The time is soon approaching when Bernie Sanders will have to do the honorable thing and start touring the country telling his followers to vote for Hillary. Otherwise, the brainless, infantile losers that make such a large number of his followers will vote for Trump.

In spite of his obvious earnestness and honorability, Bernie keeps attracting complete idiots whose main characteristic is their militant immaturity. I don’t think the poor quality of many (not all, of course, but many, way too many) of his followers and collaborators reflects badly on Bernie. But it does tell us a lot about the value of his ideas. When I see the wilted airhead Sarandon squeak stupidly about “rrrrrrevolution”, I shudder when I imagine what kind of dreary horror such vapid, stupid creatures can inflict if they are allowed to bring their fantasies into reality.

The people we meet are a mirror of ourselves. Kindness attracts kindness, gloom draws in more gloom. There are those who seem unable to meet anybody but whiny losers and those who are always surrounded by outstanding, brilliant people.

I work with the younger generation, and my students are always bright, curious, enthusiastic, and hard-working. Other people, however, only meet self-involved, whiny and stupid youngsters. They need young people to be this way to reflect their own qualities back to them. Here is an example:

Although all of these young men and women had some combination of writerly dreams, none of them—not one—had any plan for, even an ambition of, a career. Not just in the economic sense but in the existential sense of a lifelong vocation or pursuit that might find some practical expression or social validation in the form of paid work. Not because they didn’t want a career but because there was no career to be wanted. . . The future was so uncertain, they said, the economy so broken, there simply was no point in devising a plan, much less trying to execute it.

I’m not meeting such boring drama queens because I have no need for anybody to confirm that I’m entitled to cling to this bleak, self-aggrandizing worldview. But if I had such a need, I’d be stumbling on this kind of freak everywhere I went.

I was walking with Klara today, and when she started making little noises like a cute bear cub, I stopped the pram in somebody’s driveway and looked in to comfort her. I talked to her because my voice always calms her down, adjusted her hoodie  (she’s sporting a hoodie today; it’s incredibly cute), pulled up the blanket, and took a drink of water.

When I was finally ready to continue the walk, I discovered that there was a car behind me. The owner of the driveway where I stood had arrived and was waiting patiently for me to move on. This person didn’t honk, didn’t jump out of the car to yell at me, and instead waited quietly to avoid disturbing the baby.

People are worried that Ukraine’s current government is turning to be not much better than all the previous ones. But not even the best government in the universe can make people learn to be considerate to somebody else’s (let alone to one’s own; that’s an impossible dream) baby, not to stick bribes into the faces of everybody they meet, not to be casually cruel to each other, etc. These are the changes Ukraine needs. Everything else will follow.

I just discovered that my favorite student has cancer. This is a very young guy, he’s only 20 years old. An athlete, a very hard-working fellow from Chicago’s South Side. He was my research assistant last year and did great work for my new book. This is so sad and unfair.

A few months ago, I also learned that a very close friend of mine, a woman in her forties, had stage 3 cancer. Again, completely inexplicable and horribly unfair. When I learned about my friend’s cancer, I was devastated because this is somebody who means a lot to me. So as I was sitting there, feeling crushed by the news, I felt Klara kick inside me for the very first time. It is as if she knew that I was sad and wanted to comfort me.

Hey, have you taken the “Do you live in a bubble?” quiz? It sounds like fun.

I tried taking it but to me it’s meaningless. I grew up in a different reality, and after the phrase “high-prestige professions such as physician and attorney”, I realized I was wasting my time. The quiz offers zero space for immigrants.

Of all the writers of the Latin American Boom, Vargas Llosa is my favorite. I recognize that García Marquez, Fuentes and Cortazar are great writers but I don’t connect with their writing on an emotional level. Vargas Llosa is the only one of the bunch I appreciate not only as a professional but also as a human being.

The time when Vargas Llosa was creating great literature is long gone. He is getting on in years, and now writes very run-of-the-mill, linear narrative,  omniscient narrator, “he asked – she answered” kind of novels. Cinco esquinas, his most recent novel, can be summarized as “boring, trivial rich people have boring sex page after boring page.” The Fujimori regime appears somewhere in the background to spice things up but in a half-hearted, unconvincing way.

There are two or three interesting characters that would have merited further development but the writer kept abandoning them in favor of more boring sex among the boring, trivial rich people.

As much as I love this writer, this is not a novel I can recommend, unfortunately.

Remember Alice Dreger whose book Galileo’s Middle Finger I reviewed recently? Dreger investigated the persecution to which some scholars were subjected for advancing unpopular ideas. One of the cases Dreger analyzed in the book was that of a scholar hounded by trans activists for departing, in some minor way, from what they considered to be the “correct” theory of transgenderism. The fellow was subjected to outlandish abuse simply for conducting his research.

Well, how do you think these unhinged trans activists reacted to Dreger ‘ s book? They are now hounding her and trying to shut her up. And all she did was write about the guy who wrote something not 100% orthodox about transgenderism. Both Dreger and the scholar she wrote about are completely pro-transgender rights, by the way. But that isn’t enough to shield them from vilification because this isn’t about rights. It’s about repeating the same mantras that constitute identity discourse without changing a single syllable in them.

A great article on Cuba by somebody who knows what things are like there. There is a single thing in it I disagree with. If you go to Cuba, only stay in casas particulares  (regular people’s houses) if you are a smug, superior creature similar to the poetic I in Mary Oliver’s poem analyzed in the previous post. If, on the other hand, you can’t be around people without trying to engage with them on a human level, don’t stay there. You’ll be hurt and traumatized. It’s better to go to a glitzy resort and spare oneself the aggravation.

There are old posts that were written years ago yet they attract readers every single day since then. One such post is “Mary Oliver’s “Singapore” As a Pseudo-Liberal’s Manifesto.” I just reread it, and I still agree with myself completely.

I just saw on TV the moment when Bernie Sanders was told during his speech in Wisconsin that he won the state of Washington by an enormous margin. It’s such a beautiful, inspiring moment that I was touched almost to tears.

Bernie has been saying all this stuff his entire life but he was always pretty marginal with his ideas. And now all of a sudden, so late in life, he discovers that people are finally ready to hear him. Imagine what it must mean to him finally to be heard by so many people. And it’s especially beautiful that it’s the young people he connects with especially well.

I’m sorry for people who can’t get over their partisan sympathies for other candidates and appreciate the inspirational potential of this moment.