Pavlo > Recent Status Updates

“As a half-remembered hodgepodge of factoids and anecdotes about the United States and its universities, political correctness slumbered in the collective consciousness in Germany, France, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, waiting to be kissed awake by being linked to new fears. This was exactly what happened in the cancel culture panic.”

I almost want to apologize to this book and to Terry Pratchett for not having been in the frame of mind to enjoy it. It’s right up my alley and very, very funny

“ʼDon’t worry about it,ʼ another attentive California child, Patricia Hearst, recalled having told herself during the time she was locked in a closet by her kidnappers. ʼDon’t examine your feelings. Never examine your feelings—they’re no help at all.ʼ”

“Of course! he thought. He had touched the screen. It was a touch screen! The red lights around the edges must be infrared sensors. Tim had never seen such a screen, but he’d read about them in magazines.”

“And a line from the Troubles came to her, a civilian’s line to a journalist on the street. ‘It’s not the bullet with my name on it that frightens me. It’s the one addressed “to whom it may concern.’”

“Today is August 4, 2057,” said a second voice from the kitchen ceiling, “in the city of Allendale, California.”

“ ‘Be in nothing so moderate as in love of man,’ [Robinson Jeffers] advised his twin sons, and referred to mankind as a ‘botched experiment that has run wild and ought to be stopped.’ He was accused of ‘proto-fascism.’ He called himself an ‘Inhumanist.’”

“Nor does [my husband] understand that when we talk about sale-leasebacks and right-of-way condemnations we are talking in code about the things we like best, the yellow fields and the cottonwoods and the rivers rising and falling and the mountain roads closing when the heavy snow comes in. We miss each other’s points, have another drink and regard the fire.”