Good news! I’m not an Islamophobe. I used this checklist provided by the London police and I score zero on it. 

It’s a little deranged to compare Islam to “the West” given that the latter is not a religion but at least it’s a definition and not a vague accusation. 

On vacation, N and I spend all day together every day instead of just a few hours in the evening after work. As a result, I get a chance to notice that he’s the perfect husband 10 times a day. It’s like he took classes on how to make a woman blissfully happy.

“You need to write a book on how to be the perfect husband to help out other guys,” I say. 

“Nah,” he says. “It won’t work unless one has a wife like you.”

Klara’s favorite game right now is learning different emotional expressions. 

I turned on Rachel Maddow as I packed and suddenly noticed that Klara’s was doing her enactment of an outraged expression (hands on cheeks, eyes wide open, mouth in an o shape) in response to Maddow’s tone of voice.  

Since she mastered outrage, she’s now fully ready for her own Facebook account. 

I was a total fanatic when I was an undergraduate student. If a professor mentioned a book, even in the context of “book X by critic YZ is worthless”, I immediately dashed off to check book X out of the library and read it. I counted down the days of each break because I couldn’t wait to get back to class. I once left a New Year’s celebration because I had a textbook on medieval literature waiting for me. Nobody had assigned it. I was reading it for fun. I read Juan Rulfo’s novel Pedro Páramo three times in a row without even looking at the translation until I somewhat understood it (this was less than 2 months after I began to learn Spanish). 

And I loved every second of all of the above.

If you don’t feel this way about your field, please reconsider doing a PhD in it. 

Yes, this is funny. I laughed. 

Now tell me, what’s uranium? Please answer on the spot, don’t think about it, don’t Google, and don’t answer if you are a STEM professor. How do you think people you saw at the store, the gas station, in the street today would answer? How many would answer exactly like this? 

If he speaks like me and you turn up your nose at him and me, meaning us, why should I be on your side and not his? Why should I care about your Russian scandals if you didn’t care about them either until 2 seconds ago? 

​A Jihadist attempted to flee Mosul in a disguise similar to a pantomime dame, but was caught when he forgot to shave off his beard and moustache.

He didn’t forget. He is hoping for a Eurovision win now that his career with ISIS didn’t pan out. 

After many years of suffering and battling the spell check manually, I finally installed the Russian and the Spanish keyboards. And life immediately got easier. 

Inertia, Clarissa is thy name. 

Berkeley canceled a talk by Dawkins (Schmawkins, Petrovkins, it doesn’t matter who) because of his “abusive speech on Twitter.” 

It’s shocking how fast Berkeley went from a stellar university that was respected all over the world to a place where nobody sees any problem with the argument that it’s not necessary to read a book once you’ve read a tweet. 
If I’m wrong, I’ll be happy to see a link to an article describing the massive protest against this cloying and degrading talk of abusive tweets. 

Hilarious! Now Fox News is shilling for Putin in the exact same words The NY Times, The Nation, and Co used to do it. They haven’t even tried to change the text of their propaganda handout a bit for a new audience. I’m sure the Kremlin has never dealt with a more accommodating mark than the US voters. They must be stunned at how easy it is. 

And hey, can you criticize them if you were eagerly consuming his very shit when your friends disseminated it?

Spicer resigned?

Lord, please, no. Now all we’ll hear is endless speculation of how this is THE END even though this time last year nobody knew who the damn Spicer was.