The only enjoyable part of the day-long meeting was at the end, when we had a visit from a guy who was hired from the corporate world to improve enrollments. A great, positive, confident dude who told us how everything is great, he is making the enrollments grow, good things await us, “our product is good and we need to put our brand out there.”

In contrast with the Dean who starts every other sentence with “I’m not saying that…” and then proceeds to say exactly what he claims not to be saying, it was refreshing to hear from a guy who doesn’t equivocate or exhibit weasely attitudes.

my husband is one of the healthiest productive people I know—& it drives me insane. he gets up at 5:30AM, works his freelance job, does his horror writing, drives out to a trail & bikes for an hour, cooks us all dinner, & reads on the porch

I hate it. he won’t tell me his secret

— dr. alicia andrzejewski (she/her) (@aliciaandrz) July 30, 2025

Neoliberal.

Next.

No, neoliberal is not all bad. There’s no other word to describe it than exhilarating if you can master it and successfully eat the costs.

While everybody is talking about insufferably bureaucratic stuff at the day-long Hawaiian T-shirt team-building meeting, I have added 906 words to my book. Today I wrote about how stupid the expression “global citizen” is.

In other news, I no longer have diabetes. I’m now back to pre-diabetic. This doesn’t mean I’ll start slurping huge bowls of pasta, much as I’d enjoy this pastime, but it’s good to know anyway.

I feel very virtuously neoliberal in all this.

Reader Amanda asked me to describe how I materialized the perfect romantic relationship, and I’m happy to share the details.

Do you know how sometimes you get trapped in the same failed relationship model and just can’t get out of it? You know that this kind of relationship is not working but you keep recreating it with one person after another like a crazed woodpecker down to the smallest details. Once you get over the impulse to attribute this problem to the generally low quality of men / women, you will inevitably realize that the only common denominator in all these identical and sucky relationships is you.

When this happened to me, I decided to spend some time figuring out what kind of relationship I actually wanted instead the one I kept having. I began to imagine my life with my ideal partner.

It’s Friday morning. We wake up. Together? Separately? What are the first words we address to each other? What do we have for breakfast? What do we talk about over breakfast? What do we look like? How are we dressed? What is the emotional tonality of our interactions? My preferred emotional tonality is cloyingly sweet but yours might be gently ironic or one of quiet camaraderie or whatever else that feels right to you.

I imagined every detail. For months, I carried my ideal partner with me everywhere, living within the emotional mood of the relationship before it happened. The only thing that wasn’t working out in my vision of this perfect relationship was that I had a VCR tape of old Soviet movies that I wanted to watch with my perfect guy. But as I imagined watching them together, the question of language was fraying the fantasy. I knew I’d never end up with a Russian person but who else would be able to understand the movies? I tried to incorporate into the fantasy an image of myself doing a synchronous translation of the movies. I even practiced actually doing it but it was weary work.

On our first date, N told me that there was an old Soviet movie he really wanted to re-watch but didn’t know where to find it. The movie was the very first one I had on my tape. If I needed any more proof that he was the ideal partner I had imagined, that was it.

I recommend this method not only for your romantic life but for everything else. If you don’t know what you are doing with your life, try this approach. Think about your ideal life. What does it look like? What does it smell like? How does it feel? Go deep into the details. You wake up in the morning. You open your eyes. What do you see? Who do you see? What is the room like? What clothes do you put on? And so on.

When I was a teenager, I did this exercise for “what I want my life to be like when I’m 40” because 40 felt like extreme old age. I am now living that life I imagined, and please realize that I was imagining it not only from another continent but from another reality. I got even the colors of my future outfits right, even those colors did not exist in the 1990 USSR.

The method works.

This is going to hurt and offend, so trigger warning: Most women including those who are accomplished professionals are much more likely to be triggered by bouts of orgiastic jealousy if @sydney_sweeney were to walk into a room than they would be if say another woman with…

— Gad Saad (@GadSaad) July 30, 2025

I don’t envy any woman’s looks, career, or money status. I do envy women with more children because my own eldest child died. I don’t envy them in a bad way. I am so happy for them and I wish them the absolute best and even more children if they are able. But I do envy.

