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.
It’s Friday and thus music time, and here’s one of my favorite songs from the Eighties: “Don’t Get Me Wrong” with the Pretenders. Wikipedia tells us that it’s the only original Pretenders song—something new to me—and adds this surprising fact:
McEnroe apparently played something on one of her albums. At any rate, the song is from 1986 and rose to only #10 on the American charts. With its driving beat, great bridge, and lovely vocals (Hynde’s pronunciation of “Fantastic” at the end always gets me), it deserved more than that. Here’s a live performance, or so I think (it’s very close to the recorded version); the notes say it was on Top Of The Pops on 23rd October, 1986:
According to Wikipedia, there are 41 living species species belonging to 14 genera in the family Felidae (the “cat family”). One genus, Leopardus, includes (or included) eight species of small cats, among them the ocelot and Geoffroy’s cat. But now the genus has three more species—two subspecies were elevated to species rank and, excitingly, a brand-new species, L. tilcayo, was just discovered in Bolivia and described in the Current Biology paper below (click the headline to read):
No, they didn’t find a new subspecies, which is often what these announcements say, but they found a new full species of cat, at least as far as I, “Mr. Speciation,” can judge. Ergo, there are now 43 species of cats. If you know your cats, try writing down as many species as you know. It’s a good party game (LOL), but I bet you can’t get even half of them.
First, credit to the scientists. Click to read the Current Biology article, which is woefully bereft of photos (but I’ve added some below):
From the paper:
Etymology
This species is named after the local name “tilcayo” used for this felid, which is widely known in the Bolivian Yungas zone. The name is treated as an unchanged noun in apposition.
Vernacular name
We propose “tilcayo” as the English common name, preserving the traditional local designation in recognition of its cultural and regional relevance.
Diagnosis
Leopardus tilcayo differs from L. pardinoides by its shorter pelage, lower contrast pattern, more expanded and irregular open rosettes, less bushy tail, and the absence of broad and complete caudal bands (see Data S1). It differs from L. tigrinus by its larger and more irregular flank markings, longer and fuller tail, and irregular caudal blotches. It differs from L. guttulus by its larger, more heterogeneous markings, lower dorsal contrast, and relatively longer tail. L. tilcayo can be distinguished from other Leopardus taxa by a large number of molecular characters. In the nuclear genome, among the 29,288,951 transversion variants, on average 1,392,646 sites differentiate L. tilcayo from L. t. antisuyo and 1,491,301 sites differentiate L. tilcayo from L. pardinoides. For simplicity we provide a list of diagnostic mitochondrial DNA sites (see Data S1).
Description
L. tilcayo is a small felid with a head-body length of 425–505 mm and a tail length of 250–265 mm. It has a light brown dorsum, darker along the mid-dorsal ridge and paler toward the limbs. The pelage is characterized by relatively large, irregular, dark brown to black rosettes, mostly open or partially closed, on a light brown to beige background. The rosettes do not coalesce. A detailed description is provided in Data S1.
In light of the fact that the tilcayo seems to abut the distribution of L. tigrinus antisuyo, but maintains significant morphological and genetic differences from it, I think the designation of the tilcayo as a new and full biological species is valid.
Below from the paper is a map of the species range compared to that of other conspecific species, a skull of the oncilla L. tigrinus tigrinus, and, in (C), a photo of the new cat, which was captured alive, and, according to the paper, released in healthy condition.
The authors also elevated two known taxa to species rank, L. emiliae and L. pardinoides. As you see, the three new species were formerly lumped as L. tigrinus (figure A below shows only one group elevated to species rank, which is discrepant with the other phylogeny in the paper, showing two species elevated plus the newly discovered L. tilcayo).
The closest relative of the tilcayo is, according to molecular analysis, the trio of L. trigrinus tigrinus and its sister L. tigrinusantisuyo (subspecies of the oncilla), as well as their sister species, L. pardinoides, the clouded tiger cat. Notice that the species distribution forms a ring around the Amazonian rainforest. This is not, I think, a “ring species.”
(From the paper): (A) Sample localities of individuals from the tiger cat species complex analyzed in this study. Localities of other Leopardus samples are shown in Figure S1. Colors highlight the main ecoregions inhabited by each putative clade of tiger cats.8 Ecoregions were drawn from the Terrestrial Ecoregions of the World.16 Orange-teal color banding and gray shading indicate regions of uncertain distribution. “Former L. tigrinus” refers to a widely accepted taxonomic treatment of tiger cats before the current revision.10 (B) Left side of the skull of specimen USNM 395090 (L. tigrinus tigrinus) from Guyana, after we collected fragments of petrous bone through the left auditory meatus for DNA extraction and genome sequencing. Photo credit: J.L. (C) Live specimen of L. tilcayo (sample ID: L. tilcayo BOl-2, voucher ID: MNHN-L2), a newly described tiger cat species from the Bolivian Yungas. Photo credit: P.N.-A.
Pictures are few and far between, but here’s a tweet and a video showing more about this small (three-pound) cat:
BREAKING NEWS: New cat species just dropped! 🧪What is a tilcayo, exactly? Well, it's a small wild cat in the genus Leopardus and a member of the tiger cat species complex, but it is NOT a tigrina, oncilla, kodkod, Geoffroy's cat… http://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/arti…
Here is the publicity in popular media. Click to read each article. I’ll quote from only the National Geographic article.
From National Geographic. This is the best source because, if you click on the link, you’ll start off with a video of the new species:
A quote:
In 2016, Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz, a biologist and National Geographic Explorer working in Bolivia, received a call from a local wildlife sanctuary that had just been given what they described as “a weird cat.” It came from a local man who found it as a kitten on a road near a forest. The man took the animal home, believing it to be a domestic breed. But after about a year of living with the clearly wild animal, he realized it would be better off at a sanctuary.
As the lead scientist and founder of the Bolivian Felids Research Program (Programa de Investigación de Félidos Bolivia), Nogales-Ascarrunz was intrigued. The animal had a small, scrunched-up face, short and round ears, and long whiskers. It was, indeed, too small to be a housecat, and, most notably, it was covered in leopard-like spots. So she went to visit the creature at the Senda Verde wildlife sanctuary on the subtropical flank of the Bolivian Andes.
“I took a hundred pictures of it,” remembers Nogales-Ascarrunz. “I was so fascinated.”
What she couldn’t know at the time was that this curious cat had a secret. It would become the first new species of felid (i.e. the cat family) discovered in over 100 years, according to a study published today in the journal Current Biology. What’s exciting is the discovery is not a validation of a species proposed in the distant past, nor a previously recognized subspecies raised to species status—which are both more commonly reported and important findings. No, this cat was something totally new to science.
