Welcome to another damn week: it’s Monday, October 19, 2026, and it’s Rainforest Day. Here are shots, in order, from Costa Rica (La Selva) in 2017 and Oahu (Mānoa Falls) two years later:
It’s also International Gin and Tonic Day and National Seafood Bisque Day.
Posting will be light today as I’m off to see Richard Dawkins speak on “Genes and the Meaning of Life” at Symphony Hall this evening (I prepare most of these dialogues the day before they appear).
UPDATE: It was a good time; Richard was interviewed byNicholas Epley , a behavioral scientist and professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. It was at Symphony Hall in downtown Chicago and lasted about an hour and a half. I had given Nick a list of ten questions that I’d ask Richard (I don’t have the list) and was glad to see that about half of them came up: memes, evolutionary psychology, genetically based sex differences, Richard as a “cultural Christian” and so on. At 85, Richard hasn’t lost a lick: he’s still thoughtful, eloquent, and, as the audience appreciated, funny. It’s hard to think of another academic who could draw such crowds and entertain them and educate them so thoroughly. The crowd was urprisingly young—I estimate the mean age of about 40. Here’s a shot of the venue from my seat on the main floor:
I found the list of questions I’d sent to Nick as suggestions to ask Richard. I know what Dawkins’s answers would be to some of them, but the audience doesn’t.
1 Of all the books you’ve published, which is your favorite, and why?
2 What do you think has been the greatest discovery in evolutionary biology in the last several decades?
3 If you could have one unanswered question about evolution or biology answered for you, what would it be?
4. Given the mountains of evidence in favor of evolution, why do 73% of Americans believe that God had some hand in human evolution (see attached Pew Survey, adding pure creationists and partial creationists)?
5. People are now proclaiming that religion is coming back, based on the fact that the number of “nones’ (people without a formal church affiliation) has slowed down or reached a plateau in the last two years. Do you think religion is inexorably on its way out in America, or has the decline stopped?
6. Evolutionary psychology, the idea that human behaviors, preferences, and thoughts, have been heavily influenced by evolution, has been widely criticized as “just-so stories”. I presume you don’t agree with that because, after all, why is the human brain exempt from natural selection? What do you make of these criticisms and could you give us some examples of human behaviors that you think have been clearly instilled in us by natural selection.
7. Your late friend and colleague Daniel Dennett called Charles Darwin’s idea of evolution by natural selection “the single best idea anyone has ever had.” Given that the competitors include Newton and Einstein, do you agree?
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the October 19 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*After a long period of silence, Trump has finally endorsed Netanyahu in the Israeli elections (October 27). The Prime Minister of Israel, though, is not elected directly, but rather emerges from a coalition-forming caucus after the election of Parliament. I’m not a fan of Netanyahu, and am hoping for a better PM, but it doesn’t matter who emerges as the leader, for the world will hate Israel no matter who runs the government. And you know why. (Netanyahu was just one more excuse to hate Israel)
*France is rocked with riots that have arisen from protests, and yesterday the protestors rioters burned most of an old city hall in Limoges (see archived article here).
France was in a state of shock on Sunday, as citizens walked through streets lined with shattered storefronts, charred cars and burned-out government buildings after the country’s largest demonstrations in years devolved into riots and looting.
The unrest on Saturday — which led to some 2,000 arrests — caused widespread damage to several symbols of the state, including a 19th-century city hall in Limoges, a town in central France renowned for its porcelain, that was largely destroyed in a nighttime arson attack. More than 600 police officers were injured, Laurent Nuñez, France’s interior minister, said on social media on Sunday.
Rioters attacked city halls from Lille in northern France to Marseille in the south, where they broke into the local government headquarters and tipped over a bust of Marianne, a symbol of the French Republic. A fire also destroyed a tourist office in Lyon, and 1,500 shops were damaged or looted nationwide, according to Alexandre Bompard, head of the French federation of commerce and distribution, who estimated that the cost of repairs could run into hundreds of millions of dollars.
