The first Ukrainian publisher I talked to didn’t work out. They were put off by the politicized aspect of the book and wanted pure lit crit, which I don’t do. Now I understand that the problem was that this is a private publishing house.

I’m now talking with a state-owned publisher that publishes textbooks and monographs for the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences, and they don’t mind the political aspect at all. For them, it’s all about my history of publication, my rank as a scholar, the quotation index, etc. Zero objections to content.

I’m trying to get a book subvention grant from my university to offset the publisher’s cost but it’s hard to convince the Ukrainian editor that it’s a real thing.

The book should be out by February. I started writing in April, so this would be a phenomenally fast process on all sides.

I’m really annoyed by the new talking point which is that “yes, we now know that school lockdowns did more harm than good but when we advocated for closures, we were operating with imperfect information and made the best choice available at that time.”

This is gaslighting of the most primitive kind. I took my kid on the first playdate of the quarantine on April 1, 2020. By that time, I already knew COVID wasn’t dangerous to children. There were already studies – 4 of them at that time – that this was no danger whatsoever to kids. By August 2020, the evidence was absolutely overwhelming that children didn’t suffer from or transmit COVID. I understand being unsure in April, but in August the amount of evidence was absolutely staggering. There was never a single – not one – study showing COVID as dangerous to children. It’s physiologically impossible for it to harm any but the already extremely ill children.

And I’m talking 2020. The people who claim they didn’t have the information that would have let them stop calling for lockdowns in August of 2021 are simply lying. The history of COVID is being rewritten right in front of us. Nobody took responsibility, which enables them to keep lying. “Oh, I didn’t know them what I know now!” Well, if you really didn’t know, you are an incompetent. Why are we still listening to somebody so darn useless?

Crowds of people turned out in the streets in the summer of 2020 to deface a statue of a 17th-century Catholic priest that was supposedly doing great damage to black kids. But when those black kids were saddled with irrecoverable learning loss because of lockdowns, nobody gave a crap.

People should take a long, hard look at themselves.

At the airport restaurant, you have to order and pay online. And the check still lists a minimum 18% tip.

The idea of tips has been completely perverted. Tips have become completely disconnected not only from the quality of service but even from its existence. They should be renamed into a restaurant surcharge.

It’s fun to laugh at “Queers for Palestine” slogans but it’s not true that people who hold them “don’t know” how gays are treated in Palestine. They know very well. And they have their own explanation that, to them, justifies their position completely. We are making a mistake in not finding out what it is.

The theory which “gays and feminists for Palestine” have embraced is that a dislike of gays, racism, sexism, economic inequality, and all other bad things were invented and imposed by evil, Western, white settler-colonialism on good, pure, egalitarian indigenous populations. If Palestinians kill gays it’s because they spent so much time under Western control that they forgot their original pro-gay beliefs and absorbed Western “hate”.

Stupid as this all sounds, this is what is taught in US schools to children. We should pay attention because all of those young people with green hair and nose rings who march for Palestine have been taught since kindergarten about the paradise of freedom and equality that existed among “indigenous communities” before “Western colonialism” perverted them.

This explanation of history was initially created by the philosopher of the Enlightenment Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Much later, it was adapted for the US education system by Howard Zinn. And now it’s the only version of history kids are taught.

If you didn’t know all this, the real dupe isn’t a queer trans feminist marching in support of Hamas but you.

Low birth rates in developed countries aren’t about contraception, abortion or feminism. They are about a completely new subjectivity, a new way of understanding the concept of a human being that was born with the Enlightenment and became consolidated throughout the 19th century. The very concept of a child as we understand it today was invented fairly recently in historical terms and has not been adopted worldwide. We don’t, for example, have our children crawl across the US border on their own. Our concept of a child is different. You can’t be a parent like I am or anybody on this blog is to 12 children. You expect to build a relationship with a child. It’s not a fact of nature, it’s an individual. It’s a miraculous, complex human being that you need to nourish in many more ways than food. When there’s no possibility of quality because that thought doesn’t even occur, quantity becomes the norm.

My friend from Africa is one of 13 children. Her husband, one of 11. In the US, they have 3, and she says all the time that it’s a completely different kind of motherhood and these are completely different children. You can’t relate to them like you would in Africa. You can’t push them out and forget they exist. My friend’s mother doesn’t know that she had her third kid in May. I asked if they had a fight but the friend stared at me in confusion. There was no fight. But with 13 kids, the mom doesn’t really care about one more grandchild. She’s never seen any of the 3 kids, and she lives in Canada. It’s a different way of being.

Cincinnati is strange. Obviously, I’m only seeing the downtown because at the conference I’m on the executive board, which means wall-to-wall events from 8:30 to 9 pm. But the downtown is grim. Worse than St Louis. Lots of marginalized black people in a heavily narcotized state. The stench of sewage. Miserable dollar stores. A gutted Walgreens. Flashers, drunks. No shopping unless you want to fear for your life the whole time.

But also, I’ve eaten better than I have in years. There’s this breakfast place that has a wraparound line waiting to get inside for at least an hour. I haven’t had such a high-quality breakfast since Berlin. A sensational bakery, and I don’t even like baked goods. Excellent coffee. Everything very expensive but European quality good.

I don’t know the inequality stats but this is the most stratified city I’ve seen in the US so far.

This is all utterly fake but can anybody explain what a “car note” is? I never heard of that. It’s clearly not insurance because there’s a separate line for that. Plus, the amount is way too high.

https://twitter.com/kateisabroad/status/1720474779369553977?t=olZB6-ds-entIAXEHRbSUA&s=19

I read the comments, and, curiously, she isn’t being attacked by any conservatives. Only the leftist mob is hassling her for being a white supremacist and writing a book they never read because it hasn’t been published yet.

When will people learn that you can’t win at the wokeness game? You’ll always lose because there’s always somebody more intersectionally diverse than you?

I first discovered I had a gift for public speaking in the penultimate year of high school. We had this big event where everybody was brought to a large auditorium, and my form teacher forced me to go on stage to recite a poem. I was still tragically shy back then, plus, it’s the uncomfortable age, you know. There are all these body parts that suddenly appear on your body, and there was a boy I liked in the audience who never knew I existed. Walking towards that stage was like ascending to the échafaud, whatever you call it in English.

But then, strangely, the moment I faced the audience, I became a different person. The students were going nuts, yelling and being rowdy, so I said in a loud, deep, authoritative voice I had no idea I possessed, “Everybody, shut up and listen to this poem.” There was complete silence, and I recited the poem in the same powerful voice.

Then I left the stage and resumed my life as a mousy, shy person.

People usually have to work hard to become good public speakers but I never had to work for it. Whenever I face an audience, the bigger the better, I suddenly become this very funny, extremely entertaining person. I have no problem with eye contact or engaging individual audience members. And then the moment the performance ends, I go back to being me. It’s really weird how it works. People always come up to me after my public appearances but by that time I’m already back to being me and just wanting them all to go away.

I feel no pride in my excellent public speaking skills because I never worked for them. It’s a gift that was always there. I don’t feel nervous before my talks, I don’t prepare, and often I look up the subject of the talk on my way to the venue.

I was told by people who are very familiar with the publishing industry in Ukraine that the patriotic thing to do is, as soon as it appears in print, to place it in open access on a few popular websites. I’m all for doing the patriotic thing, so I’ll heed this advice.

I’ll drop the links here as soon as that happens, and everybody will be able to read it. Yes, it’s in Ukrainian but my husband is reading it with the help of Google Translate. He takes copious notes and puts his objections and observations in writing. We have the most intense, fascinating discussions about it because he’s a profound thinker with a very unique point of view.