As you’re reading this blog post silently to yourself, do you hear an inner voice speaking the words in your head? A new paper published in Psychosis suggests that most people do hear an internal voice when they’re reading.

I don’t hear the words I read in my mind, which is probably why I read so fast. Instead, I see images. It doesn’t happen immediately; I need to get into the reading for the picture to appear. But once it comes, the images are so vivid, colorful and strong that I often have the impression that I saw a movie based on the reading.

And it’s not only fiction that gives me vivid imagery. History and sociology provide very clear pictures of their own. Today, I was reading the new history of Ukraine by a Harvard scholar and could clearly see the faces of the medieval Slavs the author talks about.

What is it for you? Do you hear words or see images when you read? 

I’m back at the hospital for a checkup and the nurse is giving me the guidelines on post-op care.

“No vacuuming, no mopping, you can wash dishes at the sink if you want but don’t bend over to the dishwasher. If you really need to do laundry, do it in small, light loads.”

Given that I wouldn’t do any of this stuff with or without the operation, the conversation reminded me of the joke where a patient asks, “Doctor, will I be able to play the violin after the operation?”

“Well, I don’t see why not,” the doctor says. “This is a simple appendectomy.”

“Oh, that’s a miracle!” the patient exclaims. “I never played the violin before!”

Hormones are the craziest thing, people. During the pregnancy, my hair became extremely tangled. Forget Jewfros, this was one huge, thick, matted mess that remained uncombed for months.

“Please don’t make me deal with it!” the hairdresser begged when she saw it. I reassured her that I wasn’t going to because the only solution for that hair was to pour massive amounts of chemical solutions into it and I obviously wasn’t doing that during the pregnancy. I was lucky to be on sabbatical because I was simply not presentable in human society with this hair.

And then, in the last two weeks of pregnancy, the hair magically untangled itself and straightened out. (I mean, it was my definition of straight and untangled. To everyone else it probably looks very curly.) It just happened, completely on its own. So weird.

What bothers me about our shared political space is how eagerly people react to the superficial, trivial stuff and how readily they dismiss anything of substance.

Take, for instance, the current drama over Kasich’s “women left their kitchens” comment. There is plenty to dislike about Kasich but his actual record as governor never even gets discussed. Instead, everybody descends into a ridiculous paroxysm over an entirely reasonable, casual comment. I’m not even interested in finding out which specific orthodoxy this particular comment happened to slight because these regular bouts of outrage are growing too indistinguishable and too frequent.

We just received a social security number for the baby. It’s so cute, she’s so tiny, yet already has a bunch if paperwork to her name.

So we are now watching the Norwegian TV show Occupied about an imaginary Russian invasion of Norway. All I can say is that Putin must be deeply flattered. Everything he’s been doing has paid off if Europeans finally imagine Russians not as pathetic recipients of charity but as a fearsome, malignant power they cannot resist.

For me, the most interesting aspect of the show is that it reveals the emerging anxieties about the erosion of the nation-state model. The very meaning of the nation is in question and the characters are trying to learn to live with this new reality. 

Today we cleaned the house, then my friend came by with her kids. We had the very first barbecue of the season since it’s so hot outside. Then we watched some TV and chatted.

Everything is exactly as usual, except that there’s a tiny baby sleeping in the midst of it all.

Totally blows my mind.

A friend who studies the Ukrainian revolution was interviewing an Azerbaijani fellow who became a Ukrainian nationalist and fought in the Maidan, defending the revolution.

“I like that Ted Cruz fellow,” the Azerbaijani suddenly announced.

“But why??” asked my friend.

“He’s right when he says that all those Mexicans are destroying the White Culture. Why do they keep coming in? They need to be kept out!”

In case you don’t understand why this is funny, you need to know that Azerbaijanis were not considered white back in the USSR. Today, the Azerbaijani man is member of an ultra-nationalist Ukrainian organization. He was only granted partial membership, though, because the nationalists are wary of all those non-white folks who keep pouring across the border.

N says he dreamt of a map with the directions of Russian aggression against other countries marked with red arrows. There were Georgia, Ukraine, Syria. . .

“And one other country,” he says. “But I don’t remember what it was.”

“You need to remember!” I say. “What if the dream means you accidentally accessed a telepathic network Putin uses to let Russians know who the next enemy is?”

For now, N hasn’t figured out Russia’s next target but he’ll keep trying.

We are now watching Better Call Saul, the Breaking Bad spinoff. I resisted the idea of watching this show for a while because I liked neither the character of Saul nor the story line in the original show, but Better Call Saul is proving to be very good.

What I especially like is the unglamorous depiction of lawyering. My students think that nothing can be better than becoming a lawyer and don’t believe me when I tell them that chic offices in Manhattan skyscrapers filled with fashionably dressed, leisurely individuals they see on TV are not what lawyering is like for most people in the profession.