At the time though, Nogales-Ascarrunz assumed the unusual cat was a member of the species Leopardus tigrinus. Sometimes called tigrinas, oncillas, tigrillos, or little spotted cats, this species was described back in 1775 from a single illustration of an animal seen in French Guiana and was subsequently presumed to exist across Central and South America, including, at the time, Bolivia.
. . .It would take another few years before Nogales-Ascarrunz developed her skills in genetic analysis to the point where she could investigate the mystery cat’s genome with any accuracy. Then, working with Eduardo Eizirik, a geneticist at Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil, and study co-lead author Jonas Lescroart from the University of Antwerp, the team was able to find its distinct place on the cat family tree.
In their paper, the researchers propose the cat should be known as Leopardus tilcayo, in honor of the word local people know it by. “We asked the local people, ‘Why do you call it tilcayo?’” says Nogales-Ascarrunz, who is herself from Bolivia. “And they said, ‘I don’t know! My grandpa called it tilcayo, so I call it tilcayo.” (The name does not appear to mean anything particular in Spanish or the Quechua language spoken in Bolivia.)
So far, all scientists can say is that L. tilcayo lives in Bolivia’s Yungas forest ecoregion, which lies on the eastern slope of the Andes Mountains. But as to what these cats eat or get eaten by, how they reproduce, and many other facets of their day-to-day lives, much mystery remains. “So many basic things are not known,” says Nogales-Ascarrunz, who is co-lead author of the new study.
But the discovery is monumental, and not just because it’s the first new cat discovered since the pampas cat in 1923. The new paper doesn’t just name a new species; it redraws the cat family tree to have a lot more branches than previously thought. What’s more, the researchers hope the methods used to identify L.tilcayo may soon be used to find even more cat species spread across the world, and even transform how we protect them.
From Reuters:
From the BBC:
By the way, there are a paltry 37 species of wild d*gs in the family Canidae, and the morphology of wild cats, as I said in my New Yorker “Cats vs. Dogs” talk, is far more diverse than of wild dogs. That shows that, at least in nature, there is no lack of genetic variation in cats. Why, then, are domestic dogs so much more variable in size, shape, and behavior than domestic cats? My hypothesis, which is mine, is that wild dogs are almost always social animals, while wild cats, with the exception of lions, are almost always nonsocial. To me this means that the behavior of canids is more malleable than is the behavior of cats, which in turn means that the gray wolf (a social wild canid) had the genetic variation to be bred by humans into different breeds doing different things. Cats, I think, don’t have that kind of genetic variation, and they remain solitary and (largely) untrainable. Remember that many dog breeds were artificially selected to do different jobs, explaining their greater diversity of morphology, size, and behavior than what we see in domestic cats.
h/t: to the many readers who sent me links to announcements of the new cat.
Welcome to Friday, September 18, 2026, and National Ice Cream Cone Day. There are two types of people: cone people and cup people. I like to eat the cone, though sometimes it gets drippy, but I’ll take the cup if a place gives you more ice cream in a cup. The history of the cone as a container for ice cream is murky. Wikipedia says this:
The earliest certain evidence of ice cream cones come from Mrs A. B. Marshall’s Book of Cookery (1888), written by the English cook Agnes B. Marshall.]Her recipe for “Cornet with Cream” said that “the cornets were made with almonds and baked in the oven, not pressed between irons”. Marshall is consequently often regarded to have been the inventor of the modern ice cream cone.
Iran vowed to respond to a U.S. blockade by pushing more trade overland. On the ground, it isn’t going according to plan.
Hundreds of Iranian truck drivers are currently stuck at Iran’s border with Pakistan, unable to send their goods into Tehran’s neighbor. They say they are facing worsening bureaucratic hurdles and costs, many caused by their own government. The same thing is happening at Iran’s land borders with Turkey, Turkmenistan and Afghanistan, dealing Tehran a self-inflicted blow and throttling trade through its few remaining economic release valves.
Tons of stranded apricots have been spoiled because of the delays. Lucrative cargoes of iron ore, cement and bottled gas are stuck at entry points to the Pakistani and Afghan borders, truckers say.
“Neither Iran is taking responsibility for the situation, nor is Pakistan allowing us to unload our cargo,” one driver says in a video posted by the Union of Truckers and Drivers Organizations Across Iran over the weekend.
The economic war in the Persian Gulf is dictated as much by how much the countries in the region can move their exports over land rather than through the Strait of Hormuz. Some have found workarounds. Saudi Arabia is moving more of its oil west across the Arabian Peninsula. The U.S. Navy is helping some of the Gulf nations shift their oil through the strait.
Iran’s attempts are faltering. The U.S. is isolating its economy with new sanctions and launching strikes on Iranian tankers in reprisal for Tehran’s attacks on its Navy, collapsing seaborne exports.
In another setback for Iran’s plans to bypass Hormuz, the country’s Mahan Air, which is sanctioned by the U.S., said Wednesday that it was suspending flights to Oman and Turkey, state-affiliated media in Tehran said. Last week, the U.S. Treasury imposed new sanctions on companies it said were supporting Mahan, which operates cargo and passenger services.
The U.S. blockade has also hurt Iran’s imports of basic goods, 70% of which normally go through the blockaded ports. Though humanitarian goods and food are ostensibly exempt, the reality is that shippers are reluctant to service Iran.
Videos posted on social media last week show cranes at the Port of Shahid Rajaee, Iran’s largest commercial container port, at a standstill. Thousands of containers are stranded in ports in Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, transportation professionals in Tehran last month told the Mehr News Agency, which is affiliated with Iranian security services.
Even Iraq is blockading Iranian goods:
But in a sign of how vulnerable the alternative routes are, Iraq over the weekend temporarily closed cargo terminals at the Iran border after alleging Iran had used its territory to attack Saudi Arabia. On Sunday, trucks carrying Iranian onions bound for Iraq were forced to turn back as a result, according to Tehran’s Central Fruit and Vegetable Market.
The rising costs are now adding to Iran’s worsening inflation problem.
. . . Much of these costs are being passed on to consumers, with unpredictable results for the Iranian leadership. Food inflation rose to 128% in August, according to Iran’s official statistics office.
Is it too much to hope for the people to rise up and depose the government? Yes, I suppose it is, but this article is heartening news despite a drumbeat of bad news proclaimed by the NYT, Washington Post, and other “progressive” media that are hoping that the U.S. loses the war.
*I said I’d report back on reactions to the new anti-Israel movie “NAZA,” which accuses of Israel of deliberately killing civilians in a way not according to their strategy (“the military gains must outweight the civilian losses”, or something like that). There’s one in the Free Press by their Middle East analyst Haviv Rettig Gur, “Hold your applause for the new Gaza documentary“, with the subtitle “There may yet be hard truths in ‘NAZA,’ including evidence of Israel’s systemic failures. But the reporting around it treats flimsy claims as proof of criminality.” (Note: like nearly everyone weighing in, Gur hasn’t seen the movie).
