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.
Here’s the latest opinion/comedy bit from Friday’s Real Time show with Bill Maher, with the episode called “Let’s be frank.” Maher starts out by citing the recent Democratic Party Autopsy (here) about why the party lost the Presidency and Congress in 2024. But he then faults both parties for having politicians in office who won’t be honest (surprise!).
Honesty, he avers, can be found only in books politicians write after they have left office. Maher gives several examples, including Republicans who admit, after they leave office, that Trump is paying off the January 6 insurrectionists with a “slush fund.” And don’t forget, he adds, Eisenhower’s warning about the “military industrial complex,” issued just three days before he left office.
The key diagnosis, Maher says, was made by the late Barney Frank when he was in hospice. It’s cited in the Times of Israel:
“The key to liberal democracy being able to come back is to get rid of the perception that we have allowed to grow, that the entire Democratic Party is committed to a series of very drastic social reconstructions that go beyond the politically acceptable,
Maher says, “And there, in one sentence, is the autopsy the Democrats have been so desperately searching for.” True! And of course this explains the capitalized “Frank” in the title.
The theme, then, is that Democrats say the truth about the party only when they have nothing to lose for speaking up.
Finally, Maher notes that some red states are better than his own “progressive” state—California—in education and in green energy. The last bit: “Democrats: these are your issues: education, race, the environment. And I say this with love: you’re losing to the Waffle House car-on-the-lawn states.” Well, we’ll see how the Democrats do in this fall’s midterms, though the most crucial election is in 2028.
The guests for this episode were astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, MS Now news correspondent Katy Tur, and former Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy. Tyson is not shown in this segment.
I don’t wholeheartedly embrace AI, for I think it will be the death of liberal education. In both the humanities and science, I fear that students will lose any ability they have to write, and will not improve their writing because they’ll be using bots. This will degrade their ability to communicate. (Scientists too need to communicate, and if they rely solely on bots, which can write papers for them, they’ll also degrade their ability to think.) Take-home assignments will vanish (AI can do them, and are doing them now), and all that’s left are in-class verbal participation and in-class exams. This is fine for students who just think of college as a way to purchase accreditation and not a chance to glory in the joys of learning, but so be it.
However, AI is good for some things, including analyzing data, doing statistics, doing preliminary literature searches, and, in the article from the WSJ screenshot below, solving difficult math problems. The article shows that a problem posed by the famous and eccentric Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdös—the “unit distance problem” has been solved by AI. Open AI, which created the program that did it, describes it this way—but it’s not that simple:
For nearly 80 years, mathematicians have studied a deceptively simple question: if you place nn points in the plane, how many pairs of points can be exactly distance 1 apart?
This is the planar unit distance problem, first posed by Paul Erdős in 1946. It is one of the best-known questions in combinatorial geometry, easy to state and remarkably difficult to resolve. The 2005 book Research Problems in Discrete Geometry, by Brass, Moser, and Pach, calls it “possibly the best known (and simplest to explain) problem in combinatorial geometry.” Noga Alon, a leading combinatorialist at Princeton, describes it as “one of Erdős’ favorite problems.” Erdős even offered a monetary prize for resolving this problem.
The “distance 1” thing confused me, and Wikipedia explains it a different way:
A problem posed by Paul Erdős known as the unit distance problem asks for the maximum possible number of unit-distance pairs determined by n points in the Euclidean plane; equivalently, it asks for the maximum number of edges in a unit distance graph on n vertices.
It gives a figure described as “a unit distance graph with 16 vertices and 40 edges”.
Wikipedia describes such unit distance graphs this way:
“In mathematics, particularly geometric graph theory, a unit distance graph is a graph formed from a collection of points in the Euclidean plane by connecting two points whenever the distance between them is exactly one.”
That’s what is confusing me, for if the theorem deals only with points in a two-dimensional plane, why aren’t unconnected dots not joined that are closer than some connected dots? (Look at the four dots around the center of the graph above. None of them are connected to each other, though more distant one are.) I presume some math-savvy reader will enlighten us.
Anyway, Open AI and the WSJ tells us that the problem has been solved by AI. If you want to see the solutions, open AI says this:
But the WSJ gives more comprehensible details. Click screenshot to read (if you subscribe):
An excerpt:
“If you are a mathematician,” one of the world’s leading mathematicians recently wrote, “you may want to make sure you are sitting down before reading further.”
And you’ll definitely need to sit down if you’re not a mathematician.
Because a famous math problem that stumped humans for the better part of a century has finally been toppled—by AI.
Not long ago, the most advanced AI models couldn’t do basic math. By last year, they were performing at gold-medal levels at the International Mathematical Olympiad. Now they are solving classic problems in combinatorial geometry using algebraic number theory. In no time at all, artificial intelligence has gone from stupid to frighteningly smart.
But even mathematicians were astonished when OpenAI announced that one of its models resolved a puzzle known as the unit distance problem without the help of any humans scribbling a bunch of equations on chalkboards.
It was fed this prompt:
And produced this proof, giving the maximum number of unit-distance pairs:
Apparently the proof was accepted by mathematicians. More from the WSJ:
And everyone in math lost their minds.
For those who aren’t fluent in numbers, OpenAI helped translate its findings by presenting them alongside 19 pages of companion remarks from prominent mathematicians.
. . .Just looking at formulas is enough to hurt my brain, but I wanted to know more about what the AI found, how we humans missed it—and why this breakthrough matters to those of us who would like to permanently distance ourselves from math problems.
When I spoke with OpenAI employees, they told me this result would have sounded completely bananas one year ago.
“Forget one year ago,” researcher Sebastien Bubeck said. “A month ago.”
There are endorsements by mathematicians, and a history of the problem, which Erdös considered quite difficult. So difficult, in fact, that he offered what was then a pretty hefty sum for anybody who could solve it: $500. I think the money will be given to the OpenAI team.
OpenAI’s researchers were stunned. They had given this Erdős problem to an internal model as a test of its capabilities—to find out whether it was better than previous models. They found out how much better it was once they took a peek at the solution. “I initially didn’t believe it,” said Mehtaab Sawhney, a Columbia mathematician at OpenAI. So they searched for errors, verified the results with outsiders and checked the AI’s work using the company’s AI coding agent. “With enough reading and enough Codexing,” Sawhney said, “it seemed believable—and pretty remarkable.”
Long before AI, mathematicians who solved Erdős problems often framed their checks instead of cashing them. For them, the money was worth less than the glory. When I asked OpenAI researchers about their plans for the prize, they hadn’t given it much thought.
But they did have lots of thoughts about my next question: Why did AI succeed where humans failed?
The first explanation is that this particular solution happens to be highly counterintuitive.
