Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
No, I’m not Martin Luther King, Jr., but I did fall asleep at my desk an hour ago because of my raging insomnia. I did sleep well, however, for I had a very vivid dream, and dreams occur only during deep, restful sleep. This was a weird one, and though I’m not a Freudian who interprets dreams, I have no idea why my neurons created this scenario:
I was in a restaurant with tables and partitions between them, and at the partition by the next table was George Harrison with a guitar, singing “Blackbird.” That in itself was weird because that song is solely a Paul McCartney song, written and sung by him alone. But Paul McCartney himself was also there, standing right next to me at a partition with his arm around my waist. As Harrison got to the last line, “You were only waiting for this moment to arise,” McCartney leaned over and gave me a big wet kiss on the cheek. Then I woke up.
Before I fell asleep, I was dispirited at the state of America, and of my friends, all of which depresses me. Between our crazy President doing one stupid thing or another, and my Facebook page having all my friends saying constantly how bad Trump (and ICE) is, I cannot get away from American politics and its divisiveness.
Why do I keep looking, you ask? I will give Mencken’s quote from his great 1949 collection, Chrestomathy (everyone should have this book):
Q: If you find so much that is unworthy of reverence in the United States, then why do you live here?
A: Why do men go to zoos?
Here’s Macca singing “Blackbird”; this, at least cheers me up (the last line of the song here differs from that above):
Today we have some urban arthropod photos taken in Scotland by Marcel van Oijen. Marcel’s IDs and captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.
Urban wildlife in Scotland: 11 insects and 1 spider
Marcel van Oijen
This website recently hosted pictures of vertebrates in our Edinburgh garden. This time we show some of our favourite arthropod visitors. Unlike the vertebrates, which we see year-round, insects in Scotland are easiest to spot in the summer, followed by spiders in autumn. The following pictures were taken between mid-July and mid-September.
When we walk on the grass in summer, we see small bits of straw rising up and landing a meter or so away. Those are Straw Grass Moths (Agriphila straminella), one of the 2500 moth species in the UK. Grass moths are micromoths of about 1 cm length. When they land on the grass, they immediately freeze and allow themselves to be photographed from up close:
Once or twice a year we put out the moth trap to see what lives in our garden. The trap is just an open box with a lamp above. The moths fly toward the light and hide in the box, allowing us to admire them the next morning. Mornings are relatively cold, so most boxed moths hesitate to fly away even when we carefully take them out and take pictures. It is still not fully clear why moths are drawn to artificial light, but flight analysis suggests they treat lamps and natural light sources in the same way . We see Orange Swift Moths (Triodia sylvina) quite often. They are doing well, populations are increasing and expanding further into Scotland, but they are yet to reach Ireland.
There are 57 species of butterfly in the U.K. of which 35 breed in Scotland. We see Comma butterflies (Polygonia c-album) more and more each year:
There are two insects in this picture! Notice the huge size difference between the Buff-Tailed Bumblebee (Bombus terrestris) and the Highland Midge (Culicoides impunctatus). The cute little midge is the reason why we don’t go wild camping in the Scottish Highlands in the summer, but in Edinburgh they are still fairly rare:
The Peacock (Aglais io) is found all across Eurasia, and we see it very often. It is beautiful (but we like the moths more):
Like many larger butterflies, the Red Admiral (Vanessa atalanta) lets itself easily be photographed if you slowly move toward it, staying as low as you can:
The macromoth species that we see the most is the Large Yellow Underwing (Noctua pronuba). You can see that this one is nearing the end of its lifetime:
I find it difficult to take pictures of flies, so was happy to see this Common Siphona Fly (Siphona geniculata) land on the flower that I had just focused on:
The Eyed Ladybird (‘Ladybug’ in American) (Anatis ocellata) is one of the prettiest aphid-eaters:
And this is the only spider for today: a subadult of the Lesser Garden Spider (Metellina segmentata). Seeing it is a sign that autumn has come:
Welcome to The Cruelest Day: Tuesday, February 10, 2026, and Teddy Day. If you have one, send me a photo and a bit of information about it. If we get ten, I’ll post them. But in the meantime, here’s mine: Toasty, a bear I got him day I was born and has been with me since (he’s in my office now). He’s battered and has lost a lot of fur, but, like me, he persists nevertheless. (My mother sewed his head back on and replaced the eyes several times.)
There is again a dearth of things that I’d like to write about, though readers are welcome to send me pieces they think would interest me (note that there’s no guarantee that I’ll write about them, but I do welcome submissions). Bear with me (like Toasty); I do my best.
There is another Google Doodle marking the Olympics today, this time highlighting ski jumping; it goes to a site telling you how the jumpers remain airborne. Click to read:
As a Friday deadline to fund the Department of Homeland Security approaches, Democrats and Republicans appeared no closer on Sunday to a deal to keep the department running.
“If I had to say now, I probably would expect there is a shutdown,” said Senator John Fetterman, Democrat of Pennsylvania, on Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo.”
In the wake of federal immigration officers’ killings of two American citizens in Minnesota last month, Democrats have demanded a host of new restrictions on immigration enforcement operations as a condition for a new spending bill.
They include barring immigration officers from wearing masks, requiring them to show visible identification and mandating the use of judicial warrants when they enter private property to make arrests.
“Dramatic changes are necessary to the manner in which the Department of Homeland Security officers are conducting themselves before any funding bill should move forward,” said Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the House Democratic leader, on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Republican leaders have rejected those proposals as an unrealistic wish list, calling the new restrictions overly burdensome to an immigration crackdown that they generally support.
