Not only did I have a public appearance in Ukraine on Tuesday (37,000 views so far, yay!) but I was also invited to give a conference talk today. I was certain that I was expected to speak in Ukrainian, and I had written out my whole talk, quotes, bibliography, everything.

Twenty minutes before the talk I discovered that they wanted me to speak in Spanish. It’s easier for me to speak off-the-cuff in Spanish than in Ukrainian at this point but I had prepared! My tendency to be rigid is experiencing sore trials, indeed.

In Sara Mesa’s novel Un amor, Nat escapes the complications of her professional life in a big city by moving to a small, remote village. Except for a few elderly people, everybody in the village is from somewhere else. “It’s a village where no children are born any longer,” people say.

Nat is living the neoliberal dream, moving around with complete freedom, changing careers at whim. She’s completely unburdened by family, relationships, friends. No ties bind her, no societal structure oppresses her, she very freely chooses what to do with her body and nobody gives a toss – it’s gotta be great, right?

But no, it’s not great at all. Young women are supposed to be the greatest beneficiaries of neoliberalism but as Un amor shows us, reality is different.

Seriously, a friend needs this for a serious purpose.

Who do you think is more relatable, JD Vance or Tim Walz? Which group would find either man more relatable?

Also, do people perceive Vance as elitist because he went to Yale?

I have my answers but I might be completely wrong about it because I’m a poor judge of relatability.

This is for a friend from another country (not Ukraine).

Is anybody following the charges in the Eric Adams corruption case? I’m overwhelmed at work and can’t look into it in detail. Is it true he’s charged over airplane ticket upgrades back in 2018-19? Or anything else?

I detest corruption but is this real corruption? Or political persecution?

I don’t like Adams, obviously. But I’m interested in what’s actually happening.

We solved the problem with the Comment section, and things have become much easier. I’m so glad. It only required a small change in the settings but WordPress keeps fussing with the interface, and it’s a chore to figure out where everything is and how to change it.

However, that’s a poor excuse for not doing it earlier. I apologize to everybody for the inconvenience and for not having changed the settings earlier. Please keep pointing out things that don’t work because I see everything very differently from the app and don’t know what the experience is for everybody else.

Sara Mesa’s novel Un amor came out in English translation. This is the novel that inspired me to write a book about neoliberal love.

Sara Mesa is a hit-and-miss author. Sometimes she’s brilliant and sometimes you can see that she rushes things to get a book out to satisfy the publisher deadline. Un amor is her greatest success. It’s a short novel that offers a spot-on diagnosis of neoliberal love.

If people decide to read the novel, I’ll be happy to walk them through it once they are done right here on the blog. It’s about neoliberalism. And love. And translation. It’s very good.

A primitive person hears somebody say one thing he disagrees with and then never wants to hear from that source ever again. “If ABC is wrong about the price of cucumbers in Guam,” he says, “it follows that ABC must be wrong about everything else.”

An intellectually developed person has the exact opposite approach. He might disagree with ABC about everything but if ABC said something once that he found useful or worth considering, he will concentrate on that and feel grateful to ABC for assisting him on his intellectual journey.

Speaker Mike Johnson is trying to help Zelensky save face after the debacle of this visit to the US. He’s written a letter to Zelensky where he blames the Ukrainian ambassador to the US who organized the visit. She’s known for being a Dem-besotted twat but we all understand that it’s ultimately Zelensky’s responsibility. Johnson is an absolute class act who’s doing the diplomatic, kind, and truly Christian thing. I’m very impressed.

I also remember how he tied himself into knots to get the Ukraine aid bill passed while the Biden administration gaslit him and Ukrainians, behaving in a way that robbed me of years of my life.

He’s never going to be popular because he’s soft-spoken and old-fashioned but I’d vote for him today if he ran for president.

By the way, my Ukrainian interview about the terrible mistakes of Zelensky’s visit is my most popular yet, with over 30,000 views and overwhelmingly positive comments.

Dude, I don’t know. He never said. Dads don’t usually discuss such things, do they? She was mega pretty, had a crowd of suitors. They were barely out of their teens when they met.

They got married because that was the only normal development for falling in love back then. People in that age group didn’t cohabit or date around. I can’t even imagine anybody suggesting to a young woman like my mother anything other than marriage.

They were married for 47 years until my father’s death.

I have received a request to review an article for a journal in Tunisia. It’s almost as cool as when I was asked to review for the journal of the Czech Society of Greek Studies.

These aren’t random requests. I actually am the best person to review these articles but still, how strange, right? Czech scholars of Greek Studies and a Tunisian journal. It’s really cool.