I’m fascinated by Sarma Melngailis’s memoir (the one with the abortion story I quoted yesterday). It’s identical to the novels of neoliberal femininity that I discuss in my new book. Their heroines can have every economic advantage, fantastic careers, connections, achievements, riches – and they’ll throw it all away to pursue the dream of being enslaved by a low-quality dude. They all either reject the possibility of having children or dump the children they already have in order to be free to get bossed around and humiliated by some random guy. And not by some very manly, alpha type but a hyena-like degraded loser. I’m not talking Shades of Gray. This isn’t women prostituting themselves in inventive ways. That wouldn’t be an interesting development because that always existed.

I’ve been observing this phenomenon for as long as I have been a literary critic. There’s no medieval or Victorian heroine that would dream of being as slavishly and abjectly subservient to a man as the modern liberated woman. And look at Melngailis who is not writing fiction but narrating her life. It’s still the exact same thing. Total self-abasement for some utterly worthless dude. Or a bunch of dudes. In these stories, a successful, serious man who offers respect, equality and parity gets rejected in favor of some antisocial, emasculated loser gigolo. Melngailis discarded a wonderful husband who gave her everything to pursue feminized (in her own description), much younger men who sucked her dry and spat her out.

Nobody is talking about this because we are stuck on the idea that female liberation in real life should result in literature that celebrates said liberation. But what actually exists in accounts of women’s lives (be they fictional or not) is a wasteland of such horror that no 19th-century female character upset with the expectations of being the Angel in the House could even imagine.

Melngailis is completely liberated of all societal expectations. Highly successful in very masculine jobs (she worked for Bear Stearns and Bain Capital and made a packet, then founded a successful restaurant in NYC). Not burdened by family and children. Free from any form of morality. Sexually promiscuous with zero societal stigma. The dream has been fulfilled! Yet read her memoir and you’ll see what abject misery this dream brought her. This isn’t my interpretation. Melngailis doesn’t claim that how her life unfolded is anything short of catastrophic.

“I feel like I’m under occupation,” said N, closing the door to the room where I was doing my Duolingo exercises.

Another great conservative publishing project is Bulkington Books. They take historical texts that have been unfairly forgotten and bring them back to life. One example is this book:

Kermit Roosevelt was the son of President Teddy Roosevelt. This book is his account of fighting in WWI that was published in 1919. Kermit served in Mesopotamia and left this fascinating description of what he saw and experienced. He was a book lover and used every opportunity between battles, skirmishes, and sitting in trenches to read Xenophon and Plutarch. It’s quite extraordinary how well-read this young man was and how dedicated to improving his mind by the practice of ceaseless reading. There are some absolutely stunning stories in War in the Garden of Eden of the lengths Kermit would go to procure reading matter.

Kermit Roosevelt’s quiet dignity and an unhurried gift for observation make this book a gem. It reads extremely easily. I even read parts aloud to my 9-year-old, and she liked them. Still, publishing this slim volume today takes courage. Kermit Roosevelt was erased from literary history because his writing reflects the sensibility of his time. It’s not politically correct according to today’s norms. Kermit speaks in a way that we can no longer tolerate. And while he read ancient Greeks and easily tolerated their difference from his early twentieth-century sensibility, we are not nearly as strong. Even somebody from only just a century ago wounds our tender psyches that collapse under the realization that in the past people thought and spoke differently.

Bulkington added photos and newspaper clippings to Kermit’s narrative to help the reader get a feel for the time when he lived. We can all be proud of Kermit and a great culture that produced such an impressive young man. Bulkington Books wants us to make place in our understanding of American history for edifying and fascinating stories like that of Kermit Roosevelt. This is a wonderful goal, and I wish this publisher every success.

Finally, I have figured out a way to attract a boatload of profane, vicious replies without referring to IQ or race.

— Charles Murray (@charlesmurray) July 8, 2025

To recap a day-long fountain of vitriol, Murray got in the way of people feeling sorry for themselves, and they can’t get over it.

What Murray doesn’t understand is that it’s precisely because life is easy and good that people need to pretend everything is terrible. If there were real hardship, they’d do the exact opposite.

This is from a memoir of a childless woman who got pregnant at 39 and had an abortion. The events described take place immediately after the abortion:

When I reached Twenty-First Street, the truck was there, as expected. I ordered my all-time favorite comfort food. Not raw, but still vegan: a Mediterranean platter with a pile of silky hummus, pickled cabbage salad, tabouli, and the most delicious falafel with tahini sauce. I took it home to my cozy backroom office, sat at my desk, and scanned through new emails, while devouring the food. Almost as if I was trying to quickly fill the space that had just been otherwise occupied. Baby out; falafel in, I thought. Then I got back to work.

The Girl with the Duck Tattoo: A Memoir

Of course, after this the woman proceeded to self-destruct in the most egregious ways. You can’t lie to your psyche. It knows when you do violence to it and repays you severely.

The beach is empty, which I most definitely don’t hate for myself. I am, of course, hopeful that tourists return soon to this wonderful area.

Not having to step over 5 rows of vacationers is not something I mind, as you can probably guess. Plus, I can listen to my book without headphones because there’s nobody here to be disturbed by the sound.

Here’s the most recent video, by the way. It caused such a scandal that people started unsubscribing en masse. There are viewers who can’t tolerate any criticism of Trump. They are leftists at heart. They need an idol they can worship and a party line they need to parrot. This is not OK because we already have a Left in this country. What we need is an alternative to its lockstep fanaticism.

Florida is in a category all its own:

A great state, a great vibe, a great sense of humor.

In 1987-88, it suddenly became possible in the moribund USSR to publish and discuss things that previously we hadn’t been allowed to know about. Suddenly, everybody was subscribing to a dozen thick journals that printed all sorts of forbidden novels, essays, memoirs, historical treatises, poems, etc. People would stop in the middle of a park and strike up a debate with complete strangers. Large groups would form to observe the discussion and express support for one of the debaters. My parents were of the debating kind, and many an outing in my childhood was interrupted by my father stopping in a square or on a busy street corner and starting a spontaneous lecture on some utterly random but heretofore forbidden topic. Crowds would gather fast, and I’d sigh hopelessly, realizing that we weren’t going to be able to leave that spot for at least an hour.

People were finally free to talk about things that mattered. To read, to debate, to think. It was an extraordinary time when the life of the mind flourished, and there weren’t enough hours in the day to read all the exciting new books and share your thoughts about them. The stultifying decades of being forced to parrot the party line were over. We knew that a lot had been concealed from us “for our own good”, and anybody who could point the way to where the truth could be found became an instant hero.

People walked around with the overwhelmed and happy look of prisoners who had been let out of a dungeon and were seeing the sunshine and the flowers for the first time. These were the people in my parents’ circle and others like them. The intelligentsia, the thinking individuals. Of course, there were also those who hated the changes, and they were possibly even more numerous. They didn’t want to be exposed to any new ideas. They wanted to be told what to think and to be allowed to persecute those who thought differently. The conflict between these two groups was never resolved and later spilled out into a war.

But that’s not what I’m talking about here. My point is that this is exactly how it feels in America today. All of the new publishing houses, books, ideas, thoughts. We don’t stop in the middle of the park like my Dad had to because we have social media for that purpose. But the feeling and the excitement are the same.

And that’s really great. It means freedom will always win in the end.

BREAKING: DOJ and FBI have concluded that Jeffery Epstein had no "client list," and committed suicide, per Axios

— unusual_whales (@unusual_whales) July 7, 2025

Yes, he had no clients. Ghislaine Maxwell is in jail for procuring children to rape for absolutely no one. This makes a lot of sense.