The Charlie Kirk memorial was typical nation-building. That’s why the entire cabinet was there. That’s why there were speeches about ancient Greece and Rome. That’s why a Catholic preached to tens of thousands of Protestants, and then a Jew did the same, and it was not only positively but rapturously received. That’s why people who watched felt happy and inspired

Contrast this with 2020. That was typical nation-unbuilding. Statues glorifying the nation’s origins were pulled down and defaced. National achievements were condemned. National history was retold as shameful. A man who never did anything admirable even in the view of his family members was put in a gold casket and worshipped. Statues and memorials were put up not because his life symbolized something good about the country but because his death symbolized something bad. This all culminated in calls for austerity to abolish one of the biggest achievements of the nation-state model, which is police. Destructive riots took place as a symbolic gesture of tearing apart the social compact of national coexistence.

Nobody tried to inspire in the audience any guilt for being American at the memorial. In contrast, the whole point of 2020 was to evoke national guilt and shame.

Charlie Kirk’s memorial made so many people want to be better, kinder, bring more light to the world. I’m still very sad that he was murdered but I also feel like I’m walking on air. Like we’ve all been given a chance to do our absolute best.

I only watched some of the memorial but the power of the inspiration it carries is overwhelming.

Let’s all be good, loving, and strong. Let’s carry out our purpose with everything we’ve got.

My mushroom and buckwheat stew is divine. I married bok choy and smoked pimentón, and the whole thing simply sang.

Speaking of marriage, the best way to gauge the quality of yours is to ask yourself if you’d want your child to be in exactly this kind of marriage, with their husband or wife treating them like yours treats you.

The annual church picnic has a band, free food, games, competitions, prizes, and even offers a chance to dunk the principal and the two pastors in water. It’s for the kids. And it’s not really free. The church provides all this, including the dunkable pastors.

A group of Bangladeshis without kids crashed the party. They are heaping platesful of food and pushing their way to the front of the line for every prize. It was not until they started taking pictures of parishioners’ kids that they were asked to leave. The Bangladeshis are probably lovely people but they don’t know how to decipher what is happening and realize why their behavior is inappropriate. Any of the Americans at the picnic would look as rude and out of place at a gathering in Bangladesh.

As an immigrant myself, I know how long it takes to start figuring things out, reading the cultural clues, and remaking yourself according to a different mold. Uprooting and transplanting is always complicated, always carries consequences.

We are on our way to our church.

Then we are going to a church picnic organized by the school church.

After that, we are going home to make mushroom stew.

I’ll clean my makeup brushes. Kara and N will make leaf piles in the backyard.

Life in America.

It’s mocking me:

Yes, good luck to me, absolutely.

Bitch.

I now do 30 minutes of German before grading student work. And especially before grading oral exams.

It’s really helping me to feel some humility. Everybody needs some humility but I need it more than most.

I’m trying to pronounce correctly. But it’s coming out weird, and I can hear it’s weird. The Duolingo bot keeps mistaking my Deutsch for durch. And when I said Leute, it heard something so bad that the whole system shut down.

I can truly envision visits from police in the future because a chatbot misheard and snitched on you.

On the subject of mass migration, a regular Ukrainian is responding to the proposal by a disgraced former Foreign Minister:

I think Kuleba needs to get FРV in his yeebalo

— Crwꑭ (@ilovetzd) September 20, 2025

For those who are not native to the language, the minister is promised a drone strike in his face.

so much of “thoughtful guy” discourse reduces to “everything is like everything else.” which is actually just wrong.

— Mike Solana (@micsolana) September 16, 2025

I don’t know who this guy is and how he got in my feed but this is spot-on. In 90% of cases, what seems like a smart analogy is simply the workings of a lazy brain. The beauty of learning is precisely that there is an enormous variety of scenarios, experiences, events, and people. Some analogies work but it should never be our first instinct to jump to something we already know to understand something new.

I should definitely do that, at least for the best ones. In the meantime, you can enter “book notes” in the search field, and they will all pop out. There’s many of them, is the problem. Would be easy for movie notes since I see a movie a year or so.

Talking about books, every September publishers drop a stack of phenomenal new books, and I spend much of my reading time trying to figure out which one to read and not reading anything. I’m a typical Buridan’s donkey.

Is anybody reading anything great at the moment?