Latin America has extraordinary investigative journalism, the best in the world. There are people who conduct amazing, meticulous investigations and publish 600-page books that are incredibly enjoyable to read.

I’m reading La llamada [The Call] by the Argentinian journalist Leila Guerriero, and it’s one of those books of investigative journalism that is not only fascinating to read but also has a definite literary quality. To write the book, Guerriero delved deep into the life of Silvia Labayru who, in the 1970s, belonged to a leftist domestic terrorist organization in Argentina called the Montoneros. Labayru was kidnapped by the military dictatorship and tortured, but she survived and now lives in Madrid. Guerriero spent years in weekly and often daily meetings with Labayru, hanging around, listening, participating in her daily life, trying to build a relationship and gain her subject’s trust.

Labayru’s story is complicated. She has been shunned by her fellow militants for a variety of reasons. As a former member of a terrorist organization, there are things that she doesn’t want to reveal or probably even remember. There is a lot that she and other militants remember differently. Often very differently. It is only because Guerriero put in an extraordinary amount of time, patience, and kindness that she managed to get all of these people to talk to her about their violent and often tragic past.

I will talk about the book itself and the fascinating things I learned from it later, but the point I want to make right now is that there is no aspect of what Guerriero created in this book that any form of artificial intelligence will ever be able to touch. The book is a product of a human relationship.

Guerriero is a very talented journalist. Her skill in organizing the narrative woven out of the testimonies of many different people is outstanding. The book is extremely easy to follow. Guerriero very wisely avoids making the story about herself. The only American journalist of this caliber is Sam Quinones. In Latin America there are many, and I’m overjoyed that I discovered a new one in Guerriero.

AI or no AI, we will absolutely need journalists, but these have to be people who don’t want to go down an easy path and just phone things in without putting in any effort. When you read Leila Guerriero’s book, you feel overpowered by the admiration for the professionalism of this journalist, who is so excellent at what she does.

You need to be an absolute psychopath to film something like this and publish it for clicks:

YouTuber Jesse Ridgway and his wife abort their child after finding out the baby had Down syndrome.

Ridgway cited that they chose to kill the baby after deciding that he and his wife didn't want to be inconvenienced with a child with Down syndrome.

"Things have been pretty dark… pic.twitter.com/NsloTi8dcq

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) June 4, 2026

Everything is for sale with these people. Everything is monetized. The guy is now monetizing the abortion with maniacal intensity. To describes himself as and his wife as “two people grieving the loss of their unborn child.” It’s downright scary how devoid of all decency and morality these mega popular influencers can be.

I’m reading a book on the Chinese education system because my husband really wants me to read it and discuss it with him. The book is very enlightening. Here is one quote:

Gregory Yao’s daughter was only five years old, but she was already taking eight classes a week, including math cram classes and the “early MBA,” which trained babies as young as four months in “six core areas,” including leadership and global vision, according to one provider.

I am irreducibly Western so I find this kind of thing to be hilarious.

In America we are raising our children for a different world. And we are absolutely right.

I pass the Jerry Seinfeld test, so I’m allowed.

Never thought I would quote Glenn Beck but the dude is completely correct here:

Candace Owens taking a "suspicious trip to Russia" is NOT the real story. It's only proof that Russia and Alexander Dugin's massive propaganda operation is working.

Dugin is right about what is happening to the West. It is evil. But that's the trap. His "solution" would destroy… pic.twitter.com/1s9wE3ooeg

— Glenn Beck (@glennbeck) June 4, 2026

The good news is that as a result of Candace Owens and Co shilling so cloyingly for the Russians, many right-wingers are finally getting black-pilled on Russia and starting to figure out what is actually happening.

Let’s conduct a little test to see if people understand why these apparently insane stories are coming out of academia. Think back to this morning’s post about the academic awards lottery. What recent political events prompted this change in the way we are now going to manage student awards? There is reason behind every madness and there is a very clear reason behind this particular manifestation of lunacy. What is it? Who can guess?

Karmelo Anthony attorney Mike Howard is now asking the jury pool about current immigration policies in the US and whether they agree with them or not.

— MaryAnn Martinez (@MaryAnnreports) June 3, 2026

That the judge is allowing a political litmus test which is entirely unrelated to the actual court case under consideration is a very bad sign.

Our operational papers do not allow us to remain in the position of department chair for more than two terms. However, there are people who have been in that role for over 15 years because “nobody else wants to do it.” It’s not surprising that nobody feels like hurting a colleague’s feelings by trying to dislodge them from a job they held since before the Obama administration. Such people would have to go back to teaching and doing research but how do you come back after a couple of decades outside of these pursuits?

