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.
I haven’t been very assiduous in collecting annoying phrases lately, so I have only two. Readers are invited to add their selections:
“Medaled”. This is everywhere in the Olympic reporting, and of course it means “get a medal”. But which medal? If you’re reporting on how many medals a country has gotten in total, you can say “America now has 24 medals”. You don’t say “America has medaled 24 times.” The past-tense verb is used instead to apply to individuals or teams within a sport (figure skaters or gymnasts, for example). For example, you can say that “Mikaela Shiffrin has medaled three times”, but that leaves out the fact that these are gold medals. Curiously, you don’t say that someone “gold medaled,” though that is more informative.
If you’re going to say “medaled”, then you should say that Watson and Crick “Nobeled” in 1962 and Percival Everett “Pulitzered” for fiction last year. The verb “medaled” is not only annoying, but uniformative.
“Do better”. This is a favorite of social-justice warriors when impugning or correcting someone who made an ideological misstep.
An AI definition:
To “do better” in social justice, focus on sustained action over performative gestures: educate yourself with credible, diverse sources, actively support minority-owned businesses, and donate time or money to grassroots organizations. Amplify marginalized voices, advocate for systemic policy changes (like voting rights), and practice empathy and deep listening in difficult conversations.
So the phrase in itself can refer to doing real good, but all too often it’s performative. As an example, one could say, in light of the preceding article: PEN America, “Do better and focus on Israel’s genocide.” I find the phrase patronizing and usually uttered by the entitled. It’s also rude.
Here’s one example from HuffPo, of course (the rag still exists!): “Men: We have to do better.” Sorry, but I’m doing the best I can, and resent the implication that all men are harassers or abusers of women (read the thing).
Every day, it seems, another group gets ideologically captured, valorizing Palestine (or Hamas) and demonizing Israel. This is dispiriting for Jews, but the latest such capture—of the free-expression literary group PEN America—is especially depressing.
But six PEN members refused to be “table hosts” at the banquet, and then 139 other members (now 242) signed a letter taking issue with the award. Why? Because although Charlie Hebdo is well known to be an “equal opportunity offender,” whose metier is mocking everyone, including politicians and religions, those PEN members said that it was a no-no to mock Islam because its adherents were “already marginalized, embattled, and victimized.” From the letter:
In the aftermath of the attacks, Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons were characterized as satire and “equal opportunity offense,” and the magazine seems to be entirely sincere in its anarchic expressions of principled disdain toward organized religion. But in an unequal society, equal opportunity offence does not have an equal effect.
Power and prestige are elements that must be recognized in considering almost any form of discourse, including satire. The inequities between the person holding the pen and the subject fixed on paper by that pen cannot, and must not, be ignored.
To the section of the French population that is already marginalized, embattled, and victimized, a population that is shaped by the legacy of France’s various colonial enterprises, and that contains a large percentage of devout Muslims, Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons of the Prophet must be seen as being intended to cause further humiliation and suffering.
Our concern is that, by bestowing the Toni and James C. Goodale Freedom of Expression Courage Award on Charlie Hebdo, PEN is not simply conveying support for freedom of expression, but also valorizing selectively offensive material: material that intensifies the anti-Islamic, anti-Maghreb, anti-Arab sentiments already prevalent in the Western world.
It’s embarrassing to read the letter and see the list of signers who apparently surrendered their backbones in the face of Islamist outrage. This is a shameful episode.
The free expression group PEN America has canceled its 2024 literary awards ceremony following months of escalating protests over the organization’s response to the war in Gaza, which has been criticized as overly sympathetic to Israel and led nearly half of the prize nominees to withdraw.
The event was set to take place on April 29 at Town Hall in Manhattan. But in a news release on Monday, the group announced that although the prizes would still be conferred, the ceremony would not take place.
“We greatly respect that writers have followed their consciences, whether they chose to remain as nominees in their respective categories or not,” the group’s chief officer for literary programming, Clarisse Rosaz Shariyf, said in the release.
“We regret that this unprecedented situation has taken away the spotlight from the extraordinary work selected by esteemed, insightful and hard-working judges across all categories. As an organization dedicated to freedom of expression and writers, our commitment to recognizing and honoring outstanding authors and the literary community is steadfast.”
In recent months, PEN America has faced intensifying public criticism of its response to the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attacks on Israel, which killed roughly 1,200 people, according to Israeli authorities, and Israel’s military response in Gaza, which has left about 34,000 people dead, according to health officials there.
In a series of open letters, writers have demanded that PEN America support an immediate cease-fire, as its global parent organization, PEN International, and other nationalchapters have done.
. . .In recent months, PEN America has faced intensifying public criticism of its response to the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attacks on Israel, which killed roughly 1,200 people, according to Israeli authorities, and Israel’s military response in Gaza, which has left about 34,000 people dead, according to health officials there.
In a series of open letters, writers have demanded that PEN America support an immediate cease-fire, as its global parent organization, PEN International, and other nationalchapters have done.