Most people who tackled this problem tried to prove Erdős’s conjecture, rather than disprove it. Only by defying conventional wisdom and experimenting with seemingly improbable strategies did the model find an unexpected path forward.
The second is that humans specialize while AI synthesizes.
While mathematicians tend to focus on their specific areas of expertise, AI models use their vast knowledge to spot connections that we couldn’t possibly see ourselves. In this case, that meant pulling from both algebraic number theory and discrete geometry, which have about as much in common as the marathon and pole vault.
The third explanation is that AI has time, attention, patience, focus and the persistence to stick with methods that humans might abandon—and the solution to this Erdős problem demanded it.
“It’s the kind of idea that you try for a bit, it doesn’t work, and you think maybe you were just too hopeful,” said Mark Sellke, a Harvard statistician at OpenAI. “So you give up and move on.”
AI doesn’t move on. It keeps plugging away without taking breaks to eat, sleep, answer emails, pick the kids up from school and watch the Knicks.
And it can think coherently for so long that even an abridged version of the model’s “chain of thought” ran more than 75,000 words—the length of the first “Harry Potter” book.
Was it an elegant proof? Well, the article implies “no,” but it’s apparently a proof:
“It’s fair to say that we haven’t seen yet the spark of genius that you could attribute to some of the grandest proofs in the history of humanity,” Bubeck told me.
And how long did the computation take? Less than a day and a half:
After reading it, a former OpenAI researcher did some back-of-the-envelope math and estimated it took less than 32 hours and $1,000 in tokens, a bargain for a result of this caliber. The researchers wouldn’t confirm the exact amount of time and compute, but Bubeck described the costs as “really nothing crazy at all.”
At any rate, this is what AI is good for, and I wonder if, say, it could solve Fermat’s Last Theorem, which took Andrew Wiles eight years of work to solve (he was knighted for it). And I wonder if there are any seemingly intractable math problems that can’t be solved by AI, especially if they were or will be solved by humans.
Now I don’t think there are any practical implications of this results, but that’s true of much mathematical theory. I’m just amazed at what AI can do.
From People magazine (also at the UPI), we hear about a brave moggy whjo chased off a coyote. Click on the screenshot to read:
An excerpt:
A Pico Rivera, California, resident captured some surprising footage: a cat fighting off a coyote in the middle of the day.
“I was in shock,” Debbie Beltran, the cat’s owner, told KTLA-TV, after viewing the video. “It took me a while to see—is that our cat or somebody else’s? And no, it’s our cat.”
Beltran said she was at work on May 1 when a neighbor sent security camera footage of her cat ferociously fighting a coyote outside. The video shows the cat standing its ground outside the family’s yard on Manzanar Avenue before it climbs a tree and escapes the coyote.
“Coyotes usually come out when the sun goes down,” Beltran said. “So to see this happen in broad daylight, that was shocking.”
Beltran said her cat, named Mama, has been with her family for about 5 years and is believed to be about 10 years old. She notes that Mama has always been a courageous cat who doesn’t back down from a fight.
“She’s always been feisty, this type of cat, and has got into fights before, so it doesn’t surprise me,” the pet parent told KABC.
Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time a coyote has attacked one of Beltran’s pets. She said that last year, one of her cats died in a coyote attack. Now, she’s giving Mama some extra attention since her caught-on-camera battle.
The video is below (turn off the closed captions, as they interfere with seeing the scrap). Mama is a brave cat: watch at her bristle, hump her back, and chase the d*g! However, cats should really be kept indoors because not all predators are so timorous.
********************
From IHeartCats, we here about a high-tech way Dubai has developed to feed street cats. Click headline below to read.
An excerpt with a video below:
As people stroll through Dubai’s carefully maintained parks and busy public spaces, a quieter sign of compassion is beginning to appear beside the city’s modern landscape. New feeding stations for stray animals are being introduced across several locations, giving homeless cats a cleaner and more dependable place to find food and water. For years, many residents relied on leaving bowls wherever they could stop to help, often hoping hungry street cats would discover them in time. Now, Dubai is taking a more organized approach that blends kindness, sanitation, and public care into one thoughtful effort designed to support both animals and the shared spaces around them.
Dubai has launched a pilot program featuring 12 feeding units placed in parks and other public areas. The project is designed to support stray animals while also improving cleanliness and organization in shared spaces. For years, many residents and volunteers have cared for street cats on their own, stopping to leave food and water wherever they could. While compassionate, those efforts often created scattered feeding spots that were difficult to maintain.
Now, the city is taking a more structured approach.
The stations aim to make feeding more consistent and sanitary while helping caretakers provide support in designated locations. It reflects a growing recognition that animal welfare is connected to a city’s overall health and appearance. Instead of treating stray-cat care as an informal act left entirely to volunteers, Dubai is weaving compassion into its public infrastructure.
For the cats wandering through busy streets and quiet parks, the change could mean something deeply important: reliability.
Street animals often survive day by day, never knowing when food or water will appear. Many endure extreme heat, exhaustion, and long stretches of uncertainty. Having fixed feeding stations creates a sense of stability for animals that spend their lives navigating harsh outdoor conditions. Even a simple sheltered feeding spot can offer relief and comfort.
Dubai’s decision also highlights how cities are beginning to rethink the relationship between urban development and animal care. Modern public spaces are usually designed around people first, but this initiative acknowledges that stray animals are part of the environment, too.
The feeding stations are intended to reduce mess and discourage random food waste while still allowing residents to help animals responsibly. By centralizing feeding efforts, the city can better manage sanitation concerns without removing the compassion that inspired people to feed the cats in the first place.
The idea transforms what was once a scattered, individual effort into something shared and supported at a civic level.
Not only that, but the station combines feeding with recycling: if you put a can or bottle into the station, cat food is dispensed into the station. See the video below. Great idea!
********************
From The Animal Rescue Site we hear of an unholy interspecific friendship between a cat and a d*g species: “Wild fox befriends cat“, by Malorie Thompson. Here’s an excerpt, with a video below:
Cats and foxes seem like two of the same, but it’s rare that we see them interact.
They’re both sly and cunning, playful and adorable. Yet, they’re different species and they likely rarely cross paths in a meaningful way.
However, a wildlife photographer managed to capture a sweet exchange between the two animals and you have to see it to believe it.
Turkish wildlife photographer Ali ihsan Öztürk (@aliihsanozturk.65) shared a video of a cat and a fox hanging out on Instagram and it’s really something special.
He captioned the post (translated): “Fox and cat’s friendship. I couldn’t believe even while taking the picture. what a beautiful friendship.”
In the video, you can see the cat come up behind the fox and nuzzle the wild animal. Surprisingly, the fox didn’t seem to mind one bit and took it as an invitation for friendship!
The two animals continued to nuzzle each other in a playful way. It’s easy to see why Ali was so surprised to witness it!