“I’ve never seen this before, I am disgusted,” said Sophie Vanpoperinghe, 47, as she gazed at ransacked shops on Boulevard Magenta, the road in Paris where she has lived for 22 years and which is frequently used for demonstrations.
More than half a million demonstrators marched on Sunday to protest the rising cost of living and poor conditions in schools, among other grievances. Many were stunned on Sunday at how rioters had used those demonstrations as a smoke screen for vandalism.
. . . On Sunday, the violence and protests had subsided and given way to a political blame game. Government officials and far right leaders accused the far left of stirring up the unrest, and left-wing leaders blamed the government.
These riots are, as you see from the second tweet below, being blamed on immigrants and are boosting an anti-immigrant parties and politicians like Marine Le Pen. The question is to what extent are immigrants involved and, beyond that, why would immigration itself lead to rioting? The MSM is largely silent on the immigration component, though I found this in the Spectator (archived):
As Sébastien Lecornu said, the violence was perpetrated by two groups: far-left extremists and what he termed ‘criminals’.
Far-left extremists are usually white, like those arrested earlier this year after the death of a nationalist student in Lyon. The people seen on television forcing their way into the city halls of Marseille and Lille were mainly white. On the other hand, the ‘criminals’ filmed looting in Paris, Marseille and Bordeaux appeared to be of immigrant background.
All the demonstrations I’ve seen involve some Palestinian flags being waved, but of course we saw that among American college students. Frederick Alexander says this at The Gadfly (h/t Anna):
The hard left has spent weeks turning a legitimate grievance about failing schools into a much wider confrontation with the state.
And then there’s the Islamist connection, which the mainstream media would rather not talk about. Outside a school near Paris, a student was filmed shouting, “In the name of Allah, we can kill them all!”, to the cheers of other teenagers.
Elsewhere, there’s footage of students singing along to a rap song invoking Mohammed Merah, the Islamist terrorist who murdered Jewish schoolchildren in Toulouse, and the Bataclan massacre. Meanwhile, a 2025 parliamentary inquiry revealed the growing proximity between figures in Mélenchon’s party and organisations associated with political Islam.
So much for a protest about maths lessons.
None of this means that every student demanding a better education is an Islamist revolutionary. But it’s hard not to conclude that the political forces seeking to exploit their grievances have other ideas. France’s disaffected students offer a useful point of combustion for wider political violence.
What we’re looking at is an increasingly visible convergence between the revolutionary left and political Islam, alongside the familiar collection of hooligans and nihilists who see any disorder as an occasion to indulge their grim hobby, not just in France but across the West.
We’ll have to wait and see what the role of immigration is in these ongoing unrests, but it’s already clear that the far-left native populations are involved. And regardless of who is demonstrating, the spread of political Islam is concerning.
A tweet from Jay showing the fracas, with the English translation, “⚠️🔴 WATCH UNTIL THE END I CANNOT DESCRIBE WHAT I JUST EXPERIENCED IN MARSEILLE. ”
And a possible result (h/t Luana):
*Over at It’s Noon in Israel, Amit Segal describes the clashes between Palestiniand and Israelis in Judea and Samaria that is always described by the press as “settler violence.” In reality, says Segal, both sides can incite this violence, so it’s “chaos” mistakenly attributed by the press as totally the acts of Israelis.
t’s Sunday, October 18, and two events on Saturday captured the problem of settler violence. The first was a little-publicized provocation by Palestinians during the olive harvest, when they approached a settlement’s grazing lands pelting a shepherd with stones. The second was an unprovoked settler attack on European diplomats who had come to protect the harvest.
At 7:35 a.m., according to an Israeli emergency-response group, a shepherd from the Ma’ale Ahuvia farm was hit by stones in the farm’s grazing land near Taybeh. He was lightly hurt and got himself to treatment. Residents say the harvesters began on Deir Jarir’s land and then crossed into pasture the IDF had approved for the farm.