In March, a group of prominent writers, including Naomi Klein, Lorrie Moore, Michelle Alexander and Hisham Matar, announced that they were pulling out of next month’s World Voices Festival, one of PEN America’s signature events. And over the past several weeks, growing numbers of nominees for the literary awards, including Camonghne Felix, Christina Sharpe and Esther Allen, announced that they were withdrawing their books from consideration.
In a letter that PEN America leadership received last week, 30 of the 87 nominated writers and translators (including nine of the 10 nominees for one prize) criticized the group’s “disgraceful inaction” on the situation in Gaza, accusing it of “clinging to a disingenuous facade of neutrality while parroting” what the letter characterized as Israeli government propaganda. The letter also called for the resignation of the group’s longtime chief executive, Suzanne Nossel, and its president, the novelist Jennifer Finney Boylan, along with that of the group’s executive committee.
“PEN America states that ‘the core’ of its mission is to ‘support the right to disagree,’” the nominees stated. “But among writers of conscience, there is no disagreement. There is fact and fiction. The fact is that Israel is leading a genocide of the Palestinian people.”
That letter drew a brief but forceful response last week in which the organization described the war in Gaza as “horrific” but challenged what it said was the letter’s “alarming language and characterizations.”
“The perspective that ‘there is no disagreement’ and that there are among us final arbiters of ‘fact and fiction’ reads to us as a demand to foreclose dialogue in the name of intellectual conformity, and one at odds with the PEN Charter and what we stand for as an organization,” the organization said in a statement.
In other words, PEN America was criticized for organizational neutrality: the writers wanted it to take a stand against the “genocide” of Israel. They even claim “there is no disagreement” about this! That is a crock, and again the PEN America membership shamed itself. But the turmoil continued, and, as you see below, its chief executive, Suzanne Nossel, eventually was forced out (characterized by the NYT as “leaving the organization”).
A new article in Tablet magazine summarizes the recent anti-Israel and anti-Jewish stands of PEN America and PEN International. It’s not a pleasant read. I’ve reproduced a few excerpts (indented) below:
Here’s yet another action that appears to be antisemitic:
PEN America has quietly retracted its public statement condemning the cancellation of comedian Guy Hochman’s recent speaking engagements. In its original statement, PEN rightly “condemned placing a litmus test on someone to appear on stage,” calling such tests a “profound” violation of free expression and affirming that “shutting down cultural events is not the solution.”
That principled stance did not last.
This reversal is particularly striking given PEN America’s longstanding history of condemning the cancellation of controversial figures across the political spectrum, including music artist Kehlani (on two separate occasions) and political commentator Milo Yiannopoulos. PEN has even defended the right to gather for Moms for Liberty, an organization that actively fuels the book-banning campaigns PEN America claims to oppose.
In these cases, and many others, PEN defended a clear and consistent principle: Free expression must be upheld even when the speech is unpopular, provocative, or deeply offensive to some.
Yet, following internal and external pressure driven by anti-Israel—and, in many cases, overtly antisemitic—activism, PEN reversed itself. In doing so, it abandoned its own stated standards and effectively endorsed the very discrimination it had previously acknowledged as wrong.
The message this sends is unmistakable: PEN America supports free expression, except when Jews are involved. When it comes to Jewish artists and Israeli voices, PEN now appears willing to endorse ideological litmus tests, condemnation, cancellation, and boycotts.
Hochman has been accused of “inciting genocide in Gaza”. I’m not sure what he said, but I doubt it was “kill all the Gazans, civilians or not.” And regardless, PEN America is supposed to foster free expression, not foster it and then withdraw. Note their hisory of supporting other controversial artists, including, for crying out loud, Milo Yiannopoulos. There’s more (bolding is mine):
This incident does not stand alone. It follows PEN America’s recent deeply flawed report alleging that Israel intentionally sought to destroy Palestinian culture and education in Gaza, a report reliant largely on information supplied by Hamas, riddled with glaring omissions, and marred by demonstrably false and inflammatory claims.
By downplaying the atrocities and the horrors of Oct. 7 and largely dismissing Hamas’ own actions that led to the current situation in Gaza, PEN America further silenced Israeli and Jewish voices in literature and culture.
That bias is not confined to PEN America alone. It echoes the inherent bias, anti-Zionism, and antisemitism embedded in the recently passed “Resolution on Freedom of Expression in Palestine and Israel” at the 90th PEN International Annual Congress. Notably, Palestine was granted membership in PEN International, while Israel was rejected, a decision that speaks volumes about whose voices are deemed worthy of protection and whose are excluded.
Compounding this pattern, PEN America forced out its longtime CEO, Suzanne Nossel, after she was labeled a “Zionist” and refused to have the organization publicly declare that Israel was committing genocide. This episode sent a chilling message to Jewish professionals: Adherence to certain political dogmas is now a prerequisite for leadership within the organization.
