Welcome to Thursday, May 21, 2026, and Hummus Day (the third Thursday in May). Didn’t we just have one? Well, it’s good stuff, and I ate a ton of it when I visited Israel in 2023. Here’s a nice plate from Jerusalem with plenty of tahini in it:
It’s also American Red Cross Founder’s Day, International Chardonnay Day, International Tea Day, National Apéritif Day, and National Strawberries and Cream Day.
While traveling, reader Bill sent me this photo of a handmade metal mallard he saw on sale in a shop. I wrote, “I WANT IT!”, and he asked if I wanted to buy it through him. Of course I did, and he bought it, wrapped it carefully, and sent it to me. (I reimbursed him.) It now reposes on a cabinet overlooking my office. Isn’t it beautiful? All the feathers are metal, too, forged separately:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the May 21 Wikipedia page.
Oh, I had a dream last night, and again it was a weird one. This time I was walking in the middle of two long, long rows of Army tents. Between the rows of tends were two long rows of picnic tables, all occupied by soldiers. And all the soldiers were eating–tins of mussels! The tins were flat and had to be opened with a key, like sardines. But the contents were not just the meat of mussels, but the entire gastropod, shell and all. As I walked down the row of soldiers, all I could hear was the opening of tins and crunching of shells: a real cacophony. Why I had this dream I had no idea.
Da Nooz:
*I can’t believe this has happened. Trump made a deal with the Internal Revenue Service that he would give up his lawsuit against the IRS but, in return, gain immunity from being investigated and prosecuted FOR ALL TIME for any tax dealings. Further, the government agreed to create a $1.8 billion slush fund to be used to compensate people who, Trump thinks, were wrongly persecuted or investigated (read: January 6 insurrectionists). Oy gewalt! Read and weep (article is archived here):
The Justice Department has granted President Trump, his family and businesses immunity from ongoing inquiries into their taxes, a potentially lucrative arrangement that could shield the president from significant financial liability.
The provision, quietly inserted on Tuesday as a supplement to a remarkable deal that also created a $1.8 billion fund aimed at benefiting Mr. Trump’s allies, protects the president, his relatives and his businesses from pending audits and tax prosecutions.
The one-page document, signed by the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, said that the government would be “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from prosecuting or pursuing” pending tax claims against Mr. Trump, his family members and businesses.
The provision invited immediate criticism as tax experts raised the possibility that it was illegal.
That the addendum to the deal was posted, without fanfare, on the department’s website belied its bare-knuckled audacity. It revealed the determination of Mr. Trump and his appointees to ram through maximalist measures with minimum outside scrutiny at a moment when they still have uncontested control of government.
The provision was the latest in a series of maneuvers this week that blurred the all-but-vanished boundary between official department business and the private interests of a president intent on using his power to extract financial gain from the federal government for himself and his allies.
A day earlier, Mr. Trump agreed to drop his $10 billion lawsuit against the I.R.S. in exchange for the establishment of a fund for people he believes were wronged by federal investigations or prosecutions.
Justice Department officials had in part defended the creation of the fund by pointing to the fact that Mr. Trump and his family members would not be paid by it.
But protection from audit could be quite financially beneficial for Mr. Trump, who has always said that there was no wrongdoing in his tax filings. In 2024, The New York Times reported that a loss in an I.R.S. audit could cost Mr. Trump more than $100 million.
It is unclear if that examination has concluded or if Mr. Trump, his family members or affiliated entities are under other audits. I.R.S. procedures call for the mandatory audit of the president’s tax returns annually.
*Over at It’s Noon in Israel, Amit Segal ponders the ethics and efficacy of assassinating leaders like the Ayatollah Khamenei.
Much like the movie Groundhog Day, Washington and Jerusalem—from the think tanks to the command bunkers—are once again grappling with the exact same question they have faced before: Should Khamenei be assassinated? This time, however, it’s Mojtaba, not Ali. Other than that, almost everything is exactly the same.
In the heat of events, the fact that Israel had—for the first time in its history—killed the leader of an enemy state was overshadowed. The country had rehearsed the assassination of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in 1992, but ultimately, due to an operational disaster, the mission did not materialize. It also toyed with the targeted killing of Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat in 2002. Uri Dan, a confidant of then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, recounted asking him if Arafat had died naturally two years later. Sharon replied: “It’s better not to talk about it.” The United States had imposed an absolute veto on an overt assassination.