Below is the Facebook post, which you can also see by clicking on the picture. Here’s the entire text:
In January 2026, a story began spreading online that many people could not stop thinking about: two stray animals who soon became known as the “street brothers.”
A fox and a cat had somehow learned to survive together outdoors. They shared warmth, protection, and the feeling of not being alone. Life on the street was hard, but they always stayed close to each other. The fox, a little bigger and stronger, often let the injured cat lie right by his side. On cold nights, it almost seemed as if he was quietly keeping watch so nothing would happen to his small companion.
When rescuers finally brought them to safety, the cat received the medical care it urgently needed. But at the shelter, something became obvious right away: whenever the two were separated, both became visibly stressed. Restlessness, searching, whining — as if the most important support in their lives had suddenly been taken away. Their closeness had long become more than a habit. It was their home.
So the team did everything they could to keep them together. Eventually, their story reached a kindhearted person who did not want a half-solution. He did not adopt only the cat — he took in the fox too, so the two would never be torn apart again.
Their journey is a reminder of what loyalty really means. And that friendship sometimes appears where no one expects it. Family does not always have to be the same species — sometimes it is simply the same bond holding two hearts together.
Fox-and-cat-friends videos are not rare: here are two more. All of these, oddly, feature cats that are mostly white.
*****************’
Lagniappe: From Reese: “Our Michael” from Archaeology & Art on Facebook, featuring an old photograph that was apparently for sale on eBay but that has been sold. Lovely cat! Here’s the whole text and the dead link:
Oct, 1938: our Micheal [sic]
The love radiating from the phrase “our Michael” alone is enough to warm our hearts.
The photographer and story are unclear. The source of this vintage photo is an old eBay listing, but the link isn’t active:
Welcome to the final CatSaturday of the month: Saturday, May 30, 2026, shabbos for Jewish cats, and National Mint Julep Day, an excellent drink when you use good bourbon and plenty of crushed mint. From Wikipedia (note the reference to Williamsburg, Virginia):
The mint julep originated in the southern United States, probably during the eighteenth century. The earliest known mentions come from 1770 and include a satirical play by Robert Munford, The Candidate (where a drunkard character “Mr. Julip” appears); and “A Short Poem on Hunting” (which describes julep as a concoction “Which doctors storm at, and which some adore”), published in the WilliamsburgVirginia Gazette. Further evidence of mint julep as a prescription drink can be found in 1784 Medical communications: “sickness at the stomach, with frequent retching, and, at times, difficulty of swallowing. I then prescribed her an emetic, some opening powders, and a mint julep.”
Here’s one with the caption, “A mint julep made with Henry Clay’s original recipe at the Round Robin Bar. According to bartender and historian Jim Hewes, the cocktail was originally served in a crystal glass because it represented a more upper-class beverage.”
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the May 30 Wikipedia page.
A faculty member ordered cookies for the undergraduates at their research symposium, and some of them were meant to display Botany Pond, which the undergrads apparently love. They saved one cookie for me, and here it is. I ate it this morning with coffee, but I hated to ingest such a work of art:
Da Nooz:
*Well, it looks as if the war with Iran isn’t over yet. The news yesterday was all abuzz that a deal had been reached, and Trump was set to approve it. But, as always, that was wrong. Nothing was announced. From the BBC:
US President Donald Trump had a meeting with top aides on Friday to make a “final determination” about a framework for extending the ceasefire with Iran, but it concluded without clarity on the next steps.
He said Iran must agree to never have a nuclear weapon or bomb, that the Strait of Hormuz be reopened for “unrestricted shipping traffic, in both directions”, and that any mines in the waterway are “destroyed”.
The meeting was held in the White House’s Situation Room, used for dealing with major crises. Iran earlier said it was not negotiating on its nuclear programme – which it insists is wholly for civilian purposes.
On Thursday, the two countries had agreed a framework of a deal – known as a memorandum of understanding – pending the approval of Trump and Iran’s leadership, according to US officials.
The deal would reportedly extend the ceasefire for 60 days and launch talks on the future of Iran’s nuclear programme.
“President Trump will only make a deal that is good for America and satisfies his red lines. Iran can never possess a nuclear weapon,” a White House official told CBS News, the BBC’s US news partner.
Since the ceasefire came into effect on 8 April, Trump has repeatedly suggested the US and Iran are close to a deal and negotiations are progressing, but so far there have been no substantive results.
In a social media post earlier on Friday, Trump said he was prepared to lift the US naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, allowing ships caught in the waterway to “start the process of ‘heading home!'”
He also insisted that Iran allow the US to remove and destroy its enriched uranium.
“No money will be exchanged, until further notice,” he said. “Other items, of far less importance, have been agreed to.”
Later, a White House official confirmed to the BBC that the meeting in the Situation Room had concluded. The official provided no further details.
Of course the “Iran will never possess a nuclear weapon” stipulation holds only for Trump’s presidency. And even now who can trust Iran to keep that pledge? Their whole history of evasion and cheating says otherwise.
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D), who has been widely viewed as a potential Democratic presidential candidate,said Thursday that she won’t be seeking her party’s nomination in 2028.
Hours later, she said otherwise.
Whitmer is term-limited next year after winning two gubernatorial elections in her key battleground state, and pundits have regularly identified her as part of Democrats’ crowded potential presidential field.
In an interview with Fox 2 Detroit on Thursday morning, she said: “There will be a robust group of people running for president. … I will not be one of them in 2028. I can tell you that.”
But later in the day, at an annual gathering of Michigan’s top civic and business leaders, she said she had spoken too soon.
“I never thought I would run for governor, so I guess I should know better,” she said during a panel discussion, later adding: “Never say never.”
Whitmer rose to the national spotlight during the coronavirus pandemic, when she pushed back on President Donald Trump’s efforts to antagonize her as “that woman from Michigan.”
She led a push to codify abortion rights in the state constitution in 2022, when Michigan Democrats won control of all three branches of state government and then used that “trifecta” to repeal a law that makes it harder for workers to unionize.
Whitmer drew some criticism for a 2025 speech in which she found some common ground with Trump but continued to stoke speculation that she could be preparing a run.
This year, she was one of several potential candidates who traveled to the Munich Security Conference, which does not typically attract U.S. governors, to lay out alternatives to Trump’s foreign policy.
I would vote for Whitmer in a heartbeat against any Republican candidate I know of, though I know some readers aren’t fond of her. But she’d be better than “progeressives” like Harris and Newsom, though these two are now are trying to “de-progressivize” themselves. I’m pretty sure that Harris won’t be the Democratic candidate because of both her election loss and her inability to speak coherently, but everything is still up for grabs.