Yes, the organization cannot afford to have a “Zionist” (they mean “a Jew”) as CEO, especially a “Zionist” who won’t sign on to the ridiculous “genocide” canard. One moore bit of information:
Over the past two years, many leaders in the literary and cultural world have attempted to engage PEN’s leadership in good faith. The pattern has been consistent: They listen, offer no meaningful response, and then double down on a hostile anti-Zionist and anti-Israel posture.
In doing so, PEN America has helped legitimize antisemitic discrimination at a moment when antisemitism in the United States is at historic levels. This is not an isolated failure of judgment, but a structural rot in the organization, one that reflects leadership choices, institutional culture, and a governing board that has failed to intervene.
This past week, the organization formalized the leadership of interim co-executives Summer Lopez and Clarisse Rosaz Shariyf, a move that signals continuity rather than course correction and suggests the organization is unlikely to return to viewpoint-neutral principles anytime soon.
Especially because of its supposed mission to foster free speech and open discourse, it’s important for PEN America (and PEN International) to remain viewpoint neutral, like the University of Chicago—except on issues that threaten the organization’s mission. Those issues would involve censorship. But PEN America is now okay with censorship so long as it’s Jews and Israel who are being censored. The organization’s ridiculous “genocide” stand serves only to chill the speech of members (notably Jewish ones) who dissent. The supposed “genocide” in Gaza (actually the declared mission of Hamas, not Israel), is contentious and not something that PEN should weigh in on. But as we all know, among left-wing intellectuals in America the going ideology is to praise Palestine, ignore the horrors and war crimes of Hamas, and to damn Israel, full speed ahead. PEN America has been captured by this ideology.
Suzanne Nossel, the chief executive of the free expression group PEN America, is leaving the organization, six months after escalating criticism of the organization’s response to the war in Gaza led to the cancellation of its literary awards and annual literary festival.
Nossel will become the president and chief executive of Freedom House, a nonprofit organization based in Washington that promotes democracy and human rights around the world. PEN America announced that it has elevated two current senior members of its leadership team, Summer Lopez and Clarisse Rosaz Shariyf, to serve as interim co-chief executives, effective immediately, with a national search for a permanent leader to follow.
Nossel, a Harvard-trained lawyer, took the helm at PEN America in 2013, after previously working at the U.S. State Department, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International USA. During her tenure, its membership increased to more than 4,500, while its annual revenue grew to about $25.8 million, up from $4.3 million.
The group, by far the largest of the national PEN International chapters worldwide, also expanded beyond its traditional focus on the literary world, starting initiatives relating to free speech on campus, online harassment, book bans and the spread of state laws restricting teaching on race, gender and other “divisive concepts.”
I’m glad that Nossel has found a home where, I hope, she can promote free expression and human rights and not be required to condemn Israel and its “genocide”, but PEN America seems to be a lost cause now, but just one more organization that has abandoned its principles in favor of ideology (viz., the ACLU, the Southern Poverty Law Center).
If PEN America is serious about its mission, its board must urgently reevaluate who is running the organization, issue a clear and public apology to the Jewish community, and recommit itself to defending free expression without exception or favoritism.
That ain’t gonna happen. It’ll be a freezing day in July (in the Northern Hemisphere) when PEN apologizes to the Jews.
Here’s Nossel, and I wish her well:
Emma.connolly5, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Here’s a 4-minute video in which Nossel explains and defends PEN America’s principles (she has a book on free speech):
Praise Ceiling Cat, fleas be upon him: we have received a couple of submissions to tide us over. Today biologist and artistLou Jost, who works at Ecuador’s Ecominga Foundation, has contributed some lovely hummingbird videos. Lou’s captions are indented, and you know how to enlarge YouTube videos:
The Americas are currently the only continents that have hummingbirds, though the oldest hummingbird-like fossils are actually from Europe. In today’s world the centers of hummingbird diversity are the mountains of Costa Rica and Panama, and the northern Andes of Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. Ecuador alone has 137 species of hummingbirds, compared to only 15-17 hummingbird species regularly found in the US. I recently visited an Ecuadorian birding lodge (Sachatamia) in northwest Ecuador, with many hummingbird feeders. The chaotic swarm of hummingbirds surrounding these feeders gives a good impression of this diversity. Here are some phone videos I took over the course of a few minutes.
Left to right: three Andean Emeralds, (Uranomitra franciae; white throats, light blue crown iridescence), the aptly named White-necked Jacobin (Florisuga mellivora), another Andean Emerald (head down) and a Rufous-tailed Hummingbird (Amazilia tzacatl, pink beak and iridescent green throat), also initially head down). Then more Rufous-tailed Hummingbirds and a brief Brown Violetear (Colibri delphinae):
Purple-bibbed Whitetip (Urosticte benjamini, white spot behind eye and in tail, iridescent purple throat), Booted Raquet-tail, second Purple-bibbed White tip. Then something else obscured by feeder:
Female Empress Brilliant (Heliodoxa imperatrix)?, female Violet-crowned Woodnymph (Thalurania colombica, blue shoulders), displaced by male Green-crowned Woodnymph (iridescent green throat and purple body) in turn displaced by Empress Brilliant, photobombed at end by tiny beelike woodstar species:
Green-crowned Woodnymph front, Fawn-breasted Brilliant (Heliodoxa rubinoides, fawn breast, pink chest/throat patch) at rear, displaced by male Empress Brilliant, cameos by White-necked Jacobin, Andean Emerald, and others.