“They are threatening the safety and security of our agents so that they can’t do their job,” Senator Bill Hagerty, Republican of Tennessee, said on “Fox News Sunday.” “This is something we need to look at carefully. The request that we should put ICE agents in harm’s way is absolutely intolerable.”
Mr. Jeffries said Democrats had not heard a response to their proposals from the White House or Republican leaders in Congress. “The ball is in the court right now of the Republicans,” he said.
We discussed this not long ago, and a couple of readers suggested that masks might be okay to prevent doxxing, but badges with numbers should be prominently on display. That might be a good compromise, as ICE agents have been doxxed, endangering themselves and their families. But there should be body cameras given the history of ICE apprehensions. You can see the list of Democratic demands here.
*Now that Hong Kong is under the rule and law of the People’s Republic of China, suppression of dissent has intensified. The latest disturbing evidence of this is the sentencing of Hong Kong democracy advocate Jimmy Lai to 20 years in prison. Lai is 78 (and a British national), so this is a life sentence. Because there is no extradition to mainland China despite the PRC running the islands, Lau will serve his sentence in Hong Kong, where he’s being held now. The charges: publishing seditious materials and collusion. It’s grossly unfair, as he is a political prisoner.
Jimmy Lai, the Hong Kong pro-democracy media mogul who spent decades as a defiant thorn in Beijing’s side, was sentenced on Monday to 20 years in prison, the harshest penalty ever handed down for a national security offense in the semiautonomous territory.
The landmark ruling completes a yearslong effort by Beijing to dismantle the influence of a man it blamed for masterminding Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement.
Mr. Lai, 78, smiled and waved at the public gallery after his sentencing. His wife, Teresa Lai, sat emotionless with her arms folded, and weeping could be heard in the back of the gallery.
His daughter, Claire Lai, said the sentence was “heartbreakingly cruel.” She added: “If this sentence is carried out, he will die a martyr behind bars.”
In December, Mr. Lai was found guilty of “conspiracy to collude with foreign forces” that stemmed from meetings he had held with politicians in the United States. He was also convicted of conspiracy to publish seditious material in Apple Daily, the now-shuttered Chinese-language pro-democracy newspaper he founded in 1995.
For decades, China has branded Mr. Lai a traitor seeking to undermine the Communist Party rule over Hong Kong and China. They have accused him of being the “black hand” behind the antigovernment protests that engulfed Hong Kong in 2019. Mr. Lai had taken part in some of the demonstrations and supported them through Apple Daily.
Even in a hyper-capitalistic city filled with self-made millionaires, Mr. Lai’s rags to riches story stood out. He fled a poverty stricken China as a stowaway when he was a boy and worked his way up the city’s garment factories. That led to the launching of his own brand of casual wear in 1981, which earned him his first fortune.
Western governments have joined Mr. Lai’s family in calling for the release of Mr. Lai, a British citizen, describing his trial as politically motivated.
Lau, who has health problems, has already been in solitary confinement for well over five years. And President Trump has promised to get him out, saying it would be “easy” to get Lau released ()and presumably moved to the US). It’s time for Trump to make good on his promises; perhaps that will require a prisoner exchange.
*The new article by Ann Bauer in The Free Press, “Mob rule comes for my yoga studio,” is one of many examples where “progressives” try to force themselves into spaces where they don’t belong. Bauer and her family moved from Boston to Minneapolis in 2014 and encountered this:
Yoga was one thing I’d managed to keep separate from politics. But when I returned, after they dropped Covid restrictions in 2022, the rules had changed.
“I know I’m not supposed to talk politics,” said one instructor after another, “but this is too important.” Then they would launch into a speech on Palestine or trans athletes or immigration, and welcome input. I could feel the sanctity of this place sliding away, just as it had at coffee shops, barbecues, business meetings, and libraries. Eventually, I’d have to lie or leave.
Instead, I spoke to leadership at CorePower, first the local studio managers and then the regional one. I asked them to abide by the policy of no politics in the studio and, in a nearly choreographed way, they shrugged and smiled their namaste smiles and gave me that side-eye that said I know what side you’re on and why you’re asking, and told me in kindergarten teacher voices that there was nothing they could do. These were unprecedented times. Excitement was high. People’s higher selves were in control.
Finally, I had my own reckoning with a teacher at the studio, who grilled me about my political leanings and didn’t like what she heard. It became one more obstacle in my life. She taught a ton of classes at my studio and refused to speak to me after. She couldn’t keep me from registering but she could make it unpleasant. Soon, when I entered, her colleagues at the desk would also turn stony and stop talking, disgustedly waving me through.
My husband, son, and I left a few months later, selling two houses and much of what we owned. We’d found a marvelous opportunity to start a new publishing platform in Kentucky. We were moving toward something. But we were also escaping Minnesota and thousands of things like CorePower that made life hard. We were just done, and desperate to get out.
Our new city is purple, leaning to the moderate side of blue. We live in multifamily housing and go to an office. I have a new yoga studio, coffee shop, and library. We’ve had only a handful of political conversations with the people we’ve met here over the months, and if we disagree, we do so pleasantly and without accusation. It is a wonder to live like this. We’re grateful, every single day.
It’s a tragedy the yoga studio I used to love has been ruined by shouted ideology and shunning, just like nearly every public space in the Twin Cities. But I have to admit I had a moment of pleasure, watching that scene, thinking Thank God. Thank God we got out.