The title is an Israeli military acronym derived from nezek agavi, Hebrew for collateral damage. It refers to the filmmakers’ conviction that the systems Israel used to select targets and authorize strikes in Gaza enabled immoral and unlawfully high rates of civilian casualties. Their allegation goes beyond excessive tolerance of civilian casualties: They reportedly contend that the killing was intentional.
I haven’t seen the film. This means I cannot confidently assess its editing, corroboration, or the full testimony it presents. I would love to live in a world in which I could wait, watch the movie, and have a sober debate about its claims. Unfortunately, the discourse online is not so patient. That’s why it’s necessary to examine the argument its makers have published, the reporting on which it builds, and the standards by which its allegations should be judged. The film falls short on every dimension.
Start with the question of civilian casualties. The online conversation about the film—as distinct from the film’s own claims—is replete with shock and horror at the finding that the IDF calculated the estimated number of civilian deaths before each strike. According to the usual Israel critics, this shows that the resulting deaths amounted to deliberate murder.
It’s almost impossible to overstate how clownishly (and intentionally) wrong this claim is. International humanitarian law requires those planning an attack to assess foreseeable civilian harm and take feasible precautions to avoid or minimize it. You can’t assess proportionality in relation to the expected military advantage of a strike—as required by law—without that calculation. Indeed, an attack that isn’t preceded by an assessment of potential civilian deaths is an immoral attack. This point isn’t against the film itself, but it says something important about how skewed and shallow and preordained the debate around it was always going to be.
So what does the film itself claim? In their published accounts, the filmmakers describe interviews with 24 former IDF soldiers, most of them intelligence officers. They claim that civilian losses were authorized for targets of little military value, and that in some cases, the intended target was not present. According to the soldiers, these were features of the system, not departures from its protocols.
Those are substantive claims. But I have seen nothing to suggest that they are proven in the film itself. What I do know is that neither the filmmakers nor their production or research teams presented any of the findings to the IDF for a response. In fact, the IDF has publicly asked the filmmakers to screen the documentary for military officials so it can produce a detailed response; so far it’s not clear they have responded.
So, when we Israelis do finally see the film, we will ask the most basic journalistic questions: How are its claims established? What did each witness—all of them anonymous—actually observe, and what was their role and level of access? Does an officer describing one phase of the targeting process know what happened during the rest? Are any of these claims corroborated in any independent way? When someone says a target had little military value, what information is that judgment based on?
Nobody has to prove a system-wide policy for the unjustified killing of a particular individual or family to be wrong, and deserving of an investigation. But the film’s claim isn’t about a single strike, or even a number of them. It is that the IDF’s collateral-damage mitigation system is used to systematically and purposefully target civilians. That this was the purpose of the military campaign.
One of the few Israelis who’s had the chance to watch the film—and who is sympathetic to director Yuval Avraham—came away deeply disappointed. In a Monday op-ed in Haaretz, a left-wing Israeli outlet most likely to resonate with the film’s claims, Raviv Drucker wrote that he couldn’t help but feel the film was trying to create an “impression” of the “context in which these terrible things were done”—juxtaposing military claims about suffering in Gaza with images of people dining in Tel Aviv. He simultaneously vouches for Avraham’s integrity while complaining that the film fails to prove or contextualize its claims. According to Avraham, NAZA doesn’t say anything meaningful about the broader military context (which is necessary to prove that strikes had no military need), compare how other armies fight terrorist organizations embedded in civilian populations, or even acknowledge the problem of Hamas’s systematic use of civilian infrastructure. Drucker’s conclusion is written in a tone of sadness and disappointment, not anger. He wishes, he writes, that the film had been “truer to reality.”
Gur also shows that director Yuval Abraham deliberately distorted the number of Palestinian civilian dead in a previous publication, and that the targeting restrictions changed over the course of the war for military reasons. In the end, Gur doesn’t say Israel is exculpated, but does say this:
All this said, legitimate findings of the film should be taken seriously. Dramatically changed military circumstances do not suspend rules of proportionality or offer blanket justification for whatever followed. And even if the film turns out to be as dishonest, the civilian toll in Gaza requires examination.
But these questions do at least set a standard that a film must meet to show the immorality it claims. Will it? Did the filmmakers even try?
We’re going to have to wait, though it’s hard for me to believe that the IDF deliberately wanted to kill civilians without adequate military justification. I’m not quite sure why this film is not being shown to everybody who wants to see it, including the IDF. That alone makes me suspicious.
In the fall of 2025, I received an invitation to give a lecture on nature conservation in June 2026 at the “Friends of the Botanical Garden” association at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU). I have a long-standing connection to this association and have given several lectures there in previous years. I know the chairman personally and have met with him on numerous occasions for private discussions. My lecture, scheduled for June 2026, required extensive preparation and was to be recorded on video for YouTube. People from other universities were planning to attend. Just two days before the lecture, I had preparatory discussions with the chairman.
And then it happened. Less than 24 hours before the lecture was due to begin, late in the evening, I received an email from the chairman informing me that the lecture had to be canceled. The letter stated, among other things: “We are aware of several previous statements made by you, which have already been discussed in the past and have led to corresponding decisions by the university… After thorough examination and discussions with the relevant departments of HHU, we have come to the conclusion that these statements are incompatible with the principles that HHU and the Friends Association, as organizers, stand for…”
The source of the controversy remains unnamed.
What had I done wrong? The “responsible departments of HHU” never identified themselves to me, and nothing was ever “discussed in the past.” I don’t know who was discussing this. The rejection letter from the “Friends of the Botanical Garden” only mentions an “equal opportunities organization.”
My assumption stems from the module “Fundamentals of Biodiversity and Evolution” that I taught in 2024. A key part of this module’s content involved explaining the biological concept of a species. The species concept can only be explained by comparing the characteristics that distinguish two species with those that differentiate the two sexes. This was therefore also part of the curriculum.
Several students complained vehemently about my statements regarding gender differences during the subsequent evaluation of the course and even filed a complaint against me. My statements were reinterpreted as an alleged verbatim statement that “women cannot think.” I never made such a statement and never would, because it would be utterly absurd. The lawyers of the “Network for Academic Freedom” describe the whole affair as an “outrageous incident” and have already stated in an “Open Letter to the Executive Board of HHU” that this is based on a statement that was never made, the assertion of which constitutes the criminal offense of defamation under Section 187 of the German Criminal Code.
Removal from office without debate
The equal opportunities officer of the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, who also chairs the Biology Research Unit, accepted this statement as true and immediately relieved me of all my teaching duties (including supervising bachelor’s theses) without verifying the students’ alleged statements and without granting me the right to a discussion and defense. The examination board and the second supervisors of my bachelor’s students’ theses were not consulted. Yet, my ethical conduct could easily have been verified on my website. The majority of my bachelor’s, diploma, and doctoral students, as well as most of the co-authors of my publications, were women. I was powerless to challenge my immediate dismissal from all my teaching positions, which I had continued to hold without pay after my retirement, because I no longer had any legal right to teach.