Palestinians, for their part, claim that settlers advanced on their harvest under IDF guard, firing live rounds. The IDF has not commented on the clash or its alleged presence, and no footage corroborates the gunfire. The casting of the IDF as an accomplice to settler violence is narratively compelling for those who see all Israelis as equally malicious, but it also sets off alarm bells for Israelis who know that if the IDF is there, it is far more likely to be separating the two sides than supporting a settler attack.
The second incident took place six hours after the Ma’ale Ahuvia clash, a few kilometers away. A little before 1:30 p.m., masked men with metal bars descended on a delegation of Belgian, French and Polish diplomats in Taybeh. A French mayor put on his tricolor sash, and it didn’t help. The window of the Belgian consulate’s car was smashed. It was a disgusting act of baseless vigilante justice.
Belgium’s foreign minister blamed Israel’s settlement policy and pledged to push for further EU sanctions. France demanded that Israel arrest those responsible, and Poland declared itself deeply outraged.
The latter incident has rightly been condemned by nearly every corner of the Israeli establishment. The IDF called it a severe act of violence by Israeli rioters, and Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar condemned it without caveats. The Prime Minister’s Office said any violence against diplomats is unacceptable.
A similar incident a day earlier is covered in the shadow of provocation and response. According to the Binyamin Regional Council, hundreds of “terrorists and anarchists” threw stones and fired fireworks directly at Israelis, Palestinian Authority vehicles were allegedly on hand, and left-wing activists had organized the confrontation so the cameras could film the Israeli response.
The response, when it came, was itself highly problematic. According to one witness, 50 Israelis, many masked and some carrying gas canisters, came down the hill onto the terraced groves. Some set trees alight and used slings to throw stones at the harvesters, who retreated downhill and threw stones back.
Caught in the middle was Heidi Levine, a photographer working for The Washington Post. Wearing a vest clearly marked “Press,” she was pushed to the ground and beaten, and was left with a broken rib, a broken vertebra and a finger injury that needs surgery. President Isaac Herzog, who called Heidi Levine after Shabbat to apologize for her beating, said Taybeh weighed on his conscience as well.
Segal’s take is that the situation is complicated, but the media and the world want to simplify it by blaming all the violence on Israelis. The world’s push for sanctions, he adds, is based not on “settler violence” in the West Bank, but on Israel’s actions in its war on Gaza. The end:
The tragic reality of Judea and Samaria will not bend to the wishes of its indignant defenders. Palestinian violence against Israelis will always be played down or omitted altogether, while settler violence will always erode Israel’s standing abroad. Israel must reconcile itself to this reality and act accordingly.
*The NYT has two articles (here and here) suggesting that O. J. Simpson might not have acted on his own if he did murder his wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her companion Ron Goldman in 1994 (remember that Simpson was found not guilty). When Simpson wrote his fictional memoir, If I Did It, he told his ghostwriter he could not have done the murders alone. Now there’s evidence that that might have been the case:
In the failed murder prosecution of O.J. Simpson in 1995, the government professed that he alone had killed his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman.
Among the issues that hampered the case: the lack of a murder weapon, which has never been found. Its absence has long stoked speculation about whether the killer had assistance.
Now, records unsealed after 30 years at the request of The New York Times show that a prized government informant had told law enforcement key information about the killings, including the supposed location of the murder weapon and details about Mr. Simpson’s efforts to evade prosecution. Together, the findings challenge the popular narrative around the case.
This year, the informant’s brother told The Times that his sibling’s role in the case went much deeper. And the brother said he actually helped discard a bag, containing a heavy object, in the hours after the murders.
Joseph Ippolito, known as Joey, a convicted drug trafficker and mafia associate, escaped from a Florida prison a month before the 1994 murders.
Mr. Ippolito’s brother said the siblings went west after the escape to Los Angeles. Before his incarceration, Mr. Ippolito had operated a popular restaurant there and was a close friend of Al Cowlings, the longtime confidant of Mr. Simpson.
In the wake of the infamous Bronco chase with Mr. Simpson and Mr. Cowlings, investigators found photos in the vehicle of one of Mr. Ippolito’s girlfriends, along with her phone number.
