A yearly income of $100,000 a year is not what it was 10 years ago. The purchasing power dropped significantly. But it’s still not a bad income at all.

For people with this income, college education is free at my school. It’s free in the sense that students pay zero dollars. But it’s not free to us because we have to hire, turn on the lights, connect the Internet, provide textbooks. So who pays? It’s not the students, it’s not the state. Who pays?

The university pays. Our budget cuts, austerity, a hiring freeze are the result. We simply can’t cover all the expenses with the tuition paid by a very small percentage of students and whatever pittance the state gives us.

Also, being amidst all this constantly and then hearing people bleat about how expensive college education has become in comparison with the good old times is very annoying. How much cheaper than free do you want it to be? Do you want us to pay students for attending? Well, we already do that. We pay millions every year in scholarships and awards. That amount grew from a couple thousand to $300,000 for just my department since 2011.

I’m still reading Joyce Carol Oates’ new novel Fox, and I’ll never get over her being 87 and having a brain that can produce something this brilliantly thought out, exquisitely structured, and passionately delivered. I urgently need to know the details of her lifestyle and diet because can you imagine? She found a way never to be old.

Yes, yes, it’s probably genetic. But still.

Also, it’s funny because I thought she was a crap author after coming across her social media posts. Now I understand that she hired some stupid woke child to manage her accounts. But before, I’d chance upon them and wonder how somebody who wrote so badly could have become a recognized author. Forget ideology, the posts were atrociously written.

In her novel, Oates demonstrates not only a phenomenal command of the English language, stunning erudition and a capacity to write simultaneously for the highly literate and modestly educated readers, but also a sensibility that is not even conservative but right-wing.

If I’d known her age, I would have figured out that she wasn’t writing her own social media posts. But I somehow placed her as much younger than she is and took the posts seriously.

Almost missed an extraordinary readerly experience as a result.

This is not true and a cope. The difference between expensive and cheap shoes isn’t branding but the level of comfort, durability, and lack of pain.

I’m really not vain about brands. My entire wardrobe is from “Cato’s”, and I love it. But money absolutely does buy convenience, comfort, and reliability. Those $200 and $2,000 shoes are not like the $20 pair. They are so not like them that probably a different word should be found for these different categories because the objects they name are so distant from each other.

It is so so SO much easier to teach today than 10-15 years ago. Zoomers are on another level from Millennials.

Sorry, Millennials, I don’t think you all suck. Not at all. But cumulatively, it was… not easy.

While Millennials were woke, Zoomers are awake.

This happens daily, many times over:

It’s hard to watch these videos but it’s important for the world to see the reality in Kherson. Today, russians dropped a bomb on a civilian fixing his roof. This happens constantly – while Putin pretends to want peace. This is what russia will continue to do unless it’s stopped pic.twitter.com/mRLqobl5Mm

— Caolan (@CaolanReports) August 20, 2025

Once again, the cucks who were whining about a Russian soldier killed by a drone have zero reaction to this.

Most importantly though, let’s wonder about this:

How do you tell the people who entertain themselves with murdering civilians in these human safaris to go home? To do what? These are not Ukrainians with their businesses, restaurants, and coffee-makers. These are people who barely saw an indoor toilet before they invaded a country that has them.

Once, just once I bought at Walmart, and the shrimp turned out to be radioactive.

God is trying to tell me something.

The new Cracker Barrel logo:

Those who have been to the place even once know that the minimalist aesthetic of the new logo is pretty much the exact opposite of what  Cracker Barrel is.

A rebrand should express something, instead of stupidly modeling the logo on five trillion other identical logos.

In the USSR, scholars had to find proof that all scientific discoveries had been made by Russians. Gravity, electricity, the telephone. The idea was that the evil West had stolen and appropriated all of these Russian discoveries.

We all knew it was stupid but not in our wildest dreams could we imagine that this idea of evil West victimizing poor Russia would become accepted as The Truth in the West. “Russia invaded Ukraine because of the NATO expansion” is the equivalent of the Soviet-era “Alexander Graham Bell stole the idea of the telephone from a Russian Okhriutka Milkhriutka because that’s how the evil West always keeps Russia down.” Few things are as constant in the Russian narrative of its history as the idea that the West keeps Russia down on purpose because it wouldn’t win an honest competition.

Winning the Cold War has somehow brought us an uncritical adoption of every Soviet ideological invention. We now have people proudly calling themselves Socialists and winning elections on the strength of that identification. The left and the right are competing in who out-rubbishes the West. Postcolonial theory invented in the USSR is embraced by the left and the right. It’s hard to figure out what exactly was won in the Cold War and by whom.

Segmenting also works for large projects. Let’s say your apartment is a mess but you don’t have time to clean. Break the task into many small pieces. Walk around the apartment counting the pieces.

You are doing your step challenge in the process, so that’s good already. And maybe you are naming the parts of the apartment aloud in German (or whatever language you are learning). Three goals at once.

That’s what I call maximizing for time.

Make a list, draw a game board, decorate it if you are into that kind of thing. That’s art therapy plus meditation. Two more goals knocked out. Then sneak those bite-sized little pieces of cleaning into your day. Don’t clean your apartment. Clean the left side of the bathroom sink. And do it between other things like you are sneaking it in.

OK, OK, it’s not for everybody, I get it. But I got a lot of enthusiasm and actual requests on Anonymous Questions from people who want to know. If you are not into it, that’s fantastic. Read this as a glimpse into the lives of aliens from another galaxy.

As promised, here’s an insight into the workings of a neoliberal mind.

Gamify everything.

Break the day up into segments and use every segment to advance your individual goals. What those are, I don’t know. Everybody has their own. Maybe you are writing a novel. Or learning a language. Or trying to become a better parent, achieve inner peace, improve your health, increase your earning potential. I don’t know what it is but each segment of your day should include something that brings you closer to that goal.

I have a meeting at two. I’ll bring a list of German words and work on memorizing them while everybody is dying of boredom, listening to a bureaucrat du jour drone one about paperwork. Then I’ll conjugate some words and write a little composition in German. I’ll leave the meeting wide awake and intellectually ready for something more challenging.

Afterwards, I have to talk on the phone to an elderly relative and listen to her 20-minute description of her medical procedure. I’ll use that time to get in a couple thousand steps for my step challenge. I’ll be much more patient with the elderly relative and more eager to hear all the details because I’m doing something for myself during the conversation. Something health-related, which makes it less anxiety-inducing to hear about medical procedures.

Stop between segments and ask, what did I do for myself in the past hour? What will I do in the next? What benefit can I derive from this next activity? How can I make it into a game?

This shit is so engrossing, I was at the dentist’s yesterday for a long procedure, and they had to tell me several times they were done and I could leave.

By the way, have you tried saying “überqueren Sie die Straße” after several shots of anaesthetic into the roof of your mouth? If that’s not a fun, unusual challenge, I don’t know what is.