The new Cracker Barrel logo:

Those who have been to the place even once know that the minimalist aesthetic of the new logo is pretty much the exact opposite of what  Cracker Barrel is.

A rebrand should express something, instead of stupidly modeling the logo on five trillion other identical logos.

In the USSR, scholars had to find proof that all scientific discoveries had been made by Russians. Gravity, electricity, the telephone. The idea was that the evil West had stolen and appropriated all of these Russian discoveries.

We all knew it was stupid but not in our wildest dreams could we imagine that this idea of evil West victimizing poor Russia would become accepted as The Truth in the West. “Russia invaded Ukraine because of the NATO expansion” is the equivalent of the Soviet-era “Alexander Graham Bell stole the idea of the telephone from a Russian Okhriutka Milkhriutka because that’s how the evil West always keeps Russia down.” Few things are as constant in the Russian narrative of its history as the idea that the West keeps Russia down on purpose because it wouldn’t win an honest competition.

Winning the Cold War has somehow brought us an uncritical adoption of every Soviet ideological invention. We now have people proudly calling themselves Socialists and winning elections on the strength of that identification. The left and the right are competing in who out-rubbishes the West. Postcolonial theory invented in the USSR is embraced by the left and the right. It’s hard to figure out what exactly was won in the Cold War and by whom.

Segmenting also works for large projects. Let’s say your apartment is a mess but you don’t have time to clean. Break the task into many small pieces. Walk around the apartment counting the pieces.

You are doing your step challenge in the process, so that’s good already. And maybe you are naming the parts of the apartment aloud in German (or whatever language you are learning). Three goals at once.

That’s what I call maximizing for time.

Make a list, draw a game board, decorate it if you are into that kind of thing. That’s art therapy plus meditation. Two more goals knocked out. Then sneak those bite-sized little pieces of cleaning into your day. Don’t clean your apartment. Clean the left side of the bathroom sink. And do it between other things like you are sneaking it in.

OK, OK, it’s not for everybody, I get it. But I got a lot of enthusiasm and actual requests on Anonymous Questions from people who want to know. If you are not into it, that’s fantastic. Read this as a glimpse into the lives of aliens from another galaxy.

As promised, here’s an insight into the workings of a neoliberal mind.

Gamify everything.

Break the day up into segments and use every segment to advance your individual goals. What those are, I don’t know. Everybody has their own. Maybe you are writing a novel. Or learning a language. Or trying to become a better parent, achieve inner peace, improve your health, increase your earning potential. I don’t know what it is but each segment of your day should include something that brings you closer to that goal.

I have a meeting at two. I’ll bring a list of German words and work on memorizing them while everybody is dying of boredom, listening to a bureaucrat du jour drone one about paperwork. Then I’ll conjugate some words and write a little composition in German. I’ll leave the meeting wide awake and intellectually ready for something more challenging.

Afterwards, I have to talk on the phone to an elderly relative and listen to her 20-minute description of her medical procedure. I’ll use that time to get in a couple thousand steps for my step challenge. I’ll be much more patient with the elderly relative and more eager to hear all the details because I’m doing something for myself during the conversation. Something health-related, which makes it less anxiety-inducing to hear about medical procedures.

Stop between segments and ask, what did I do for myself in the past hour? What will I do in the next? What benefit can I derive from this next activity? How can I make it into a game?

This shit is so engrossing, I was at the dentist’s yesterday for a long procedure, and they had to tell me several times they were done and I could leave.

By the way, have you tried saying “überqueren Sie die Straße” after several shots of anaesthetic into the roof of your mouth? If that’s not a fun, unusual challenge, I don’t know what is.

To my earlier point, I just saw on Twitter that in America it’s the Right that demands to drag “children from Gaza” into this country for “lifesaving surgeries.” In those same words. It’s extraordinary.

We have the left and the right promoting the exact same measures that lead to the exact same result of undermining the nation-state.

