My very very dear friend is friends with the Colombian writer Héctor Abad Faciolince. He introduced me to the author which was very cool because Abad Faciolince is pretty much the only famous Latin American writer who supports Ukraine. He was almost killed in a Russian airstrike when he was visiting Ukraine, and now he wrote a book about it.
I asked don Héctor why Latin Americans were so Putinoid. He said, “in Latin America, being pro-Ukraine means being right-wing. And for a Latin American intellectual being considered right-wing is the kiss of death.”
He told us that when he was trying to tell his friends in Latin America, highly educated, supposedly intellectual people, about his near-death experience in Ukraine, their reaction was very crazy.
“We were having a coffee at a pizzeria in Kramatorsk,” he would say, “and Russians hit us with an Iskander missile. Civilians! Parents with children. Old people. We were targeted for no reason.”
“No,” people would tell him, “there was a NATO headquarters on the second floor of that pizzeria.”
“There was no second floor,” the writer would try to explain. “It was a one-storey building.”
But when were Putinoids ever able to listen to reason? These are Putinoid leftists, so they are double the stupid.
In Abad Faciolince’s new book about Ukraine, I actually know most of the characters. In person. This is weird because I’m a hermit and try very hard not to know anybody.
Clarissa's Blog 
This is amazing! You should conduct an interview with him and have it published.
Ol.
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https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/10/21/fas-phd-admissions-cuts/
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This is excellent, excellent news. Thanks for sharing!
There’s a huge overproduction of PhDs because schools would admit people who have zero future in academia to use them as cheap labor to teach up to 2/3 of all undergraduate courses. People send a kid to Harvard, thinking he’ll be taught by a famous professor when in reality a kid can go his entire college degree without once clapping eyes on a professor. All of the teaching is done by graduate students who have no idea what they are doing.
This is the dirty secret of academia. You have a much higher chance of being taught by an actual professor if you go to a third rate school than to an Ivy.
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“All of the teaching is done by graduate students who have no idea what they are doing”
I can think of a couple of courses I had where the grad student TA was far better than the professor ‘official’ teacher.
For one thing in a lot of fields by the time a person becomes full professor they usually no longer understand the needs of those just taking an intro course and tend to ramble on about their research which is not of any interest or use to most students even if they could understand it.
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As we say in Spain, me siento aludida. 😆😆
I try very hard not to ramble maniacally about neoliberalism in class. This semester I held out all the way until October. Then I couldn’t contain it anymore but this year the response was very good. Which is unusual. Normally, students just stare.
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“I try very hard not to ramble maniacally about neoliberalism in class”
Humanities are different (as are social sciences sometimes). I’m thinking more along STEM lines. There is no way would I have passed statistics (and loved it at the time) without the grad student led optional ‘study sessions’.The class lecture was a couple hundred people in an auditorium… I went once and said never again. That was my most dramatic example but not the only one.
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As an undergrad, I took a course in American modernism, and it was a huge class of 150 students. The professor had the most atrocious accent in English. None of us understood anything in his lectures. The poor grad students who lead discussion groups had to retell everything to us from scratch. I’m grateful to them because it was fascinating material, and the professor simply didn’t have language skills to deliver it.
The main point of the course was that in modernism, the form of delivery is as important as the content, which was ironic given the quality of the professor’s delivery.
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IIRC I had profs for most of my college classes. Notably, had a TA for Linguistics 101, and she was *fantastic*. Bottomless well of enthusiasm for the subject, and only occasionally talked about her grad project, which involved tracking down native speakers of Russian, and convincing them to let her stick a camera in their throats while they talked, which seemed pretty wild.
-ethyl
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Russia has always been popular with the left in SA, since they’re seens as resisting the Anglo empire and capitalism, or neoliberalism as they’re calling it these days.
https://iol.co.za/news/opinion/2025-09-04-the-alabuga-start-saga-how-south-african-influencers-faced-a-media-smear-campaign/
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“ussia has always been popular with the left in SA, since they’re seens as resisting the Anglo empire “
I thought SA loved the ango empire…. which is more important in the country Zulu, Afrikaans or English?
(to be clear, I’m in favor of developing and expanding the range of uses of African languages but almost no Africans seem to agree, so….).
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All languages are officially equal, but English is the most equal for government, business, education. Afrikaans more likely on farms or in small towns.
Local TV is mostly in Afrikaans or Zulu. English is all imports, especially Netflix these days.
In bookstores, 80% of books are English imports with a few shelves of Afrikaans on local topics.
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