Oh, what a lovely question. A lovely, lovely question.

I would include An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser so they can understand the American East Coast. And The Big Rock Candy Mountain by Wallace Stegner so they learn about the American West. And yes, these are very long, but what’s the rush?

I’d include short stories by O. Henry and Jack London so that they can understand the American spirit.

For Europe, I’d put Robinson Crusoe by Defoe and Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne.

Ivan Bunin’s diary of the Communist revolution of 1917 Cursed Days is crucial to understand the horror of the twentieth century that haunts us still.

I’d put poetry by TS Eliot and Seamus Heaney on the list.

These are the titles that come to me early (9 am) on a Saturday morning without much thinking. What would you add?

In a single blue state, Somalians stole more money from U.S. taxpayers than the annual GDP of their entire country.

Now imagine how bad and widespread the fraud is in all the blue states put together. https://t.co/hGrfsnO4rP

— Theo Wold (@RealTheoWold) December 19, 2025

Yet neither US Somalis nor Somalis in Somalia became wealthy en masse as a result. There’s nothing to show for this money. It evaporated.

This is yet another example that giving people “free money” doesn’t work. Maybe it’s time to conclude this experiment and do something different.

The term “neoliberal” traveled in the same direction as I did. Originally, it was very lefty-coded. But today, it only appears in far-right circles.

Every time I try to use the term in a publication (which is 90% of my publications these days), I get a lot of pushback.

This happened because the left found out how much it enjoyed everything it used to decry. And the right found out that “free markets” and “choice” can very easily be applied to human beings, body parts, and life itself.

What puzzles me is, does he really believe this extraordinary crap? Or is it a put on persona? It has to be, right? Nobody is that clueless.

The real test here is: are you fully inhabiting the existing reality? Can you describe David Barclay Moore’s appearance and sexual preference without googling him?

For extra credit: is the book about racism and homophobia?

If you can’t answer these questions on the spot, you are not ready for life in year 2025.

It’s a very good thing I no longer live in a big city because I’ve been in one for two days and I already Doordashed a latte.

It’s raining like an absolute bastard or I would have walked. But yes, I did it, and now I’m one of those people. Might have to vote for Pete Buttigieg now to stay true to my latte Doordashing identity.

The whole promise of neoliberalism is that finally everybody will be treated as an individual. It won’t be about groups, ethnicity, race, sex, or any other unchosen characteristic. Neoliberalism was supposed to free an individual from any unchosen group identity. We were going to give it a pass on every problem it creates in exchange for the wonderful boon of liberating the individual.

The pass was extended but in return all we got was group identities becoming more important than ever.

What is the point then? Why should we subscribe to this setup? What’s in it for us?

I don’t understand the American belief that sexual intercourse makes people absorb the professional skills of their partners. I’ve spent twenty years being weirded out by “spousal hires” in every area of life. Everybody is discussing how jobs were granted based on DEI characteristics but it never gets mentioned how many of these jobs went to wives, then to mistresses, and then increasingly to throuple partners.

There’s a lot of this in academia but it also exists in politics where every Hillary and Michelle get inflicted on the public in perpetuity for no reason I can comprehend. Now there’s Erika Kirk who is destroying TPUSA not for any conspiratorial reason but simply because she has no idea how to run a large organization. The spectacle of her flailing is sad and utterly unnecessary.

It’s paradoxical that TPUSA, of all organizations, should prove so incapable of hiring based on merit.

The man suspected of both the Brown shooting and the MIT murder was supposedly “found dead from a self-inflicted wound.”

This is the worst development. It will give Candace Owens years of material about maroon beekeepers. Conspiracies will never end. And it’s all because the FBI and the RI law enforcement are terrible.

COVID broke people’s brains. Especially in Montreal. I took my mother to her oncologist today, and when we exited the hospital, we got into a cab.

“Flu? You got the flu? I saw you come out of the hospital. Do you have flu? It’s got to be the flu. Ay yay yay!” ranted the can driver, a tall, wide-shouldered young man.

Tired of his lamentations, I screeched, “Cancer! It’s cancer she’s got, not flu!”

“Oh,” said the driver.