It was apparently these events, which took place almost two years ago, that forced the chairman of the “Friends of the Botanical Garden” to cancel my aforementioned lecture at short notice, with the words: “We have become aware of several previous statements made by you, which have already been discussed in the past and have led to corresponding decisions by the university…”
Again we see a professor penalized after ridiculous student accusations. Species, like sexes, are not “defined” but “recognized”. Yes of course there are cases where species are not absolutely distinguished, though those (particularly when allopatric) are much more frequent than individuals who are neither male nor female (about 1/5600 or less). But in both cases we are dealing are biological realities that exist independent of definition (e.g., H. sapiens doesn’t blur into any other species, nor do Pallas cats or platypuses). Just as nature is lumpy with respect to types of animals and plants, so is nature lumpy with respect to the kinds of animals that produce gametes (in that case there are two lumps). They really should apologize to professor Kunz.
The last vestiges of warmth drained out of a Tyrannosaurus rex’s body around 66 million years ago, but scientists just used chemistry to take the long-extinct dinosaur’s temperature: 97 degrees, give or take a few.
The new finding securely situates the king of the dinosaurs among the warm-blooded animals, confirming previous years of research.
T. rex ran hot, but not too hot, according to the study, published Wednesday in Science Advances. Instead, the reading places it somewhere on the body-temperature spectrum near large mammals like Indian elephants (97 degrees) or humans (98 degrees) or flightless birds like ostriches (101 to 103 degrees) — but nowhere near the heat of a chicken, say (105 to 107 degrees).
“That is absolutely spectacular,” said Jasmina Wiemann, a molecular paleobiologist at Johns Hopkins, who was not involved in the study.
So how did they do it?
To take the body temperature of a long extinct, school-bus-size predator, scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles, used a clever geochemistry technique on fossilized teeth, including two from “Thomas,” a famous T. rex in the collection of the National History Museum of Los Angeles County.
The team first used a dental drill to sample the tough outer enamel from the teeth, and then took advantage of a remarkable fact: The chemical bonds within minerals can tell their own stories.
“Basically, at the point a mineral forms there are elements of its chemistry that are kind of frozen in time,” said Robert Eagle, a geobiologist and one of the leaders of the study.
. . . Dr. Eagle and his colleagues analyzed the bonds between two isotopes; heavier versions of both carbon and oxygen. Those bonds acted like a thermometer: The more bonds present, the lower the body temperature.
For a gut check, they also compared the T. rex teeth to those of ancient crocodilians excavated from the same site Hell Creek Formation in Montana. T. rex measured 97 degrees; the crocodilians ran much cooler at, on average, 88 degrees.
Being warm-blooded is associated with a more active lifestyle and means the “tyrant lizard” could live in a broad range of environments. The researchers calculated that, at least from a temperature tolerance point of view, T. rex could have roamed over most of the North American continent, from Alaska to Mexico.
. . .Stephen Brusatte, a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh, pointed out in an email that the body temperature reading opens up a whole new set of questions about how this celebrity dinosaur operated.
One possibility is that T. rex was warm-blooded the way humans are, with a constant and hot body temperature regulated by an internal furnace, Dr. Brusatte said. Another possibility is that T. rex was more like a giant, terrifying insulated coffee cup that takes forever to cool down.
The way to answer that question, at least tentatively, is to look at the chemical bonds in relatives of T. rex that were not so big, and so would cool down quickly. If they also showed evidence of warm-bloodedness, particularly in very small dinos, that would suggest that homeothermy was an ancestral trait.
Here’s a figure from the paper comparing the isotopically-calculated body temperatures from various groups, along with the environmentally calcualted temperature (see the paper for free here to read more):
(From paper): Fig. 1. Comparison of calculated Δ47 temperatures for T. rex, crocodilians, and bivalves from the HCF along with body temperature ranges of modern birds, mammals, and reptiles. (A) Symbols indicate sample averages for individual tooth specimens, with error bars indicating 1 SE. For T. rex, circles indicate samples from LACM 150167 teeth, and the triangle indicates the single LACM 151468 tooth. Vertical dashed lines indicate taxon averages, and shaded regions under data points indicate 95% confidence interval (CI). Bivalve and modern animal bars indicate the full range of temperatures reported in their respective studies: The upper light gray bars indicate model results and show yearly temperature range at 3× CO2 concentration, while the lower dark gray bar shows 6× CO2 concentration. Both bars show the full range of monthly temperatures with a dark vertical line to indicate mean annual temperature. 1Tobin et al. (37), 2Clarke and Rotherty (38), 3Eagle et al. (11). All silhouettes are licensed under Creative Commons license CC0 1.0 (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/). Artist credits: Manuel Brea Lueiro (T. rex), Guillaume Dera (crocodilian), Pablo Amador Crespo (bivalve).
Dolly Parton ’s megawatt smile and big wavy locks are gracing fields across the U.S. and Canada this fall.
Twenty farms have carved out large corn mazes to honor the late country music icon, actor and philanthropist and raise money for her Imagination Library, which provides free books to children.
The “Jolene” crooner’s death due to cancer on Aug. 25 in Nashville at age 80 brought an outpouring of tributes. They ranged from a drive to rename the country music capital’s airport in Parton’s honor to a surge in online streams of “9 to 5,” “Islands in the Stream” and her many other hit songs.
Now she is being immortalized in corn, with the mazes located in about a dozen states and two provinces, from Alabama to California and Ohio to Texas. Most also feature a Parton-themed trivia game, photo ops and other offerings.
Brett Herbst, founder of The Maize Inc., the Utah-based consulting company that designed the mazes, called Parton a “true American treasure.”
The company said the mazes were in the works months before Parton died and are part of its annual campaign honoring country music’s brightest stars. Previous honorees included Reba McEntire in 2023, Luke Bryan in 2024 and Lainey Wilson in 2025.
Parton, who famously grew up poor in rural Tennessee, thanked organizers for supporting her charity before to her death. In a statement provided by The Maize Inc., she encouraged people to “get lost in this year’s country music corn maze for a little fun, laughter and a real good reason to get lost.”
Here’s a video:
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is becoming quite philosophical:
Hili: I look and wonder?
Andrzej: What about?
Hili: Where does time disappear to?
In Polish:
Hili: patrzę i zastanawiam się?
Ja: Nad czym?
Hili: Gdzie ucieka czas?
From Luana, and not a surprise: “inclusive excellence”:
I thought the tweet below must be omitting some critical context or paraphrasing the text ungenerously.