The Supreme Court on Thursday threw out a Mississippi man’s conviction and death sentence. By a vote of 5-4, the court in Pitchford v. Cain agreed with Terry Pitchford that the judge at his 2006 trial had not properly analyzed whether the prosecutor in Pitchford’s case violated the Constitution’s ban on racial discrimination in jury selection.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote for the majority, in a nine-page opinion joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Quoting a 2019 opinion in which the court threw out the conviction of Mississippi inmate Curtis Flowers in a case that involved the same prosecutor, Kavanaugh acknowledged that “‘America’s trial judges operate at the front lines of American justice’ and ‘the job of enforcing’” the Supreme Court’s 1986 decision in Batson v. Kentucky, holding that the use of peremptory challenges (that is, challenges for any reason) to remove potential jurors based on race violates the Constitution, “‘rests first and foremost with trial judges.’” But in Pitchford’s case, Kavanaugh wrote, “the Mississippi trial court erroneously omitted” a key part of the Batson inquiry.
Justice Neil Gorsuch dissented, in a 10-page opinion joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Amy Coney Barrett. In his view, Kavanaugh’s “opinion errs on the law and the factual record alike.”
Pitchford, who was 18 at the time, was charged with murder for his role in the 2004 shooting death of a shopkeeper. A 16-year-old, Eric Bullins, fired the shots that actually killed Reuben Britt; he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Notice that two conservatives joined with the three liberal judges in this decision, which makes it unusual. But I think it’s a good decision because they are following the Constitution, which is their job. You can see the decision here. In the NYT, Yale Law School graduate Avital Fried agreed with the decision in an op-ed called, “College admissions are race blind. Jury selection is not.” Two bits (you won’t like the op-ed if you think affirmative action is essential to ensure “equity”):
The court recently ruled out the consideration of race in other contexts, like college admissions (as decided in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard) and voting rights (as decided in Louisiana v. Callais). The court has explained the shift toward a race-blind approach in those contexts as a way to reduce discrimination. To be sure, there are reasons to question this new approach in a racialized society like ours. But if that is the court’s stance, it should be applied to jury selection, too, where the stakes can be much higher and the consideration of race can be even more clearly linked to discrimination.
. . . The court’s decision on Thursday took a step in the right direction, upholding the current jury selection standard. But more needs to be done to align discrimination protections in this area with those in college admissions — both governed by the constitutional promise of equal protection under the law. The court has read that promise to protect high schoolers applying to elite colleges, and the very same promise serves as the bedrock of criminal trial rights. No one has a right to be admitted to Harvard, just as no one has a right to be seated on a jury. Still, every person has a right not to be denied a spot at Harvard or a seat on a jury because of his or her race.
If anything, the stakes are higher in a criminal trial than in college admissions. Discrimination in jury selection undermines people’s right to a fair trial when their life or liberty is on the line. Surely, high schoolers applying to elite universities should not get moreprotection than those facing the deprivation of life or liberty. Mr. Pitchford’s legal saga began when he was the same age as students around the country applying to college. Furthermore, racially biased strikes prevent members of the public from participating in an important civic duty. Just as the right to vote is carefully guarded, the right to be considered to serve on a jury is worthy of extra protection.
I have no beef with this decision, and am happy that two conservatives voted with three liberal.
*As always, I’ll steal a few items from Nellie Bowles weekly snark-and-humor column at the Free Press, called this week, “TGIF: The Donald Trump $250 bill.” Sadly, the real author is Nick Gillespie, a Free Press editor and libertarian.
Speaking of assisted dying:
→ Tim Hortons with a side of death: A Canadian doctor, James MacLean, approved medical aid in dying (MAID) for a 45-year-old man after briefly assessing him outside the popular coffee-and-donuts chain Tim Hortons, named for a beloved hockey player whose death in a car crash shocked fans. After determining that the man had inflammatory bowel disease and depression, Dr. MacLean then personally drove the man to a morgue where the MAID was administered in an industrial unit filled with other human cadavers. In another case, reports The National Post, “MacLean failed to administer one of three drugs used in assisted deaths—one that paralyzes the body’s muscles, including the muscles involved in breathing. The patient resumed spontaneously breathing again after initially being pronounced dead, and after MacLean had already left the home.”
Even—or especially—for supporters of MAID (I’m one), this sort of malpractice must be thoroughly investigated and punished.
If that’s the way MAID is actually practiced in Canada, it needs much more severe scrutiny, and the doctor needs his license pulled.
→ When you see only one set of footprints in the sand, that’s when Israel carried you:
→ Let’s check in on RFK Jr.: “Cheryl cheerleads the removal of a pair of Black Racers from Dr Oz’s patio.” Of course she does! I’m fond of saying we’re living in a Philip K. Dick novel as “shorthand for just how fucking weird our world is, and how much weirder it continues to get on a daily basis. What writer could have created Hunter Biden, or Lauren Boebert, or Elon Musk? The idea that Arnold [Schwarzenegger] would emerge as a major political player is strange—until you get to Trump.” Or RFK Jr.
Nobody but nobody is as good as Nellie at writing TGIF!
Like many on Thursday’s stage for theScripps National Spelling Bee finals, Shrey Parikh was a returning competitor. But his appearance this year wasn’t guaranteed.
He ranked 89th in 2022 and third in 2024. He seemed poised to take yet another flight from his hometown of Rancho Cucamonga, California,to the nation’s capital to contend for the Scripps Cup. Then he misspelled a word in his middle school’s bee last year. He was disqualified before nationals — or regionals — even began.
The word was calipers.
“Last year, I was really dejected and just very upset,” Shrey said. “It didn’t even sink in until the next day. I had a really tough time.”
Now, he’s got it down: “C-A-L-I-P-E-R-S,” he said for good measure on Thursday evening from the Scripps stage at DAR Constitution Hall after the competition ended.
In his last year of eligibility, the 14-year-old finally earned what he has coveted for years: the towering floral Scripps cup and a $50,000 cash prize. He beat out 246 other contenders. From the stage where he had just claimed his title as national champion, Shrey compared his feelings with his loss early last year.
“It’s like two ends of a spectrum,” he said. “Right now, I’m probably the happiest I’ve ever been.”
Shrey had a buzzworthy run in this year’s bee, which knocked out four of nine finalists in one round and ended in the competition’s third-ever spell-off tiebreaker. In several intense rounds of spelling during the finals, Shrey bested words like Bhubaneswar, Pluchea, hwyl, Metohija and Philepitta, before moving to the spell-off, where he spelled a record 32 words correctly in 90 seconds.
Shrey’s championship word — the last word he spelled correctly in the spell-off — was bromocriptine.
Ishaan Gupta, the runner up, spelled 25 words correctly.