Welcome to Thursaday, February 19, 2026, and Iwo Jima Day, marking the American invasion of that Japanese-held Pacific Island on this day in 1945. Four days later, five marines climbed Mt. Surabachi (the island’s high point) and planted the American flag on top. You all know the classic photo by Joe Rosenthal, which won the Pulitzer Prize for that year and was made into an iconic statue that sits in Virginia across the Potomac from Washington D.C. Several of the soldiers shown below did not survive the battle:
Photo by Joe Rosenthal, public domain
But did you know there was a movie filmed by Sergeant Bill Genaust at the same time that Rosenthal was snapping his photo? Here it is. (I find it amazing that this iconic moment was captured by two people.) The crucial moment is about 29 seconds in.
There’s a Google Doodle for women’s figure skating at the Olympics today. U.S. women haven’t won a medal in that event since 2006, but the news says there are several candidates this year. Click to see where this goes:
*You could see this coming! Probably unable to pass his “wealth tax” on NYC residents, as that would drive the wealthy out of the city, Islamist Mayor Zohran Mamdani is now threatening to impose a 9.5% property tax on many residents, and not just the rich.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Tuesday proposed to raise property tax rates in New York City by nearly 10 percent, a measure he is preparing as a “last resort” to be deployed if he cannot persuade Gov. Kathy Hochul to raise income taxes on the wealthy.
The suggested 9.5 percent increase would affect more than three million single-family homes, co-ops and condos and over 100,000 commercial buildings, Mr. Mamdani said as he delivered his preliminary spending plan.
The mayor acknowledged that his proposal would not merely force the wealthy to pay more taxes, but would also be a “tax on working- and middle-class New Yorkers,” and stressed that this was not his first choice.
But he noted that New York City mayors had little authority to raise taxes without the governor’s and Legislature’s acquiescence, and said that a city property tax increase — combined with raiding the city’s reserve funds — was the only way to address a looming budget deficit projected to reach $5.4 billion over two years.
“If we cannot follow this first path,” he said, referring to his proposed income tax hike on wealthier New Yorkers, “we will be forced onto a much more damaging path of last resort — one where we have to use the only tools at the city’s disposal: raising property taxes and raiding our reserves.”
“The second path is painful,” he added. “We will continue to work with Albany to avoid it.”
If other options surface, Mr. Mamdani may yet water down or abandon the proposed tax increase as the June 30 city budget deadline draws closer — a possibility that Ms. Hochul alluded to on Tuesday, as she played down the likelihood of city property taxes rising.
“That’s their prerogative to look at that as an option,” she said, suggesting that cost-cutting measures and updated accounting might make such an increase unnecessary. “He’s required to put options on the table; that does not mean that’s the final resolution.”
Is this a surprise? Of course not! The budget was in trouble before Mamdani took office. What is new is that Governor Hochul now seems less willing to levy a new tax on the rich. In the face of this budget crunch, Mamdani’s promises, which got him elected, may well come to nought.
Over the past decade, pediatric “gender-affirming care” has been adopted widely in clinical settings despite a remarkably weak evidence base. Systematic reviews from several countries have consistently found that the research supporting puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and related interventions in minors is of low quality, lacking reliable long-term data on physical or psychological outcomes. Meanwhile, the severe and often irreversible side effects of these treatments are well documented. Chief among them is the loss of fertility.
Because of this risk, clinical guidelines recommend that adolescents be counseled about infertility and offered fertility preservation before beginning medical transition. In theory, this gives them the choice to protect their ability to have biological children in the future. In practice, however, only a vanishingly small number of “transgender and gender-diverse” (TGD) adolescents actually pursue fertility preservation, even when counseling is provided.
This creates an odd set of seemingly contradictory facts. Survey-based studies show that while few adolescents choose to preserve their fertility, a significant number hope to become parents later in life. Follow-up studies of adults who began medical transition as teenagers confirm that the desire for children often increases with age, leaving many to deeply regret not preserving their fertility when they had the chance.
. . .A new retrospective cross-sectional study published in the Journal of Pediatric and Adolescent Gynecology helps clarify this issue by tracking patients from their first counseling visit through referral, specialist consultation, and—if it occurred—completion of a fertility preservation procedure.
The study followed 311 “transgender and gender-diverse” patients between the ages of 10 and 24 who presented for initial gender-related medical evaluations at a pediatric gender clinic between 2020 and 2023. During the intake process, patients were asked about their “fertility goals” and how important biological children might be to them in the future.
The attrition rate was steep. Of the 311 patients, 25 (8 percent) agreed to a referral to a reproductive endocrinology and infertility (REI) specialist. Nineteen of these 25 actually attended the REI consultation, and only eight ultimately completed fertility preservation. In total, this is roughly 2.5 percent of the entire group.