But no, the NYT actually published an op-ed that claims the University of California hasn’t sacrificed excellence even though it admits students who struggle with basic math. https://t.co/fTZjZnIG3Ipic.twitter.com/hAitGCNqb1
Also from Luana (click to go to page as I can’t embed this by itself):
Two from my feed. First, a new species of cat discovered, and not just a subspecies, either. See the article here. It’s called the tilcayo tiger cat.
New cat alert! A call from a wildlife sanctuary about a “weird cat” has led to the first new cat species discovered in over 100 years in Bolivia’s Yungas forest ecoregion. Learn more about this feline surprise: https://t.co/crffXvPqH4pic.twitter.com/USo7rI3Y5q
This Dutch Jewish girl was gassed to death as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. She was two years old and would be 86 today had she lived. https://t.co/sFswTlMyB9
UK barrister, international law advocate, and legal director of UK Lawyers for Israel Natasha Hausdorff has argued several times on video why Israeli’s occupation of Area C of the West Bank is neither illegal nor constitutes “ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians. Remember, according to the 1995 Oslo II accords, Areas A and B are largely under Palestinian control, with area A under full Palestinian civil and security control, while area B is under full Palestinian civil control and joint Israeli/Palestinian security control—and Jews aren’t allowed to live in either area. Area C is under full Israeli security and civil control, and both Palestinians (about 300,000) and Israelis (about 500,000) are allowed to live in that area. The Palestinians in that area are largely descendants of people who were there pre-Oslo, and Palestinians are rarely allowed to build new houses or settlements there. Israelis are allowed to move there of their own accord.
Note that these borders are temporary, and the whole division was supposed to be settled at some time after Oslo II. But that settlement never happened. I believe the idea was that all of area C was supposed to be transferred to Palestine, but not until there was a full settlement, including apportionment of land, between Palestine and Israel. And if you think Israel won’t move its own residents out of an area to bring peace, then you’re forgetting Israel’s own “ethnic cleansing” of Jews from Gaza in 2005. Did that bring peace? You know the answer.
You can see several videos of Hausdorff’s arguments (e.g., here, here and here) which are pretty clear (the first is marred by the interviewer shouting). But in a recent article in the Spectator (click on archived link below) Hausdorff is a bit confusing, to the extent that her argument is obscured by fine points of international law and claims of those who oppose them. It’s not her fault; the situation is complicated. You can read her argument by clicking on the archived link below, but I’ve asked Grok to put her argument in simpler language.
The whole question appears to hinge on two issues:
Whether the West Bank lies within Israel’s sovereign boundaries. Hausdorff argues “yes”.
Whether Israel forcibly transported or deported its citizens into the West Bank or whether Israelis settled in Israeli-administered territory of their own volition. Hausdorff maintains the latter, arguing (correctly, I think) that the border of area C is an “armistice” line rather than the border of a sovereign territory.
To quote her Spectator article:
A legal rule selectively (and incorrectly) cited whenever Jews build houses across an armistice line, which is not and never was a border, is not the application of law but political posturing. Additionally, the Oslo Accords, which gave Palestinians self-government in Areas A and B of the West Bank, left Area C under Israeli administration, and deliberately reserved settlements, borders and Jerusalem for final-status negotiations.
. . . The consequences extend far beyond legal disputes. The phrase ‘illegal settlements’ is increasingly being used to mean something much more disturbing: that Jews should not live in certain places because they are Jews. Consider what is being demanded. A future Palestinian state is routinely imagined as requiring the removal of hundreds of thousands of Jews from their homes. The Jewish residence in Hebron, the cradle of Jewish civilisation, is inexplicably presented as an international crime. As is the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem or the Jewish communities re-established after their inhabitants were expelled.
No comparable demand would be tolerated elsewhere. We would immediately recognise the ugliness of saying that peace between two peoples requires territory to be cleansed of one ethnicity. Yet once the proposition is dressed in the language of ‘settlements’ and ‘international law’, politicians repeat it.
. . . Crimea illustrates the point: Russia’s occupation does not extinguish Ukrainian title. If Ukrainian forces recover Crimea tomorrow, Ukraine will not suddenly become the occupying power just because Russia controlled the peninsula for a decade. The sovereign title comes first.
. . . International law was designed to provide rules by which disputes could be resolved. It was not created to furnish political campaigns with intimidating vocabulary. The starting point should therefore be the law itself, applied consistently: the Mandate, uti possidetis juris, the actual status of the 1949 armistice lines, the wording of the Geneva Convention, subsequent agreements, including the Oslo Accords, and state practice elsewhere.
I’m absolutely sure that about 95% of people who throw around the phrase “illegal settlers” (or “settler colonists”) and “ethnic cleansing of Palestinians” do not know the international law that applies here. They’re merely following the progressive party line.
But read for yourself (click the headline):
To help out with the argument, I’ll post two maps. First is the Green Line (from here). The “international boundary” indicated below—dash, two dots, dash— is the “green line” boundary that, says Hausdorff, constitute the sovereign boundaries of the state of Israel, including the West Bank.
And here are areas A, B, and C of the West Bank (map from here):
I quote the bot Grok in answer to my question: What is Natasha Hausdorff’s argument for why Israelis are not settling illegally in the West Bank, and why they are not committing “ethnic cleansing”?
Grok’s full answer is indented, and I’ve put crucial bits of the argument in italics. I’ve left out Grok’s references supporting its answer, but I see no errors there.
Natasha Hausdorff, a British barrister and legal director of UK Lawyers for Israel, argues that claims of “illegal settlements” and Israeli “ethnic cleansing” in the West Bank rest on a misapplication of international law and invert historical facts. Her case, set out in writings such as her September 2026 Spectator article [article above] and in interviews and parliamentary evidence, has two main parts.
Why settlements are not illegal
Hausdorff starts with the status of the territory itself. She says the legal story does not begin in 1967. Under the customary rule of uti possidetis juris, a new state inherits the administrative boundaries of the preceding entity unless those boundaries are changed by agreement. When Israel declared independence in 1948 it was the only state that emerged from the remaining Mandate for Palestine west of the Jordan (Transjordan having already been separated). The Mandate’s lines therefore became Israel’s default international borders and included Judea and Samaria (later called the West Bank) and East Jerusalem. The 1947 UN partition resolution was a non-binding General Assembly recommendation that the Arab side rejected; it never displaced the customary rule.
Jordan seized the area in the 1948–49 war and held it until 1967, but occupation does not confer sovereignty. Only two states recognized Jordan’s annexation, and the 1949 armistice lines were explicitly military ceasefire lines, not borders. In 1967 Israel therefore recovered territory over which it already held title; a state cannot occupy its own sovereign land. Hausdorff uses the analogy of Ukraine recovering Crimea: no one would then call Ukraine the occupying power. The ICJ’s 2024 advisory opinion, she notes, is non-binding and simply assumed occupation without addressing uti possidetis.