I also envy the women who are able to have easier pregnancies. Mine were extremely difficult, and I’d so love to have had the experience of being pregnant and not in hellish pain or needing to see the doctor three times a week.

Compared to this, honestly, what another woman looks like or how much money she makes is nothing to me. Women who can feel that kind of envy are very fortunate because they haven’t suffered real female defeats. Being at war with one’s own body because it just won’t do the one thing you really need it to do is harsh.

We finally received the agenda for tomorrow’s day-long training. And guess what? For the first time since I started attending these meetings, not a single item on the agenda is about race or sexuality. I’m very glad.

Seriously, is it too much to ask not to be humiliated at work based on one’s unchosen characteristics? Is it unreasonable to want that? At work, I want to talk about work and not about how I’m mediocre and suspicious because of my race. I want my race or sexuality not to be discussed at all. At work, I’m not a “white cisgender heterosexual woman.” I’m a professor and a literary critic. I’m things that I trained to be for a long time. Things that I agree to offer up in a labor exchange, which is what a job is. I don’t want to place my physiology into the labor exchange, and I should be able to make that decision.

How is this unreasonable or wrong?

On the subject of the now famous American Eagle jeans campaign with Sidney Sweeney, a Senior Lecturer in Marketing at Adelaide Business School wrote this:

I don’t work at a Business School, so most people around me wouldn’t express themselves so clumsily. But they do share the sentiment. And still, I love them, I work with them, and I’m coexisting daily with their nuttiness.

Tomorrow we have one of those day-long training sessions that led me to self-mutilate last year. This time, we are asked to wear Hawaiian shirts to the event. I’m obviously not going to wear a Hawaiian shirt but sitting all day long across a bunch of people in their fifties and sixties dressed in Hawaiian shirts is the visual equivalent of reading Amelie Burgess’s prose. So let nobody ever claim that right-wingers are intolerant.

The King of Fakeness uses AI to write tweets:

It’s not surprising that Trump’s uncontrolled self-expression comes off as refreshing to so many people.

Everybody but the completely brainwashed knew this photo was a fake:

New York Times stunningly rolls back claims about viral photo of starving Gaza boy https://t.co/sQkMcFUfus pic.twitter.com/jZDLsO5sNq

— New York Post (@nypost) July 30, 2025

And the recent viral video of a crowd of starving Palestinians storming an aid center is AI. But the number of people who believed this crap was shocking.

I have no idea how people will live with this degree of gullibility in a world where keeping your mind grounded in reality will require increasingly more effort.

I highly, highly recommend avoiding the sources that keep “rolling back claims” after lying egregiously.

This is an old Soviet joke.

In Moscow newspapers, an announcement appears that caviar will be available for purchase at the Yeliseev grocery store at the shockingly low price of 67 kopecks per kilo.

People line up all the way to the Kremlin to buy the caviar.

It’s very cold. People get hypothermia, but they remain in line. Every once in a while, they make roll calls.

At 10 o’clock, the store manager comes out and says:

– Comrades! No caviar will be sold to Jews!

The crowd buzzes approvingly, and Jews leave, cursing anti-Semites.

2 p.m. The store manager comes out to the frozen crowd again and says:

– Caviar will only be sold to people with a Moscow residence permit!

Some people leave, and the rest of the crowd hisses, ‘Serves you bastards right.’

6 p.m. The store manager comes out to the shrivelled and thinned out crowd again and says:

– Caviar will only be sold to the veterans of the Patriotic War!

After this, there are only a few dozen people left in the queue.

At 9 p.m., the store manager comes out and announces:

– Caviar will only be sold to the veterans of the Patriotic War of 1812!

The people disperse, sighing sadly, but there still is one old man left in front of the store and he’s so cold he’s almost in rigor mortis.

The store manager invites him to his office, pours him a  shot of vodka, and asks:

– Are you a communist?

– Yes! – The exhausted old man answers.

– Then you have to understand. The thing is, there’s really no caviar, but we had to hold a promotional action to show the whole world that in the USSR we have cheap caviar for sale! Do you understand why we just had to do it?

– Yes, of course, I get it, says the old man, but I still don’t understand why the Jews were the first ones to be released???