A joke from Ukraine:

Today is the 73rd anniversary of the day when Stalin finally became a good Communist.

Because he croaked on this day, in case you don’t know.

One little quote from Prada in Spanish so that those who know and love the language understand why I’m into Prada in spite of his extremely unfortunate geopolitical stances:

Pero Hello no creía en el éxito, sino tan sólo en la gloria, que no la dan los hombres; y aguardó esa gloria poniéndose a escribir todos los días, en un pequeño pabellón o belvedere, con las cristaleras abiertas hacia el mar y el sol naciente inflamando su escritura de un estilo ardoroso que, aun tomado en pequeñas dosis, abrasa las resistencias del incrédulo y descompone a los tibios y a los eunucoides.

I love it how he goes up and up in this very elevated style and, right at the moment when it reaches the level of utter pomposity, the writer collapses it all into comedy with the word eunucoides that is extremely funny and not very translatable.

Shoot it straight into my veins because this is the shit I live for.

A great quote from the inimitable and permanently pissed off Juan Manuel de Prada:

Today, a transgressive writer is not one who delights in invoking demons, but the one who dares to pray to the saints; it is not an activist of unbridled excess, but an apostle of temperance; it is not a shrill bard of freedom, but a discreet minstrel of tradition. A true rebelliousness today is not practiced by a spoiled, self-destructive, nihilistic child whose antics are applauded by the system, but an artist who dares to take subversion to the point where the system begins to foam at the mouth, like the girl in The Exorcist: to the point of scorning its democratic religion, to the point of denouncing its empty platitudes and pomposity, to the point of execrating its murky ideologies, to the altar where God becomes flesh.

Juan Manuel de Prada, Weirdos Like Me

I was in a seminar with Prada once, and dude, is he permanently peeved or what. I feared he was about to catch a stroke the entire time because of how majorly miffed Prada was. I don’t necessarily blame him because in every interview the writer gives, he has to answer the question of “why are you such a fascist?” Which he is most definitely not but he is openly conservative, and we all know how that goes.

Based on his girth and what I know about his life from the gossip circuit, Prada is not who one imagines when hearing about apostles of temperance but, boy, does he know how to write.

The quote is from Prada’s book on écrivains maudits, and he proposes his own definition of who the accursed authors of our times really are. I translated maudits as transgressive but I fully understand why the word I use is stupid. “Cursed authors” is not instantly recognizable in English as the expression is in the original French.

Before we all get too distracted by Iran, here’s an update on the Russian human safari:

🔴🔴🔴 Kherson.

Human safari as presented by a Russian military channel: to a sadistic music, with a civilian running for his life.

10 civilian cars destroyed since 23 Feb. (including my friends’ cars, a young family with children.)

The situation is worse than ever. pic.twitter.com/rzxczhXkeO

— Zarina Zabrisky 🇺🇸🇺🇦 (@ZarinaZabrisky) March 5, 2026

We can start making bets on the maximum number of arrests some of these recidivists clock up until the justice system finally puts them behind bars.

The reason we gotta spend $4 million per Patriot missile to shoot down a silly $20,000 Shahed drone is because Donald Trump refused to give Ukraine the Tomahawks necessary to take out the Shahed factories in Russia

— Liam Nissan™ (@theliamnissan) March 4, 2026

People are naive. The real reason is grift. It’s easy to hide trees in a forest. And it’s really easy to skim off the top when expenditures are huge.

There’s this old, pre-Uber joke where an executive type gets into a cab. The driver asks, “where to?”

“Anywhere,” says the executive type. “Everybody everywhere needs me.”

I’m like that executive type. I teach MWF from ten to 10:50. You’d think for those 50 minutes three times a week I could be left in peace. But no, people storm the classroom, everybody with an urgent need.

“Where’s the secretary? I need to see her!”

Well, she’s definitely not in my pocket, is she?

“I lost my key, I left my phone in the car and now the two-step verification doesn’t work, what do I put on line 5 of the activity report, where can I find the Italian tutor?”

