while pregnant, which means that her wish was for the baby to be born. Doesn’t that matter to her own mom?

It’s 11 pm and I’m traveling but I’ve got half a mind to start calling people, waking them up, and demanding reassurances that if I had kicked the bucket during my very high-risk pregnancies, they wouldn’t have gotten rid of my children.

Why do so many students sign up for a beginner Spanish course taught online asynchronously? They could learn these basic language skills on an app and then take the free proficiency test, place out, and receive the course credit for free.

Under no scenario would I pay for such a course, especially with the existing technology.