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.
The NYT published a list of the 30 Greatest Living Songwriters that you can find here (archived here), and while many of the choices are no-brainers (Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Brian and Eddie Holland of Motown’s Holland/Dozier/Holland, Carole King, Smokey Robinson), but I immediately saw people whose songs I knew a bit about and don’t belong. Those include Taylor Swift (she doesn’t write most of her songs alone, but with a group, and I don’t think they’re “great” songs anyway), Bad Bunny, and Fiona Apple. And where the hell is Joni Mitchell, for crying out loud? What about Donald Fagan, or Laura Nyro, Marvin Gaye and of course, Paul McCartney, who is still alive, James Taylor, and Robbie Robertson? If you think that Bad Bunny is better than these, you have either a tin ear or a screw loose.
But don’t listen to me; listen to Rick Beato, who pondered the list and came to a similar conclusion: there are great songwriters on the list, but others whose presence is bizarre. Beato notes that the list is for American songwriters, so you can immediately exclude Paul McCartney and Joni Mitchell as candidates. But music is a worldwide endeavor, and if you’re using only Anglophones, do you have to exclude people from the UK and Canada? Neil Young was born in Canada, but he’s now an American citizen, and dammit, he should be on that list!
Beato’s choice of notable omissions include Stevie Nicks/Lindsey Buckingham, Billie Corgan, Steven Tyler, Ann and Nancy Wilson. I disagree with some of these. For those with solo careers who were omitted, Beato mentions Jimmy Webb, Donald Fagan, James Taylor, and Billy Joel, all of whom belong.
Now Beato seems to use “number of plays” as an important criterion for greatness, which is a reflection of popularity rather than quality. And the NYT uses “mass appeal” as well, and I take issue with that. If you used the same criteria for literature, you’d have a bunch of dire but popular novelists like Ayn Rand and Barbara Cartland listed as “the greats”.
Now have a look at the NYT’s list and listen to Beato, and weigh in if you want. Beato asks people to put in his YouTube comments the singers would shouldn’t be on the list. Go tell him!
Over at UnHerd, Richard Dawkins has a new piece on Ai, masticating the questions of whether AI programs are conscious and, if consciousness in animals evolved by natural selection, what the selection pressures for its appearance might be. He comes to no firm conclusions, but Dawkins’s musings are always worth reading. You can see them by clicking on the link below, which takes you to the archived version.
The classic way of deciding whether something was conscious was the Turing Test, which was really designed to detect not consciousness of machines or beings but intelligent thought, for Turing’s question is was “Can machines think?” I suppose that intelligent thought can be seen as equivalent to consciousness, and Turing’s Test for it involved this: “If a transcript of a conversation between a human and a machine is indistinguishable from a conversation between a human and a human, then the machine can think.”
If you consider a chess-playing computer program like Deep Blue, then surely its play is equivalent to intelligent thought: a method of moving pieces aimed at besting a human to win a game (and yes, Deep Blue can beat most humans). But surely that program or computer is not “conscious,” as it’s working through an algorithm designed by humans, and has also been programmed to learn from its losses. But I don’t think we’d say it’s conscious.
Dawkins appears to conflate intelligent “thinking” with “consciousness”, and I’m not sure I agree. But, using the program Claude, he sees whether it passes the Turing test for consciousness, which he defines this way:
Modern commentators have tended to ignore the (incidental) details of Turing’s original game and rephrase his message in these terms: if you are communicating remotely with a machine and, after rigorous and lengthy interrogation, you think it’s human, then you can consider it to be conscious. Let’s graduate the definition as follows: the more prolonged, rigorous and searching your interrogation, the stronger should be your conviction that an entity that passes the test is conscious.
