Writing is hard. It takes too long and it’s really painful. This is why I don’t write articles, book chapters and books. The very idea of writing an article is too daunting. The moment I think, “I need to work on my article today”, I become paralyzed to the point I can barely move. So I quit all that and instead of writing articles, I say “today I’ll write two sentences on how the metaphors of stone and water are central to this novel” and “today I’ll integrate the quote from Byung-Chul Han into paragraph 6 on page 3.”

Everything I have written was done this way. And I have written a lot.

Another thing that helps if I’m completely blocked is to start writing my two sentences not in a Word file but in the posting box of this blog. That removes the stress and moves things straight along. A different place to write is always a good idea. I always find it useful to write in a less formal place and do it between other pressing activities. I do great writing during meetings. Every summer we have a 6-hour meeting, and I write massively there because it feels good to know I’m doing something useful while everybody else is drowning in yet another endless discussion of a yet another stupid bureaucratic policy.

Try unexpected places, formats, times. Try dressing up to the nines for when you write. Have something completely unusual for breakfast, sleep on the different side of the bed. Everything that’s unusual can kick you out of getting to deep inside your head and getting stressed out over the daunting need to write.

Which program, though? There is no program. We will all sprout wings and take off in flight before there is any such program or anything remotely resembling it.

See how no one on the left is calling this a sham trial? See how Biden accepts the verdict even though it will likely send his last living child to prison. This is what standing for the rule of law looks like. Trump on the other hand… https://t.co/uQiF87VyEu

— Matt Lieberman (@social_brains) June 12, 2024

See how nobody is calling you a sausage? That’s probably because you are not a sausage.

People don’t even realize what they are doing when they make these statements. It’s become so natural to them. It’s not about what things are. It’s about what you call them.

Here’s the famous bean stew, by the way:

Delicious and already gone.

The journalist who invited me is a controversial figure. One of my prospective publishers in Ukraine even asked me to remove a quote from him from my book.* Obviously, I didn’t publish with them because I’m not escaping from one form of censorship to plunge right into another one.

Matt Walsh has 2,8 million YouTube subscribers, and with the US population plus the global reach of an English-speaking journalist, you can imagine the equivalent of 500,000 subscribers for a dude in Ukraine.

* Most of Ukrainian publishers, news outlets and cultural projects exist on Soros money. The one I finally chose for my book is not a huge publisher but it’s independent and despises Soros money. As a result, nobody had a single objection to the content of the book.

I’m being invited to a show of a famous Ukrainian journalist with half a million YouTube subscribers. This is my husband’s favorite journalist, and it’s a dream of his life to see me on that show. I’ll be speaking Russian on the show, and I’ll post the link when it airs. If I don’t perish of nerves before then.

Nineteen-year-old Ruslan V. V Turko and two unnamed minors were arrested on Wednesday for first-degree malicious mischief after vandalizing the rainbow Pride mural that sits in front of Riverfront Park located in Spokane, Washington.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13513907/amp/washington-spokane-teens-jail-lgbtq-rainbow-mural-vandalism.html

The media description of what happened is, of course, extremely tendentious. These teens are facing felony charges for leaving skid marks while riding their scooters. That’s all they did. They revved their scooters and left barely visible skid marks. But the crosswalk where they left scooter marks was painted the saintly rainbow colors, so it’s now a felony to leave a scratch on it. It’s a good idea for everybody to avoid that crosswalk because what if you track mud on it? Or make a facial expression that is considered genocidal?

In the massively tolerant Canada, the support for LGBT “dropped precipitously” over the past couple of years. I wonder what the teens in Spokane will learned about the importance of tolerance from this experience.

At work, I mostly live in a bubble that I created for myself but sometimes I come across a reminder of how much my university despises research, publications, books, and everything that constitutes the life of the mind. It shouldn’t bother me too much but it does. What we do is such a farce.

To extract myself from the dumps into which this sad state of affairs plunged me, I made a bean and fish stew. I don’t use canned beans because the whole point of a bean is building a broth. There’s no reason to eat beans if there’s no broth.

Carrots, coriander chutney, a cinnamon stick, a large onion (added whole and then removed because you know why), some juniper berries, a bay leaf. A large batch of fresh spinach at the end. It didn’t really need the fish but N doesn’t like vegan, so I added something called “Vietnamese snapper” that had a shockingly attractive price at the store.

I spent so much time nursing this broth as a way of providing psychological help to myself that when the stew was done it was too late to eat. I do feel better, though, and the dish will be good for lunch tomorrow.

When Brezhnev was in steep decline and barely able to string a few words together, we used to joke that our great leader was so progressive that even his progressive dementia was the most progressive on the planet.

Palestinians outside a theater attempting to intimidate Jews and their supporters who are inside the theater screening a movie about October 7. On 10/7, Jews were burned alive by Palestinians.pic.twitter.com/X5wtq7Zvlw

— Marina Medvin 🇺🇸 (@MarinaMedvin) June 11, 2024

One has truly got to be a terrible person to engage in such a performance. Whatever one’s political beliefs or opinions, this is disgraceful. One’s first loyalty should be to fellow citizens, and creating this kind of discomfort for your own community is not OK. The people in the theater aren’t political figures. They can’t do anything to address your grievances. It’s terrible to harass them like this.