“Hackers are free people, just like artists who wake up in the morning in a good mood and start painting,” Putin told news agencies.

What a piece of vile trash. 

And here is a comment to the post I linked to this morning:

It’s a recurrent feeling I get whenever you talk about how your kids are growing up 100% American, they don’t speak your native language and don’t have any ties to your culture: you are very adamant that this is good for them, being full Americans and not having to carry the background of your immigrant past. I feel a pang of sadness for them, for what they are missing and don’t even know; and for you, for what you’re losing of yourself by raising children in an alien culture, even one in which you are completely integrated.

It really got on my nerves, to be honest. It’s preachy and condescending, and I hate that kind of thing. Don’t perform sadness in front of people who didn’t ask for it. It’s beyond obnoxious when somebody starts expressing unwanted and and unwarranted compassion. Oh, poor you, it must suck so badly to be you, I’m dying of pity right here.

If that blogger’s children or my Klara decide to learn the language of their parents in adulthood (or any other language), there’s nothing to prevent them from doing that. If they decide they want to explore that culture (or any other culture), they most surely will. I learned Spanish and everything I know about Hispanic civilization in adulthood, didn’t I? 

Among all the kinds of damage parents can do to a child, learning or not learning a language is simply not there at all. And by the way, the best manner to guarantee that a child will detest a language and a culture is to have the parents pester them with how important their knowledge is. I say, gosh, just let the kids be. They have a lifetime to figure out what they do and don’t need to learn.

I identify profoundly with this post:

But every so often, I feel, very acutely, how ill-suited I actually am for this culture into which I work so hard to integrate my family. How uncomfortable so many of the interactions are and how lonely the whole immigration endeavor feels.

 A woman observed Klara and me playing outside yesterday, loudly admired how beautiful Klara is, listened to Klara prattle on and on, and then asked. . . if she speaks English. Because if a 15-month-old mispronounces a few words, it’s got to be because she is a child of immigrants and not because she is very little. 

Klara’s speaking is very advanced. She says “thank you” and stuns everybody at daycare with how many toys and pictures she can name. But she’s 15 months and she only has 10 teeth so far. Of course, she mispronounces words. It’s not an accent. It’s how kids speak. 

An alternative is to hang out only with university people who are not congenitally incapable of noticing nothing but one’s accent. OK, I went out with 3 colleagues who are moms to the playground. And it was even more uncomfortable than the encounter with the “does she speak English” lady. Two of the three colleague moms were immigrants themselves, so that’s a plus. Accents were not mentioned at all.

But oy vey, the entire time we spent on the playground, they exchanged slogans. It was like they were robots who had their Demonstrate Your Liberal Identity setting turned on. I love talking politics but these colleagues weren’t talking politics. They weren’t talking at all. They were mechanically delivering lists of points I’d heard and read before. Verbatim. 

Then they started gleefully listing everything that made them superior to the locals. And that’s when I began to miss the “speak English” lady and wished I could chat to her instead. She hadn’t understood 80% of what I said but that was still more refreshing than the slogans and the gleeful superiority over the country pumpkins. From the linked post, this is how the encounter with these colleagues made me feel:

And then I got angry that I have to socialize with people for whose company I am so ill suited, and who can’t and don’t actually want to get to know the real me, or if they did, I know they would not like me, because the real me has no place in their world.

In Arizona, where the legislature seems dedicated to a program of zeroing-out state funding to higher ed, and Illinois where an ongoing political struggle has left the state budget-less, the declines are over 50%.

Oh, so that’s who’s refusing to sign our budget. A fellow named “Mr. Ongoing Struggle.” 

I’d rather we weren’t mentioned at all because all this does is reinforce the two-sides narrative. 

So remember Ms Pattie, the teacher Klara loves? I asked her to babysit on Saturday because N and I want to celebrate our 10-Year anniversary. 

When I asked her how much she charges, she told me that the daycare pays her $10 per hour. Of course, I’m not going to pay her $10 because it’s exploitative and immoral.  

And please don’t think that she’s new at the daycare, and that’s why her pay is so ridiculous. Ms Pattie has worked in childcare for 30 years and at this particular place for 6. And she’s fantastic. 

I’m very outraged. 

I started getting emails from colleagues who say things like, “I am starting to work in crisis literature and have discovered that you already have a book coming out about it” and ask me to let them know what the book’s argument is. 

I’m very happy because my goal was precisely to define the conversation about crisis literature before people took it in a direction I don’t like. And now everybody who wants to write on the subject will be forced to quote me. 

The book is really going to be super timely. 

Are people who write shit like 

video of Trump admitting to a string of sexual assaults appeared last October

genuinely that crazy or do they know they are bulshiting but simply don’t care? 

Long-form journalism seems to be recovering after the prolonged post-election slump when nobody published anything but monotonous Trump-related moans. Here is a great article on the disappearance of retail jobs. 

My summer schedule is as follows:

7:00 – 8:00 – wake up, get dressed, have breakfast (bran buds sprinkled with cinnamon), read news, heat Klara’s milk.

8:00-8:45 – Klara wakes up, I give her the morning milk, get her dressed, and take her to daycare.

8:45-9:45 – I go either to the gym or to an appointment (dentist, HR, pedicurist, periodontist, somebody who needs me at work, etc).

10:00 – 12:00 – I work on my research. 

12:00 – 1:30 – I eat lunch and cook. 

1:30 – 3:00 – more work.

3:30 – I pick Klara up, feed her, and we go on an adventure (the bookstore, the gardens, the neighboring subdivisions, etc).

7:00 – N comes home and we read to Klara together. 

7:30 – 8:00 – I bathe Klara and N puts her to bed. Putting her to bed used to be a long and arduous process but now it takes about 3 minutes. 

8:00 – 9:30 – I read and N does the dishes and watches his program.

9:30 – N and I enjoy each other’s company. 

Of course, on the days when Klara is at home, the schedule is dictated by her two naps and includes no gym, appointments, or work. 

It’s unbelievable that alarmist moans related to Merkel’s very boring and run-of-the-mill campaign statement would pollute my news feed for quite this long. 

Are there no real news anywhere in the world?