*If you look at Wikipedia’s list of national spelling bee winners, you’ll see that Indians or Indian Americans have had a lock in the championship for about 18 years. (They do allow international competitors, so I can’t tell if the winners are citizens, but who cares?: it’s still amazing.) Shrey, who practices spelling for five hours a day, was in his last year of eligibility. His prize was a big trophy and $50,000.
Here’s a video of the competition and the winner (they can’t write down anything); note that it is mostly minority students of Asian origin who reached the top. The spelling part ends at 4:38, so you can stop there.
Here are the finalists in a screenshot from the video above:
You can take your own spelling bee quiz here (I haven’t yet done it).
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Editor Hili is keeping Andrzej in line:
Andrzej: What are we running in “Letters” tomorrow?
Hili: Something short, because yesterday the readers complained that you’re making them read too much.
In Polish:
Ja: Co dajemy jutro w „Listach”
Hili: Coś krótkiego, bo wczoraj czytelnicy narzekali, że każesz im za dużo czytać.
. . . and Andrzej posted this photo on his public FB page:
From Masih, who’s down on AOC for the Congresswoman’s apparent glorification of oppression:
“My body, my choice.” Except when a Muslim mayor says cover up. Then it’s “my body for votes.”
Since yesterday, when I criticized AOC, I have been under attack by her fellow feminists and colleagues calling me Islamophobic. Really? I have no fear of my beautiful mother, who… pic.twitter.com/Y4rC5PtsJP
Here’s the speech and appearance of AOC that Masih criticized. I have to say that here AOC makes me cringe. Donning a hijab, indeed! It’s either hypocrisy, pandering, or AOC is a covert Islamist.
Hello @AOC, while you smiled in a hijab at a New York event, I was in Federal Court facing the 4th hitman hired by the Islamic Republic to assassinate me, for campaigning for Iranian women to have the same freedom you performed for a photo op. Will you come to court with me in… pic.twitter.com/25mEGcdQ9d
One from my feed; the English translation of the Japanese is this: “A performance titled ‘Stairway to Success’… It steals your gaze without you realizing it.” Ah, life!
These three Dutch Jewish girls, with the youngest only three years old, were gassed as soon as they arrived in Auschwitz. Their mother was also gassed.
In the dim light of a late fly-out, to the tune of cicadas, Nayang’s wrinkle-lipped bats leave their cave…just as they have probably done every night for thousands of years…🦇#bats #Thailand #wildlife
I’m starting to get some new batches of wildlife photos, and I encourage readers to submit their good photos for consideration.
Today’s installment features the photos of UC Davis ecologist Susan Harrison, who recently went birding not too far from Chicago:
Birding in the Upper Midwest
Minnesota and Wisconsin may not be at the top of everyone’s list of nature travel destinations, but do they have darned nice birding? You betcha! On a late May work trip to Minneapolis, it was my good fortune to visit some of the Upper Midwest’s riparian forests, wetlands, and restored prairies during spring migration. Friendly people and well-tended parks and nature reserves helped make it delightful.
Rarer small birds that were new (a.k.a. “lifers”) for me….
Kirtland’s Warbler (Setophaga kirtlandii), a specialized inhabitant of young Jack Pine (Pinus banksiana) forests, only recently removed from the endangered species list:
Louisiana Waterthrush (Parkesia motacilla), a warbler that lives on the banks of crystal-clear headwater streams in forests:
LeConte’s Sparrow (Ammospiza leconteii), a secretive marsh dweller that sings in the dark and scurries around on the ground:
Henslow’s Sparrow (Centronyx henslowii), a stealthy bird of the region’s much-diminished grasslands (historical note: it was named by John James Audubon in honor of Darwin’s mentor John Stevens Henslow):
The week has flown by fast, like a migrating mallard, and June is nearly on us; today is Friday, May 29, 2026, and International Everest Day, celebrating the first confirmed ascent of the world’s highest peak (8,848.86 meters or 29,031.7 ft) on this day in 1953. The summiteers were, of course, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay. I have hiked to Everest twice, and have some lovely pictures of it, but they are 35mm Kodachrome slides that I can’t reproduce here. You’ll have to settle for a photo of the ice axe used by Hillary on the ascent, photographed by moi at the Auckland Memorial War Museum:
Many historians consider May 29, 1453, to be the date on which the Middle Ages ended. It was on this date that Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, fell to the Ottoman Empire, after being under siege for almost two months. With the fall of the capital, the Byzantine Empire ended as well. Following the fall, Byzantine scholars left Constantinople and Greek culture began being studied outside of the area of the old empire. Learning based on classical Greek sources was revived and it helped bring on the Renaissance.
Here are what is reputed to be the best biscuits in Amerca (ergo in the world), part of a fantastic Southern breakfast I had at the Loveless Motel and Cafe outside Nashville, Tennessee (Martha Stewart, eating there, said it “was the best breakfast I ever had”). They were certainly the best biscuits I ever had, and, combined with eggs, grits, country ham, and red-eye gravy, I can’t think of a better breakfast, either. The jams in the plastic cups are homemade.
The biscuits come as soon as you sit down, so if you eat there don’t scarf them all up, as you won’t have appetite for the feast to come. And don’t worry, the biscuits keep coming. (There is a “biscuit lady” in the kitchen whose sole task is to make them).
Loveless Motel biscuits
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the May 29 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
Breaking News, Ripped from the Headlines: Yesterday the NBC Evening News announced jubilantly that the U.S. and Iran are near a final deal on ending the war. Well, not so fast. What we have is “a draft plan on the table” (NYT) and “perhaps the makings of a deal” (WSJ). Here’s a rather lame proclamation from the WSJ:
The U.S. and Iran are within reach of an agreement to wind down the war, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told reporters Thursday, but President Trump has yet to sign off on it, and the White House wants a deal that satisfies several key conditions.
“We perhaps have the makings of a deal here,” Bessent said from the White House, noting both sides have been swapping proposals. “Everything depends on what the president wants to do, and President Trump is not going to make a bad deal.”
Bessent said Iran must agree to dispose of its highly enriched uranium, commit to never seek a nuclear weapon and fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz—elements U.S. officials previously said would be in the so-called memorandum of understanding.
The statement came after a U.S. official said the two countries were closing in on a 60-day agreement, including a mutual unwinding of blocks in the strait over the first 30 days. Axios reported earlier on the details.
Stay tuned (in two months). Any promises from Iran about never seeking nuclear weapons, should that be in the agreement, will be arrant lies.
The United States and Iran traded strikes overnight after President Donald Trump insisted he would not agree to a “crummy agreement” in the negotiations to end the three-month-old war.
The president used a Cabinet meeting Wednesday to insist he had maximum negotiating power with Iran and was not under pressure to make a deal.
“We’ve been doing this for a few months. Vietnam lasted 19 years. Korea lasted eight years. Afghanistan lasted many years,” Trump said when asked what the time frame is for the war ending.
