For the first time in years, N and I have a chance to go to the movies. What should we see, Wonder Woman or Beatriz is at Dinner? 

I’d like to see All Eyez on Me about Tupac but the times don’t work for us at all. 

And another cutesy baby story. Klara is very excited about her new skill of identifying and naming objects and phenomena. 

Yesterday, she fell and scraped her knee. Of course, she started crying, and I picked her up, and she was crying, and then suddenly a neighbor turned on his lawnmower. Immediately, Klara interrupted the crying and announced, “Mower!” She kept repeating the word “mower” for the next 5 minutes, having completely forgotten all about the scrape. 

All of these inexplicable things and loud noises that used to scare her lose their capacity to terrify once she can name them. Language is truly an awe-inspiring thing.

When she woke up today, Klara started demanding that I wash her toes. I wasn’t going to do it because she’d been sleeping, and the toes were completely clean. 

She kept repeating, “Toes! Wash water! Wash! Water!” as I dressed her. 

Once she realized I wasn’t in any hurry to wash her toes, Klara thought for a second and said, “Please!” So of course I washed them. 

I honestly had no idea such little kids could communicate so well. 

This glowing belief in one’s own extraordinary virtue and the obsession with denouncing the sinful nature of others that you can see in the article linked in the previous post are the scariest things I know. 

I remember watching George W. Bush on TV and feeling terrified of the luminous conviction in his own goodness that seemed immune to reason or logic. A few months later, he started bombing Iraq.

Or these senators who want to cut Medicaid. They are convinced that nothing like poverty and indigent illness could have happened to them because they know how to live correctly, they are too good for this to happen to them. 

The political flavor these fanatics happen to have at any given time is irrelevant. At the core of their being lies a narcissistic wound that requires that spectacles of punishing the sinful and rewarding the righteous be constantly staged.

This piece was written by the kind of academic I am ashamed to share a profession with. The holier-than-thou earnestness is so Soviet in tone that it feels like I’m at a 1983 meeting of a Komsomol cell. What a disgrace. 

An Oklahoma doctor is facing five counts of second-degree murder charges following the opioid overdose deaths of her patients.

Finally! If only there existed at least a tiny little chance that the companies that engaged in blatant false marketing of opioids could be brought to trial. I’d be a happy, happy person if I got to see that. I once again recommend Dreamland by Sam Quinones for a brilliant investigative report on these vicious criminals. 

Klara said her first sentence yesterday. She was working at her easel and I heard her say quietly to herself, “Happy baby, happy baby.” This was super cute. 

Once a cause wins a resounding victory, should it pack up and go home or keep looking for things to fight for?

I’m thinking the former because if not, you start seeing Pride get degraded all the way to Jew-bashing and. . . I don’t even know how to describe this shit. See for yourself. 

Make sure to scroll all the way to the end for a photo that will restore your faith in humanity after the insanity quoted in the post. 

The Transportation Security Administration is testing and plans to expand a program in which airline passengers will be asked to remove books from carry-on luggage.

So what, one can’t have a laptop, a Kindle and now not even a book on a plane? What are those of us with a functioning brain supposed to do on a flight? I understand we are a tiny minority but still. 

A very simple but crucial assignment for this week: set aside 5 minutes each day to write or draw with your non-dominant hand. You will feel your brain literally screech and ramp up when you do it.