By the way, my mother is loving my new book. This is a great sign because it’s aimed at regular people, not academics.

She says it sounds like my father wrote it which is a great compliment because he’s the smartest person I ever met.

My mother isn’t normally generous with compliments, to put it very mildly. So it’s not like she’s blinded by maternal love and can’t be objective. She’s…. erm…. not like that, so to speak.

American postmodernists love futuristic dystopias because their readers’ lives are so comfortable, they like to titillate themselves with visions of imaginary religious autocracies interfering with their sex lives.

Realists write for normies with actual problems, so they don’t need to invent anything.

AI is actually quite weird. I tried one of those AI apps that finds research articles on the topic you indicate and gives summaries of article PDFs.

The AI is adamant that I should only read research from former USSR countries. It gives me nothing outside of lists and lists of Kyrgyz, Uzbek and so on sources.

It overanalyzes, and the results are unusable. It’s like a suitor who tries too hard to please and ends up scaring one off completely.

A woman came late to yesterday’s event. She crashed through several rows of attendees, deposited herself at the front, and emitted a large string of mucousy, barking coughs.

After covering the first three rows of the audience in sputum, she reached into her bag, extracted a grimy single-use mask and put it on.

This attitude was topped by that of one of the moderators who wore her mask whenever anybody else spoke but removed it every time it was her turn to speak.

People have the most unusual relationships with their masks. I’m sure they have some sort of a theory about what these masks do but I can’t figure out what that is.

George Saunders is a famous postmodernist writer. He’s also mega-woke because wokeism is an outgrowth of postmodern thought.

But it’s really funny because his books show how far leftism has traveled in only a few years. In Saunders’s 2006 short story collection In Persuasion Nation, there’s a character who’s an irate, prudish conservative. This character insists that… get this… feminine men are actually women, and mainly women are really men. If a man has longish hair, a soft voice and a passion for baking, he’s really a lady.

In the short story, this is all presented as sexist insanity coming from an angry conservative. Fast forward to today, and conservatives are banned from social media for saying that a dude with a soft voice, long hair and a penchant for baking is still a dude. I watch these dissident far-right podcasts in secret where people say that women who don’t like color pink and frilly dresses are still women. Shhh, don’t tell anybody I know. I don’t want to be a social pariah.

It’s very funny that in 2006 liberals worried that conservatives would insist that any deviation from the most rigid sex stereotypes meant you are actually the opposite sex. And then those same liberals went and did exactly that. I wonder if Saunders remembers that story he authored as he diligently refers to dudes in dresses as “she” and rants about “life-saving gender care”.

Everybody is surprised that Trump is running as a centrist. He’s saying a federal abortion ban at 6 weeks is insane and wouldn’t even make a firm promise at 15 weeks. He’s refusing to say that a man can’t become a woman.

The only reason why this is surprising is that people have bought into the silly news coverage that keeps trying to present him as a far-right autocrat.

In reality, Trump has always been consistently centrist and the most open to bipartisan thinking of all presidents since I can remember. Forget the noise and think back to what he actually did in what concerns crime, immigration, COVID – everything.

Trump is far-right like Obama was a Communist. And he’s an authoritarian like Biden is a teenager.

I went to a workshop on how to use AI. The presenter showed us how she uses prompts to have the chatbot create detailed activities for students. We all oohed and aahed appropriately.

At the end, a colleague asked, “But so who writes all these texts? Are there people on the other end typing this all up real fast?”

I heard the professor of information technology sitting next to me suck in a huge gulp of air to avoid collapsing. Everybody stared at their notepads in deep concentration.

It’s extraordinary how many people think that a budget starts with needs.

“Here is what I need for each important purpose, here’s the total. That’s my budget!”

The idea that a budget starts with the total sum available, which is then allocated to specific needs, seems completely alien to people.

“But I need more for my needs!”

Well, I need it to start snowing immediately but it’s 90°F outside, and I’m dealing.

The problem of the global order we inhabit is not that there’s a big, scary master plan to do bad things.

No, the real problem is that there is no plan.

People keep saying Klaus Schwab. The poor old guy is pushing ninety and has no idea about anything. Schwab is just an old dude who enjoys running his mouth to attract attention.

Look at whoever your in-group suggests as the big evil mastermind, and you’ll see a doddering, confused old man or a doddering, confused Justin Trudeau.

The economic model we are slipping into is unsustainable. Not just for me and you. It’s unsustainable for the Schwabs and the Trudeaus, as well. And they have no idea how to get out of this bind.

The solution will be found, of course, but not from a place of deep anxiety that forces people to fantasize about omnipotent evildoers who control everything.

The first time in my life I had a conversation in Ukrainian was in January. I read a lot in the language in my teens, and I went to the Ukrainian theater with my Dad after the independence but I never spoke because there wasn’t anybody to speak with. And since 1998 I haven’t read either. A couple of years ago, when I wanted to publish in a Ukrainian journal, I couldn’t even begin to write. I wrote my article in English, and my Dad translated it for me. Now I speak fluently and wrote a 400-page book in the language since April.

People see the shiny part – a book, an interest from the publisher, a plan for another book. Nobody sees the grind. Even N asked me yesterday how come my sister and I are from the same family but I’m a lot more Ukrainianized and speak so well. I speak because I taught myself this year. I worked like a dog on it and I keep working on it.

It’s like this in everything. People say, “you are lucky, you have such a calm child.” Lucky, yeah. My kid inherited all of my sensory difficulties because why wouldn’t she? They have run in the family for generations. I’m working like an indentured servant since her birth to make it easier for her to process the inevitable sensory overload. Also, it’s really weird to see me as fortunate in the child-bearing department but that’s another issue. I’ve even heard “you are lucky you could give birth at 40 with no complications”. Well, let me tell you about complications because complications and I spent many years in each other’s company.

Everything is a grind. I’m not complaining, I like the grind. But nothing just happens. You work like a dog and then work some more. That’s life.