Iran, he said was “negotiating on fumes” and had made a mistake by thinking “they were going to outwait me” because he would be under political pressure from this year’s midterm elections.
“I don’t care about the midterms.”
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said Thursday morning that it had retaliated against a U.S. attack outside the airport in Bandar Abbas, a city on the Strait of Hormuz, by targeting a U.S. base in Kuwait where the strike originated. Further U.S. attacks would receive a “more decisive” response, it said, according to state media. U.S. Central Command said Kuwaiti forces had successfully intercepted an Iranian ballistic missile.
Hours earlier, U.S. forces struck an Iranian launch site in Bandar Abbas, according to a U.S. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss military operations, after U.S. shot down five Iranian one-way attack drones that Centcom said “posed a clear threat in and near the Strait of Hormuz.”
The official described the U.S. action, first reported by Reuters, as “measured, purely defensive, and intended to maintain the ceasefire.” It follows similar strikes on Monday, during a ceasefire between the two sides that has looked increasingly shaky.
As readers suspected, this war is going to continue, and each exchange of attacks makes it harder to confect an agreement, despite the crowing from the Trump administration. My plan, which is mine: the U.S. needs to go harder after Iran, and stop dilly-dallying around striking missile sites. If they can’t get an agreement to completely ruin Iran’s ability to make nuclear weapons, and get the Strait of Hormuz open freely, then they should stop trying to get compromises on these issues. But I am no pundit!
Trump administration officials have pressed the office responsible for printing the nation’s money to design a $250 bill featuring the president’s portrait, according to four current and former employees, in what would be the first appearance of a living person on U.S. currency in more than 150 years.
Starting last year, two political appointees at the Treasury Department — U.S. Treasurer Brandon Beach and his senior adviser, Mike Brown — repeatedly urged staff at the agency’s Bureau of Engraving and Printing to prepare prototypes of the note, according to the employees, who said the move raised concerns because federal law currently allows only deceased people to appear on bills.
The employees spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.
As part of the effort, Beach in August and September provided bureau staff with mock-up designs for the note, including one that shows President Donald Trump’s face in the center of the $250 bill between the signatures of the president and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, according to one of the employees and records reviewed by The Washington Post.
The artist who said he designed the mock-up told The Post that he had spoken with Trump about it.
British painter Iain Alexander said Trump endorsed changes to his original design, such as adding the colors of the American flag and a logo commemorating the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding.
“He likes to call me his favorite British artist,” said Alexander, a former competitive swimmer and DJ who describes himself as a royal portrait artist of Queen Elizabeth II and others.
No living person has appeared on U.S. currency since 1866, when it was outlawed after the image of a mid-level Treasury bureaucrat showed up on a 5-cent note. Legislation that would allow Trump to appear on a $250 bill was introduced in Congress last year to commemorate the nation’s 250th anniversary but has languished.
In a statement, a Treasury Department spokesperson said the printing office “is conducting appropriate planning and due diligence” in response to the proposed legislation.
“Should this legislative mandate be signed into law, the BEP is moving proactively to produce a $250 commemorative note which will appropriately recognize the 250th Anniversary of our great nation,” the statement said.
The director of the printing bureau, Patricia “Patty” Solimene, and other staff repeatedly explained to Beach and Brown that there were legal and procedural obstacles to producing the note and that it would take years longer than they envisioned, the four employees said.
I wonder whether Congress will approve this bill about a bill (there’s of course no doubt that Trump would sign it). Right now a straight-up vote would pass it, assuming it’s a vote along party lines, but since it will take years to actually produce this infernal bill, it might be stopped after the midterms or when (fingers crossed) we get a reasonable President.
For Paul McCartney, songwriting isn’t only a job, a craft and an emotional outlet. It’s a compulsion and a craving.
“People say, ‘Well, why do you still write songs?’ And it’s just because I love it. I’m addicted,” he said in an interview at Boulevard Carroll, a warren of recording and rehearsal studios on Manhattan’s Far West Side, where McCartney, 83, had just wrapped up an afternoon of band practice for the season finale of “Saturday Night Live.” “Out of a black hole comes forth milk and honey. And it’s so great, the feeling.”
Prolific as he has been — through the Beatles, Wings and solo albums — McCartney doesn’t follow any songwriting discipline or routine. “I’ll just be somewhere, and with some time to spare, and my guitar will be there, or I’ll be near a piano. And the urge will take me,” he said. “Whenever I’ve hit something, it’s just like, ooh, wow. It’s a great feeling. You know, the whole creative thing is a great thing. I say it beats working.”
Even for a rehearsal, McCartney was nattily dressed. He sported a blue jacket, a black shirt with pink pin dots, black pants, white-soled shoes like karate slippers and socks with a psychedelic design of blue bubbles below a bright yellow stripe.
. . .In person, McCartney carries his six decades of fame with extraordinary grace. He’s genial and unpretentious, proud but not arrogant and still amazed and delighted at his life as a musician. “I wonder these days at how I ended up as a songwriter,” he mused. “Because, you know, I’m just some kid who went to school, went to the careers master who said to me, you know, ‘You haven’t got qualifications and, there’s not … I don’t see a great future for you.’
“So I had to take that and just sort of think, ‘Sod you — I’m gonna do something.’ And it made me work for success harder, because I wasn’t supposed to be successful. So writing songs was one of the great things about my growing up.”
. . .He added, “John had a much harder edge, which I liked a lot. When we were working together, it was very inspiring, very useful to have that kind of edge. And I think possibly it was good for him to have something less hard, something maybe a little bit more romantic. It’s just my way, you know. I’m that kind of person. I like certain things that some people might just sniff at and say, ‘Oh my God, that is so corny.’”
But at times, he has also felt misunderstood. “It’s funny how you get stereotyped,” he said. “Being called the cute one in the Beatles — that was like the worst insult you could give me. I really didn’t like that. It’s like, ‘No, no no, I’m more than that.’ But it also is true that if I’m writing a song, I do like it to have that sort of loving element. But to offset that, I often find that something a bit more realistic creeps in. I like the mix of the two.”
His melodic gift can hide his darker moments. When I asked which of his lesser-known songs he’s fond of, he cited “Daytime Nightime Suffering” and “Arrow Through Me,” two Wings songs from the 1970s that are not only full of musical twists, but also harbor troubled thoughts.
. . .McCartney is no longer concerned with making hits. “In attempting to be creative, it’s good if a lot of people like it,” he said. “But it’s not the be-all and end-all. It’s nowhere near as important to me as it is to some people. I like freedom. And if the freedom leads to a hit, great. If the freedom leads to just me enjoying it, probably even greater.”
