Three or four obsessions

I have already written, in one of the dozens of columns in which I quote Virginia Woolf, how difficult it is to try to put together something new every week in a Sunday column when deep down one has three or four obsessions a year, with very lucky. The feeling is that the situation should help; Every week, in theory, different things happen. But it happens that the president and Argentine society also have three or four obsessions per year. And then one wants to talk about the world, about something that does not live only in my living room or inside my mind, and it is also necessary to repeat oneself and write over and over again about the same topics; today, about education.

I always remember that Busqued tweet that said that no one has as much to say as they have to write every week, because it is absolutely true; but I think now, too, that there is something that can be valuable or interesting about having to think about the same thing a few times in a row. This week, in addition to what happened at the local level with Javier Milei’s veto of the university budget and the massive march against it, many North American journalists and academics that I follow on social networks were talking about a note that appeared in The Atlantic on the difficulty that university students in the United States have in reading entire books. Among the problems cited by the teachers interviewed was the issue of boredom and persistence: students do not have patience when they encounter a difficult passage or one that does not entertain them. I thought, then, that I could also learn something from my own boredom, and that sometimes this column, or this country, is about that: discussing the same topics over and over again and having the patience to wait to see if something appears. new.