But the most revealing detail is who those eight patients were. All were biologically male, opting for sperm cryopreservation. Not a single female patient underwent egg or embryo preservation. As the authors note, this disparity “likely reflects the relative simplicity and lower cost of sperm cryopreservation compared with oocyte preservation.”
. . . . The literature on fertility preservation exposes a central flaw of the pediatric “gender-affirming” model. Interventions are aggressively promoted despite low-quality evidence, highly uncertain long-term benefits, and increasingly well-documented harms. The model also operates on the pseudoscientific premise biological sex is mutable, can meaningfully conflict with a person’s “brain sex,” and can be medically altered to resolve that conflict. The difficulty adolescents face in preserving fertility is not an incidental side effect of this model but a predictable consequence of it.
Puberty blockers cause sterility while they’re being administered, but often that effect is reversible if blockers are stopped without further treatment. But if blockers lead to cross-sex hormone treatment, as they often do in “affirmative care”, sterility cannot be reversed. This is one more reason why gender transitioning should be delayed until the transitioner is of age to consent and fully apprehend the consequences. This article shows that patients often don’t grasp those consequences.
*The White House has rejected the latest proposal from Democrats to put limits on ICE agents, and, in the absence of an agreement, the partial government shutdown continues (ICE itself won’t shut down, as it has billions of dollars), but imporant aspects of the government will not be funded until the Democrats and Republicans forge a compromise on ICE:
The White House on Tuesday rejected the latest offer from Democratic lawmakers on proposed new constraints on federal immigration officers, the latest sign that there would not be a quick resolution of the stalemate that has left the Department of Homeland Security without funding since Saturday.
A White House official who provided a statement on the condition of anonymity to describe private negotiations said the two parties were still far apart, adding that President Trump’s team remained interested in continuing good-faith talks to resolve the impasse.
In response, aides for the Democratic leaders in Congress said that Republicans had largely ignored the guardrails the public was demanding, and urged them to start negotiating in good faith as they said their side had been doing.
Both White House officials and Democrats on Capitol Hill have kept largely confidential the specifics of their offers to end the standoff that allowed funding for the agency to lapse as of 12:01 a.m. Saturday.
The outlines of the Democratic demands, however, are well known: limits on masked police, an end to random sweeps, new requirements for judicial warrants, putting “sensitive locations” such as churches, schools, hospitals and polling places off limits to Immigration and Customs Enforcement among them. The offer was given to the White House Monday evening but brushed aside by the White House less than 24 hours later.
“These are common sense,” Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, said Sunday on CNN about the Democratic proposals. “Police departments across America use them. We have a rogue agency. Why don’t we rein them in? That’s what the American people are asking Republicans.”
It seems to me that there is room for compromise here, as several of the Democratic demands make sense for any law enforcement (e.g., no masks, strict requirement for warrants), while the Democrats could compromise on, say, areas where ICE agents aren’t allowed. So long as both sides dig in their heels, though, there will be no compromise and no funding for TSA, the Coast Guard, or FEMA. This has apparently become a hill to die on for both sides, but the people who will suffer are us—the average Americans.
Two men have been jailed for life after attempting to stage one of the UK’s deadliest terrorist attacks before it was thwarted by an undercover operative.
Walid Saadaoui, 38, and Amar Hussein, 52, who had sworn allegiance to Islamic State (IS), planned a marauding firearms attack targeting Greater Manchester’s Jewish community.
On Friday, the pair were sentenced at Preston crown court after being found guilty of preparing acts of terrorism between December 2023 and May 2024.
The prime mover in the plot, Tunisian-born Saadaoui, of Abram, Wigan, was ordered to serve a minimum of 37 years.
Hussein, of no fixed address, was ordered to serve at least 26 years.
Saadaoui’s younger brother, Bilel Saadaoui, 37, of Hindley, Wigan, was sentenced to six years in prison for failing to disclose information about the plan.
All three had denied the offences in a trial lasting almost three months last year, in which jurors were told they were Islamist extremists with a “visceral dislike” of Jewish people.
Walid Saadaoui, a former Italian restaurant owner and hotel entertainer, arranged for the purchase and delivery of semi-automatic rifles, conducted reconnaissance and identified targets, but the man supplying them with the weapons was an undercover operative.
The operative, known to them as Farouk, had infiltrated jihadist social media networks and convinced Saadaoui that he was a fellow extremist.
Saadaoui was arrested in a counter-terror strike involving more than 200 officers as he attempted to take possession of two assault rifles, a semi-automatic pistol and almost 200 rounds of ammunition in the car park of the Last Drop hotel in Bolton on 8 May 2024. The weapons had been deactivated.
The court heard that Saadaoui hero-worshipped the IS terrorist Abdelhamid Abaaoud, who orchestrated the 2015 Paris terror attacks in which 130 people were killed and hundreds more injured in gun attacks.
