January’s Atlantic has a fantastic review by Deresiewicz. It doesn’t even matter what he’s reviewing. It’s just good.

As if it weren’t enough that at this airport restaurant there is an iPad on each table that keeps flashing in front of my eyes and a bunch of huge TVs to distract me from my reading of a paper book with actual pages, there are also groups of men who scream like they are possessed while watching a football game. 

And this was the quietest, most decent place here. As much as I love Philadelphia, its airport stinks. 

The Women’s March on Washington now has an unofficial uniform: a pink, knitted hat shaped to look like two pointy cat ears. Two California-based women and the knitting instructor who designed the hat have released the pattern for free online. They’re calling them “pussyhats.”

Freaks. Hopeless, deranged freaks. In the midst of everything that is going on, they are valiantly defending their right to wear pink hats with ears. It’s like we haven’t debased feminism enough with dumbass slutwalks. 

Crowds of sad people wander around the MLA. They’d love to visit the talks and the book fair but they can’t. They are the graduate students and the adjuncts who couldn’t afford to pay the enormous registration fee. They don’t have the magical conference badge and they are too honest to make one in Word (which would be extremely easy to do.)

It’s a mystery why there is such an effort to exclude them from the book fair. What’s the worst they can do? Look at books? Oh, the evildoers! 

Next year I’m hoping to see my book at the exhibit, and I’d prefer for as much people as possible to see it. 

It would be great if instead of discussing Israel for 3 days we’d pass a resolution allowing our colleagues without badges to look at the darn books and listen to talks. 

People should stop interviewing at the MLA. At breakfast, I heard a hiring committee at the next table go on and on for an hour, exchanging the most ridiculous gossip about a candidate. In their natural habitat, people rarely do this because they have work, family, errands to run, papers to grade. But here they are bored and shit floats upwards from the bottoms of their souls. 

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Female academics I talked to all loved Hillary. Male academics all hated her and weren’t excited. I’m sure this is a total coincidence. 

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“When I said at my interviews that I got really got news this morning,” a job seekers shared, “committee members all looked at me weird.”

“They thought you were about to say you found you are pregnant,” I said. “Drop the “this morning” part because morning is the time when women pee on sticks.”

“Yes,” another colleague said, “a pregnancy would be really good news. To her competitors because that would be it for this job search.”

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I miss N so much that yesterday I watched 3 episodes of American Greed because it’s his favorite show and it reminds me of him.

We rejected the stupid boycott. I’m proud of us. Plus, I don’t have to quit the association now. Let me have a small port to celebrate.

I told N that I went to Macy’s and bought a bunch of clothes. 

“Go tomorrow, too,” he said. “And buy a bag to fit them all in. And more books! And order yourself a glass of wine to sleep better.”

He keeps sending me photos of Klara because he’s brimming over with the joy of spending time alone with her. 

I’m a fantastic wife, too, by the way but he doesn’t blog, so this might seem a bit one-sided. 

A waiter brought me an amuse-bouche and I felt bad about keeping my elbows on the table. 

Evicted is one strange book. The writer claims to be a sociologist who spent months with people suffering the effects of evictions and wrote an account that sounds fictionalized but he claims is literally true. I find it impossible to believe his claim, though. The characters he describes illustrate so neatly every single stereotype about people on welfare that it’s suspicious. They are:

1. A homeless woman on welfare who buys $200 face creams and eats lobster and steak on her food stamps. At least, she doesn’t arrive in  a Royce to pick up her lobster, so thank God for that very small mercy. 

2. A white ex-felon who makes his black stepdaughters chant “White power!”

3. A black woman who keeps having insane numbers of fatherless children, abandoning them, having more, etc. Of course, the children grow up to become crack dealers. 

4. A family of black women who celebrate a bizillionth teenage pregnancy and try to chase away a responsible, hard-working father because they don’t want to lose the pregnant kid’s welfare check.

5. Irresponsible black parents who let their baby burn to death while they party.

6. A white male nurse who pisses away a great job and a high salary on an opioid addiction. 

All of these characters live in extreme filth, pour kitchen grease down bathtubs, leave rotting food on takeout plates lying around, and pummel at each other at every opportunity. 

All white characters hate black people. All black people hate black people, too. I wonder to what extent the anti-black statements by black people were made because that’s what they thought the white Harvard prof wanted to hear but Desmond apparently doesn’t understand that utterances might be influenced by the audience.

Desmond doesn’t judge his characters. To the contrary, he tries to explain how their behavior isn’t a cause but is caused by their poverty. But I can’t get over how conveniently his characters illustrate every stereotype that he sets out to debunk. The result is poverty porn with very little value aside from confirming stereotypes.

The book’s structure is weird, too. There are copious endnotes many of which contain extremely important and relevant information on poverty and homelessness. But it’s beyond annoying to have to dig through the book to find them. The useful endnotes are hidden among truly crazy ones. For instance, one of the stories of today’s homelessness in Milwaukee links to an article about hospital patients in Argentina with no explanation what Argentina has to do with any of it. Another endnote references an article from 1961, again with no explanation how it might be relevant. 

The author also loves to fill his endnotes with pompous declarations of the painfully obvious in the spirit of “Hunger can be very unpleasant for human beings. It can cause short and long-term negative effects.”

The conclusion to the book is that Azerbaijan and Zambia are more progressive than the US and have better social services. Those lucky Zambians! I wonder why they offer no foreign aid to the pathetic, miserable Americans. 

Let me end the review with the book’s closing words:

No moral code or ethical principle , no piece of scripture or holy teaching, can be summoned to defend what we have allowed our country to become.

Fivethirtyeight’s analysis of a Surveymonkey data-set shows that Hillary Clinton would have won the 2016 election if registered Democrats had turned out and voted in larger numbers — in other words, Hillary’s failure to convince registered Democrats to vote, rather than abstain, lost her the election.

This is why I’m indifferent to the current hoopla over Russians owning the Wikileaks. This is so much bigger than the Wikileaks. Over the years, I’ve seen crowds of Liberal journalists, bloggers and Facebook acquaintances lap up and eagerly promote every lie fed to them by Russian propagandists. They did that in good faith because they are still in the Cold War mode of “If evil conservatives say the USSR is bad, it must be good.”

From “Nazis in Ukraine” they seamlessly moved to “Hillary is boring, she is unexciting, it’s business as usual, eeencrementalism, I just can’t get excited about her.” As if they were asked to masturbate to her campaign photo instead of voting. Many of them are still repeating the same shit interspersed with the same old Nazis in Ukraine. 

Assange on his own would have done nothing. There was an enormous number of sincere Liberals who helped out of intellectual inertia and lack of psychological agility.