But even a liberal can justifiably object to being propagandized with Lefist stuff when they just want to do yoga, and really, businesses and yoga studios should maintain institutional neutrality. All yoga-ites should be treated the same so long as they behave themselves. It seems to me, though I don’t have data, that this kind of personal propagandizing and virtue signaling comes more often from the Left than the Right. Democrats should stop doing this to a captive audience, like those who patronize businesses. It only turns people off on the Left, which means fewer Democrats when it comes to elections.
*If you’re contemplating sending your kid to college, the Washington Post has a long list of colleges with free tuition (article archived here). I had no idea there were any colleges that gave free tuition to all students (without an income threshold), but the paper has 87 pages of colleges offering free tuition—some without income requirements. The first page is below:
The cost of higher education can be intimidating.
Americans are increasingly questioning whether college is worth the price, as student loan debt tops $1.6 trillion and the average tuition has doubled in the past 30 years. At the same time, new federal caps on how much parents can borrow for college could place higher education further out of reach for some families.
Against that backdrop, a growing number of schools are making college more affordable by providing free tuition to undergraduate students from low- and middle-income families. The movement dates back 20 years but has gained momentum in the past decade, largely fueled by state policies.
We set out to catalogue free tuition programs and found nearly 1,000 — in 45 states, at two-year colleges, four-year universities, vocational schools and elite private campuses. You can look up schools using the tool below. And if your school offers free tuition but is not on the list, let us know by filling out this submission form.
The University of Chicago offers free tuition to students coming from families making less than $125,000 per year “with typical assets” (whatever that means). Further, AI tells me this: “Furthermore, [University of Chicago] students from families with incomes under $60,000 (with typical assets) receive free tuition, fees, and standard room and board. This policy is part of their need-based, “no-loan” financial aid approach to increase accessibility.
And just to show you that not everything is horrible in the world, information.net has published a graphic (with links) to the Most Beautiful News of the Year 2025. Here’s the list (click to enlarge), and let’s look at the second one. (Links are at the original site, but click below to go there):
Trachoma is a dreadful and highly infectious disease caused by a bacterium, and a major cause of blindness. Once you’re blind from it there’s no cure, so this really is good news. The link at the second square gives the details:
The number of people requiring interventions against trachoma, the world’s leading infectious cause of blindness, has fallen below 100 million for the first time since global records began. There were 1.5 billion people estimated to be at risk in 2002, dropping to 97.1 million as of November 2025: a 94% reduction (as recently as 2011, 314 million people were estimated to be at risk and to require interventions).
This milestone reflects decades of sustained efforts by national health ministries, local communities, and international partners implementing the World Health Organization (WHO)-endorsed SAFE strategy (Surgery to treat trachomatous trichiasis, the blinding stage of trachoma; Antibiotics to clear infection; and Facial cleanliness and Environmental improvement to reduce transmission and sustain progress).
“The reduction of the population requiring interventions against trachoma to below 100 million is testament to strong country leadership and consistent implementation of the SAFE strategy,” said Dr Daniel Ngamije Madandi, Director of the Malaria and Neglected Tropical Diseases Department at WHO. “Progress across all trachoma-endemic WHO regions shows that SAFE is both effective and adaptable across contexts. WHO remains committed to supporting countries through the provision of technical assistance to achieve the global elimination of trachoma as a public health problem by 2030.”
Following the recent validation of Egypt and Fiji as having eliminated trachoma as a public health problem, the total number of countries validated by WHO now stands at 27 – including at least one country in every trachoma-endemic WHO region.
Global progress for trachoma has been supported by a diverse range of stakeholders, including implementing non-governmental organizations, academic institutions and donors, many of which collaborate through the International Coalition for Trachoma Control (ICTC), as well as the donation of more than 1.1 billion doses of azithromycin by Pfizer Inc. through the International Trachoma Initiative (ITI). These partnerships have enabled health ministries to distribute valuable donated medicines efficiently and effectively, while strengthening community health systems.
We may not eliminate it, but humans have wiped out two diseases completely. Can you name them?
Once hunted almost to extinction, the group of humpback whales currently migrating down Australia’s east coast has bounced back — and then some.
In a preliminary report to the federal Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, marine scientists estimate there were more than 50,000 eastern Australian humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) in 2024.
That’s around 20,000 more individuals than the estimated pre-whaling population of the early 1900s.
So if you’re down about the state of the world, remember that, as a whole, things are better than they were 150 years ago, and a big part of that is human well-being: medical and economic issues in particular.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej speaks truth to felinity:
Hili: Did you see any positive news today? Andrzej: No, the media do their best to avoid it, because it results in financial losses.
In Polish:
Hili: Widziałeś dziś jakieś pozytywne wiadomości?
Ja: Nie, wszystkie media starają się ich unikać, bo to przynosi straty.
From Luana; Fetterman breaks ranks again. I can’t see any problem with showing an ID at the polls to verify that you are who you say you are when you get a ballot:
BREAKING: Democratic Senator John Fetterman joins the Republicans and comes out in favor of requiring an ID to vote in every election across the country.
“I do not believe that it’s unreasonable to show an ID to vote.”
Crunch time for Starmer as he realises that the only one left to throw under the bus now is Larry The Cat, and he’s seen off five Prime Ministers. pic.twitter.com/1FTm5zesv1
After the heavy snowfall in the US, the zoo staff opened the gates for the penguins so they could go out and explore as if it were their natural habitat.pic.twitter.com/7VB8YwCIMh
. . . and two from Dr. Cobb. First, a sheep’s brain on drugs:
And more Larry, who has a big anniversary coming up (he is 19 now: a Senior Cat):
Dominic Dyer: @number10cat.bsky.social Larry the Cat will have been in Downing Street 15 years next week, he is the most stable thing about British politics these days
I have a busy day and can’t brain otherwise, so I’ll put up a video of the entire T.A.M.I. Show, an epochal rock and roll show, with many greats (see below) from 1964.
