I wanted to distract myself by buying clothes. Only after leaving the store did I realize that everything I’d chosen was funereal black.

I used to wear all black in my twenties but not since then. Today, though, only black outfits attracted me.

Thank you for trying to distract me. I appreciate it and it worked.

Here’s the link to the article.

I don’t know if I mentioned it but a while ago I helped a scholar with her research on surzhyk. She asked me to watch a few TV programs (news and sitcoms) and identify instances of surzhyk, which I gladly did. She’d say, “You marked “Ah!” as surzhyk. What makes you think it’s a surzhyk “ah” and not a Russian or Ukrainian “ah”?”

But I know just by the sound of it. It doesn’t sound like Ukrainian or Russian. It’s in the middle.

This isn’t voodoo science. You know immediately when Jasmine Crockett switches into her fake Ebonics twang. Or when you reach a call center and hear “hello!”, you immediately know when you are talking to somebody in India.

I can’t speak surzhyk myself but I know and recognize it. I grew up surrounded by it. My mother’s Ukrainian is mostly surzhyk.

So yeah, it’s a fascinating topic and thank you for the link.

I took a day off today. It’s very annoying to many people that I’d be off at this time in the semester. And I get it, there’s a million things to do, and it looks indulgent for me to be taking long weekends for no reason. I can’t explain the reason without falling apart, so I had to say “no, I can’t on Friday” without any explanation about 30 times in the past days.

Nobody fully knows what’s happening in another person’s life. Sometimes a person can make an impression of being a self-involved prick but there might be all sorts of shit going on with them. Or not. They might just be a prick. This is the ambivalence of a human life.

I used Copilot to edit my article in Ukrainian that I wrote for an online portal. It did a great job. But I wouldn’t do it for my research. It won’t work. Nor would I do it for writing in English because I do it much better myself.

In my field, which is literary criticism, the quality of writing is half the value of the piece. And even Claude (which is the better AI for writing) doesn’t get beyond a gushy Filipina type of writing.

The best use I have found for AI so far is to have it write a piece of code to clean out my Gmail inbox. The code only needed a small tweak to work moderately fine.

But please rest assured, every word of Neoliberal Love was written by me.

I have found it unexpectedly hard to write my sabbatical proposal. I’m supposed to explain why I need a semester dedicated exclusively to research, and I do need it for my sanity but that’s not an argument I can roll out.

I will have written two whole books from start to finish and I don’t know how many articles and chapters, while being department Chair, teaching, and serving on two executive boards for scholarly organizations. It’s kind of hard to explain what additional feats of productivity I will manage to perform without any obligations beyond writing.

A DC resident shared this photo she took at Union Station yesterday. Looks like a scene from the Handmaid's Tale, but no, just another day of Trump's militarization of DC right now. #UnderHisEye pic.twitter.com/lXJaAFmohU

— Jennifer Bendery (@jbendery) September 3, 2025

Apparently, Trump’s militarization forced these women to wear costumes from a TV show making them look like characters from that TV show.

We are surrounded by idiots.

An English Department, of all people:

Nobody wants their own extinction more than academics.

A guy cancelled his wedding just because he visited the girl’s parents and saw her father washing plates and the mother was even shouting at him to hurry up and finish.

— Habibty💗 (@Rukksssst) September 2, 2025

My husband’s father beat his wife regularly to a bloody pulp. My husband’s mother chased the father with a meat cleaver. We make a lot of jokes about meat cleavers (and now you know why) but other than that out relationship isn’t thwarted by fear that it will be anything except what we make it.

The guy in the tweet is a wuss. He might very well be apocryphal but the thousands of guys who are tweeting about how he was right are not. They are all exceptional pussies.

My Dean has no secretary or receptionist and has to do his own secretarial work. And he’s too much of a wuss to protest, take a stand, and demand that this travesty end.

A friend of many years built a cabin in the woods and moved there for a foraging lifestyle because that’s what his girlfriend always wanted. He is so not a foraging wooden cabin guy. He’s a “sitting in a cafe in Paris with a new Gallimard book” type of dude. After a few years of forced foraging, I was afraid we were going to lose him prematurely. He looked bereft and bedraggled, it was heartbreaking. Of course, the girlfriend eventually dumped him for a guy with a better wood cabin. My friend is now free to be who he always was. Last week, he showed up in a new fancy suit and told me about this new really cool cafe in St Louis where he goes every morning with a book. I almost cried.

You can say no, you can have some agency, you can figure out how to do the bloody dishes to mutual satisfaction. Yesterday I had a very confrontationional situation at work. Verbally confrontational, no cleavers. It was a serious issue and we both felt very strongly. After 1,5 hours of debating in very strong terms, we found a compromise and were hugging before we left. If I can do it with a woman I’ve met exactly twice before in unpropitious circumstances (she’s the one who has a dream that there should be no white people on campus), surely one can manage to discuss who’ll do the dishes or express a reluctance to work without a secretary / forage in the woods instead of crying in the corner.

Obviously, most men are not like that. My husband is the opposite of that. He makes reality his bitch, and I love it. But performative wussiness exists, and I hate it.

You thought you had problems? Look at these poor bastards:

Notice the word “choice”. These loser idjits brainwash themselves into utter abjection with this word. Choice is their god. It’s their only measure of morality.