Saadaoui and Hussein planned to disguise themselves as Jews and attack an antisemitism march in Manchester city centre before heading to suburbs north of Manchester city centre that are home to one of Europe’s largest Jewish communities.
These plotters are truly evil, and thank Ceiling Cat that their plot was stopped in its tracks. And kudos for “Farouk”, a brave man who risked his life to pose as an extremist—and probably saved the life of many Jews. He must have been a convincing terrorist, and it’s very lucky that the plotters didn’t get hold of some real extemists with fully activated weapons. But, for a Jew, it’s tiresome to see this kind of stuff day after day. It’s not like Jews all over the world are plotting to slaughter Muslims, you know. And it’s clear that the target wassn’t Zionists, but Jews. As one of my friends said, “‘Globalize the intifada’ is here.”
*And from the WaPo news summary:
For the past two nights: Colbert has roasted his own network, saying that lawyers stopped him from airing an interview with Texas state Rep. James Talarico [a Democrat]—watch here.
The disagreement: Colbert said the segment was blocked because of FCC rules requiring broadcasters to provide equal opportunity to candidates. CBS has disputed his account.
The first mention:
CBS late-night host Stephen Colbert rebuked his own network Monday night, claiming that lawyers for parent company Paramount Skydance prohibited him from airing an interview with Texas state Rep. James Talarico (D), a U.S. Senate candidate, over concerns it would violate the Federal Communications Commission’s equal-time rule.
“You know who is not one of my guests tonight?” Colbert asked his audience. “That’s Texas state representative James Talarico. He was supposed to be here, but we were told in no uncertain terms by our network’s lawyers, who called us directly, that we could not have him on the broadcast.”
In response, the studio audience booed.
“Then I was told, in some uncertain terms, that not only could I not have him on, I could not mention me not having him on,” Colbert continued. “And because my network clearly does not want us to talk about this, let’s talk about this.”
Colbert launched into a segment about the FCC’s equal-time rule, which requires broadcasters to provide equal opportunity to political candidates. News and talk show interviews have traditionally been exempt from the mandate. But in January, the FCC issued a public notice saying that daytime and nighttime talk shows would have to apply for exemptions to the equal-time rule for each of their programs.
. . . and the second:
Late-night host Stephen Colbert laid into executives at CBS and its parent company for the second night running Tuesday, rebuking his bosses for their handling of his interview with a Texas Democrat.
In an on-air segment, Colbert suggested the network was caving to pressure by trying to apply the Federal Communications Commission’s equal-time rule, which requires broadcasters to provide equal opportunity to political candidates but has traditionally not applied to news and talk show interviews.
CBS pushed back against that account in a statement Tuesday, suggesting its executives hadn’t prohibited the interview but instead had informed Colbert of legal guidance that it could trigger the FCC equal-time rule.
. . . and the video:
That is one strong video; kudos to Colbert. I doubt that he would have delivered such a monologue had he not already planned to leave the network. Why did this happen? Possibly because the network, CBS, has named Bari Weiss as the Editor-in-Chief of the news, and she is enforcing a strict doctrine of “equal time.” (She didn’t do that when Charlie Kirk’s wife appeared.) But, as Colbert notes, that policy not apply to late-night talk shows. But Colbert was even prohibited from mentioning the name of guests that weren’t allowed to be invited! That seems to be crossing the line into network censorship.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej has worked himself too hard, but he says it’s a mild flu.
Hili: Better cook enough for a few days.
Andrzej: Why?
Hili: The flu is catching up with you.
In Polish:
Hili: Lepiej zrób obiad na kilka dni.
Ja: Dlaczego:
Hili: Zaczyna ci się grypa.
From Hillel Neuer, head of UN Watch, showing Masih giving a powerful speech. But do note the “Community Note”:
This meeting in Geneva was held by UN Watch, a private group not affiliated with the UN. Its name and setting often mislead audiences. The board’s claim here is deliberately false—these remarks were not read at the UN and carry no official legitimacy.
The speech (NOT at the UN); I’m not clear why Hillel Neuer would say that. Still, Masih’s words are stirring:
Rare Moment of Truth at UN: Iranian women’s rights activist @AlinejadMasih takes the floor at United Nations @GenevaSummit to blast European politicians who for years failed to call out the regime’s terrorism and gender apartheid, points to victims in the room shot by the regime. pic.twitter.com/zvgdS2J8Ld
From Bryan, 3D photos (here’s a video on how to view them without special glasses):
Beautiful Northern Ireland (in 3D for those with viewers or who can free fuse) – Stereo photos of castles, coastlines, greenery, and Giant’s Causeway. https://t.co/R1HO9n043wpic.twitter.com/OeB0jsfBIL
A nurse with a 30-year unblemished record didn’t want to get undressed in front of a man – and she told him so.
Of all the gender ideology stories I’ve covered, the witch hunt of Sandie Peggie is the most insane and enraging.