Why epochal? Well, for one thing, it introduced a white audience (I can’t see any non-whites in it) to black music, and not just soul music, but the blackest of black music: the music of James Brown, also known as the “Godfather of Soul” or “The Hardest Working Man in Show Business” (he was). He blew away most of the other performers, who were numerous and themselves good musicians. Chuck Berry also appears twice (see below), and there was also more standard soul music that must have been new to most of the white students, including Marvin Gaye, the Supremes, and Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. I would date this show as the beginning of popularity of black rock and roll, though others might differ.
From Wikipedia:
T.A.M.I. Show is a 1964 concert film released by American International Pictures It includes performances by numerous popular rock and roll and R&B musicians from the United States and England. The concert was held at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium on October 28 and 29, 1964. Free tickets were distributed to local high school students. The acronym “T.A.M.I.” was used inconsistently in the show’s publicity to mean both “Teenage Awards Music International” and “Teen Age Music International”.
In 2006, T.A.M.I. Show was deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.
. . . T.A.M.I. Show is particularly well known for the performance of James Brown and the Famous Flames, which features his legendary dance moves and explosive energy. In interviews, Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones has claimed that choosing to follow Brown and the Famous Flames (Bobby Byrd, Bobby Bennett, and Lloyd Stallworth) was the worst mistake of their careers, because no matter how well they performed, they could not top him. In a web-published interview, Binder takes credit for persuading the Stones to follow Brown, and serve as the centerpiece for the grand finale in which all the performers dance together onstage.
It used to be nearly impossible to see this (I watched it on a rented CD), but now much of it, including James Brown’s performance, is on YouTube—for free. Here’s the set list in the entire concert, in order of appearance (from Wikipedia):
Do NOT miss James Brown, who comes on (with his Famous Flames) at one hour, 17 minutes into the show. As far as I can see, this video incorporates most but not all of the performances, and not in the order listed above. You can scroll through it to see your favorites, but James Brown’s appearance was historic for rock and roll, so don’t scroll past that one. Chuck Berry does a good performance at the start and then again at 13:30.
Posting will be light today as I have three meetings/events to attend. I am supposed to be retired!
Those of you with photos please send them along, as I have about three more batches before Armageddon hits. Thank you!
Today we have the second batch of photos from Sri Lanka contributed by reader MichaelC—and one video (his earlier batch on the flora is here). Michael’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.
Sri Lankan Fauna!
Unlike the orchids and Angel’s Trumpets, which kindly stayed still for me, most of the animals did not. So few of my critter photos are well focused. Even so, some are interesting.
An Indian Elephant (Elephas maximus indicus) snorkeling its way across a lake! Right behind this fella were two cows and a young one, also snorkeling:
Here’s the big fella coming out of the lake….:
….to join a herd of some thirty other elephants. We were in an open vehicle on a tour of Wasgamuwa National Park. This is a close up showing a newborn calf. There were a number of Sri Lankan biologists there in other vehicles documenting the little one, which they said was only four days old:
These are all wild elephants who are accustomed to gawking tourists. Nevertheless, our guides were very stern about never leaving the vehicle. Elephants tolerate people, but they don’t like us. That’s by design. Sri Lankans value their elephants and don’t want to cull them in order to keep them from destroying crops. They do not kill elephants unless they become a threat to people. So farmers use what are essentially paint ball guns to shoot them. Stings like hell, but does no harm. The elephants learn to avoid people, but the process makes them cranky and unpredictable. Indeed, my soon-to-be-wife and I (and a bunch of other guests) were chased off a dinner set up on a beach in Yala National Park by a cranky bull elephant. The resort had “spotters” positioned around the resort watching for elephants. A familiar, bad-tempered bull decided he didn’t want any humans on his beach, so the spotters came running.
This is a Brahminy Kite (Haliastur indus). They follow the herds and gobble up things they stir from the grass.
Asian Green Bee-eater (Merops orientalis) the birds are welcome visitors to Sri Lankan, migrating in from India (I suppose) part of the year. They are very pretty and have a wonderfully beautiful song:
A Little Egret (Egretta garzetta) with a disappointed Mugger Crocodile (Crocodylus palustris). This was the last in a series of shots of the two. The croc tried to sneak up on the egret, but the bird saw him the whole time. It was hilarious because the croc thought it was being so stealthy but the bird just carried on fishing and was like; “dude, you know I can see you, right?”.:
These Hanuman langurs (Semnopithecus sp.?) are notorious thieves. But this guy was part of a small troop who completely ignored us:
Bengal monitor (Varanus bengalensis). This guy was more than a meter long!:
Lagniappe! A short video of immature bull elephants working out the pecking order. Or maybe just showing off. The young males spent a lot of time jousting like this. Surely it must be important behavior because otherwise, instead of spending their time and energy doing this, they could be eating and growing:
Welcome to Monday, February 9, 2026, and National Bagel and Lox Day, one of the few ways I’ll eat fish. I don’t know who got the idea to put salmon on a bagel with cream cheese, but the idea was, as the kids say, “genius”. Below is a a photo from the Wikipedia “Bagel and cream cheese” page. First, some history:
In American Jewish cuisine, cream cheese toppings (colloquially called “schmear“) of bagels have particular names. For example, a bagel covered with spread cream cheese is sometimes called a “whole schmear” bagel. A “slab” is a bagel topped with an unspread slab of cream cheese. A “lox and a schmear” is a bagel with cream cheese and lox or smoked salmon. Tomato, red onion, capers and chopped hard-boiled egg are often added. These terms are used at some delicatessens in New York City, particularly at Jewish delicatessens and older, more traditional delicatessens.
