In a court filing last week, prosecutors said Butina’s emails and chat logs are full of references to a billionaire as the “funder” of her activities.

Actually, the word she uses is one that prostitutes use to refer to their johns in Russian.

She’s a prostitute, and not a particularly successful one because the ones who are really successful live in Monaco and Cannes.

Kenan Malik’s blog is being banned in Pakistan. It’s their loss because he’s a super talented fellow. Example:

‘Those who claim that it is ‘racist’ or ‘Islamophobic’ to mock the Prophet Muhammad’, I added, ‘appear to imagine, with the racists, that all Muslims are reactionaries. It is here that leftwing ‘anti-racism’ joins hands with

rightwing anti-Muslim bigotry.’

Yep. I’ve only been saying this for ages.

The nicest words in the English language currently are, “No, don’t get up, we are going to the park, and you keep resting.”

People are mistaken, however, if they see this phenomenon as ideological. It’s purely a labor issue. White-collar workers and the creative classes are preparing weapons to start fighting for jobs. Blue-collar workers fight for jobs by chanting “No to open borders!” and doing everything that accompanies it. And white-collar workers create less tangible yet so much more prohibitive borders.

When I tell N the recent news about people getting fired for saying something fifty years ago that contradicts the half-baked dogma of the last 5 seconds, he says, “It’s a good thing I don’t talk a lot!”

And it’s true. The best way to stay employed is to avoid expressing opinions, joking, posting anything online, and ideally just to keep silent for the entirety of your life until you are ready to retire.

There is no constitution, no law, no freedom of speech guarantee that can defend one from unhinged crowds ready to pounce on anybody who can be revealed as a sinner against the fresh iteration of dogma. This is also a manifestation of ageism because the longer you live, the more the dogma mutates.

I used to go to the zoo a lot when I was a kid. And even though I loved the idea of an outing, like all kids do, I didn’t like the zoo. Animals were kept in really small cages, and I’d spend the entire day feeling bad for them.

Animals in the St Louis Zoo aren’t kept in cages, as we discovered on our first visit today. We’d been wanting to go for a while but it was always way too hot to take a toddler. Today was the first day all summer when you can be outside for over 3 minutes without fainting, so we went. The goal was to find elephants because Klara wanted to show them her favorite toy elephant.

The elephants turned out to be a lot smaller than I remembered from the Ukrainian zoo. Is it a different kind of elephant or do I remember it as enormous because I was a child and it looked bigger?

There was also a kid railroad, and we had to go because Klara is massively into trains. The kid railroad is a lot worse than the one we have back in Kharkiv and even than the toddler railroad in Southwest Florida. The train spends so much time in tunnels that it’s more like a subway. Klara didn’t even want to make more than one trip, and usually it takes at least 3 trips to make her happy.

The best part of the experience for me was that I found cotton candy, which I haven’t had for over 30 years. Everything at the zoo is extremely well-organized. Nobody organizes kid-friendly experiences like Americans. Even Canadians don’t do it quite as well. But there were way too many people for me to enjoy the whole thing. In our town, I’m never surrounded by this many people. I used to love being in a crowd in a big city but after 15 years in sparsely populated tiny towns, I lost both the skill and the enjoyment.

So now I need to stay in bed for 2 hours, read Vargas Llosa, and eat cherries to recover.

Let’s share our go-to dinner ideas, the ones we use when we have no time and energy to cook. Mine used to be boiled hot dogs with mashed potatoes but hot dogs cause diabetes, so I gave them up.

The current go-to is the one I came up with the help of my sister who is not into cooking as much as I am into it.

I dump a bunch of vegetables – asparagus, broccoli, baby carrots, Brussels sprouts – into a baking sheet and place them in the oven. Fifteen minutes before they are ready, I put in another baking sheet with one of those slabs of salmon they sell at Sam’s for $16. The salmon doesn’t even need to be salted, so there’s zero prep.

It’s dinner and lunch for two days.

All I can say at the end of this long day is that it must suck beyond words to be a single mother.

One thing that does bug me about the contemporary feminist theory is the obsessive need to compare Sex & the City and Girls because these shows supposedly represent my generation and the one 10 years younger than me respectively. You have no idea how many sources in all kinds of languages I discovered that compare these stupid shows.

I liked Sex & the City a lot but the idea that women in the show represent me or any women I know is insane. The show and its characters always looked extremely outdated to me, and it was fun to watch such antiquated ideas and behaviors on the screen. I always thought that the show was a collection of stereotypes more at home in early 1980s.

I also think that there is a big difference between “feminist” and “about women.” And people often seem to lose that distinction.

Hey, folks, good news for feminist scholars. Turns out that the global economic crisis of 2008-9 had a wonderful effect on the field of feminist studies. They have finally – FINALLY! – moved away from the navel-gazing calls for inclusion and intersectionality and are now in a completely new and very promising territory of engaging with the reality of global capitalism and fluidity. I missed this development completely because I had given up on feminist theory precisely when the crisis was beginning. And now I was forced to go back to the field and was pleasantly surprised.

For those who are interested in exploring this new strand of feminist theory, I recommend you begin with the second edition of Postfeminism: Cultural Texts and Theories by Stéphanie Genz and Benjamin Brabon. It has to be the second edition, though, because the first was published in 2009 and was still all about intersectionality and all that.

I will post more sources as I go along.

This is very heartening because I was so not looking forward to writing this feminist article because all I care about is global capitalism and the nationalist response to it. And now it turns out that feminism has gone in this direction, too. This is my first day of writing the article (I don’t consult any sources until I create my own thesis) and I’m already feeling encouraged.