My sister is visiting, and that means I’m having a day of shopping and visiting beauty salons. Here are the magazines I bought to feed my magazine addiction:

So did you hear that Pistorius was found not guilty of murder?

Apparently, society’s approval of unhinged hysterics who claim to freak out over completely imaginary threats and slaughter innocent people is not an exclusively American thing.

I’m very intrigued by the magic powers of this “I felt threatened for absolutely no reason so I murdered people” defense. It seems to leave folks world over weak in the knees. Fear – no matter how ridiculous and irrational – justifies everything, even murder. Burly armed fellows kill kids, pregnant women, unarmed teenagers, then claim they were scared and everybody exclaims, “Oh well, in that case, the freak totally deserves this!”

Societies that would never even consider conceding everybody the right to laziness, weakness, incapacity to make money and a whole host of other pretty normal things easily grant the right to murder because of a psychological problem that is not in any way different. It’s beyond bizarre that while nobody would take seriously the defense of “I was lazy and bored so I killed an unarmed person in the toilet”, the defense of “I chose to be irrationally scared and committed murder” is constantly given so much weight.

Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings is not wholly devoid of value, though. It allows us to see with greater clarity what the new era we are entering into will be like. Everybody in The Interestings is a throwback to the past that is now gone and cannot be brought back.

The novel’s characters share one defining feature that completely takes over their lives: they have no capacity whatsoever to look inside themselves for solutions to their problems or even for an insight into what these problems are. This is all the more shocking given that the novel’s protagonist Jules is a psychotherapist. Even that, however, doesn’t make her aware of the existence of psychological problems either in herself or in anybody else. Like the rest of the characters, Jules spends her entire life beating her head against the same old issue that bothered her in adolescence without moving an inch in the direction of resolving it or progressing to the next stages in her development.

As Ulrich Beck once pointed out, we are entering an era where there is no alternative to looking for “biographical solutions to systemic contradictions.” This means that the only thing you can do to improve your lot in life is changing yourself, simply because there isn’t much more that it is in your powers to change. One could refuse to accept this new reality or one could try to adapt to it. Both are valid life choices, in my view, although for myself I have very obviously chosen the latter. What I do find unacceptable is a profound incapacity ever to recognize the existence of these choices. I don’t get people who spend their entire lives in the state of staring in shock at their own existences, asking “And what the hell was that?” 

Wolitzer’s characters are the perfect example of people who live in the state of a deadly lack of self-awareness. This is a way of being in the world that was maybe possible 20 or 30 years ago. Today, this option is no longer available. And when I look at the characters in The Interestings, I can’t avoid thinking that maybe that’s not such a bad thing at all.

The most interesting thing about The Interestings is how addicted the author is to every single trite and boring cliche known to humanity. The fascination of the book, to me, resided in trying to guess if there was going to be an authorial wink, signaling that Wolitzer knew that these cliches were stupid and possibly even offensive to some people. I missed any indication that she was aware of what she was doing.

Here are some of the cliches that organize the novel’s plot:

1. Jews are brilliant at making money. They make tons of it. And they help each other in secret ways to make money.

2. Nobody but Jews can make money.

3. Even half-Jews are incapable of making money. But they can always try to attach themselves to money-making Jews and leech off them.

4. Jews can’t have good marriages because they are too fucked up by their parents.

5. It’s a woman’s lot to bear in cheerful silence any ridiculous antic that her husband might throw and any form of torture he might subject her to for decades. But it’s not a husband’s role to do anything like this for his wife.

6. Few things in life are worse than having an autistic child because those autistics are just useless and icky.

7. Dancers of any age, gender or race are extremely sexual in a way that non-dancers can’t hope to be.

8. Hippies are horrible parents and immoral drug addicts.

9. Everybody wants to be an artist. But you are only a real artist when you make tons of money. But you won’t manage to make tons of money because. . . see cliches 1 and 2.

I also have positive things to say about the book but they will have to wait until the next post.

My sister is coming to give a talk to my students about their career prospects. She will tell them that a college degree does NOT lead to a better job or a higher salary.

Instead, it leads to a better career. Faster promotion, greater lifetime earnings, better prospects. And this is something that recent graduates really need to know: people with college degrees should start thinking of their lives in terms of fashioning a career, not just finding a job.

College graduates will probably find the same job and get the same starting salary as people who didn’t go to college. However, college grads will have a completely different life strategy which will be about life-long projects, not solving a temporary need of the moment. They will not get stuck in those first jobs for nearly as long. And that’s the whole point: not being a helpless toy of forces beyond your comprehension.

OK, maybe I also need to give a talk. Of the motivational kind, possibly.

A great thing about one’s husband beating his gaming addiction is that one gets a really powerful gaming computer to feed one’s blogging addiction.

Thank you, everybody who posted in the Anniversary thread. You are good people, and it was helpful to know you were all here, waiting for me to come back.