The lox and schmear likely originated in New York City around the time of the turn of the 20th century, when street vendors in the city sold salt-cured belly lox from pushcarts. A high amount of salt in the fish necessitated the addition of bread and cheese to offset the lox’s saltiness.It was reported by U.S. newspapers in the early 1940s that bagels and lox were sold by delicatessens in New York City as a “Sunday morning treat”, and in the early 1950s, bagels and cream cheese combination were very popular in the United States, having permeated American culture.
Jewish cuisine is pretty dire as ethnic cuisines go, but a bagel with lox and a schmear is surely its glory and apotheosis:
There’s a Google Doodle honoring ice skating in the Olympics (they change the sport every day or so). Click below to go to the AI site explaining figure skating:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the February 9 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Sports: The Seattle Seahawks crushed the New England Patriots in Super Bowl 60 (or LX, as they say), with the final score 29-13. I watched about five minutes and read the Italian novel The Leopard instead, as I wanted to finish it last night. It was superb and I recommend it very highly. All the news about the Super Bowl appears to be Bad Bunny’s halftime show, and I still don’t know who Bad Bunny is, clearly showing that I am ignorant of modern music.
Jeffrey Epstein’s longtime companion, Ghislaine Maxwell, played a substantial role in supporting the creation of the Clinton Global Initiative, one of President Bill Clinton’s signature post-White House endeavors, new documents released by the Justice Department show.
Ms. Maxwell took part in budget discussions related to the first Clinton Global Initiative conference; talked through challenges about it with both Clinton aides and Publicis Groupe, the company that produced the inaugural event; and arranged to wire $1 million to pay Publicis for its work on “the Clinton project,” according to emails in the massive cache of documents collected as part of the government’s investigations of Mr. Epstein.
The source of the money is unclear, including whether Mr. Epstein provided the funds. However, the emails show that he was aware of the payment.
“Ask him to tell you why i million now and where will it be going,” Mr. Epstein wrote to Ms. Maxwell a few days after she received the wiring instructions from Publicis.
Ms. Maxwell’s involvement in the launch of the Clinton Global Initiative took place in 2004, before Mr. Epstein’s 2006 indictment and 2008 guilty plea for solicitation of prostitution with a minor, and long before Ms. Maxwell, a daughter of the media baron Robert Maxwell, was sentenced in 2022 to two decades in prison for conspiring with Mr. Epstein to sexually exploit underage girls.
The emails support an assertion Ms. Maxwell made last year in an interview with the Justice Department that she played a key role in helping set up the global conference.
Mr. Clinton has said he stopped speaking with Mr. Epstein sometime before his 2006 indictment. In a statement, Angel Ureña, a spokesman for the Clintons, said the former president had “called for the full release of the Epstein files” and “has nothing to hide.”
Again, there’s no evidence so far that Clinton participated in any of Epstein’s illicit activities, and this was all before Epstein had been convicted for the first time. Nevertheless, there are allegations that Clinton visited Epstein’s private island, and the ex-President (and Hillary) also refused to testify before Congress, though I think they’ve since agreed to do so. What can I say?—news is scant and papers are touting associations like this that may well turn out to be nothing.
Iran has sentenced the Nobel peace prize laureate Narges Mohammadi to more than seven more years in prison after she began a hunger strike, her supporters said Sunday, as Tehran cracks down on all dissent following nationwide protests and the deaths of thousands at the hands of security forces.
The new convictions against Mohammadi come as Iran tries to negotiate with the US over its nuclear programme to avert a military strike threatened by Donald Trump. Iran’s top diplomat said on Sunday that Tehran’s strength came from its ability to “say no to the great powers”, striking a maximalist position just after negotiations in Oman with the US.
Mohammadi’s supporters cited her lawyer, Mostafa Nili, who had spoken to her. Nili confirmed the sentence on X, saying it had been handed down on Saturday by a court in the city of Mashhad.
“She has been sentenced to six years in prison for ‘gathering and collusion’ and one and a half years for propaganda and two-year travel ban,” he wrote. Mohammadi had received another two years of internal exile to the city of Khosf, about 740km (460 miles) south-east of the capital, Tehran, the lawyer added.
Iran did not immediately acknowledge the sentence.
Supporters say Mohammadi has been on a hunger strike since 2 Februrary. She had been arrested in December at a memorial ceremony honouring Khosrow Alikordi, a 46-year-old Iranian lawyer and human rights advocate who had been based in Mashhad. Footage from the demonstration showed her shouting, demanding justice for Alikordi and others.
Supporters had warned for months before her December arrest that Mohammadi, 53, was at risk of being put back into prison after she received a furlough in December 2024 over medical concerns. While that was to be only three weeks, her time out of prison lengthened, possibly as activists and western powers pushed Iran to keep her free. She remained out even during the 12-day war in June between Iran and Israel.
Mohammadi has had multiple heart attacks, convulsions, and surgery for what might have been bone cancer. But she has a Nobel Prize, and is serving time as a political prisoner. Iran should let her go, preferably overseas where she can get decent medical care. I don’t know if, were she released, she would want to stay in Iran, but she will likely die in prison if they don’t let her go soon.
I majored in English, which baffled many of my friends and, I think, worried my parents. Sometimes, when I’m confronted by the salaries of first-year software engineers and the technical training that such salaries require, I worry I made a mistake.
