So what is the explanation for the 70% illegitimacy rates among black Americans? Does anybody know?

The idea that this is a result of some welfare program is dumb. You can’t erase the prestige value of having a dude in your life with some paltry handout. Millennia of social conditioning have taught women that having the father of your children around is good and not having him is bad. I can’t think of anything that would lower your prestige among the female peer group more than having the co-author of your pregnancy evaporate the moment that pregnancy happens.

Middle-class divorced white people, please don’t project this onto yourselves. Your ex-husband who would rather die than not see his children, divorce or no divorce, is a completely different story.

We are watching Dune II, and I wonder if it’s in the original books that all the good dudes are “people of color” while the evildoers are all so white that even fireworks on their planet have zero color. Beyond white, obviously. Was it meant to be about a conflict between skinhead Nordic Nazi types and sub-Saharan types? Because, sheesh, how tedious.

We are halfway through the movie, and, God, is this second part ever so boring. The first part was good but the sequel just drags and drags.

No spoilers, please. I’m still hopeful it will pick up in the second half.

In my Duolingo, I have reached the point of “ich heiße” (“my name is”). I was reciting “ich heiße Frau Merkel. Ich bin Kanzlerin” at work when I realized that the German professor was in his office next door. He probably now thinks I’m completely cracked.

Yes, these are the exercises. I preferred the one with “ich heiße Johann Wolfgang von Goethe” but then we got stuck on Frau Merkel.

When did it become fashionable to pose as a brainless, infantile airhead?

This is painful to watch.

The funny thing, though, is that Spaniards have no idea what to do with their excellent produce. Ordering a salad in Spain makes you lose faith in humanity because the wonderful fresh produce is either drowned in mayo or topped with chunks of canned tuna and pickled veg.

The only edible food in Spain is either ethnic or at the restaurants where you are served a grilled fish with a boiled potato and no additional effort.

Against all odds, Trump seems to have hired somebody with a functioning brain who manages to keep him somewhat quiet at the exact right time:

Trump not making the worst possible hire known to humanity is the most unexpected news item this week.

Went to Europe for two weeks. Ate like I was getting paid to do it. If I ate that amount of charcuterie and carbs at home, I don’t even want to imagine.

Came back and discovered that I’m now the weight I haven’t been since getting pregnant for the first time. (If you give birth after 35, the pregnancy weight doesn’t understand it’s supposed to go away after the pregnancy).

If I said it once, I said it twenty times. There’s something wrong with food in America. And I never buy canned or frozen and cook everything from scratch.

Also, the number of smokers in Spain is out of this world compared to America but life expectancy is higher and nobody is fat.

I really miss those weight-loss charcuteries.

I suffered terribly from jet lag when I was younger. Some trips were almost completely eaten by it.

Strangely, with age I stopped getting jet-lagged. Even though I’m physiologically incapable of sleeping on airplanes, I switch over to local time with great ease both going there and returning.

That night, Ally was absorbed in the book she’d been reading the last two weeks. Thora had seen a lot of people carrying the book around the Center: making a big deal of bringing it to lunch, women squeezing the hardcover tightly to their chests as they walked to Restorative Yoga.

“Can I see?” Thora said.

Ally passed it over. Thora read just a few pages. It was about a plucky doll-maker in occupied Paris during World War II. It seemed like a book for people who hated books.

– Emma Cline, Daddy

It is no secret that I consider Emma Cline to be the most talented author writing in America today. The queen of understatement and self-control, she can write about the most mundane moments in life with a surgical precision that slices your heart. Daddy is a short story collection written closer to the style of Cline’s extraordinary The Guest than her less successful The Girls.

What’s really interesting about the very young Cline is that she writes about the middle age a lot more convincingly than about childhood and teenage years. “Marion”, the only unsuccessful story in Daddy is a Bildungsroman, and not a particularly great one.

The subject that Cline dominates to absolute perfection is that of middle-aged men whose relationships with their young adult children have grown distant, leaving the fathers bereft, confused, and close to exploding with pain. She never looks at the father – child relationship through the eyes of the child. In Daddy, fathers’ pain spills all over the pages.

Not all stories are about fatherhood. A few are about young people not being able to handle cancel culture and other online phenomena. There’s a story that gently mocks #MeTootery, without ever naming it, and leaving the readers a lot of space to figure out their own meaning.

A sensationally talented writer.

Dude, we’ve all read detailed descriptions of your vagina’s adventures. We figured out you are “she/her” a quarter of a century ago. No need to clarify at this late date.

Why do people even do this? I mean those who are given a choice, of course. It’s embarrassing. It’s especially embarrassing to call attention to your genitals when all anybody knows about you are the things you did with those genitals.