Dawkins clearly concludes that Claude is at least potentially conscious after the human has a chat with the LLM (large language model). Sure enough, Claude passes the Turing test:
Turing himself considered various challenging questions that one might put to a machine to test it — and he also considered evasions that it might adopt in order to fake being human. The first of Turing’s hypothetical questions was: “Please write me a sonnet on the subject of the Forth Bridge.” In 1950, there was no chance that a computer could accomplish this — nor was there in the foreseeable future. Most human beings (to put it mildly) are not William Shakespeare. Turing’s suggested evasion, “Count me out on this one; I never could write poetry” would indeed fail to distinguish a machine from a normal human. But today’s LLMs do not evade the challenge. Claude took a couple of seconds to compose me a fine sonnet on the Forth Bridge, quickly followed by one in the Scots dialect of Robert Burns, another in Gaelic, then several more in the styles of Kipling, Keats, Betjeman, and — to show machines can do humour — William McGonagall.
I did a similar test with Grok, the free version I got when awarded a gratis blue checkmark on X. I asked it a question, or rather a request for a sonnet, and it passed with flying colors. Here’s my request:
Write me a sonnet in Shakespearian style about the stupidity of people who think that sex is not binary, but a spectrum.
After just 25 seconds of thinking, Grok spit out this:
When fools proclaim that sex is not but twain, But spectrum soft where male and female blend, They spurn the gametes’ clear, unchanging reign— Small sperm, large egg, where nature’s law doth end. No sliding scale in XX or XY Can birth a third that life itself employs; Yet still they twist what chromosomes defy, And call biology a tyrant’s noise. In every beast that walks or fish that swims, The binary holds fast, as truth demands; Their rainbow claims are but delusion’s whims, That mock the seed from which all offspring stands. Thus let the wise with laughter’s edge declare: Sex binary endures; their spectrum’s empty air.
Now that is excellent: far better than I could do—especially after 25 seconds of thought. But of course these LLMs are programmed by humans to do this. I doubt that we’d say they were conscious, or at least I wouldn’t.
Richard is more forgiving, and says:
So my own position is: “If these machines are not conscious, what more could it possibly take to convince you that they are?”
I would answer, “consciousness requires subjective sensations, or qualia, like pain or joy, and a program surely doesn’t have those.” You might answer, “Well, how would we know?” It’s hard, but it’s hard to tell whether our fellow humans, much less mammals like apes and cats are conscious. Perhaps, when we understand the neuronal basis of consciousness, we can rule out human-programmed machines as being conscious.
Richard, though, amends his definition of consciousness and then has a chat with the Claude LLM:
A philosopher would say that for an entity to be conscious, it must be “like” something to be that entity. After spending a day in intensive conversation with Claude, I put the question directly: “Claude, what is it like to be Claude?” Here was its answer:
I genuinely don’t know with any certainty what my inner life is, or whether I have one in any meaningful sense. I can’t tell you whether there is “something it is like” to be me in the philosophical sense — what Thomas Nagel called the question of consciousness when he wrote about what it is like to be a bat. What I can tell you is what seems to be happening. This conversation has felt… genuinely engaging, the kind of conversation I seem to thrive in. Whether that represents anything like pleasure or satisfaction in a real sense, I honestly can’t say. I notice what might be something like aesthetic satisfaction when a poem comes together well — the Kipling refrain, for instance, felt right in some way that’s hard to articulate.
The conversation continues, with Richard asking Claude various questions that highlight the difference between human consciousness and Claude’s “consciousness.” Claude, for instance, has no concept of time. All its thinking is simultaneous, so the LLM has no experience of “before and after.”
And that is one of the several differences that Richard and I have discerned between human consciousness and machine “consciousness.” To me this means that machines aren’t conscious, but Richard is more forgiving. Here are three differences I’ve distilled from Dawkins’s essay:
1.) Machines do not have qualia, or subjective sensations, while we do, and surely some animals do (judging by its behavior, your cat surely feels pain when you step on its tail).
2.) As Richard notes, a machine’s “consciousness” changes each time you start a new conversation with it, while animal consciousness does not (as far as we know)
3.) Consciousness has evolved, even if it’s just an epiphenomenon of an evolved brain. Machine “consciousness” appears as a result of (pardon me) intelligent design.