But I remember, too, the first time I read Paradise Lost and felt that there might be more to the world than I knew. I had always considered myself a bookworm, but it wasn’t until I enrolled in my major that I learned that reading the right books, and reading them with other people, was a different experience altogether. It wasn’t that I hadn’t thought about the problem of evil, or wondered about the existence of fate, before reading Paradise Lost. But reading John Milton gave these questions force and meaning to a degree that nothing prior had. If angels made by God to live in heaven couldn’t resist temptation, what hope was there for me to try to live according to my own values? In other classes, I learned statistical modeling and facts about recent American foreign policy. But nothing gave my life more urgency than the questions that I found in literature. Studying the humanities, for me, was like replacing a too-dim lightbulb. Suddenly I became aware of what was, and always had been, around me. There is so much to the world that I didn’t (and still don’t) know, and before I began studying the humanities, I had no idea that there was so much I was ignorant of.
Much has been made recently about the decline in reading among young people, especially those enrolled at elite universities known for rigorous humanities programs. Professors fret over declining enrollments. While smaller liberal arts colleges shutter, state flagships cut programs, and elite schools reduce Ph.D. admissions and consolidate departments.
While some of this is the result of decades of academic overproduction, practical degree programs absorbing the time of students, and yes, the Internet-phones-AI tripartite, the crisis of the humanities also comes from a lack of clear understanding of what the humanities are for. So argues Humanistic Judgment: Ten Experiments in Reading, a new book published by Yale University Press. Edited by Benjamin Barasch, David Bromwich, and Bryan Garsten—the latter two are Yale professors—the essay collection examines the current state of the humanities.
In recent decades, Bromwich argues in his introduction to the book, the academy has become less focused on understanding the goal of humanistic study as the cultivation of judgment or the development of self-knowledge or even inquiry into the nature of reality and humanity and the world, but rather focused on understanding texts through the lenses of cultural and political debates.. . .
. . .Humanistic study in the Western tradition has long been taught in seminar-style dialogues, taking after Socrates. Scholars commonly refer to works as “in conversation with one another.” At the center of the liberal arts lies this precept that education cannot be a solitary project. In reading and conversing and debating, the student of the humanities is, ideally, always exposed to one who experiences a text, or a painting, or the world differently. Just as reading might expose one’s ignorance, so too might the classroom. But this humility, in turn, should always lead to a desire to understand reality more deeply. In this vein, Barasch, in his contribution to the essay collection, discusses the work of journalist James Agee, writing, “Agee’s radical humanism is a craving for reality, a desire to live in the world as it is, and as he is. In becoming real to himself he discovers again and again the separateness, and thus the reality, of others.”
The sciences, social sciences, and technical fields are noble, good pursuits. But we do a disservice to young people when we discourage them from pursuing the liberal arts and treat education as the mere acquisition of skills and knowledge. To withstand the challenges posed by scientism and politics and AI and declines in reading, the humanities need positive accounts of their value. They have an excellent one in Humanistic Judgment.
I don’t like the “scientism” bit nor the implication that the humanities helps us “understand reality more deeply” unless that means “subjective reality” or “the fact that different people have different viewpoints.” But, as I said in my Quillette piece, the arts (I’m excluding quasi-scientific humanities fields like economics and sociology), the value of the humanities is to apprehend the diversity of viewpoints of others, and to expand our understanding of how other people view the world.
*I was pulling for Lindsay Vonn to get an Olympic medal in downhill skiing. It was less than two weeks ago that she tore the anterior cruciate ligament in her left knee, a ligament that stabilizes the knee. You’d think that that would end her plans to ski, but this is one tough woman, and although she’s 41, she was bent not just on competing, but on winning. All that came to a grim end when she crashed painfully in yesterday’s competition. The latest report is that she broke her left leg and underwent surgery to stabilize it.
Lindsey Vonn’s pursuit of a downhill medal in her fifth Olympic Games ended violently Sunday morning here with a gruesome crash that left her screaming in pain and being airlifted from the mountain.
Vonn was the 13th of a scheduled 36 athletes to take to the course under baby blue skies at this stunning resort town in the Dolomites. She was just 10 days removed from a crash that tore the ACL in her left knee, and her comeback for these Olympics had already been made possible by a replacement of her right knee.
But with teammate Breezy Johnson, who won gold in the event, waiting at the bottom, Vonn — who was third fastest in Saturday’s final training run — barely got to evaluate herself against the competition before disaster struck. Thirteen seconds into a run that would have taken more than a minute and a half, she clipped the fourth gate with her right arm.
The contact sent Vonn spinning, with snow flying around her. Her head and shoulder violently drove into the surface of the course before she flipped again, her legs splayed.
Various broadcasts captured audio of Vonn crying, “Oh my God!” The crash occurred at noon local time, and it took just nine minutes for a helicopter to arrive to begin the process of flying her from the mountain.
“Certainly hoping she is okay after that terrible crash,” the public address announcer belted to a once buoyant crowd that had grown essentially silent.
. . . In a World Cup career that extends back more than two decades — and includes 84 victories and three Olympic medals, including gold in the downhill in 2010 — Vonn has been injured countless times. Never, though, in this kind of spotlight.
Her comeback bid that began last season — after the knee replacement allowed her to ski without pain for the first time she could remember — had been enormously successful. She won two World Cup downhill races this season, was the leader in the standings and had not finished out of the top three in five downhill starts. This comeback wasn’t a lark. This comeback was legit.