I go to the bathroom and come back to a group of people searching my office because they don’t know where I am. I haven’t been of the size that would enable me to hide in this office since age 5. It’s not large. Why are you searching it and exchanging panicky whispers to the effect of “I don’t know what happened. She was here just a minute ago”?

This is the way! Parents know best what would benefit their individual child. I built my app because my son loves making nonsense words. He was using Google Translate to create them. AI has given parents super powers to personalize education. https://t.co/6V65PQlnGL

— Wendy (@teachthemx3) March 4, 2026

People are very nutty. Yes, parents know their child better than anybody. Why do we need AI and apps? Children love wordplay. They’ve always loved wordplay. And they’ve always managed to do it without any technology at all. A child doesn’t want or need to stare at an app. She should see her mother’s and father’s faces and not apps.

First, mom stares at a screen to build an app. Then, the kid stares at the app mom built. This whole time they could be looking at each other, goofing around, creating funny new words. No app can substitute time with mommy and daddy. It’s insane that one even has to say this.

Richness of language only comes from reading a rich literary heritage. For that, more than functional literacy is required. You need strong attention span, good impulse control, strong ability to focus, to read ahead fluently, to articulate and most of all, you need developed… https://t.co/8GsjN2Kthk

— CJ the palmer worm; wife,mother, analyst. (@thepalmerworm) March 3, 2026

This is why I’m addicted to Juan Manuel de Prada. Yes, he’s far-far-right but his novels are not remotely political. It’s the language that I’m obsessed with. People say his writing is too ornate and yes, it very much is. But that’s why I love it.

Under the fold, I’ll place an excerpt from Prada’s novel Lucía en la noche that I’m currently reading. It’s a thinly veiled mockery of the Spanish writer Lucía Etxebarria and it’s ridiculously funny.

Continue reading “Richness of Language” →

Reader Avi asks a great question:

I love cooking. I can create a lineup of complicated dishes and never get tired. Cooking doesn’t take away any energy. To the contrary, it gives me energy because I enjoy it.

Cleaning, on the other hand, saps my energy. I wash a single sink and need to sit down. The physical effort is a lot smaller yet it tires me a lot more because I don’t enjoy the activity.

Enjoyment is not the opposite of productivity. It’s what makes productivity possible. We do enjoyable activities to replenish our energy supply. But many people squander this energy by opening a channel through which it escapes. This channel is called guilt.

Let’s say your enjoyable, energy-producing activity is watching cat videos on Tik Tok. But you feel guilty about it. You tell yourself that you are lazy, a procrastinator. All of the energy you harvested from watching the videos gets invested into these feelings of guilt. As a result, you need to watch more videos. Then you feel even more guilt. And this requires more cat videos. In the end, you spend an enormous amount of time on the videos and still have no energy because you were throwing it away the second you got it.

All it takes to solve this issue is to realize that the videos and the productivity are not in conflict. The videos are like sleep. If you deprive yourself of sleep in order to work more, what will happen? Soon enough, you won’t be able to work at all.

My birthday enjoyment program isn’t really about the birthday. It’s about April, the last full month of the academic year. It so happened that my birthday is in April. If it weren’t, I’d still be doing the same intense enjoyment because I need to replenish my energy supply.

I get a lot done. People laugh when they see my CV, especially if they know about everything else I do. How is it possible to do so much when you spend so much time doing nothing? they ask. But that’s precisely why. I have an energy-maximizing lifestyle. The moment I became department Chair I stopped answering emails after 5 pm and opening my laptop on weekends. Because I had more work I knew I would need a lot more time lounging on my bed with my sticker books and color markers.

If you have an unpleasant but necessary activity, you need to book-end it with purposeful, guilt-free activities. For example, I hate signing contracts. It’s not hard but it’s very boring. It’s dumb mechanical labor that is often useless because most of the contracts have to be re-done and re-signed several times. Knowing that I’ll have to dedicate 40 minutes to the contracts this morning, I drove to my favorite part of town and I’m walking around in the mist writing this post. Yes, I should be in the office signing the contracts but the walking and the posting are refueling me for the signing of the contracts. I’ll breeze through them in 20 minutes instead of 40 because I refueled.