“Look, Mommy, there’s a book about different kinds of fruit. That sounds interesting,” says Klara at the public library.

Of course, it immediately turned out that “fruit” is a dubiously appropriate metaphor for the only thing we should all be concentrating on 24/7, which is obviously sex:

DIFFERENT KINDS OF FRUIT

In this funny and hugely heartfelt novel from the Newbery Honor-winning author of Too Bright to See, a sixth-grader’s life is turned upside down when she learns her dad is trans.

People who are living on a different planet will say, “what’s the big deal? It’s just one book.” But it’s not one book. 100% of books featured at the library (meaning, taken purposefully out of the stacks and exhibited prominently where kids will see them) are aggressively woke. All of them. Always.

I don’t object to such a book being published or being present at the public library. What I do object to is that subject matter which is of interest to the smallest percentage of the population is constantly, insistently and relentlessly shoved into everybody else’s face.

It started with “why can’t we be left in peace to love whomever we love and be whatever we are” and somehow led to the place where I have to explain to my 7-year-old that pussy and fruit mean something different to some people and we should go home and order books online instead.

So I discovered a new (to me) genius writer. His name is Juan Manuel de Prada. He’s so good, I read the first 50 pages of a novel by him 3 times in a row before proceeding with the plot. Those pages were so well-written I couldn’t let them go, not even for an excellent plot.

Of course, then it turns out he’s against Ukraine. And not just mildly against but cuckoo bananas, howling at the moon kind of against. This obviously doesn’t change my professional opinion that he’s a once in a generation literary genius. But why, why can’t I get lucky once in a lifetime and find a favorite author with political beliefs that I don’t find nauseating?

Rafael Chirbes was a Commie. Juan Goytisolo, a Commie with shades of NAMBLA. Barbara Kingsolver and Richard Russo are woke. Ana Iris Simón is a Putin groupie. Ramon Saizarbitoria is an open-border lib. Again, none of this detracts from their talent. Art and politics occur in different dimensions. But I’d so enjoy having a favorite writer who isn’t a moron.

If the word “freedom” isn’t accompanied by an answer to the question of “freedom to do what?”, it becomes a meaningless word. Today, thanks to liberalism, it’s become the most disgustingly ambiguous word in existence.

Leonardo Castellani

I always find it interesting how eager the proponents of small governments are to embrace initiatives promising to legislate away uncomfortable opinions.

Yeah, and how are you going to do it “on day one”? What’s the methodology?

All you can achieve “on day one” is make her scared to say these things aloud. But you can’t instantaneously persuade her she’s wrong. You can’t even stop the discrimination itself. But yes, you can shut her up. Is that what we are going to do? See who scares the other more? Terrify each other into silence?

None of this can be solved by the government. We’ll have to figure it out ourselves, like adults. Nobody can legislate wokeness or anti-wokeness away. There are no easy, “day one” solutions.

Folks, you’ve got to get over to Twitter. Matt Walsh is performing unconventional sexual acts on the management of Fox News. He’s giving it to them every which way. It’s almost embarrassing to watch. But really fun, too.

So once again I’ve been able to save our French program. I sicced our labor union director on the administration. They immediately folded and even apologized.

This is the same union director who publicly accused me of “wanting to cause mass deaths in the community for my personal convenience” during COVID. But I don’t hold grudges. I made friends with him since then over Ukraine and his support of it.

There’s a huge drama online about a young woman who has an adjunct job at Columbia. She says she lives in poverty, and people are blowing a gasket because nobody understands how academia works.

Those adjunct jobs are miserable. They pay a little over $30,000 a year, and you never know if your contract will get extended. There’s no chance of career advancement, so you are stuck for life, chasing these crappy temporary gigs. Adjuncts often don’t even get office space and have to see students for office hours at coffee shops. They don’t live a life of the mind because they never find out it exists.

And what most people don’t know is that the more expensive a university is, the less likely it is that an undergraduate student will ever talk to a real professor and not be stuck with these itinerant, hassled, uninterested adjuncts with zero intellectual life. Pay for an Ivy, and get nothing but these Molly McGhees for your money because real professors prefer to teach graduate courses.

Only at a cheap school like mine you are guaranteed to take every course with a real professor.

So yeah, Molly McGhee probably is as indigent as she says. She also sounds extremely shallow with not a thought in her head beyond the usual woke sloganeering. This is what you get for $30,000 in New York with New York’s cost of living.

There is no such thing as a free lunch. You want a real education, create good working conditions for the professors. And if you are looking for a college for your kid, the #1 question to ask is what percentage of courses in the program you are interested in is taught by NTT (non-tenure-track) faculty. Or resign yourself to paying for bitter Molly McGhees.

Inspired by the Ukrainian sniper, I decided to take charge of my own life. Because of a snowflake colleague, I’m forced to teach a course in the Fall that I really don’t want to teach. I hate everything about this course. Advanced Spanish, really? It’s so stupid. But I have to teach it.

So I decided to get creative. I threw away the multi-stage placement test, the syllabus, the textbook, the digital workbook, the composition, the tests, the “oral presentation” – all that sorry, outdated crap.

Instead of dumb multiple-choice clicking in a digital workbook, lab will mean discussion groups and one-on-one conversations with a native speaker. Zero staring at a screen will occur. Instead of the textbook, we are reading literature. The exam will be conversation-based. People wanted me to teach Advanced Spanish which I don’t believe should be an actual course, well, that’s what it looks like when I do it.

This course will be epic, and when the snowflake colleague deigns to come out of her huff, she’ll be sorry she left it in my hands.

In 15 years at the very least, nothing changed about this course. And then people complain about low enrollments. I’m surprised we got anybody at all to participate in this charade.

And before people say, “of course, you can do this, you are a department Chair”, I did an identical thing with another course in my very first semester at this university. An older colleague who had lovingly designed that course back in the 1990s almost had a conniption fit when I refused to use her VCR tapes (really, I kid you not, actual VCR tapes). And it was fine, everybody survived. Instead of the 15 students she normally attracted to this course, I got 70. (It’s a content course, not language).

I watched an interview with a Ukrainian sniper Serhey Pozniak. He was a successful businessman in his fifties and a father of 4 when the war started. Then he enlisted and became a sniper. One day, he stepped on a landmine and lost his leg.

With all that, Pozniak has a sweet, sunny personality.

“I’m fine with re-dislocation marches,” he says softly, with a self-conscious smile. “I can do 8 kilometers on this temporary prosthesis, it’s OK.”

“Wait, you are saying that you still serve?” asks a stunned journalist. “Without a leg?”

“Of course,” says Pozniak. “We haven’t won yet.”

“What motivates you?” asks the journalist. “What keeps you going on those 8-kilometer marches?”

“I just really love my country,” the sniper says. “Our nation must survive. This is the most important thing.”

“Was there a time when you got really angry?” asks the journalist

“Well, when I stepped on the mine, I realized that my wife would get really upset. So I didn’t like that”, says Pozniak with a soft chuckle.

This is a middle-aged, balding, soft-spoken guy with the personality strength of a Titan.