It’s sad, but you have to give her credit; she knew the danger and skied anyway. And after a knee replacement some time ago! She’ll be ok financially, and she had her medals. I doubt she’ll be back at 45 for the next Olympics, but you have to give her kudos for courage and diligence. Here’s a video of her accident (click on “Watch on YouTube” or here.
I couldn’t stop blinking back tears, and I couldn’t understand why.
I’d just walked out of a movie called “The Testament of Ann Lee.” Lee was the founder of the American Shakers, a tiny utopian Christian sect that started in England in the mid-18th century. Lee brought a small band of followers to the United States shortly before the Revolution.
The Shakers were known for their ecstatic worship (hence the name), their egalitarianism and pacifism, their absolute commitment to celibacy and their furniture. Shakers committed themselves to excellence in all things, and their craftsmanship was impeccable.
I’m not exactly the target audience for a film about chair-making religious extremists. I’m more the kind of moviegoer who’s drawn to Will Ferrell or light sabers or dragons. Also orcs. I find great meaning in superhero movies. But my wife and son were going, and I wanted to hang out with them.
So I went, a bit skeptically, hoping that perhaps I might get to see a new trailer for Christopher Nolan’s upcoming adaptation of “The Odyssey.” But then the movie started, and it broke my heart.
. . .In Ann Lee’s case, her radical faith, which mirrored Christ’s and the Apostle Paul’s commitment to singleness and celibacy, also manifested itself in radical love, both for people inside her community and outside it.
In essence, Lee and her followers turned to God and said — as so many believers have — I will do anything for you. And they heard God’s ancient answer to that declaration: Love thy neighbor. And your neighbor includes the enslaved Black man, and the white indentured servant who possessed so few rights, and the Native American who was slowly but surely being driven from his land.
Hours after the movie, I finally realized why I had tears in my eyes. In the final scene, you see Lee’s plain wooden casket sitting alone under a painting of a beautiful tree.
In that moment, you could clearly see the gap between American hope and American reality. And I was reminded once again of one of George Washington’s favorite Bible verses, Micah 4:4 — “Everyone will sit under their own vine and under their own fig tree, and no one will make them afraid.” In his writings, Washington referred to it almost 50 times.
. . .And so it is with this nation we love. In 250 years, the already of American liberty has expanded. We are a better and more decent nation than the one Ann Lee encountered. But as we see state brutality and state violence spill out across our streets, we know that we are not yet fulfilling the promise of the declaration.
Ann Lee died in 1784. When she was reportedly reinterred in the 1820s, she was found to have a fractured skull. It’s 2026 now, and we still see beatings in the streets. There are still too many caskets under the tree of liberty. But the tree is still alive, and it continues to grow. May we all sit securely in its shade one day.
It looks like the movie broke his heart because it reminded him of Trump’s America. That is a stretch at best. I will see the movie, but won’t go to it looking for analogies between 18th century America and today’s America. I will go to learn a bit about history (the Shakers were celibate, so could grow only through converts) and to admire the artistry.
Here’s the official trailer:
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the two downstairs cats affirm their pledge:
Szaron: Between us, veganism is not my option.
Hili: Not mine either.
In Polish:
Szaron: Między nami mówiąc, weganizm nie jest moją opcją.
Hili: Moją też nie.
From Masih; the mothers of murdered protestors console each other:
A mother of a sports champion killed in the recent uprising stood at the grave of another grieving mother and held her hands, saying: “Your child is not alone.”
Immediately, other mothers began shouting their children’s names, names the Islamic Republic wants erased.
From Bryan, a long (8-min) clip of Peter Boghossian practicing “street epistemology”. Peter is damned by progressives, but as you see he’s really good at practicing the Socratic method on ignorant youth (and oy! is this youth ignorant!):
@peterboghossian encountered one of the most brainwashed students ever captured on camera. This perfectly illustrates the problem at the center of all of this pic.twitter.com/nr9V5bCyVt
From Matthew, a hilarious Instagram video (sound up) featuring a British t.v. presenter pretending to ask for kitschy items in a British store. Click on screenshot to watch, or go here to see the original. Ms. Welby cracks herself up.
I LOVE the Edwardian fox with a ruff and human hands who plays the cello:
I used to subscribe to the New York Review of Books, which, while sometimes a repository for boring academic cat-fights, often included engaging and illuminating articles—until fabled editor Bob Silvers died in 2017. Now, under the leadership of editor Emily Greenhouse, the magazine, always Left-leaning, seems to have become more progressive.
The article by gender scholar Paisley Currah in the December issue, for example, fully accepts the argument that trans people are fully and legally equivalent to the sex that they transitioned to or think they are, not their natal sex. While for most issues trans people should have the same legal rights as cis people, I’ve argued that in a few cases, like sports, confinement in jails, and right to have a rape counselor or battered-woman’s helper the same as one’s natal sex, trans “rights” conflict with women’s “rights”. Further, an enlightened resolution of those “rights” involves accepting the biological definition of sex, based on gamete type, rather than the self-identification of sex adopted by many gender activists and “progressives.”
You can read the NYRB article by clicking below, or find it archived here.
What’s useful about Currah’s article is its summary of the history of legislation involving both biological sex and self-identified gender, as well as discrimination against women if they stepped outside what was seen as their “proper roles”. What’s not so useful is that Currah swallows the whole hog of “progressive” gender activism, arguing that those who hew to the biological definition of sex are not only endangering feminism (in fact, the opposite is true), but buttressing the Right, including Trump and Team MAGA. Here he is wrong, for he neglects the many liberals who question the view that you are whatever sex you think you are. (Most Americans, for example, do not think that trans-identified men (“trans women”) should compete on women’s sports teams.) Currah further argues, also mistakenly, that legislation accepting that biological sex can matter legally, is really “anti trans”. I would argue that, at least in the cases I mentioned above, it is in fact “pro woman.”