In 2026, the United States coordinated with Israel on the assassination of the leader of a country with nearly one hundred million residents, hoping to destabilize the regime’s foundations. That hope was partially fulfilled, or partially disappointed, depending on how you look at the glass. On the one hand, the undisputed, top-down control vanished. Iran sank into an internal battle, evident in attacks on the Gulf states that completely defied the political echelon’s position. The replacement son is pale, corrupt and wounded; it is doubtful whether he is leading or merely being dragged.
On the other hand, there is still a command structure; there is still someone to lean on. As long as there is an ayatollah named Khamenei, Iran maintains the facade of a functioning state. President Pezeshkian and Foreign Minister Araghchi do allow themselves to deviate slightly from the supreme leader’s rigid line on the nuclear issue—something they would never dare do during his father’s time—but they do not dare deviate much.
So in the war games, here is the dilemma: On one hand, Mojtaba is the last survivor, the only remaining natural heir. If he is assassinated, Iran could sink into leadership chaos that might help the more moderate wing secure an agreement. This is what Israel attempted in the Doha strike last September. It fired advanced missiles at the building housing the more recalcitrant wing of Hamas, the faction that had thwarted a hostage deal.
On the other hand, it’s not as if there are true moderates in Iran. If there is no Khamenei, no Anwar Sadat is waiting in the wings. Without him, there is the danger of securing an agreement that looks good on paper but is not fundamentally different from Barack Obama’s. Mossad Director David Barnea used to tell his American counterparts how, in the previous decade, the administration allayed his fears by arguing, “Who knows what will happen in the long term, in 2026, when the agreement begins to expire.” Well, here we are in 2026—welcome to the long term. Even if a different leadership agrees to freeze the nuclear program for 15 years, 2041 will eventually arrive just the same.
In short, a severe dilemma.
But it’s not clear whether Mojtaba is even alive, as he hasn’t been seen since the airstrike that killed his father on Febraury 28. Or he may be in a coma, or simply staying out of sight. But it would have been possible, if he were sentient, for him to release a video whose location could not be identified. I think he’s out of action, whether dead or comatose. Segal does, however, characterize the dilemma aptly. Even if Mojtaba is dead, there are no “moderates” to replace him. If they can pretend a dead man is still alive, they can pretend there’s still an Ayatollah calling the shots. Israel would not only have to kill him, but also prove that they did, which is very difficult.
*This tweet by Maarten Boudry called my attention to a new NYT op-ed by Bret Stephens, “Hatred of Israel and the degradation of the West” First the tweet
Excerpts from Stephens, a good palliative to the odious Nicholas Kristof, which he alludes to at the beginning:
[Israel] is not a country of saints. As is true of every other country, the United States not least, plenty of sins past and present can be laid at Israel’s door. They include allegations, by Israelis and others, regarding cases of abuse of prisoners in Israeli jails. Those cases should be thoroughly investigated, just as in the United States the 8,628 allegations of staff-committed sexual misconduct victimizing adult inmates tallied in 2020 alone by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics need to be deeply investigated.
Yet this kind of good-faith criticism of Israeli leaders and policy has for years been giving way to something darker. It’s a hyperbolic and often conspiratorial hatred of the country. It’s a belief that Israelis are perpetually out for the blood of their enemies, even when it comes at the cost of the blood of their friends. It’s the sense that it’s socially acceptable to boycott, assail and sometimes assault Israelis for the supposed sins of their government. It’s a conviction that Israel, alone among the nations, was a mistake to begin with and has no right to exist now.
None of these impulses are justified indictments of Israel. They are indictments of the indicters. More broadly, the fashionable frenzy that is today’s loathing of Israel, coming from the far right but especially from the far and not-so-far left, is a sign of the degradation of the West. Societies that value critical thinking and reasoned moral judgment do not make a fetish of demonizing one small country and its people while imagining that peace, justice and freedom would somehow be achieved if only the country and its people were made to disappear.
I’ve been closely covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for over 25 years. It’s given me something of a front-row seat to this degradation.