What matters for him now is simply making music. “It’s a magical world, music,” McCartney said. “Scientifically, even, it is just a bunch of frequencies. So how can these frequencies affect your heart? I get it, if it’s got a lyric, sometimes you go, oh yeah. But if it’s just a melody — how can that make you cry? That’s magic. I love it.”
Here is his song “Days We Left Behind” that he sang on SNL. Yes, his voice is gone and he knows it. I didn’t like this song the first time I heard it, but I have to agree with the readers who said it was okay. It’s not a classic, and I’d like to hear the Beatles do it, but so be it. It reminds me of George Harrison’s Beatles remembrance song “When We Was Fab,” except this is about an old man pondering his past, not the Beatles.
The NGO at the centre of Kristof’s essay calls itself the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor (Euro-Med or EMHRM), which Kristof blandly describes as “often critical of Israel.” Registered in Switzerland in 2015, this Palestinian NGO has a mailing address in Geneva and an unknown number of staffers paid with funds from undisclosed donors. The publication of a 69-page Euro-Med report on 12 April was the source of Kristof’s accusation that Israel “employs systematic sexual violence” that is “widely practiced as part of an organized state policy.” The report was accompanied by an extensive public-relations campaign, which included promotion in Turkish-government-controlled news platform TRT, Qatar-linked propaganda platform Middle East Eye, and many other outlets that routinely promote invented or tendentious stories about Israel.
The April Euro-Med report was also the source of the most sensational allegation in Kristof’s essay—that Israel trains police dogs to “rape prisoners and detainees.” Anti-Zionist influencers and officials seized on this charge and were already energetically circulating it before Kristof’s essay appeared last week.
. . . Euro-Med adopted this model [of NGOs having terrorist goals], and Israel has long considered the NGO to be a Hamas propaganda front. In 2012, the organisation’s founder and chairman Ramy Abdu was photographed posing with the late Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh (killed by Israel in Tehran in July 2024). And at a 2013 event he organised in Gaza (“Hamas Movement Within the International Context”), Abdu was pictured next to Hamas’s international-relations officer Osama Hamdan. Abdu also created and led a series of propaganda frameworks, including the European Campaign to End the Siege on Gaza and the Council for European Palestinian Relations (CEPR). In 2013, Israel’s Ministry of Justice listed Abdu as one of Hamas’s “main operatives and institutions” in Europe. In November 2020, the Minister of Defence sanctioned him “in relation to his work with the designated terrorist organization ‘IPalestine—International Platform of NGOs Working for Palestine (aka ‘IPNGO’)’ that belongs to and acts on behalf of the designated terrorist organisation HAMAS.”
. . . Another important figure at Euro-Med is Muhammad Shehada, the organisation’s chief of programmes and communications, who posted a picture of himself with Ismail Haniyeh in November 2014 under the caption: “Talking a gently walk and a selfi with the ex-Prime Minister of#Gaza and the leader of #Hamas: #Ismail_Haniya.” Between February 2021 and August 2023, Shehada wrote twenty articles for Newsweek(which still describes him as a “writer and civil society activist from the Gaza Strip”),and from July 2017 to January 2024, he was a regular contributor to the Israeli left-wing newspaper, Haaretz. In addition to which, he has been quoted by the Washington Post and the New York Times, invited to address a Harvard human-rights centre (in February 2025), and been appointed as a visiting fellow at the European Council of Foreign Relations think tank.
Richard Falk—a 9/11 conspiracy theorist and professor of international law at Princeton University—is chairman of Euro-Med’s Board of Trustees. In 2011, when Falk was serving as the Human Rights Council’s special rapporteur on Palestine (the position now held by Francesca Albanese), his crankery became so egregious that it was even condemned by the office of then-UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon. That same year, Falk published a cartoon on his personal blog that depicted an American dog in a kippa urinating on lady justice while it feasts on the skeletal remains of a small human corpse.
Here’s the cartoon published by Falk (from Quillette):
And of course, the dog-rape charge:
In this context, the chronology of events related to Euro-Med’s promotion of this story bears examination. On 19 June 2024, Dr. Muneer Al Barash, director general of the Hamas-run Ministry of Health in Gaza, was interviewed in Arabic by Al Jazeera. According to an unofficial English translation posted on X, Al Barash referred to “trained dogs used to perform vile [sexual] acts on detainees.” Eight days later, the Euro-Med story quoted Fadi Bakr, a Palestinian lawyer arrested after the 7 October atrocities, as the sole witness to the allegation of dog rape. “Throughout the entire ordeal I endured,” he told the NGO, “this was among the most awful things that I witnessed.” But four days earlier, Bakr had given an interview to the radical Israeli opposition NGO B’Tselem and made no mention of this incident, even though he detailed many other aspects of his ordeal. Bakr’s testimony is not included in Euro-Med’s April 2026 report either.
None of the MSM seems moved to let us know about Shehada’s background, or Abdu’s for that matter. Finally, Euro-Med certainly published antisemitic lies before:
Euro-Med’s dog-rape allegations and the wider claims of sexual violence are the most recent in a series of demonisation efforts engineered to elicit revulsion at alleged Israeli behaviour. In November 2023, the NGO published an article in which it alleged:
The Israeli army has been holding the bodies of dozens of Palestinians killed during its genocide in the Gaza Strip beginning on 7 October, and Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor has called for the creation of an independent international investigation committee into organ theft suspicions.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, friends and comrades: this is the “NGO” on which Nicholas Kristof relied heavily. And the NYT is standing behind his allegations. He won’t get fired, and I doubt he was even reprimanded. It stinks.
*Finally, it’s become news (the AP’s odd news) when a tennis player has to take an unscheduled bathroom break during a major tournament. But he really had to go, and it was apparently not micturation!
Home player Arthur Gea ran off the court for an emergency bathroom break early in the first set of his French Open debut on Sunday.
“I need to go to the bathroom. I can’t move anymore. I’m going to (go) on the court,” Gea told the chair umpire in French before hastily running off Court Suzanne-Lenglen.
The 135th-ranked Gea was trailing 13th-seeded Karen Khachanov 4-2 when he made his move. Khachanov won 6-3, 7-6 (3), 6-0.
Usually, bathroom breaks are only permitted between sets.
Khachanov protested to the chair umpire as three minutes passed between games at a point in the match that was not a changeover when players change ends.
Gea said the umpire allowed him the break because of “medical circumstances” and that he was given some medicine to settle his stomach pain.
After the match, Gea said he had not felt ill the night before but started feeling unwell when he woke up in the morning.
Here’s a video of Gea begging to empty his bowels:
“I cannot wait… it’s not a joke” 🚽 A desperate Arthur Gea pleaded with the umpire for a toilet break during his first round match at Roland-Garros. #tennis#RolandGarros#FrenchOpen
Hili: What are you writing? Andrzej: A respectful letter to an idiot.