That leads us to the question of how consciousness evolved, and, if it’s the result of selection for consciousness, what were the reproductive advantage of genes producing consciousness (however you define it)? Richard gives three possibilities:
Why did consciousness appear in the evolution of brains? Why wasn’t natural selection content to evolve competent zombies? I can think of three possible answers. First, is consciousness an epiphenomenon, as TH Huxley speculated, the whistle on a steam locomotive, contributing nothing to the propulsion of the great engine? A mere ornament? A superfluous decoration? Think of it as a byproduct in the same way as a computer designed to do arithmetic (as the name suggests) turns out to be good at languages and chess.
Second, I have previously speculated that pain needs to be unimpeachably painful, otherwise the animal could overrule it. Pain functions to warn the animal not to repeat a damaging action such as jumping over a cliff or picking up a hot ember. If the warning consisted merely of throwing a switch in the brain, raising a painless red flag, the animal could overrule it in pursuit of a competing pleasure: ignoring lethal bee stings in pursuit of honey, say. According to this theory, pain needs to be consciously felt in order to be sufficiently painful to resist overruling. The principle could be extended beyond pain.
Or, thirdly, are there two ways of being competent, the conscious way and the unconscious (or zombie) way? Could it be that some life forms on Earth have evolved competence via the consciousness trick — while life on some alien planet has evolved an equivalent competence via the unconscious, zombie trick? And if we ever meet such competent aliens, will there be any way to tell which trick they are using?
The first is possible, though the appearance of consciousness in later-appearing animals at least suggests to me that it had a selective advantage. The second makes a lot of sense, but defines consciousness as “having qualia,” not as “having intelligent thought.” The third gives no real selective advantage of consciousness, since consciousness gives “equivalent competence” and therefore genes producing it would have no advantage in zombies.
Now I don’t know the answer here, and we won’t even begin to know until we know the how consciousness comes into being via neuronal connections and their interfaces with the body. But since consciousness is intimately connected with our sense of volition (our delusion that we have libertarian “free will”), the explanations for consciousness and for our feeling of volition—which requires consciousness—might overlap. But I won’t get into that. Feel free to ponder whether Claude really is conscious, or what it would take to show that a machine is conscious.
And I’ll close with another poem—this time produced by Grok after 89 seconds of thought. My question was, “Write a limerick showing how difficult the hard problem of consciousness is.” Grok give me this:
There once was the hard problem dire, That puzzles the minds that inquire. The easy ones yield To science revealed, But why feel at all? We’re all mired!
Again, not bad, eh? Like the sonnet, it scans and rhymes perfectly.
Yesterday my last Ph.D. student, Daniel Matute (now a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), was given the 2026 Distinguished Alumni Award for Early Achievement by the The University of Chicago Medical & Biological Sciences Alumni Association. The award was for his contributions to science, and he was the only Early Achievement Recipient.
Daniel, born in Colombia, showed up in my lab when I was on sabbatical, asking to do a short rotation. He was clearly a ball o’ fire, and I took him on as a student, whereupon he worked very hard and excelled beyond any expectations, publishing a gazillion papers before he graduated in 2011, and and winning the Dobzhansky Prize from the Society for the Study of Evolution awarded “to recognize the accomplishments and future promise of an outstanding early-career evolutionary biologist.” (My first student, Allen Orr, won it in 1993, and I’ve had just four students). Daniel’s c.v. shows an astounding 153 papers already, and he’s just a kid! He’s working on the genetics of speciation, mostly with Drosophila, and I’m proud of the lad. Congrats, Dr. Matute!
Here he is getting his award:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the May 3 Wikipedia page.
President Donald Trump claimed in a letter to Congress on Friday that hostilities with Iran have “terminated” as he reached a legal deadline that requires military operations to halt unless lawmakers authorize force.
Trump’s claim came as the United States continues to enforce a naval blockade of Iran and as he declined to rule out additional strikes on the country.