I met her for @thetimeshttps://t.co/NZU75EDXm4
There are many courses in universities that seem not to be exercises in objective teaching and learning, but rather courses designed to foist certain political ideologies or points of view on students. One of them at this university was called to my attention by several in our community; it seems to be a course on how it’s justifiable to use violence to resist oppression. It was and is still taught by Alireza Doostdar, director of our Center for Middle Eastern Studies and Associate Professor of Islamic Studies and the Anthropology of Religion. I’ll just cover what must be one of Doostdar’s biggest areas of interest: the settler-colonialist, genocidal, and apartheid state of Israel. Does that justify the violence of Hamas? You’d have to take the course to see, but from the syllabus it looks like terrorism against Israel is not demonized in the course.
Doostdar is one of the handful of professors here who have taken an active and visible role in pro-Palestinian demonstrations, and was, I believe, one of the 28 faculty and students arrested for trespassing at the admissions office in 2023 (disruption #3 described here; the city later dropped charges). His brother, Ahmadreza Mohammadi Doostdar, was arrested in 2018 for spying for Iran, and was sentenced to 38 months in prison, 36 months of supervised release, and given a fine of $14,153.
Over the past couple of years Alireza Doostdar has issued a number of tweets showing his animus towards Israel, but then took them down, which is either an act of cowardice, contrition (which I doubt) or ambition (getting rid of stuff that makes you look bad). Here are three of them. First, plaudits for Iranian missiles:
The thought that Iranians will rise up against their government doesn’t seem so insane now, does it?
It is clear that the man has no love for Israel, promoting as he does the false narratives of Israeli “apartheid” and “genocide.” There is, of course, no opprobrium for Hamas or other terrorist organizations.
Look at that image of the buff Palestinian man wielding a sling à la David and waving the Palestinian flag! Here’s a description of the course (bolding is mine):
From 18th century slave rebellions in the Americas to 20th and 21st century anticolonial revolutions, oppressed peoples’ struggles for liberation have often incorporated violent tactics, even against noncombatants. This course examines anticolonial violence in light of the work of the Martiniquan revolutionary Frantz Fanon and some of his interlocutors. We study specific freedom movements: the Haitian and Algerian revolutions against French colonialism, Nat Turner’s slave rebellion and John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, Russian and American anarchism, Malcolm X and the Black Panthers’ mobilization against white supremacy and police violence, and the ongoing Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid. Throughout, we will pay attention to how revolutionaries evaluated the place of violence in their own movements, including criteria for justifiable and unjustifiable use of force.
Here are the readings for the section on Palestine. I haven’t looked all of them up, but looked at about a dozen, and all the ones I saw damned the apartheid, genocidal, settler-colonialist state of Israel.
None of the sources I examined condemned Hamas (the course, after all, is about justifiable violence), and all I saw were resolutely anti-Israel.
What is my conclusion? Well, first, Doostdar surely has a right to teach this course; to prohibit it because it may peddle hatred and lies (“apartheid”, “genocide,” etc.) would violate academic freedom. All I can do is say, that as a fellow faculty member, I think the course is biased and promotes misunderstanding and hatred. Is this an academic or a polemic course?
I would add that if any Jews want to take the course (and some of course should—to see what other side is arguing), they will not emerge having learned that there’s anything good about Israel, or that the IDFs war in Gaza was justifiable. It’s ironic since Israel’s response to the attack on October 7 could also be seen as “liberatory violence” in response to yearslong Palestinian attacks on Israel, though either missiles or acts of terror.
My inspection of the syllabus and perusal of the reading suggest that this is an example of the “one-sided” syllabi that I discussed in a post last year. The authors of the study I described looked at 27 million syllabi. I summarized their results thus:
The upshot is what you might expect: “anti-progressive” (or “conservative”) works were assigned with progressive ones far less often than were works that buttressed the progressive point of view. Conclusion: liberal academia is not exposing students to credible alternative points of view (and yes, the authors took care to examine cite only works that academically credible).
Classic “progressive” works used in their analysis include the following; you won’t know the critical views so much but you can see them in the paper. I’d recommend reading the big unpublished paper if you have time as it has a lot more data.
The classic progressive views of racism in the criminal-justice system: Michelle Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book Between the World and Me
The classic progressive view of the Israel/Palestine conflict (and oppression of Arabs in general): Edward Said’s book Orientalism
The classic progressive “pro-choice” paper: Judith Jarvis Thomson’s paper “A Defense of Abortion“
In short, “progressive” courses did not assign views counter to the course’s own ideology nearly as often as they assigned papers buttressing that ideology. This seems to be the case in Doostdar’s course. Make of it what you will, but it looks like an example of “myside bias.“
The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finally published an obituary of J. D. Watson, who died in November of last year. (Nathanial Comfort has written a biography of Watson that will be a good complement to Matthew’s biography of Crick; Comfort’s book will be out at the end of this year or the beginning of 2027.) You can access the PNAS obituary for free by clicking on the screenshot below, which is a good summary of Watson’s accomplishments (and missteps) if you don’t want a book-length treatment.