This is a declaration of war on Kristof by Stephens, implying that he is making a fetish of Israel-hatred and abandoning critical thinking. Stephens then gives a lot of stories in which unjust accusations were leveled at Israel, and the stories were later corrected by journalists. I’ll quote more than usual here, as this is an important take on accusations like those made by Kristof, but also by many others:
The common thread in these and many other stories is that they all involve strenuous, if ultimately embarrassed, efforts to prove that Israelis deliberately seek to kill the innocent and maim the vulnerable, apparently for no other reason than gratuitous cruelty. This isn’t a matter of reporters’ impartially trying to expose wrongdoing wherever they find it — if that were the case, the errors wouldn’t invariably lean in the same ideological direction. It isn’t speaking truth to power. It’s feeding narratives to the credulous.
Over time this does at least three kinds of damage.
The least of it is damage to Israel, which has been living under the endless drizzle of orchestrated propaganda and media hostility over the course of its 78 years while still managing to transform itself into a military, technological and economic powerhouse — as well as one of the happiest countries in the world.
A more serious form of damage, paradoxically, is to Palestinians. Israelis have become so inured to the tide of tendentious allegations about their supposed perfidy that they can too easily shrug off real scandals, as it is with West Bank settler violence. And the endless parade of anti-Israel stories too often means the Western media pays too little attention to the domestic tyrannies that are Hamas’s rule in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority’s rule in the West Bank.
But the gravest damage is to Western institutions, particularly those entrusted with the dissemination of hard truths.
That goes not only for journalism, but also once-admired organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, which in recent decades have turned themselves into factories of anti-Israel invective. “Major human-rights groups’ shift toward overt opposition to Israel has had the unusual effect of sidelining many of Israel’s own activists, who historically are among the sharpest critics of the Israeli government’s behavior in Gaza and the West Bank,” noted Michael Powell last year in The Atlantic.
It’s a similar story with much of academia, in which the anti-Israel furies stirred by the attacks of Oct. 7 were both a symptom of the broader intellectual rot within them and an invitation to the political and legal blowback from which they are still suffering.
. . . this obsession has contributed to the relative neglect of the region’s other fundamental problems, above all the abiding grip of authoritarian politics in places like Cairo and Ankara and totalitarian religious fundamentalism in Gaza and Tehran. When was the last time you heard of an American campus protest against the treatment of Kurds by Turkey (a NATO ally and longtime beneficiary of U.S. security guarantees), or the genocide in Sudan? Why is this year’s arts biennale in Venice being roiled by the inclusion of Israel, but not of China? Why has the recent report detailing the extensive documentation of systematic use of rape and sexual torture by Hamas and its collaborators received little attention?
These aren’t just questions of hypocrisy or double standards. They are evidence of minds that have lost the capacity to think dispassionately and critically. What we should really be worried about isn’t the future of Israel; it’s the fate of the West.
I can’t help but read this as a critique of his colleague Kristof. Of course Stephens will face all kinds of accusations for this piece, but note that he does call out Israel for things that he really thinks are wrong, like the treatment of Palestinians on the West Bank. But Stephens is right that this kind of mindless and obsessive accusation of Israel hurts Western institutions, which are already assailed by assucations of genocide, apartheid, and the mindless blatherings of protestors like “Globalize the intifada” that we hear regularly.
*Both the Harvard Crimson and the Wall Street Journal report that, completely against my expectations, Harvard has voted to curb grade inflation by capping the number of A grades in each course. Glory be!
From the Crimson:
Harvard faculty voted to impose a roughly 20 percent cap on A grades beginning in fall 2027, approving the College’s most aggressive attempt in decades to reverse grade inflation and reshape academic standards.
Faculty voted 458 to 201 for the first plank of the three-part proposal, which will limit A grades in undergraduate courses to 20 percent of enrollment, with flexibility for up to four additional A’s.
The measure passed with 69.5 percent of votes cast.
Faculty alsoapproved a companion measure to use average percentile rankings, rather than GPA, to determine internal awards and honors. That measure passed 498 to 157, with 76 percent of participating faculty in favor.
But faculty rejected the proposal’s third plank, which would have allowed courses to petition to opt out of the A cap if they were graded on an unsatisfactory, satisfactory, and satisfactory-plus basis. That measure failed 292 to 364.
This is unclear; my inquiries at Harvard have revealed that what was rejected was a plan that would allow courses now graded either “satisfactory” or “unsatisfactory” to add the grade “satisfactory plus”. That was turned down. Back to the Crimson
Together, the votes represent a sweeping intervention in Harvard College’s academic culture — one that will sharply reduce the share of A’s and place new constraints on grading decisions traditionally left to individual instructors.
The decision marks a major victory for Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh and the faculty subcommittee that designed the plan after warning that Harvard’s grading system had become too compressed at the top to distinguish exceptional work from merely strong performance.