It’s got to be all sorts of funny that the left and the right both clobber the nation-state with these utterly imaginary “children from Gaza who need surgeries.” It’s like they are reading from the same script. Couldn’t even be assed to come up with something original. Fascinating.

Tomorrow I will be posting suggestions on how successfully to neoliberalize ourselves because it’s now clearly inevitable.

She thought that with a name like Miriam Krinsky she can be in charge of a leftist organization? Poor naive fool.

I think that the main difference between “the left” and “liberals” is that “the left” thinks America is bad. There are other differences but the main one is that operating thesis of “the left” is that America is bad and should be sorry. For what? Glad you asked. Everything.

— Ben Dreyfuss (@bendreyfuss) August 19, 2025

It’s not only the left. A significant portion of the right is like this, too. Helping hasten the collapse of the USSR was bad. Why? Because America did it. Winning World War 2 was bad. Because America did it. Listen to Tucker Carlson. His interpretation of the US history in the twentieth century is identical to that of a Berkeley professor. I mean this in a literal sense, having talked to several Berkeley professors. There’s nothing that America did well in these people’s opinion. Every bastard dictator on the planet is better than the US.

Since people are talking about libraries, I want to post these photos I took at our university library last week. This is since books were ejected:

I didn’t choose a particularly weird corner for the photos. It’s all like this now.

This entire idea that young people can’t survive if they aren’t horizontal much of the time is counterproductive. A young man in his late twenties came to my office completely winded because he walked 3 flights of stairs to get there. He remained winded and heaving for the next 15 minutes of our conversation. I’m… not in my late twenties, let’s put it that way, but I walk these stairs all the time and don’t notice it.

Nothing illustrates the difference in worldview around the nation-state than this exchange. There cannot be a national healthcare system that provides services to everybody on the planet. There cannot be a nation-state that guarantees rights and protections to everybody on the planet. The nation-state is by definition exclusionary.

But this exchange reveals much more than that.

Remember how I recently wrote that a healthy relationship is one that tolerates ambiguity? This is true not only for individuals but groups and countries. Aaron Bell, whoever he is, is incapable of tolerating the ambiguity of wanting to provide healthcare to British children but not to any others. His love is unhealthy because it will ultimately destroy healthcare for everybody except the wealthy who can pay out of pocket.

Aaron Bell doesn’t want to live in reality. He can’t accept that reality is imperfect. He will destroy the imperfect real in search for an impossible perfection. In interpersonal relationships, this kind of an individual will go to pieces if the object of his affections is not 100% attentive to him 100% of the time. The ambiguity of any love, profound as it might be, is that, unless you are an infant, the object of your love will not always be completely available and completely devoid of boundaries all the time. In a healthy loving relationship, you say to yourself, “today, I can see that he’s tired, distracted, needs some space. That is fine. I will respect his boundaries and step back.” In an unhealthy relationship, you throw a fit because you interpret the normal human ambiguity of “I love you to pieces but right now I want to be alone” as lack of love.

Love that doesn’t accept boundaries is not love at all. It’s a destructive, consumerist force that will eat everything in its way. If Aaron Bell really cared about the sick children of Gaza, he’d start a charitable campaign, donate, organize, find money and pay for it. I, for example, care deeply about the plight of the lonely elderly people in Ukraine. I found a group of volunteers who provide food packages and lamps to them. I donate, I help the group (@JuliaSubbotina1 on Twitter) get the cause known. I didn’t privatize the benefits while socializing the costs of my love for these elderly. I assumed the costs. That’s true, healthy love.

We live in a mentality where accepting any form of boundary is intolerable to people. Their self becomes so big that it squeezes out everything around them. There’s no space left for anything else. We need to rehabilitate such concepts as boundaries, borders, and ambiguity.

One of the editors to whom I proposed publishing my Ukrainian book sent me an offer. It’s a good offer but the book came out 16 months ago, so it’s kind of beyond the point now.

It’s nice, though, because I can now boast that I had offers from 5 publishers.