Most laypeople, if they know Watson’s name, probably know just two things. First, he and Crick co-discovered the structure of DNA, one of the great findings of biology. Second, Watson was demonized, and fired as director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories, for making racist comments. Both are true. Yes, Watson was a racist, as I discovered from talking to him for an hour and a half (see below), but he was also a brilliant scientist who did far more than just the DNA-structure stuff. The article describes some of his other accomplishments and I quote:
DNA was not the only structure that Watson solved at Cambridge. Using X-ray crystallography, Watson determined that the coat protein subunits of Tobacco Mosaic virus (TMV) were arranged helically around the viral RNA, although he could not detect the RNA (5). Two years later, Rosalind Franklin, now at Birkbeck College with J. D. Bernal, published the definitive study on the structure of TMV (6).
Watson left Cambridge in 1953 to take up a fellowship with Delbrück at the California Institute of Technology. He joined forces with Alex Rich in Pauling’s laboratory to work on the structure of RNA, but RNA gave fuzzy X-ray diffraction patterns and provided no clues as to what an RNA molecule might look like. Watson was not happy in Pasadena and, with the help of Paul Doty, was appointed an assistant professor in the Department of Biology at Harvard. However, he first spent a year in Cambridge, United Kingdom, before moving to Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Watson and Crick teamed up again to study the structure of small viruses and proposed that as a general principle, the outer protein coat of these viruses was built up of identical subunits. Franklin was also studying small viruses, and she and Watson exchanged letters, and she asked Watson and Crick to review drafts of her manuscripts.
At Harvard, Watson, his colleagues, and students made many important findings on ribosomes and protein synthesis, including demonstrating, concurrently with the team of Sydney Brenner, Francois Jacob, and Matt Meselson, the existence of messenger RNA. Watson’s contributions are not reflected in many of the publications from his Harvard laboratory. He did not add his name to papers unless he had made substantial contributions to them, thus ensuring that the credit went to those who had done the work. These papers included the discovery of the bacterial transcription protein, sigma factor, by Watson’s then graduate student Richard Burgess, along with Harvard Junior Fellow Richard Losick. At Harvard, Watson also promoted the careers of women, notably providing support for Nancy Hopkins, Joan Steitz, and Susan Gerbi. He also contributed to the split in the Department of Zoology due to his contempt for those working in the Department who were antireductionists.
In his last scientific paper (7), published in 1972, Watson returned to DNA. In considering the replication of linear DNA of T7 phage, he pointed out that the very ends of a linear DNA molecule cannot be replicated, the “end replication problem” which is solved in eukaryotes by telomeres. (Watson’s work was predated by Alexey Olovnikov who had published the same observation in 1971 in a Russian journal.)
Note the contributions Watson made, along with collaborators, at Harvard, and note as well that he did not put his name on publications unless he made “substantial contributions to them.” I did that, too, and I inherited that practice from my Ph.D. advisor Dick Lewontin, who inherited it from his Ph.D. advisor Theodosius Dobzhansky, who inherited it from his research supervisor at Columbia and Cal Tech, the Nobel Laureate T. H. Morgan. This is a good practice, and I never suffered from keeping my name off papers, for the granting agencies care only about which and how many papers come from an investigator’s funded lab, not how many his or her name is on. I’ll digress here to say that this practice has almost died out, as people now slap their name on paper for paltry reasons, like they contributed organisms or other material. The reason is the fierce competition for funding and credit.
Watson went on to write influential textbooks, trade books (notably The Double Helix) and headed up the Human Genome Project, from which he ultimately resigned. Finally, he ran the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, which he did very well until the racism scandal broke, rendering him ineffective.
Witkowski and Stillman don’t neglect the dark side of Watson:
In the late 1990s, Watson gave seminars, notably at the University of California Berkeley, where he expanded on research on the hormone POMC and related peptides and made inappropriate and incorrect observations about women. In October 2007, he made racist remarks about the intelligence of people of African descent, and, damagingly for his fellow employees at CSHL, stated that while he hoped that everyone was equal, “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true.” The CSHL Board of Trustees dissociated the institute from Watson’s comments, and he was forced to step down from his administrative position as Chancellor. The matter resurfaced in January 2019 when Watson was asked if his views on race and intelligence had changed. His answer was unequivocal: “No, not at all.” The Laboratory’s response was immediate, relieving him of all his emeritus titles. Watson and his family, however, continued to live on the CSHL campus.
They conclude this way:
Jim’s remarkable contributions to science and society will long endure—for the scientists using the human genome sequence, for students using Molecular Biology of the Gene and for readers of The Double Helix, and for reviving Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. He was a most amazing man.
Here’s a photo of Watson and me when he visited Chicago in 2013 to introduce the Watson Lectures that he endowed for our department. Do read the cool story about how those lectures came about in my post “Encounters with J. D. Watson“.
The latest Jesus and Mo strip, called two, is an apparent update:
This one is updated and re-named, because the world population has increased by more than 2 billion since it was published.
Well, the barmaid is an atheist, so she’d surely lose the argumentum ad populum! On the other hand, I have to laugh when I see people claim that a religion is “true” because it has so many adherents.
