This is a sad day when Democrats in Congress block aid for Israel and Ukraine, sacrificing it to their need to facilitate sky-high levels of illegal immigration to the US.

Lowering the rates of illegal immigration has broad, bipartisan support among voters. So does military support for Ukraine and Israel. But Democrats choose to disregard the voters’ wishes on the altar of their single-minded obsession with eliminating national borders.

Yesterday, Klara’s second-grade teacher sat next to her for 20 minutes, trying to figure out why Klara was staring into an open book. She didn’t believe the kid was reading.

This does not bode well for the education system if a 7-year-old who reads is an uncommon sight in a classroom.

To the person who misses me and wants to hang out: me, too! I’m available for lunch tomorrow in St Louis.

Yes, I now have dreams in Ukrainian quite often. It’s really weird because in the awake state I can speak Ukrainian very fluently if I remove the control in my head completely. The second I start thinking about a word or an expression, I stop dead in my tracks and can’t say anything at all. A language is like dancing. You can’t think about what you are doing because it will stop everything. The most important thing for language learning is knowing how to relinquish control.

As for Steve Sailer’s observations about the characteristics of autogynephiliacs, he’s spot on. Confused young girls are a casualty of a paraphilia common to some highly intelligent, rich and influential men in very masculine fields, such as the military, sports, IT, etc. Part of their paraphilia is to bend others to their will and make them unwilling participants in the paraphiliacs’ performance. These are people who can put enormous sums of money and high-level connections into practicing their fetish. The brother of Illinois governor Pritzker is a great example.

For password-protected posts, please send me an email at clarissasblog@hotmail.com, and I’ll email you the password.

My notary in Canada says Quebec is going to start prohibiting non-residents from buying real estate in the province. That’s wonderful and pretty unbelievable news. Young couples in Canada no longer can buy a house in major cities in Canada because real estate is being bought out by rich foreigners as an investment, and this drives up the costs of housing in insane ways. This, if true, will be the most nation-state measure I’ve known Quebec to take.

Our town was always great in terms of housing prices. I used to see many students graduate, get married and buy a house for $110,000-$130,000. But now, it’s weird. We have new apartment buildings with $700,000 two-bedroom apartments and a whole new lane of Tesla chargers being installed. It feels like a bunch of rich people moved in.

This deserves to be watched in full, my friends. Presidents of Harvard, MIT and Penn disagree that calling for a genocide of Jews constitutes bullying and harassment according to their universities’ code of conduct:

This is truly one of the most out there things I’ve seen, and I work with people like these every day. We’ve spent a week hearing endless outbursts of outrage over some anti-semitic no-name Twitter accounts, but when presidents of 3 major universities say that calling for a genocide of an ethnic group is not necessarily wrong, that’s perfectly fine. There’s, you know, context.

It’s just truly.

I mean.

Is this finally going to make an impression?

Now I have a question for everybody. I read a lot of entertainment literature. Should I post about it? I used to but then I felt that it was annoying everybody. So now I keep my Freida McFaddens, Lisa Gardners and John Lescroarts to myself.

Do we have any lovers of fun, entertaining, airport-type reading?

I live in rural Illinois, and I deeply love the nature here. The only nature I love more is in the North of Quebec. I especially love that my town is extremely walkable. Miles and miles of walking trails. I can walk from campus to home without ever coming in the vicinity of a car. Hell, I can walk from campus to church, although that would take hours. And maybe the word “hell” was not the best choice in this sentence.

To the reader who wrote all the sweet stuff, I want to say, thank you! This means an enormous lot, especially when you say you like my book recommendations. I live to recommend books.

Also, a great question about language teaching. I don’t do singing in the classroom, although singing is great for language learning. But I’m not only a terrible singer. I also get extremely distracted by music. I don’t do fun stuff in the classroom at all. No games, skits, videos, PowerPoints, projects. God, how I hate projects And you should see the face I make when students call me by my first name. I do a lot of traditional stuff. Conjugation drills, translation, daily quizzes. OK, I kind of suck. But students love it, so it works. I’m like this really old-fashioned professor from a C.P. Snow novel dressed like I’m on my way to a disco bar.

These are all great questions. I’m going to put this link on top of the page instead of the email because I never check the bloody email and it daunts me.

No, people, I’m not getting a tattoo. I already resolved my midlife crisis, remember? And in case it flares up again, I’m already writing the next book.

Now for the question about the best American writers of the moment. Even a couple of years ago my answer would be different but since then some of my favorite authors have gone woke, so I have to change my list.

I’d say the strongest US writer right now is Jennifer Egan. A Visit from the Goon Squad and Candyland are pretty brilliant. They are about chi-chi-frou-frou people figuring out fluidity. Very talented.

A new writer who is very gifted is Tess Gunty. I’ll write about her more soon but she’s the closest we got to a novelist of the crisis. Outstanding talent.

Bárbara Kingsolver hit it out of the park with Demon Copperhead, so I’m giving her a chance with whatever else she writes from now on. One novel isn’t a guarantee of anything but let’s be hopeful.

Jonathan Franzen is good, and Laura Lippmann is sloooowly becoming a real writer.

I feel like I’m forgetting somebody because this all sounds like extremely slim pickings. But that’s what I’ve got right now. Finding a decent American author these days is like mining for gold. I spend hours browsing shelves, reading first chapters, poring over reviews. This is hard work, folks.

Thank you for the question. It was lovely.

To the person who sent the first message: I love you, too! And I’m actually re-watching Grey’s Anatomy right now! I’m on season 10.

I miss you!!!