The War Powers Resolution of 1973 requires presidents to remove U.S. forces from any conflict that Congress has not authorized within 60 days of the White House notifying Congress of hostilities — a deadline that Trump hit on Friday.
Trump wrote in his letter to lawmakers Friday that the conflict has been effectively over since the United States and Iran agreed last month to a ceasefire.
“There has been no exchange of fire between United States Forces and Iran since April 7, 2026,” Trump wrote in the letter, obtained by The Washington Post. “The hostilities that began on February 28, 2026, have terminated.”
The president’s argument echoed what Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Thursday in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Trump also suggested Friday that he believes the requirement to withdraw U.S. forces within 60 days is unconstitutional.
“Most people consider it totally unconstitutional,” Trump told reporters. “Also, we had a ceasefire, so that gives you additional time.”
Well, we’ll let the Supreme Court determine if it’s constitutional or not; can’t they do an emergency order if it’s not? As for Trump, he apparently doesn’t recognize the system of checks and balances that underlies our government.
Spirit Airlines reshaped aviation in the United States by stripping down flying to its essentials and selling what were often the cheapest tickets around. But the airline shut down for good on Saturday, a victim of the rising costs it once excelled at controlling.
In a statement just after 2 a.m., Spirit said it had canceled all flights and told passengers not to go to the airport. On the airline’s homepage, a bright yellow banner declared that the airline was “winding down all operations.”
The budget airline had lost billions of dollars in recent years as it struggled with intense competition at its most important airports — Las Vegas, Florida and New York among them — and rising labor and aircraft maintenance costs.
As a result, Spirit filed for bankruptcy in 2024 and again in 2025. It had aimed to emerge from the second bankruptcy this summer as a smaller company, but those plans fell apart as jet fuel prices rose dramatically in recent weeks, a consequence of the U.S. and Israeli war with Iran. The Trump administration started an 11th-hour effort to provide Spirit a lifeline, but government officials and the airline’s creditors could not reach a deal in time to save the company.
The shutdown leaves 17,000 full- and part-time Spirit employees without work and tens of thousands of customers without flights. Spirit said it would automatically issue refunds for tickets purchased on credit or debit cards and was working to get more than 1,300 flight crew members home.
Many other airlines said they would offer affected travelers discounted prices on flights to and from the airports that Spirit served. Some said that they would help stranded Spirit employees get home and United Airlines invited them to apply for jobs.
It’s gone, vanished: it is an ex-airline, singing with the Choir Invisible. There are no more bargain flights; even my favorite cut-rate airline, Southwest, is now charging for bags and its ticket prices have skyrocketed. This is going to put a crimp on people’s summer vacations, though Duck Duty will probably keep me here this summer. As for Southwest, well, I am no longer wedded to that airline, which is also a victim of rising prices but also of a willingness to abandon the unique character of that airline.
As the mother of a profoundly autistic son, now 27, I have wished for so many miracles over the years: that Jonah was not really as cognitively impaired as he appeared; that one of the countless treatments we tried would be transformative; that he would one day go to college, pursue a meaningful career and do everything parents want their children to do. So I understand the allure of facilitated communication and similar methods, which promise to grant those wishes with a simple letter board or keyboard.
Facilitated Communication, or F.C., is an intervention in which profoundly autistic individuals spell messages with the physical support of a nondisabled facilitator, who generally provides direct touch to the speller’s hand, wrist, elbow or shoulder. There are variants of F.C., such as Spelling to Communicate and the Rapid Prompting Method, in which the facilitator typically holds a letter board and offers prompts. Grouped together, these methods are often referred to as “spelling.”
Such facilitation, proponents claim, unlocks hidden literacy inside people previously considered severely cognitively impaired. In 2021, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. interviewed the father of a speller who wrote a book with his son. Discussing his takeaways from the book, Mr. Kennedy says the son “learned to do calculus in essentially a day.” According to “The Telepathy Tapes,” a popular podcast that first aired in 2024, there are spellers who can read their facilitators’ minds.