Mr. Ippolito was eventually brought back into custody a year later. Right away, records show, he fed federal investigators in New York information about the mafia and set up meetings with undercover drug agents, with prosecutors saying that they “found Ippolito to be a remarkable source of information.” Mr. Ippolito risked his own safety to help them, prosecutors wrote in a memo lobbying a federal judge for leniency in his sentence.
He also divulged information about Mr. Simpson and the killings.
. . .“The O.J. Simpson case remains an open and ongoing investigation,” a spokesman for the L.A.P.D. said. Because there was no conviction in the murders, “the department has an obligation to continue to pursue justice in this matter.” The spokesman added, “at a point that new evidence is found, detectives will follow those investigatory leads.”
As part of a re-examination of the Simpson case, The Times has unearthed tales of secret audiotapes, mafia links, a prison escape, and backchannel communications between state and federal prosecutors. The reporting also came across a dramatic account from the rapper Fat Joe that bolsters the informant’s supposed role in the case.
You can read more about the NYT’s investigation at the archived link here.
*When I was looking for jobs in the early 1980s, it was tough to find one. After many rejections, I finally got an offer from the only remaining school: the University of Maryland. Soon thereafter, the job market for STEM Ph.D.s expanded and things became easy. Now it’s tough again, as exemplified by this Ph.D., from chemical engineering (Princeton) who got rejected from over 2300 jobs.
Jack Weiss likes to joke that he’s just another unemployed guy living in his parents’ basement.
That leaves out a few key details: The Salt Lake City native has applied to more than 2,300 jobs since he graduated from Princeton in 2024 with his Ph.D. in chemical engineering. And he still doesn’t have a job.
He first pursued corporate science jobs and prestigious postdoctoral fellowships at national laboratories. Then he cast a wider net, applying to software engineering and other roles. Eventually, he was getting ghosted for food-preparation jobs, including at a company that sells frozen crab cakes.
For a time, Weis got a gig training AI on his expertise, including in engineering and fluid mechanics. That work dried up too.
I first interviewed Weis late last year, the day before his 30th birthday. Covering careers and the labor market, I endeavored to meet job seekers in all 50 states, hoping it would help me understand why many people felt so dim about their futures. Just 34% of Americans surveyed by Gallup in August said it was a good time to find a quality job.
The picture remains murky. The latest jobs report fell far short of expectations. The unemployment rate remains low, but the percentage of unemployed people out of work for 27 weeks or more was higher this summer than it’s been for more than a decade, with the exception of Covid-19 and its immediate aftermath.
The promise of AI—and unease around its application—also contributes to an environment that is harder than usual for young, college-educated workers to find work, while the opposite is true for those without degrees. More than 70% of U.S. respondents to a Pew Research Center survey released last month said they expected AI would lead to fewer jobs overall.
After dozens of interviews across all 50 states, Weis’s story struck me for the way it embodied the deep freeze that has paralyzed the current labor market in the past few years—what economists refer to as a low-hire, low-fire environment.
Many people have jobs, but they’re not leaving them, limiting opportunity for others. Those who don’t have a job are locked out of the growing economy as if it were a fortress, leaving them puzzled by the headlines of low unemployment and an accelerating GDP.
The guy is no slouch:
The son of two physicians, Weis graduated summa cum laude from Rice University and enrolled at Princeton for his Ph.D. in 2018. His research on ice formation was cited by the Nobel committee when it awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 2024.
The situation is exacerbated not only by fear of AI, but by applicants who submit hundreds of applications using AI, and employers, drowning in applications, uses AI to screen them. I’d still want to be 30 again if I had the choice, but the job market is one of the things on the downside of that.
*Yesterday’s Washington Post article by Mark Wagner—”My sister may have visited me after death. There’s a term for it“—doesn’t show the supernatural, it at least suggests it (see article archived here).
One summery Friday, as I mowed the lawn, I’m pretty sure my dead sister, Caroline, appeared to me as a peach. On a tree that had in five years never borne fruit, a single, perfectly ripe peach nearly touched my nose as I bobbed my head under the boughs.