Even if one treats the West Bank as occupied for the sake of argument, she says Article 49(6) of the Fourth Geneva Convention does not make civilian Jewish communities illegal. The article forbids an occupying power from deporting or transferring parts of its own civilian population into occupied territory. It was drafted after World War II to stop forced, state-organized population transfers of the Nazi type. Israeli Jews who live in the West Bank move voluntarily; some re-established communities (such as Gush Etzion) that Jordan had expelled. The provision does not create ethnically exclusive zones or criminalize private residence. Hausdorff also points to inconsistent international practice: large-scale civilian settlement in other prolonged occupations has not drawn the same legal condemnation.
She adds that the Oslo Accords left Area C under Israeli administration and reserved settlements, borders and Jerusalem for final-status talks. Much of the unauthorized construction she identifies as illegal is Palestinian building in Area C, not Israeli communities built with planning permission.
Why Israel is not committing “ethnic cleansing”
Hausdorff treats the ethnic-cleansing charge as projection. Jordan ethnically cleansed Jews from the West Bank and East Jerusalem between 1948 and 1967. Areas A and B, under Palestinian Authority control, are already free of Jews. Demands that Israel evacuate Jewish communities from Area C, she argues, amount to a call for the remaining parts of Judea and Samaria to be made Judenrein [JAC: “free from Jews”]. She has described the ICJ’s language as effectively endorsing that outcome.
On the facts, she says the Palestinian population in Israeli-administered Area C has grown, not shrunk. There is no evidence of a systematic Israeli policy of removing Palestinians from the territory; the opposite demographic trend is visible. Accusing Israel of the crime that was actually committed against Jews in the same area, she contends, inverts both history and law.
Hausdorff’s overall position is that the phrases “illegal settlements” and “ethnic cleansing” function as political slogans that apply a double standard to the only Jewish state and that they are used to justify excluding Jews from places of historic Jewish presence. She maintains that genuine international law, applied equally, does not require that result.
That is the argument which, according to Hausdorff, complies with international law. She recognizes that Israeli violence against Palestinians in area C is illegal and should be dealt with harshly, and also that this division of land is temporary, though it doesn’t look as if a two-state solution is anywhere in the offing. Until there is a final settlement, Hausdorff considers the “illegal settler/ethnic cleansing” argument to be a canard—indeed, a blood libel.
Welcome to Thursday, September 17, 2026 and National Monte Cristo Day. No, it’s not honoring the small Italian island or its fictional count, but rather the bizarre Monte Cristo sandwich, a ham-and-cheese sandwich dipped in egg and fried—sometimes topped with jam and powdered sugar. I’ve never had one, though I’d try it. Here’s a specimen from Wikipedia; look at all the sugar!:
Here’s the first page of the Constitution, which you can see at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. The caption is, “Page one of Jacob Shallus‘ officially engrossed copy of the Constitution signed in Philadelphia by delegates of the Constitutional Convention in 1787″
Wikimedia Commons
Posting will be light as I prepare for my cataract surgery (one eye next week, the next two weeks after). Wish me luck!
Locked in a trade war with President Donald Trump and pivoting away from the United States, Canada is seeking stronger ties in Europe and Asia as a shield against Washington’s volatility.
On Wednesday, sitting as a guest of honor inside the European Parliament, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney received an unprecedented offer: European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said she wants to make Canada the first “associate member” of the 27-nation bloc.
“We want to bring the relationship with Canada to the highest level possible,” she said in her annual State of the Union address.
The declaration at the Parliament in Strasbourg, France, received a standing ovation from European lawmakers and from Carney.
The offer, which would see two longtime U.S. partners expand their alliance from trade to security, highlights the extent to which Trump is redefining alliances.
The president’s foreign policy gyrations, including threats to take Greenland from NATO ally Denmark, have triggered a reckoning among Washington’s traditional friends about their relationship with the United States.
Amid the standoff with Trump on tariffs, Canada has pursued a thaw in ties with China including new trade deals. Beijing has praised Ottawa for walking away from talks rather than caving to Trump’s demands, and this month, China and Canada revived a dialogue on military issues after an eight-year break.
Ahead of his trip to Europe this week, Carney said he wanted a “unique alliance” with the E.U., including on energy and critical minerals, to help safeguard Canada against economic coercion. “The world’s more dangerous and divided, and friends need to stick together in these times,” he said.
Trump’s stupidity not only alienates our friends directly, but also weakens the U.S. as a superpower by forcing our erstwhile friends to ally with others, and even strengthen ties with America’s biggest nemesis: China. It will take a long time, if ever, to repair the damage Trump has done.
The Trump administration has approved a $2.8 billion sale of heavy bombs to Israel, according to a U.S. official, in what would be among the largest deliveries of U.S. munitions there even as American public support for the country declines.
The proposed sale would include 40,000 one-ton bombs whose use by Israel in Gaza and Lebanon has drawn international anger because of the civilian harm caused by their wide blast radius.
Human rights groups and some foreign governments have condemned Israel for dropping the giant munitions in densely populated areas, sometimes killing dozens of civilians in strikes targeting just one individual.
The package would include 20,000 each of America’s 2,000-pound MK-84 and BLU-117 bombs. It would also provide Israel with 20,000 bunker-busting I-2000 penetrator warheads, which explode on delay after smashing through an outer surface like soil, rock or concrete. The plan was reported earlier by The Washington Post.
The blast from a 2,000-pound bomb can be lethal at more than 1,000 feet and leave a crater as deep as 50 feet. Israel provoked a fierce outcry after it dropped hundreds of the heavy bombs on Gaza.
The State Department recently sent the proposed deal to two congressional committees to get informal approval, the U.S. official said.
Production and delivery of the munitions usually takes months or years, but there are ways to expedite the process.
In mid-2024, the Biden administration paused a shipment of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel because of concern about their use in crowded civilian areas. President Trump allowed the shipment to proceed days after taking office last January.
Then in February, the Trump administration agreed to sell roughly $2.7 billion in munitions to Israel, a package that included 35,000 of the one-ton MK-84 and BLU-117 bombs.
While congressional leaders can tell the Trump administration that they oppose the deal, Secretary of State Marco Rubio can exercise emergency powers to proceed with the sale regardless, as he has done repeatedly, or just say he is moving forward with it. The administration would then bypass getting informal approval from Congress and formally announce the sale is happening.
I can’t say that I oppose this sale, especially because the bombs are more likely to be used in Iran, where they can be used against large military facilities, nuclear sites, and so on. I largely trust the IDF’s decision, but not entirely, nor am I party to how the IDF makes its decisions weighing military advantange against civilian casualties. Given this, I will not say this is a deal that shouldn’t be done, though you can be sure that most Democrats will say no, and every “progressive” will say no.
*I have always opposed capital punishment, and, in a Free Press article, Douglas Murray generally agrees/. But he finds an exception in a piece called “The death penalty is cruel. Hamas terrorists deserve it.” And just the other day I hit on the same reason he did for changing his mind, a reason based on the Israeli psyche.