There’s no doubt that much of the legislation involving trans people is meant to buttress a conservative, religious-based agenda, and I disagree with a lot of it (I think, for example, that there’s no good reason to ban transgender people from the military). But when there are real clashes of rights, what we need is discussion and argumentation, not name-calling or claims that adherence to a definition of sex based on biology is designed to “erase” trans people—or rests at bottom on bigotry.
You can see where Currah is going at the outset:
On April 27, 2023, Kansas became the first state in the country to institute a statewide definition of sex. “A ‘female’ is an individual whose biological reproductive system is developed to produce ova,” the law declared, “and a ‘male’ is an individual whose biological reproductive system is developed to fertilize the ova of a female.” Since then dozens of state legislatures have introduced similar bills; sixteen have passed. In Indiana and Nebraska governors have issued executive orders to the same end. Each of these measures effectively strips transgender people of legal recognition.
While Currah, tellingly, never gives a definition of “man” or “woman,” he seems to tacitly accepts the self-identification principle: “a woman is whoever she says she is,” regardless if that person has had no hormone therapy or surgery, and has a beard and a penis. He rejects the biologicaL sex definition on the grounds that so many seemingly intelligent people do. People like Steve Novella and Agustín Fuentes, for example, argue that gamete-based sex is associated or can be disassociated from many other traits, including chromosome type, hormonal titer, chromosome content, and morphology, so there is no one way to define biological sex. I won’t go into the arguments about how a gamete-based defintion is both nearly universal and also helps us make sense of biology; I’ve gone through that a million times. If you want a good take on sex, see Richard Dawkins’s Substack article). Here’s Currah again:
There is no single sound definition of “biological sex.” Even if you know the chromosomes of a fertilized egg, you can’t definitively determine which type of reproductive cells will develop. . . .
But that definition, too, flies in the face of current knowledge. Biomedical researchers have come to recognize that sex is not a single thing but an umbrella term for a number of things, including sex chromosomes, internal reproductive structures (prostate, uterus), gonads (testes, ovaries), and external genitalia. For most people, these characteristics generally align in a single direction, male or female. But they won’t for everyone. At birth some people, often labeled intersex, don’t fall neatly into the male or female column.
Most people? The frequency of true intersex people in the population, estimated by serious people rather than ideologues, lies between about 1 in 5600 and 1 in 20,000. This means that, for all intents and purposes, sex is a true binary.
Currah’s implicit definition of “sex” based on self-identification leads him to reject all forms of discrimination involving biological sex, including the “hard case” of sports, where biology makes the crucial difference:
That coercion isn’t confined to trans people: the current wave of efforts to enshrine biological definitions of sex pressures cis people, too, to conform to a conservative vision of gender difference. A sports ban in Utah led officials to investigate the birth sex of a cis girl after parents of her competitors complained.
And while he’s again not explicit about gender medicine—at a time when “affirmative care” is being recognized as harmful and is being rolled back for young people—he seems to buy that, too, and without age limits:
A blitz of anti-trans executive orders requires that passports list birth sex, trans women in federal prisons be housed with men and denied transition-related medical care, and federal employees use bathrooms associated with their birth sex.
I am not as concerned with bathroom bills (though single-person bathrooms are one solution) as with medical care. No, allowing a 12-year old girl to have a double mastectomy, or a teenage boy to start taking estrogen or testosterone blockers, or any adolescent to take pubery blockers, do not comprise an “enlightened” form of care. What about therapy—objective therapy? What about the fact that the vast majority of gender-dysphoric adolescents not given hormones or surgery eventually resolve as gay people as opposed to trans people?
Currah’s main conclusion is that accepting a biological definition of sex, and thinking that biological sex matters, are not only bigots bent on erasing trans people, but also are doing severe damage to feminism:
By campaigning to make birth sex the sole basis for legal distinctions between men and women, advocates of a “gender critical” feminism evidently hope to cordon off trans women from the rest of womanhood without jeopardizing cisgender women’s access to the rights and freedoms that feminism won. But the logic of this position in fact aligns with—and ultimately serves—the desire to roll back feminism itself. That trans and nonbinary people have been able to move beyond their birth sex classifications is due precisely to the successes of the women’s liberation movement. And that movement’s most influential social victory, the decoupling of ideas about biology from ideas about how women ought to be, is precisely the achievement under threat today.
Currah doesn’t realize that liberals like me don’t give a damn about women’s “roles” or “how women ought to be,” but do care about the difference that biology makes when rights clash between groups. He doesn’t realize that those on the Left who emphasize biology are not “transphobes,” but accept trans people but also care about women’s rights—the rights of natal women. (Note that if you think you can be whatever sex you think you are, there is no such thing as “women’s rights”; there are just “people’s rights.” This goes along with the inability of those favoring trans rights, including the plaintiffs’ lawyers in the Skrmetti case, to even define “man” and “woman”.)
In fact, what does “feminism” even mean for those who think that you’re whatever sex you think you are? Does a biological man who suddenly identify as a woman gain a new set of “rights”? If so, what are they beyond the “right” to be called whatever pronouns you want? Tarring one’s opponents as conservatives, bigots, or transphobes accomplishes nothing; in fact, it’s counterproductive. And society is beginning to realize this.
I will tar people like Currah, though, with one word: “misguided”.