How and why Caroline became a peach is a story that begins in August 1985. As part of her wedding ceremony, we sang “Amazing Grace.” At 30, Caroline was no shrinking violet. She’d been hired as a technology analyst by the CIA. She insisted that she would not sing, “To save a wretch like me,” demanding instead that we sing, “That saved a peach like me.” So we sang Christianity’s most notable hymn with new words. No divine punishment ensued. In fact, Caroline went on to have a healthy family and succeed in her career in higher education.
After her wedding, she embraced all things peachy. We called her “Sweet Peach.” At our “Yankee swaps” at Christmas, each year a niece or nephew would give her a peach candle, and they would all sing the SNL carol — “It’s a candle, that same peach candle.”
. . .And here I was, two months later, staring at a peach dangling in front of my face. I pulled it clean and ran into the house to show my wife and son.
We went out to check. There were no other peaches on the tree. We have another peach tree, one that’s actually fecund, but those peaches were weeks from being ripe.
What else could we do? My son and I made a smoothie, and I called my siblings.
And I told the story to friends. To my surprise, many shared a similar tale: After a death, a special bird appears. Or the loved one arrives with surreal lucidity in a dream. Or they catch an unexpected whiff of cinnamon, or lilacs, a scent the person had loved the most.
Of course the author can’t really say this was a miracle—a sign from his dead sister—but when you read the end, it sort of becomes ambiguous:
Was the peach Caroline? Perhaps Shakespeare said it best. As Hamlet instructed his friend Horatio, there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophies. I would suggest the working word at the tip of Shakespeare’s pen is “dreamed.” Our philosophies and models of what is possible are dreams. The true reality of our lives and deaths is something other, something we struggle to put into words. Sometimes, it tastes sweet.
If you can figure out what the guy is saying, you’re better than I am! It seems deliberately ambiguous.
I take the appearance of the peach as a coincidence, and nothing more. Sometimes it happens, sometimes this stuff happens, and sometimes doesn’t, but many people are looking for some affirmation that the deceased live on, or at least something that vividly reminds them of those who died. And you don’t hear about the coincidences that don’t occur. I suggest this article verges on affirmation of the supernatural more than it does on extolling coincidences that, after all, happen many times in a huge population.
There are two successive comments with opposite views:
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili shows her erudition:
Hili: Horace was right.
Andrzej: About what?
Hili: Almost everything.
In Polish:
Hili: Horacy miał rację.
Ja: W jakiej sprawie?
Hili: Prawie w każdej.
*******************
From Things With Faces:
From Cheryl’s Amazingly Positive, No Politics Allowed, Interesting People Group:
From Terrible Maps: U.S. states that have more cows than people:
Masih gets emotional speaking of Iranian protestors on death row:
From Luana; the town hall of Limoges, France, coming down after an arson attack:
J. K. Rowling is opposed to death threats no matter who makes them. This one is pretty scary, though.
Two from my feed. First, Greta has moved onto the latest cause:
A funny bit from Stephen Fry and Hugh Lsurie:
One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:
And two from Professor (Emeritus) Cobb. Here’s the first cat in space. Sadly, as Wikipedia notes, “Félicette euthanized two months after the launch so that scientists could perform a necropsy to examine her brain.” That is horrible—NO MORE CATS IN SPACE!
It's Félicette Day!On the date in 1963 the first cat went to space. Here's the song we wrote about her youtu.be/70VCY9Iu6qc?…
— SPRAY (@spraypopmusic.com) 2026-10-18T07:50:41.344Z
Matthew asks, “What do they use it for?” Good question, and you can find the answer here. (It anchors the sponge in the sediment, but also keeps the animal above accumulating sediment.)
Some glass sponges may be the oldest animals on Earth. Individuals of Monorhaphis chuni are estimated at over 11,000 years old, and they build a single skeletal spike up to 3m long, the largest natural glass structure any animal makes. 🧪 #SpongeThursday #HowToBuildAGiant #marinelife
— Dr Craig R McClain (@drcraigmc.bsky.social) 2026-09-17T17:17:26.475Z
