One thing I was never told about getting older is that one acquires a capacity to feel deeply happy over very little things. After all the deaths, losses, illnesses, surgeries, and so on, the comfort of a cozy bed, a cup of tea at bedtime, a fresh breeze after the rain feel like the gifts they are and not entitlements that are always insufficient.

You think this is funny. And then you get a classroom where at least one third of the people honestly don’t understand why, after saying “let’s make sure we get all our ducks in a row before we proceed”, I don’t whip out any toy ducks.

In my field, North American scholarly journals have the highest standards. They’ll torture you over every clumsy turn of phrase or loosely used term. And this is excellent. It is as it should be.

In Spain and Latin America, the main criterion is whether you can make your literary criticism paper sound “scientific.” It’s very boring to me to have to include paragraphs on scientific methodology. I have no idea why a fake similarity between the Humanities and STEM should be at such a premium.

The lowest standards are in Brazil and Eastern Europe. Pretty much the only journals where I have recommended rejecting articles instead of giving a chance to rewrite were from there.

“We will not dwell on Justice Jackson’s argument, which is at odds with more than two centuries’ worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself. We observe only this: Justice Jackson decries an imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary.”

—  SCOTUS majority opinion today

SCOTUS dropped a bunch of excellent decisions today, including in the case brought, among others, by a group of Orthodox Ukrainians in Maryland who want to opt out their children from lessons in gender propaganda. These are very important victories, and we should celebrate.

Looks aren’t always deceiving. This cream not only has a vyshyvanka pattern but it smells like summertime borscht:

I’m not into product placement, so please don’t think I’m asking anybody to buy anything, God forbid. But I had to mention that there’s a cream smelling of very fresh veg, and our paths finally crossed.

113,000 likes. We are so screwed.

Polio was eradicated because Jonas Salk chose not to patent the vaccine, if you want a perfect example of a socialist act. https://t.co/fMHAyiwKhS

— Nick Pettigrew (@Nick_Pettigrew) June 25, 2025

I wish it were possible to pay for a service, leave a generous tip, and then not receive multiple messages and phone calls asking me to leave an online review.

At Macy’s, I ran across an elderly gentleman in a MAGA hat.

“Great cap,” I said.

“Pretty and smart,” the gentleman replied. “Your husband is a lucky man.”

I’m now so Americanized that I compliment strangers in public places.

I organized an event in the community. It was a great success. A large attendance, excellent food. A husband of one of the colleagues came with his 3 friends. These are men in their seventies who have been friends since kindergarten. Seventy years of friendship. Seventy years of witnessing each other’s lives, putting up with each other’s BS, pranking each other, celebrating, sharing meals, working on each other’s cars, watching games, having drinks. Seventy years and counting. The energy from these dudes when they were together was like nothing I ever experienced.

I don’t have that. My life is too neoliberal. I tore myself from a group of very dear friends when I went to grad school. Then another group when I left grad school. I made a close friend here and then she moved. And now it’s simply too late for me to have a 70-year-long friendship with anybody. The capacity to be with people throughout their lives when they aren’t family members is atrophied in me. This is one of the terrible costs of neoliberal lives.

Kharkiv, the city where I grew up, gets bombed every night with actual bombs. But it’s more livable, looks prettier, and has more life in it than St Louis. It doesn’t look like this:

Mind you, these images are not from the site hit by the recent tornado. This is how parts of St Louis always look.

In Kharkiv, people come out after every bombing to clear out the rubble, plant flowers, repaint. They dress prettily, they beautify their spaces.

In St Louis, it’s neighborhood upon neighborhood of this complete despondency. Precious Victorian buildings crumbling down. Abandoned churches. What was done to these people that they are more hopeless and have less will to live than people in an actual war of invasion?

Downtown St Louis is dead. On weekends, it’s completely empty save for the drug-addled homeless. You can hear the sound of your own footsteps anywhere in the downtown area on a Sunday. No cars, no tourists. Even the parts that aren’t bombed out ruins are empty. The roads in the center of the city are catastrophically bad. The whole feel of the city is dead, decaying, miserable. There are a couple of wealthy neighborhoods that look very pretty but they are enclaves in a sea of decay.

Now imagine New York given over to this malignant force that sucks life out of cities. Folks, it will be literally less destructive to invite Putin to bomb it for a year. These Mamdanis are that dangerous. They don’t just kill the buildings and the roads. They kill the spirit of a place. Putin invaded Ukraine against the will of Ukrainians. Are we going to give ourselves willingly to destruction when we don’t even have to?