Yale is now paying its PhD students a whopping sum of $30,000 – $35,000 per year. Plus the ever-growing benefits, of course. 

Wow, fellow Yalies, is this shocking or what? We only got- what was it? – $19,000 – $20,000? We were so short-changed. Let’s go back to grad school and get paid to have drinks at Sullivan’s. Good times. 

Before I had Klara, I never knew what it meant to be really tired and really want to sleep. I’m not saying it in a dramatic way. I like having this experience. It’s new and refreshing. 

It’s strange to be discovering at my age how refreshing sleep can be and how one can actually need it.

Sexual harassment entails failing to see a woman, any woman as extremely vulnerable and fragile human being who, at any given time, is on the brink of a mental breakdown. At least, that’s the definition that is becoming dominant in academia. 

And this is what a sexually harassing syllabus looks like these days. 

This post on the “Confederate Party” is over 2 years old but it’s really great. 

MSers, beware! Courts have declared it legal for law enforcement to swipe your gift cards. 

Testosterone and the risk of dementia: a very important post. 

It’s curious that only people who live in extraordinarily opulent societies feel this sorry for themselves. Never ceases to amaze me. 

Trump supporters are not the wretched of the earth. Loved this piece (Except for a dumb comparison of unemployment in Spain and during the Great Depression in the US.)

The Toronto burqa murder. 

Remember the Swanson TV dinner? I used to think those were so chic.

Whenever I cook anything except borscht that contains cabbage, N complains that the house smells too Russian. 

Everybody was telling me that Klara only says “Dada” because the “m” sound is harder to pronounce. And then last night (or is it tonight? I keep getting confused. The night that was 8 hours ago) she got hungry and I heard a very clear and distinct “Mamma! Mamma!” coming from her room. Because she knows that Mamma is the one to feed her at night.

What I find hilarious are the endless mullings of what Melania Trump can possibly feel. It’s as if people thought she is an actual wife and not an object of consumption. She’s not a wife in the sense I am a wife or you are a wife. She’s more like what my phone is to me: it’s convenient but it doesn’t have opinions of its own and I’ll trade it for a new model whenever I feel like it. 

I’m sure she experiences a vague sense of relief at the idea that Trump is groping somebody else because that means she’ll get groped less. But that’s about it. 

There is a whole industry of these Eastern European prostitutes. There are manuals, websites, magazines, blogs, etc that teach them how to empty themselves of all content and become perfect objects of consumption. They have meditation routines where they learn to care about nothing but shopping and looking a certain way. 

This is a parody of womanhood, of the idea of a woman as a gaping, bottomless hole that devours objects, that receives, receives, receives in complete silence and immobility. 

Eastern European women were forced to break with the traditional womanhood in a radical and painful way, and now many are compensating for the trauma. 

“Sometimes the job is the career, and sometimes the job is a means for subsidizing the career.”

That’s precisely the problem. I feel like the job and the career have become completely divorced in my life. They exist on different planes.

A friend of my mother’s lived with her husband for 30 years, and every year he took a photo of her in the same place with the same bouquet of flowers. And they ended up with a photographic progression where she changed and nothing else did. 

If N and I wanted to do something like this, we’d find it hard to come up with a place to take the photo that would remain the same for 30 years. We always relocate! 

N suggested McDonald’s. And instead of a bouquet, we could hold Big Macs. That’s definitely a possibility but the problem is, McDonald’s doesn’t mean anything to us. I have to look up the spelling every time I mention it. 

Does anybody have any suggestions? 

Trump has infected my mind with his verbal tics. I heard myself speak and knew it reminded me of something.

And that’s when the French invaded. So horrible. But the people of Spain decided to fight. So brave. That was so brave. Totally. 

I’m scaring myself with this. Maybe I shouldn’t watch the debate on Wednesday. 

And since I’m on it: I used to be passionately in favor of making all students take a year of a foreign language but now I changed my mind. Yes, it’s beyond useful to have exposure to another language and culture. But if people don’t want this super useful exposure, why force them? It’s like forbidding the use of cell phones in class. Yes, people waste their time and money if they are on Facebook instead of paying attention in class. But that’s their choice. Why should I care if they want to spend their resources this way? 

I don’t want to impose myself on unwilling students. I want to work with the willing ones only.