I am now posting answers to the comments in that thread.

Translators rule:

Dutch literary translator Hans Boland has refused to accept an award from the Russian authorities for his work, in protest at ‘president Putin’s behaviour and thinking’, the NRC reports. Boland should have been awarded the Pushkin medal by Putin himself on November 4, the NRC says. The Pushkin medal is the highest cultural award Russia can bestow and was to have been given to Boland for his highly praised translations of works by Dostoyevsky, Pushkin and other Russian greats.

In a letter to the cultural attaché at the Russian embassy in The Hague, Boland wrote of Putin: ‘He is a very major danger to peace and freedom on our planet. Every relationship between him and me, between his name and that of Pushkin, is disgusting and insupportable.’

Thank you, dear fellow translator! It appears that in the world of wimpy, mumbly politicians and useless, stupid journalists only we, the translators, can tell the truth. It’s so great that finally somebody spat in Putin’s ugly excuse for a face.

Yale built an enormous School of Management building. This project was, of course, a lot more urgent than trying to make sure that Yale undergrads actually get to talk to a real professor at least once in their entire college career.

“When the Russian attack on Ukraine started, there were many predictions that the West, with its huge advantages in money and military power would have little trouble brushing Putin aside. But so far it has been Putin’s Russia that has outclassed and humiliated the West’s divided, slow moving, and deeply unimaginative leaders.”

“An East Tennessee woman convicted of child neglect in her teenage daughter’s cancer death is asking the state Supreme Court to declare that she is innocent because she relied on prayer to heal the girl. Jacqueline Crank was sentenced to unsupervised probation after her 15-year-old daughter died of Ewing’s sarcoma in 2002.” Yet another indication that children are not people. I’m horrified that we still consider it not really a crime for parents to eat their children.

“My conclusion is that, once we add “get good student evaluations” to the mix of requirements for our country’s teachers, we are asking for them to conform to their students’ wishes, which aren’t always good. Many of the students in this country don’t like doing homework (in fact most!). Only some of them like to be challenged to think outside their comfort zone. We think teachers should do those things, but by asking them to get good student evaluations we might be preventing them from doing those things.” I have no idea how one can despise students this way and still claim to be an effective teacher.

“Your harangue on how privilege allowed someone to get somewhere they otherwise would not have might sound in the swim to you, but all your unlucky listener will ever hear is: “Your life is a sham, you don’t deserve what you have, and you are personally evil.””Exactly.

“In the last few years, he reports, “scientists have begun to think that procrastination might have less to do with time than emotion. Procrastination ‘really has nothing to do with time-management,'” Thompson quotes Joseph Ferrari, a psychology professor at DePaul University, as saying.” This is why I keep repeating that there is no such thing as laziness. What we call laziness is, in reality, a very traumatized psyche.

“Corruption and the resulting government weakness and incompetence are the core reasons Ukraine is in trouble today. If Ukraine had managed to build a strong economy and effective government in the 25 years of independence since 1990, Vladimir Putin would have no hope of breaking up the country.” Putin still doesn’t have a hope of “breaking up the country.” The so-called East vs West division in Ukraine is a myth concocted in the Kremlin and joyfully embraced by brainless Western journalists who are too lazy to research anything before publishing.

Funny: “The SAT “is a blatant class indicator,” Green tells me. “The entire system of standardized tests and higher education is completely ridiculous and ludicrous. But colleges haven’t found any other way to objectively evaluate the merits of a student. You have thousands of students applying to your school — there has to be a way to compare them to one another in terms of math and language and writing skill.”

“It is true that as a small child I was very ashamed of being such a deficient and also inadvertently mean person. I was afraid of being thrown out on the street if I made any further errors at all, or if I did not manage to function entirely at the service and for the pleasure of my caregiver. I knew that nobody else would put up with me, and my death on the street would be long and painful. I was willing to give a great deal of myself in exchange for avoiding that.” Hello, sister. I’ve had this exact same experience. Did we grow up together by any chance?

“The Obama administration this week declassified papers, after 45 years of top-secret status, documenting contacts between Jerusalem and Washington over American agreement to the existence of an Israeli nuclear option.” Gosh, what a huge surprise.

Birth control cupcakes.

Astronomical bedclothes.

“Sanctions will have no short-term impact on Russian behavior at this point. Vaunted Western “soft power” has been run over by Russian tanks. The decision for war has been made in Moscow, and it will be prosecuted until Putin achieves his objectives or the cost — rising numbers of Russian dead — becomes politically prohibitive. . . If the West wants to prevent more Russian aggression and save Ukraine from further Kremlin depradations, it must offer Kyiv armaments, logistics, training, and above all intelligence support without delay. Nothing else will cause Moscow to back down.” Putin reads “soft power” as simply “soft.” It is high time somebody understood that.

Take this test to find out which Yiddish word describes you. Apparently, I’m a kvetcher.