It also signals that faculty were willing to endorse a mandatory cap despite months of objections from students and professors who argued that the proposal could heighten competition, discourage intellectual risk-taking, and infringe on faculty autonomy.
Students overwhelmingly disapproved of the proposal. Nearly 85 percent of respondents to a February survey administered by the Harvard Undergraduate Association said they disapproved of the proposal.
From the Wall Street Journal:
Harvard spent years researching ways to fight grade inflation, including examining prior efforts at Princeton and Wellesley.
A Harvard committee looked at 25 years of grades to model a range of possible remedies, including introducing A-pluses, according to Claybaugh.
Their conclusion: “Anything short of a cap doesn’t work,” she said.
Campus debate increased in the fall, when Claybaugh released a report noting that about 60% of grades were A’s during the 2024-25 school year, a jump from about 25% in 2005-06.
Note that the cap is on straight-out “A” grades, and does not include “A-” (“A minus”) grades. This means that there is nothing preventing professors from giving 20% As and 80% A-s. It turns out that my colleagues at Harvard get beefed at by students who get an “A-“, as that
Here’s the graph of the inexorable rise in percentage of “As” (the unadorned “A”) at Harvard, Look at the greater-than-10% increase in 2020, attributable to the pandemic and, I think, the desire of Harvard to reward students who, they thought, were being forced to get a substandard remote education. At any rate, the mean grade at Harvard is no an unadorned A. What will happen when As are capped at 20% in 2027? Who knows, but I think this is a good move.
Today there’s a op-ed on these data: “60 percent of grades were A’s. Enough is enough.” The authors are two professors who teach economists at Harvard. They say that capping As is not a perfect solution (and don’t mention that 80% of the students who don’t get As could get A-s), but add this:
When a school’s transcript stops distinguishing students from one another, employers and graduate schools fall back on what they can: connections, internship pedigrees, the polish of a personal essay (increasingly written with artificial intelligence). Grade inflation doesn’t just devalue an A; it also quietly hands more weight to factors other than what a student actually learned. That is true at Harvard and every other school that has let its grades drift upward. Bringing inflation down is hard. The alternative is worse.
There will be only four news items today as I’ve quoted at length from Stephens’s piece.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili the editor is policing Andrzej’s behavior:
Hili: What are you doing?
Andrzej: I’m cleaning my desk.
In Polish:
Hili: Co ty robisz?
Ja: Sprzątam moje biurko.
*******************
From Band Director Jokes:
FromTherionArms, ancient script:
From Cats Doing Cat Stuff:
Masih is quiet today, but here’s a comment on how Australia is policing extremist gender ideology; it was posted by JKR:
From Luana. This is sad, as I pronounced this guy a hero (he was the security guy at the San Diego mosque who lost his life trying to save the people inside from the two killers) and still think he is, but he also appears to be a Nazi sympathizer and anti-Semite. People are not one-dimensional.
I probably posted this one before, but listen to those seagulls meow!
Three from my feed. First, a robot “tries” to imitate Michael Jackson:
Allah didn’t help this time:
The Old Man and the Ray!:
One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:
This Belgian Jewish girl was gassed as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. She was six years old, and would have been 89 today had she lived.
— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2026-05-21T09:55:27.941Z
Two from Dr. Cobb. First, a flatulent symphony:
Well, I missed the 11th anniversary of this on Sunday, which was an appalling dereliction of duty, but good morning anyway
— Odd This Day (@oddthisday.bsky.social) 2026-05-19T06:10:23.889Z
A beautiful grouping of drakes in flight:
Today's #BirdOfTheDay theme is #DucksInTheAir. Mine today is mallards.#bird #birdphotography #mallard
— Tor Berg (@torbergen.bsky.social) 2026-05-18T17:03:48.003Z
Egg-shaped frame: a lattice shell that gives the whole system its structure and protection.
Colossal membrane: the secret weapon. A bioengineered, gas-permeable layer that matches a real shell’s oxygen transfer, so O₂ flows in and CO₂ flows out exactly the way nature does it.
See-through build: the largely transparent design that lets us watch development in real time. This is critical for research and for de-extinction, where visually confirming milestones and the gene-edited traits we’ve put back is everything.
Modular scale: the platform will stretch to fit eggs of any size, including the South Island giant moa egg, roughly 80x the volume of a chicken egg.