This is wrong, though, because look at me. I’m completely jaded and exhausted after only two terms. If I remained for an additional term, not only would it be undemocratic, it would also be completely impractical. I am of no use to the department any longer. With every new round of administrative madness, I just want to give up. And this is precisely why the administration so gladly grants exceptions to our two-terms-in-office rule.

Our Dean says this openly. “I’m supposed to be a historian but I haven’t taught or done any research for such a long time that I no longer remember anything,” he says. He is terrified of not being Dean any longer and that’s why he is very convenient to the higher-ups. “The provost is my boss. I have to do what my boss tells me or I will be out of a job,” he keeps saying. He’s tenured, so not having a job does not mean that he will be fired. It only means that he will have to become a regular professor and this is something he no longer knows how to do. I am grateful that he says this so openly.

The whole system is completely messed up because of this issue. Professors should rotate out of academic leadership jobs at regular intervals. But, again, it’s convenient to do it the way it’s currently done. Convenient to the administration, that is, but definitely not for faculty members or students.

Remember the drama around the award ceremony at my university? That whole story about the sweet elderly widow?

As you know, after a protracted struggle, I defeated the administration and forced it to include the widow’s award (and other scholarships) into the second part of the ceremony. Love, peace, butterflies. However, season two of this drama dropped yesterday and it’s a doozy.

From now on, we were told, professors are not going to be allowed to choose the students to award. Students’ names are going to be fed into a database, which will assign a random number to each student. Professors will be choosing whom to award but no longer between Jessica McBride and John Smith. We will be choosing between number 4,583 and number 7,912.

“But why?” I asked, making inhuman efforts to control my temper.

“Because,” I was told, “this will prevent professors from cherry picking which student will receive the award.” Cherry picking. This is the actual word that was used.

“That is the whole point, however,” I responded. “We pick the students who deserve the award based on our interactions with the students and our knowledge of their achievements.”

“Yes,” the administrator said in an accusatory tone. “Precisely! That is what makes the whole process unfair. Under the existing system there are students who have no chance of ever being awarded. We are trying to bring fairness to the process.”

“By turning it into a lottery?” At this point, I most definitely deserved an award for keeping my voice calm and my countenance mostly composed.

“I don’t understand why every professor who is being informed about this important and crucial change is so opposed to fairness,” the administrator pouted.

I am very glad I will no longer be department chair and will not have to find ways to bypass the system in the next award cycle. The next cheer is a wonderful person, a friend and the fellow Conservative. I feel very bad for her because I have no idea how she is going to handle the new process. I keep telling myself, I don’t have to care. I don’t have to care about this any longer. But it’s hard because this is absolute, shameless, ridiculous lunacy.

I haven’t been able to find a good book to listen to in Spanish in two months and this put me into a vile mood. I drive and I need to listen to something while driving. I will be on the road at midnight tonight, for example, going to fetch an unwell friend from the airport. On Friday I will be on the road for a total of up to three hours. Which is great. I love it. But I also need some listening material.

Finally yesterday I came across a novel by a Spanish author, Jacobo Bergareche. The author reads it himself and he’s the perfect voice actor for his own book. The novel is excellent, so much so that I actually already finished it and am now experiencing the same conundrum of not having anything to listen to in Spanish when I go on the road.

Leaving aside my drama of endless book-searching, here is what makes the novel so interesting. Los días perfectos talks about Luis, a liberal, low-earning, middle-aged Spanish journalist in a dead marriage to a much more successful wife. In a work-related trip to Austin, Texas, Luis starts a tawdry affair with a random Mexican woman. The work trip is short and the affair only lasts for three days. A year later Luis returns and has another short sojourn with the same random Mexican woman. When he tries to repeat this escapade for the third year in a row, his paramour refuses to meet him and Luis composes a long imaginary letter to her explaining why their affair meant so much to him.

Luis is pathetic, weak, and excessively prattly. Everything in life is relative, though. Luis comes off as a paragon of happy masculinity in comparison to the main character of Ben Lerner’s novel Transcription. I would have despised Luis if I hadn’t read Transcription first. His rebellion through sporadic infidelity (the random Mexican woman is, of course, not the first of his random infidelities) does not inspire much respect but at least he does consider himself entitled to rebel. Luis’s narrative voice could not appear in a novel published in English because it’s not remotely subservient enough to the ruling ideology.

Bergareche’s novel is a reminder of the unevenness of ultra liberal ideological conditioning. Luis a reminder that we are not completely cooked.

If you are going to read the book, I recommend listening to the Audible version instead because it makes half of the novel’s charm.