Israelis must soon make serious decisions about the issue. Though Israel prohibits the death penalty for most offenses, the Knesset voted unanimously in May to allow it for terrorists who participated in the October 7, 2023, attacks. Now the Israeli justice system must determine whether capital punishment will go forward, and exactly who it will be allowed to ensnare.
Since this is a question of conscience, perhaps it is worth outlining my own moral views from the outset. I have always been deeply opposed to the death penalty. Rather than explain every reason I have for opposing it, I’ll just say that I agree with the argument Albert Camus makes in his 1957 essay “Reflections on the Guillotine.” The problem is not only the possibility of wrongful convictions, and not just the taking of a life, but something perhaps even more cruel: putting a human mind in the position of knowing the place and time of its ending. A change comes upon a society when it permits this ultimate sanction.
. . .Yet despite my deep, instinctive opposition to the practice, I still believe that there are times when it may be legitimate. Few people would deny that the Allies had the right after World War II not just to try and convict but also to hang the Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg. The world needed to demonstrate this ultimate expression of revulsion for the crimes of the Nazi high command. And the new world that was to follow, which was being built by Allied victors and Holocaust survivors, could not afford to remain haunted by living Nazi leaders, who would have sustained a glimmer of faith in their movement despite living in captivity.
The same justification may rightly stand in the case of the only hanging to have taken place in the State of Israel since its reestablishment. That is the hanging in 1962—after capture, trial, and judgment—of the architect of the Shoah, Adolf Eichmann.
The same principle may well be applied to the several hundred terrorists belonging to Hamas’s most gruesome fighting unit, the Nukhba Force, who were captured alive after breaking into Israel on the morning of October 7, 2023. Each of these men invaded Israel in order to murder, rape, torture, and kidnap. They represent a special type of evil.
To me these aren’t valid reasons for the state engaging in killing. Better life without the possibility of parole (I’ve discussed my reasons before). The problem is that the way Israel deals with terrorist prisoners means that “life without parole” may not be an irrevocable sentence, and there’s the rub:
But there is an additional justification for the execution of these terrorists which too few people outside of Israel appreciate. It is the fact that Israel will someday face the temptation to use the several hundred terrorists currently held in its maximum-security prisons as bargaining chips.
The architect of October 7, Yahya Sinwar, was himself a terrorist detained in Israeli prisons. He was released early from his sentence and returned to Gaza in 2011, along with more than 1,000 other terrorists, in exchange for a single Israeli soldier who had been captured by Hamas and held in Gaza. Sinwar himself once said that the best news that a Palestinian prisoner could receive in jail was the news that an Israeli had been kidnapped. That is because the prisoners then knew that a thousand-to-one prisoner swap might be in the offing, and they had a good chance of being spared even from a life sentence.
Despite my deep, instinctive opposition to the practice, I still believe that there are times when it may be legitimate.
In recent decades, including the years since October 7, thousands of terrorists who should have spent the rest of their lives in prison have been released in exchange for Israeli hostages. It is the best leverage that Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups have. This has led to some of the most painful scenes imaginable in which, for instance, people convicted of murdering Israelis have been released from prison after serving just a few years and receive a hero’s welcome from enraptured crowds in Gaza. It is a wretched, appalling system, which Hamas and others exploit well.
It is because Israel values life so highly, particularly the life of a kidnapped soldier or POW, that this problem comes up. Despite that, Murray says that the incentive to kidnap Israelis has to be broken. The problem is that even prisoners scheduled for execution, or get life without parole, could still get money for their families via the Palestinian Authority’s “pay for slay” program, so there’s still an incentive to take Israelis hostage. And Murray mentions the criticism that would come down on Israel were it to engage in mass executions. That would be unfair he says, but he’s still in favor of mass executions of some terrorists. As for me, I am undecided, but am still leaning towards the banning of capital punishment.
*I always thought that airline pilots made decent salaries, but not as much as the Wall Street Journal describes in a new article, “The volatile finances of airline pilots, America’s unpredictable millionaires” (subtitle, “They can earn fortunes in a single month, but are often dependent on one airline for their entire careers.”
Jeff Barath never had a need for a financial adviser. Then he retired last year at 65, and it threatened to unleash a tidal wave of taxable income.
Like many of his fellow airline pilots, Barath spent much of his career bound by a rigid seniority structure that came with similarly rigid compensation and retirement benefits. When he left United Airlines after 35 years, he was inundated by more financial decisions than he ever expected upon entering the profession.
He has a partial pension, a brokerage account and a $3.5 million 401(k). Once he starts taking his required minimum distributions, his income will be well over $300,000 a year, including Social Security, which is more than he earned most years while working. He needed to know how much to take out, where to pull from first and how the decision would affect his taxes and his Medicare premium.
“It’s a high-class problem,” Barath said.
. . . Many pilots leave the workforce as millionaires thanks to generous pay and 401(k) contributions from their employers. But they face lots of pitfalls, too. They typically work for the same carrier their entire careers, and in a volatile industry, working for the wrong airline at the wrong time can take a major toll on earnings.
Pilots with seniority can make as much as $100,000 in a month if they live near a hub, fly the biggest planes and can pick up a lot of flights that pay overtime rates due to weather-related events, according to Timothy Pope of wealth manager 360 Aviation Advisors.
. . .Barath, who is still single and now lives in Bronxville, N.Y., has remained conservative with his investments. On the advice of a financial-services executive, he avoided high-cost mutual funds with a spotty performance history. Instead, he put about 75% of his plan into an S&P 500 index fund. The remainder he spread across a value fund, a small-cap fund and a money-market account.
He left it there until a couple years before retirement, when he moved more into the money-market account. A Charles Schwab adviser who took over managing his money a few months after his retirement helped Barath create a budget to determine how much he would need each month. The upside is that he has plenty to live on. The downside is that almost all of it will be taxable.
Barath’s adviser recommended he put 60% in stocks and 40% in fixed-income investments.
This is pretty much what I did, and relied entirely on Vanguard funds. My allocation is still 60% equities andf 40% stocks, but I’m set for life, and will give the vast majority of my savings to charity when I did. As for the pilots, they have a very important job, flying hundreds of people at least once a day, and they can’t afford to make a mistake. I don’t begrudge them their high salaries at all.
Early in the fall semester of the 2025-26 academic year, Lisa Belkin, an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s journalism school, realized that one of her students, Jamie Beaton, had yet to show up for class.
Belkin, who avoids combing the internet for information about her students, knew nothing about Beaton. She was curious about his absence, though, so she reached out to a dean, who sent an email.
Beaton was apologetic in his reply, saying he had mixed up his schedule. He was in New Zealand, teaching a course in entrepreneurship at the University of Auckland, but would be back in New York the next week.
That was when Belkin decided to break her rule. Who was this guy?