In Polish:
Hili: Co piszesz?
Ja: Uprzejmy list do idioty.
*******************
From TherionArms, another example of weird medieval calligraphy:
From Cats Doing Cat Stuff (the cat would also be content without a peach or a lemon):
From Stacy:
From Masih. The English translation of the print is below, but her words are captioned in English:
Today, I appeared in a U.S. federal court to face off, for the fourth time, with one of the individuals that the IRGC had hired to kill me.
Jonathan Lodeholt, the criminal, was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Rivera, who was convicted and sentenced to 15 years in the previous trial, had hired Lodeholt, who was an American citizen. Both were operating under the orders of Farhad Shakari, an IRGC agent.
The Iranian regime had offered them $100,000 to kill me.
In court, in front of the judge, I said that I am a journalist. My only weapon is my voice, and my work is to be the voice of the people of Iran. But the Islamic Republic, even here, on American soil, is trying to kill its opponents.
Shakari is still taking refuge in Iran. He is still free. This case is not over.
As long as the Iranian regime is in power, none of us—whether inside or outside Iran—will have any security.
امروز در دادگاه فدرال آمريكا حضور پيدا كردم تا براى چهارمين بار با يكى از افرادى كه سپاه پاسداران براى كشتنم استخدام كرده بود، روبه رو شوم.
جاناتان لودهولت مجرم و به ١٠ سال زندان محكوم شد.
ريورا كه در دادگاه قبلى مجرم و به ۱۵ سال حبس محكوم شد، لودهولت كه یک شهروند آمريكايي بود را… pic.twitter.com/SxWoFkpdON
*Speaking of Nicholas Kristof, his second unsubstantiated accusation of sexual assault, this time on captured members of a flotilla, philosopher Maarten Boudry canceled his NYT subscriptsion. See his two tweets below (the other two sources from his first tweet are in a thread, and the articles to which he refers are here and here).
The @nytimes “dog rape” story was so grotesquely bad and irresponsible — and the response from @nytimes so obtuse and deflective — that I’ve decided to cancel my subscription. I have no interest in funding this kind of antisemitic drivel. If you read these three damning pieces,…
I wouldn’t have cancelled my subscription over one idiotic column. What clinched it was the fact that @NYTimes unequivocally “stands by” the story and considers its journalism as rigorous as any other news report. Fuck you, NYT.
From Luana: more violence inspired by Luigi Mangione. You can read more about the case here.
Palisades Fire ends up being one of the most destructive acts of left wing terrorism in modern history.
The arsonist Rinderknecht searched “free Luigi Mangione,” “let’s take down all the billionaires” and “let’s kill all the billionaires” before setting the Lachman Fire which… pic.twitter.com/laUfBmy8fm
And one from Dr. Cobb. He’s referring to “gasoline”, and the rest of the thread explains this post:
Yes, calling a liquid "gas" used to bug me no end. Then I discovered that it ought actually to be "caz," not "gas." It's based on a trade name.A thread… 1/6
Correction: Colin told me this: “One minor correction: Theory and Society isn’t a new journal. What’s new is the newly approved ‘Peer Review’ paper category they offer. We had been working with the Springer Nature people for close to 6 months back and forth, and finally they approved it and implemented it on the journal website’s backend so it appears in the drop-down menu when people submit articles.
Luana sent me this tweet, which I’d missed, announcing the founding of a new section of a scientific journal that exists to critique articles in other journals (with the original author given the right of reply). Click on the screenshot if you want to go to the original tweet:
To see the Wall Street Journal op-ed by Kevin McCaffree and Colin explaining the journal, click on the screenshot below—or you can find the article archived here.
Some excerpts:
We’re often told that science is “self-correcting.” But science isn’t like a thermostat regulating your home’s temperature. It’s a human institution run by fallible human beings. Scientists and scholars are susceptible to career incentives, moral fads, groupthink and fear. When those pressures capture journals or entire fields, peer review can become less a filter for error than a credentialing system for fashionable nonsense.
. . . Decades of studies on publication bias, replication failures and political bias in the social sciences have shown that peer-reviewed papers are often less reliable than the public assumes. John Ioannidis’s famous 2005 paper, “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False,” remains disturbing because its basic insight about the fallibility of medical research remains true. In fields that rely heavily on narrative or qualitative methods, or that touch on politicized topics (as much social science does), ideology influences which questions are asked and which conclusions are professionally acceptable.
The authors then mention the Sokal hoax as well as the “Grievance Studies affair” involving submission of bogus papers to social-science and humanities journals by Helen Pluckrose, James Lindsay, and Peter Boghassian. (There were no submissions to STEM journals in either “affair” unless you consider gender studies journals as being in STEM.
A bit more:
This problem is growing more serious. Across swaths of the humanities, social sciences, medicine and biology, some narratives have become taboo. Papers presenting contrary evidence or dissenting viewpoints are rejected without comment. Letters to the editor, which are supposed to provide a quick way to respond to flawed work, are ignored or unavailable. The result is an ideologically biased literature that’s presented as an expert consensus and cited by journalists, courts, school boards, medical associations, government agencies and lawmakers to justify policies that affect millions of people.
The most obvious answer is better peer review. But ideologically captured fields have little incentive to correct themselves. As a result, objections to progressive orthodoxy are relegated to social-media threads, blog posts and newspaper opinion sections.
This is where the myth of “self-correcting” science becomes a problem. People assume the system will fix itself, but first someone has to notice the problem and create a mechanism for correction.
That is what we have done. As an editor-in-chief and a member of the editorial advisory board of Theory and Society, an interdisciplinary journal published by Springer Nature, we are proud to announce a first-of-its-kind article type called “Peer Review.” The purpose is to avoid procedural traps that can prevent legitimate criticism from being published and to recover what peer review was supposed to be: serious, good-faith analysis by experts seeking clarity and truth.
As in postpublication peer review, a Peer Review article may address a paper from any scholarly journal so long as it raises concerns about methods, evidence, logic, definitions or theory. The focus must be on claims, arguments and scholarly standards, not the author’s character or motives.
Submissions, limited to 2,500 words, will undergo a simple merit review rather than endless rounds of gatekeeping. An editor or subject-matter expert will ask a straightforward question: Is this critique coherent, serious and reasonable enough to deserve scholarly attention? If so, it will be accepted.
This is a good idea, and I can easily see myself writing a short response to some pieces that I find deficient. (Some of my website critiques of “sex-is-a-spectrum” posts might have been appropriate.
The only problem is what to do with papers (not just critiques) that try to air subjects that are forbidden or inflammatory. Those might be suitable for The Journal of Controversial Ideas, but I’ve never seen a straight science/data paper there. (Granted, I haven’t looked at every issue.)
Anyway, pass this news along to those who might be interested.
