Holy cannoli

To my surprise, our local café "Crosta" is now selling Sicilian cannoli which is most welcome since I feel quite under the weather after my booster. Hopefully, all will be back to normal before Monday when I start teaching. Though it has been a long time coming, the university vice-chancellor finally announced new rules for the spring semester, including capping the maximum number of students to 50 for lectures and giving some flexibility with regard to how closely we have to follow the syllabus. For my political philosophy class, I have already planned for a hybrid version with both campus teaching and pre-recorded lectures in case the students (or I for that matter) get sick.

Down in Ukraine, the situation remains tense. The other day, Leonid Bershidsky had a great piece on how important it is to look beyond Putin and offer the Russian people real hope of European integration. I could not agree more. While this ideally should have been done already in the 1990s, we urgently need to break the underlying antagonistic logic and realize that there cannot be any winners in a conflict with nuclear weapons.