Beaton, she learned, had graduated magna cum laude from Harvard in 2016, picking up a master’s degree in applied mathematics along the way. He had gone on to collect an M.B.A. from Stanford. Then a law degree from Yale. That was followed by a doctor of philosophy in public policy from Oxford, where he was a Rhodes scholar — all before age 28.
Attending classes remotely and in person, he earned additional master’s degrees from — deep breath — the University of Pennsylvania (education entrepreneurship), Stanford (education technology), Princeton (finance), Cornell (health care policy and economics), Dartmouth (implementation science), King’s College London (war studies) and Tsinghua University in Beijing (global affairs).
Still, there was more: Beaton, who was born and raised in New Zealand, was a founder and the chief executive of Crimson Education, a college admissions counseling service that has been valued at more than $600 million.
. . . If he continues collecting advanced degrees at such a swift pace, he will surpass Benjamin B. Bolger, who has racked up 16 at age 50. He might even beat Michael Nicholson, an octogenarian forever scholar with more than 30 degrees to his name.
Away from his studies, Beaton, 31, has become a player in the field of college admissions counseling. His clients pay between $30,000 and $200,000 for a multiyear program designed to enhance their children’s chances of getting into top universities.
Why is Belkin doing it? Well, he clearly likes to both learn and to work hard—to the extent that he abjures vacations. Will he get more degrees? His friends say he might go into politics, though they’re just guessing. But one thing’s clear: this guy is wickedly diligent and also extremely rich.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Szaron wants out:
Szaron: Could I go out too? Hili: What for?
In Polish:
Szaron: Czy ja też mógłbym wyjść z domu?
Hili: A po co?
Reza Rashedpour, do you remember that teenage girl you humiliated just because she wasn’t wearing a hijab? Now your own daughter produces content without a hijab! That means she’s enjoying a freedom that Iranian women were beaten for, arrested for, and humiliated for—so, keep your hands off Iranian women and girls. The morality police inside you is still running rampant!
رضا رشیدپور، این دختر نوجوانی را که فقط بهخاطر نداشتن حجاب تحقیرش کردی یادت هست؟
حالا دختر خودت بدون حجاب تولید محتوا میکند! یعنی از آزادیای بهره میبرد که زنان ایران برایش کتک خوردند، بازداشت شدند و تحقیر شدند، پس، دست از سر زنان و دختران ایران بردار. گشت ارشاد درونت هنوز… pic.twitter.com/fdOaHCSfeI
The 179 mins of HR training I’m forcing myself thru in 5 min increments casually denigrates physicians thus:
“Sex Assigned at Birth: Typically, health professionals label infants as male or female after a cursory examination of their external physical characteristics.”
From Malcolm; six minutes of information from the BBC about an unusual job: a steeplejack. This guy is taking down the entire chimney singlehanded! Why not wear safety gear?
“I’ve never fell off a big chimney. You only fall off one of them once.”#OnThisDay 1979: Extraordinary steeplejack Fred Dibnah was introduced to the nation. pic.twitter.com/07PPc6um4D
“I find the idea of a national conversation on AI regulation inherently funny. A national conversation? With this nation, whose current conversations include: 1) Whether the Jews snuck letters into math, and 2) Whether Sydney Sweeney’s side-boob means we’re living in The… pic.twitter.com/wHwxoWIz6w
One from my feed. Remember this? (You can see an alternate version here.)
I know this is real. I know this is part of the world in which we all live. And yet I remain in a state of cognitive dissonance in which I can’t integrate this fact that I know to be true into my picture of the world. I know that 1.) this was a video that had to be made to… pic.twitter.com/Lp9Ell3YLx
And two from Doc Cobb. This first one is plenty weird, and I’ve printed it out to read:
The soul is real and can be tied with a rope according to this graphical abstract. The paper is even weirder!"Quantum evidence of nonlocal consciousness during clinical death" http://www.cell.com/the-innovati… This is a Cell Press journal…via @pubpeer.com @forbetterscience.bsky.social
Yes, as the world goes on its apocalyptic way, I’m pulling a temporary Andrew Sullivan and concentrating on other stuff. Today we’re back on language with a new edition of “Words and phrases I despise.” Remember, this is a compendium of language that irritates me, so do not bother to tell me that “lanaguge evolves.” And you’re of course welcome to put your own pet language peeves below. Time to air your grievances!
Today we have five, with examples. I can’t guarantee that I haven’t mentioned any of these before.
1). “Merch”, which is simply an “I’m so cool” shortening of the word “merchandise.” Here’s an example from Huffpost (click on screenshot”. (I’m surprised they don’t shorten “purchase” too, so they can urge you to “purch the merch”.)
2. “Sammy” for sandwich. This is really irritating, as it doesn’t even save any syllables. Not only that, but it sounds juvenile—something a two-year-old might say if she isn’t able to pronounce the proper word. Further, I had a mentally disabled relative named “Sammy”, and the use of the s-word dishonors his memory. This is from a HuffPost article on the “9 best sandwiches to pack for lunch.” I can’t imagine someone making one of these to pack for work:
3,) Anything with “-maxing” or “-maxxing” as a suffix. “Looksmaxing” is the most common form of these c0nstructions, and it simply means “trying to make a feature look as good as possible”. Here’s a highly important article—or at least HuffPost thinks so:
Grok gave me several other examples:
A productive slang suffix -maxxing (usually spelled with a double x) has become widespread online. It means “maximizing” or “optimizing” something, often appearance or a lifestyle trait. Common examples include looksmaxxing, sleepmaxxing, softmaxxing, and many nonce formations. This usage grew out of gaming “min-maxing” and later internet culture.
“Nonce”? I suppose they mean “one-time” formations. Whatever, although the suffix lends itself to many uses (I just thought of “foodmaxxing” at a buffet) is should never be used by people with more than two neurons.
4.) “Advancements”. I know I’ve put this one up before, but I find it particularly irritating. All it means is “advances”, but some people have a desire to gussy up the word by adding four more letters. Here’s an awkwardly title page from the progressive Huffpost—one of my favorite sources for this kind of infelicitous prose:
If you want to learn more about the ice cream, here’s a tweet from B&J:
NEW FLAVOR ALERT! 🍦 Introducing Justice ReMix’d, a new Limited Batch flavor! We’ve partnered with @adv_project to churn up a flavor to support criminal justice reform and an end to structural racism in our broken criminal legal system. Find it near you: https://t.co/HWkZOdRYVtpic.twitter.com/JrybfmeY40
5.) “I haven’t done this” (or been here) in a minute.” This means exactly the opposite of what it says; the real meaning is “I haven’t done this in a long time.” It’s bizarre, and its only purpose is to show that you’re conversant with the latest stupid jargon.
I’m hearing this more and more, and always discount a person when they use the phrase. Here’s one example from Facebook:
