Hey, folks, you have totally got to read this amazing story about an Orthodox Jew who converted a white supremacist leader to anti-racism. It’s the most endearing thing ever. 

That’s why young people are great. Their minds have not ossified. They can change their minds. How I love people who can change their minds. 

Back in New Haven, I had a boyfriend from a very well-to-do family who’d take me to New York to the opera. He wasn’t that into opera but for me he got season tickets.

Once we were driving back to New Haven at night, and his car stalled. The fellow freaked out something major. 

“This is South Bronx!” he said, shaking. “If the car doesn’t start right now, we’ll be murdered within 10 minutes. Because that’s the kind of neighborhood this is!” 

Given that a week earlier I refused to enter the Central Park on a Sunday afternoon because many episodes of Law & Order had convinced me I’d be raped and murdered immediately, I believed the boyfriend. Luckily, the car started and we survived. 

And yesterday I discovered that at that very moment N was actually living in South Bronx. And he has no idea what there was to be scared of. He doesn’t understand the boyfriend story at all. 

So here is the question: was N oblivious or was the boyfriend racist? I honestly have no idea whatsoever. And I still feel terrified of the Central Park.

Everywhere but in a small number of elite colleges, we are moving towards elimination of tenure and an army of contingent, cheap workers teaching primitive, basic courses that keep the gap between the elites and everybody else as wide as ever. 

In order to do away with the concept of a professor as a scholar and thinker, professors are being lured into teaching courses where they can easily be substituted by cheap, fungible part-timers. In foreign languages, this is being done through the narrative of “you can still be a professor and a scholar even when teaching Spanish 101.” Once a gullible or lazy professor buys into this narrative, it will become super easy to get rid of him altogether. 

My suggestion is: let’s not allow our expertise to be trivialized. Let’s remember that we are thinkers and intellectuals, and everybody, including students at state schools deserve access to our research and our knowledge. 

His supporters here said they plan to go to their local precincts to look for illegal immigrants who may attempt to vote. They are worried that Democrats will load up buses of minorities and take them to vote several times in different areas of the city. They’ve heard rumors that boxes of Clinton votes are already waiting somewhere.

In short, Trump thinks we already live in Russia. Because busloads of minorities, illegal immigrants who are forced to cast fake votes to avoid being deported, and boxes full of fake ballots is how Trump’s BFF Putin keeps winning his elections. 

I only just found out that Acadians and Cajuns are the same people. I honestly had no idea, although it should be obvious that it’s the same word. 

I’m reading about the devastation of Louisiana by the oil industry, and it’s absolutely horrifying. That this should happen in a rich developed country is a shame. 

Merkel now is in favor of intensifying anti-Putin sanctions after she saw what the Russians did to Aleppo. Of course, I suspect she’s even more shocked by what they did to her party’s chances to remain relevant in Germany.

It’s sad to see how passionately people cling to the idea that history and culture don’t matter and that everybody is exactly the same. They end up paying an enormous price for this mistake but keep on denying the obvious. 

The trauma of losing WWI and seeing their economy collapse in the 1920s sent Germans straight into Nazism. Yet the very same Germans who have this legacy take forever to understand that much more traumatized Russians will not move towards democracy in a quiet and orderly fashion without making sure everybody else pays through the nose for their severe trauma. 

Reader Cliff Arroyo asks about my vision for an ideal Spanish program at a university. I already know what that program looks like because I learned my Spanish in it.

At the university where I learned to speak, read and write fluent Spanish in under a year, the program looked as follows:
1. Language courses were limited to Beginners Spanish 1 and 2 and Intermediate 1 and 2. The best thing was that these 1 and 2 parts could be compressed into a single intensive course, so that language classes didn’t have to be dragged out for years. 

2. There were no more language courses at all. All this advanced grammar, advanced conversation, Spanish for native speakers, Spanish for future nurses, Spanish for firefighters, Spanish for poor accent writers, Business Spanish, Spanish Linguistics, etc crap didn’t exist. 

3. Students went directly from Spanish Intermediate to literature courses. I took a graduate-level course on Latin American boom right after the single language course in Spanish I ever took. It was intense but it worked. And it didn’t work just for me. We were overwhelmingly fluent by the end of the second year because nobody gave us a choice. 

4. There were no “culture” courses either because that’s a waste of time unless you turn them into hard-core history courses, which is what I end up doing.

5. We had 40+ students in each section of language courses to limit the number of sections. In the only Spanish course I took in my life, we had 46. And look at the result. And by the way, I’m not the only person who took that course and ended up with a PhD in Spanish from an Ivy.

So to resume:

1. Cut language offerings to a bare minimum.
2. Eliminate gimmicky softball courses. 
3. Don’t waste the valuable time of scholars on teaching conjugations. Let students figure out conjugations on their own.  

The second most valuable literary prize in the world- Spanish Premio Planeta – went to. . . some woman I never heard of. She wrote a mammoth mystery novel with supernatural elements. 

Hey, if the Nobel went to some dime-a-dozen pop singer, why not give the Premio Planeta to a supernatural mystery writer?

Of course, I now have to read the mammoth supernatural mystery because that’s my job. I’m super happy I didn’t become an English professor, at least, and don’t have to listen to Bob Dylan, at least. 

Wow, folks, if I had known how this pin works, I’d have worn it all the time. I’ve never felt as popular and welcome everywhere as I do because of the pin. It’s like I’m a movie star. Everybody comes up to say something nice. 

Thanks, Hillary!

My ginormous Hillary pin that’s almost as large as my head is hugely popular among African Americans. They light up when they see it. I’m getting endless compliments on the pin.