A colleague has been writing me endless messages with questions about how to organize her teaching, coming into my office with the regularity of a metronome, and sharing detailed updates regarding her health. She seeks me out in every nook and cranny where I attempt to hide from human contact. I was resting in the lounge with the door closed but the colleague found another door, one that hadn’t been used in 20 years, and crashed through it like somebody on a quest for the Holy Grail.

Reading social cues is not my forte, so it took me until now to figure out that the colleague isn’t trying to annoy me on purpose. She’s trying to befriend me. And the funny part is that I was actually planning to befriend her myself. I even put it on my calendar: “July 6, 2026. Befriend Elza.” I can’t before then because a) I’m very busy and b) I’m department Chair and not interested in additional social obligations until I quit that role.

The only problem is that I don’t know how to transmit the message that I’m interested in being friends but not before July 6.

Iris Stalzer, the mayor of Herdecke, Germany, adopted two African teenagers. They tortured her for hours in extremely brutal ways. The likelihood that either of them will serve time for the crime is nil.

The 1970s leftist fanatics are different from today’s in that they didn’t skip on their chance to have children. As soon as thirties appeared on their horizon, they’d start popping out kids like crazy. They were, in fact, nuts but not so nuts that they’d avoid childbearing.

If you are a Spanish speaker and want to give yourself a cracking good time, please listen to the Audible version of the novel La tregua by Mario Benedetti. The voice actor, Ernesto Alterio, delivers it in such a spot-on, brilliant way that you’ve got to be dead and buried not to enjoy it.

I don’t even like Benedetti, and I’m almost in tears from how glorious this book is.

Maybe I was wrongly prejudiced about Benedetti. I read him back in college but all I remember was that I deeply disliked the writing. This is unusual for me as I would read anything, including candy wrappers, as long as it’s in Spanish.

Please start listening now. I can’t bear the thought that time is passing by, and people who could be reveling in the voice rendition of this excellent book are not doing it.

Also, please recommend to your students. Alterio speaks very slowly to transmit the vacillating, uncertain personality of the narrator, and it makes the novel perfect even for lower intermediate students.

Folks, did you hear? Matt Walsh got Exantus, the Kentucky murderer of a 6-year-old boy, arrested. Exantus was found not guilty of the murder by reason of insanity but guilty for attacking the boy’s family members. He was released on parole recently after serving just a few years. Matt has been speaking about this injustice for days.

As a result, Florida authorities discovered Exantus in their state where he was breaking the conditions of his parole. He was arrested and returned to Kentucky to finish our his sentence. Walsh actually saved the bastard’s life because the father of the slain boy had vowed to murder Exantus. Now Matt will be on the lookout to prevent the Kentucky authorities from wantonly releasing him again.

This is why I listen to Matt. Dude gets results. He’s actually doing things that are of great use to the public.

I’m very glad to see justice served.

The Church of England defaced the interior of the historic Canterbury Cathedral with ugly graffiti. Which is a tautology because they are all ugly.

Here is how Reverend David Monteith, Dean of Canterbury, explains the reasoning behind the project:

There is a rawness which is magnified by the graffiti style, which is disruptive. It is unfiltered and not sanitised. This exhibition intentionally builds bridges between cultures, styles and genres.

Just the language itself couldn’t be any more neoliberal if the Reverend tried his reverendest to make it so. Disruptive? Honestly? Why should people come to church if even there they can’t escape the inane language of disruptive bridge-building between unfiltered cultures?

I regularly speak at the local community center for retirees. I love this audience because these are people who know a lot and I don’t have to describe everything from scratch. Engaged, knowledgeable, focused people.

This year, a very young person got the job of organizing the speaking calendar. I’m at the point of losing my temper, so I left the office to take a walk and breathe. She’s acting like I’m about to speak to a group of preschoolers. First, she suggested that I bring “homemade treats.” I reacted with horror, so she changed tack and is asking me to prepare “some fun, engaging activities” for the audience.

I have a long-standing relationship with the attendees of the community center. They’ve been inviting me as a speaker at least once a year since 2011. I always have great attendance, great reviews. But I don’t do fun activities or homemade treats. This is not how I position myself publicly. The idea is repellent.

I’m two seconds away from telling the young person to leave us oldsters to our own funless and treatless devices. Who even uses the word treats outside of the elementary school context?

People need to read Zygmunt Bauman. He described precisely this in 2000 as the difference between the solid and the liquid forms of capitalism. I still have my very first copy of Liquid Modernity with all the shocked ??? and !!! on the margins because I didn’t believe what he was saying. Then it all started to come true.

Here is a quote from political theorist Roger Foster that I used in my book:

In earlier, laissez-faire variants of capitalism, the entrepreneur symbolized an ideal of self-mastery, but also embodied the notion of sacrifice of self on behalf of duty, honor, and integrity. The entrepreneur’s economic success also served as a symbol of his virtue, evidenced by the capacity to subordinate immediate wants and needs to rational control and planning. In its neoliberal form, the figure of the entrepreneur is stripped of the vertical dimension of moral self-sacrifice, and accompanying notions of honor and duty. In its place, neoliberalism develops a notion of responsibility divorced from submission to collective ideas, as the responsibility for the management of one’s own life.

We still often talk as if we were living in the same form of capitalism that existed before the 1970s and we don’t. The leftist terrorism of the 1970s serves as the wrecking crew to open up space for neoliberalism. It was very successful.

Matt is making an important point:

An abyss will form between people who have limited intelligence, detachable body parts, and a flat inner world vs those who will have the discipline to develop a true depth and, most importantly, help their children develop it. Fake food, fake art, fake news, fake relationships and a life of raging, unschooled emotionality will await the former. An iron self-control will be required of the latter. The prize in this game will be remaining fully human.

Why, why do people insist on prattling moronically about religions they don’t remotely understand?

Do I express opinions on Hinduism or Buddhism? Never. Because I know nothing, and it would be presumptuous to opine.

Christianity built our world. Our Western world. It seems normal to us because that’s all we know. Fishes perceive the world as wet because that’s their world. Thankfully, fishes don’t write tweets because there’s already enough stupidity out there as it is.

The Christian civilization-building process was painful and difficult. There’s absolutely nothing easily commonsensical about Christian teachings. Even today, two thousand years after Jesus’s birth, there’s not a Christian in existence who isn’t struggling daily with following his teachings. It’s not easy or “basic”. It’s very, very hard. Back in Jesus’s time, what he had to say was beyond revolutionary. It was otherworldly.

Many people have this weird idea that Christianity is about perceiving yourself as vaguely nice. And since everybody thinks themselves to be exceptionally nice, that’s it, all that is left to do is to pout that others are not as nice. It’s of course a failing of the churches that stopped explaining the doctrine or requiring anything at all. Like colleges who admit everybody and hand out diplomas for anybody who deigns to pretend to attend.

I woke up at 5:45 am to make blini and have been going a mile a minute since then. Held a meeting, created the Fall schedule for the department, sent in the annual report, answered many emails, translated 4 documents, did a taping, went to Sam’s, cooked salmon two ways (diabetic and normal), folded laundry, did German, started packing for Spain, squeezed in an hour of reading…

Why, why didn’t I have all this energy when I was 25? Or 30? On a regular day back then, I did maybe 5% of what I do now. And there was no cooking, folding, husband, or child, so I should have been swimming in free time.