Here is a funny true story about today’s video.

My mother’s friends watched the video, saw the artificial background, decided it was a picture of my actual house, and started calling my mother en masse to say, “Your daughter is rich! Why did you never say??”

“I didn’t want to brag,” said my mother modestly, even though she likes nothing more.

“And there’s a baby grand piano!” friends kept exclaiming. “Who plays in her family?”

“My son-in-law is an amazing pianist,” my mother answered, even though N never played anything beyond the accordion that every Soviet child was forced to play. “My daughter also plays but not as well.”

Do I need to mention I don’t play?

So please feel free to head over to the video and look at the house where I don’t live and the piano I don’t play.

My new video titled “Is Wokism Doomed?”

I now have a regular spot on Friday mornings on this channel. 

By the way, I’m not making any money from these appearances. If I were to get paid, I’d have to fill out paperwork where I’d explain to our new woke chief administrator what it is I’m doing. And something tells me that “I now work as a pro-Trump pundit on social media” will not endear me to him.

The only reason I’m doing these appearances is because I have discovered late in life that I really, really enjoy doing them. If somebody told me at this time last year that I’d have this new hobby, I wouldn’t have believed them.

And also I want to remind everybody that all of this started because I was on a bus on Spain two years ago and I decided not to read or do anything and just sit there in silence for 5 hours, not consuming any media or texts. In the process of sitting there and not doing anything, I invented my Ukrainian book, and then things developed from there. You don’t know what’s hiding deep inside your brain. Give it a chance to come out by staying silent for several hours straight.

This week at work has been paradisiacal. The building is empty. I walk around, loudly doing my German exercises, which by the way:

I read, work on my book, take naps, walk more, do more German exercises. The building will be locked starting today and until everybody shows up in January. I will be expelled from this paradise in a few hours.

In Gisèle Pelicot’s place, I would completely refuse the trial, the publicity, all of it. Mind you, I’m not saying she should have refused. I’m saying I would have. In my worldview, I’m at least equally responsible for the relationships I create. Once again, I’m not saying Pelicot is responsible. I’m saying I am. I’m an active agent of my life, and if my half-a-century marriage were to lead to such ugliness, I’d care about nothing before figuring out why I constituted it this way. I’d definitely not want to spend the last few good years of my life on being a public spectacle.

I respect Pelicot’s choice but I really don’t get her lionization on social media. People are wailing that she’s the person of the century but that would be really sad for the century. A decade of being completely asleep to her own life and a passivity of extraordinary proportions do not merit all the gushing.

Education is a very faddy field. The newest fad has the clunky title of “social-emotional learning”, and it’s as dumb as you can gather from the title:

Much of what is termed “social-emotional learning” does not stem from developmental psychology, cognitive science, or neurology. The creators of these programs often lack the academic or professional background necessary to navigate this “social-emotional” space, yet they create programs that promise to address kids’ cognitive and emotional needs. They treat correlation as causation, reduce complex processes to linear constructs, and lack a developmental lens.

Most social-emotional curricula promise that kids will become little high-functioning adults—calm, organized, optimistic, and rational problem-solvers—forgetting that young people are still growing and learning (and that they are human). Yet, these expensive programs are apparently too compelling for administrators to pass up.

https://x.com/KarinMariaPsyD/status/1869715601872089524?t=wFzCPYASkPF89BJ0yGEt1Q&s=19

Most adults are not “calm, organized, optimistic, and rational problem-solvers.” To expect children to be that way is nuts. It’s not even a desirable thing that children should be like that. Experimenters in the field of education are promising to engineer away childhood, and they’ll fail. We need to stop humoring them and tolerating their inept theorizing.

My daughter uses “the latter and the former” correctly in casual conversations, and my students use apostrophe to denote the plural.

Putin said today that he started the war because he was bored. I expect an apology from everybody who kept repeating “NATO expansion” like an overheated parrot.

Even this they can’t get right. He said “dovboyob”. People whose languages have an impoverished swear vocabulary should not even try to understand all of the beautiful shades of meaning of the word “dovboyob”.

I respect Google Translate for this inspired translation:

Good for you, GT. A dovboyob is a dovboyob. Nobody translates whiskey, and it’s the same principle at work.

My friend and I arrived at the pre-Christmas dinner with identically wrapped gifts for each other from the same store. It’s a little, out-of-the-way store, not a chain or bog box, and we never discussed it with each other.

We went there on the same day and apparently said identical things to the shop owner.

“You don’t have an unhealthy attitude to food!” a friend said.

“Yes, I do,” I answered.

“No,” she said. “I’ve known you for years. I would have noticed.”

“I carry this picture with me on my phone,” I explained. “And I look at it often.”

“Oh,” she said.