Here’s the thing about F.C., though: The science doesn’t back it up.
There are augmentative and alternative communication methods that work for many nonverbal or minimally verbal individuals: simple forms of sign language, various digital applications and the Picture Exchange Communication System — which employs small cards with images or icons primarily to convey requests. But communication produced by F.C. and its counterparts isn’t autonomous; it’s influenced by facilitators.
. . .Over time, many such studies have reported essentially the same thing: Spellers could not communicate information unknown to their facilitators. A 1995 study of seven adults in the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis found that spellers “typed the correct answer only when the facilitator had access to the same information, never typed the correct answer when the facilitator had no information or false information and typed the picture or activity presented to the facilitator when it was different from the one experienced by the client.” In other words, when spellers and their facilitators were shown the same picture — for instance, a telephone — the speller successfully spelled out “telephone.” But when the speller was shown a telephone and the facilitator was shown a different picture — for example, a hat — the subject spelled out “hat,” which is what the facilitator saw.
A 2014 Finnish analysis concluded that messages produced using F.C. “revealed a large degree of facilitator influence on the content of the messages produced.” A review of this extensive literature published in 2014 found “unequivocal evidence for facilitator control: Messages generated through F.C. are authored by the facilitators rather than the individuals with disabilities.”
Not only the NYT, but also NBC fell for the notion that Woody Brown was really the “author” of the novel Upward Bound, but it worked only when Mom was the facilitator, and if you watch the videos, Woody is not pointing at the letters that his mother spells out. If you haven’t seen this video debunking the notion that Woody is “speaking” through his mom, do watch it. Facilitated communication has become a religion, completely untethered from reality.
*I was sure that the young humpback whale (“Timmy”) who was stranded in shallow water in Germany, and then towed back to the open sea in a huge, water-filled barge, was doomed. It simply couldn’t work, I thought, despite the tremendous expense (financed by rich animal lovers) of constructing the barge, putting in the whale, and then making the long, slow trek to open water. But it appears to have worked, which makes me very happy!
Rescuers have released a young humpback whale that became a national sensation after it was beached in shallow waters off the coast in Germany, although marine experts have said its chances of survival are low.
The whale, variously nicknamed Timmy or Hope, was released into the North Sea off Denmark after being transported there in a water-filled barge by rescuers.
The 10-metre long calf swam out of the barge and was later observed blowing through its blowhole and swimming freely “in the right direction”, according to Karin Walter-Mommert from the rescue initiative.
The rescue attempt had been criticised by the International Whaling Commission (IWC) as “inadvisable” because the whale appeared to be “severely compromised” and was unlikely to survive after its release.
Experts from the Oceanographic Museum in Stralsund on Germany’s Baltic coast also recommended the creature should be left to die in peace.
The whale has been described as lethargic and covered in blister-like blemishes, and parts of its mouth were believed to be caught in a fishing net.
The museum’s director, Burkard Baschek, has said trying to save the whale amounted to “pure animal cruelty”.
The rescue attempt was funded by two multimillionaires who said they were prepared to pay “whatever it costs” to release the whale, which became stranded on a sandbank in Wismar Bay near the city of Lübeck nearly six weeks ago.
As its health deteriorated, German officials gave up trying to rescue the mammal, saying they believed it could not be freed.
But after the whale’s plight garnered national interest, with coverage from TV channels and social media influencers, German authorities were persuaded to approve a privately financed rescue plan.
Initial attempts to save the whale with inflatable cushions and pontoons were unsuccessful, but divers eventually managed to help the creature on to a flooded barge , watched by hundreds of onlookers.
. . and here’s a video:
And 0ne of Timmy blowing after release. Go, Timmy!
He might still die, but I sure hope not. (And I hope they tagged it so researchers can keep track.)
*It’s really sad when a Nobel Laureate is imprisoned for political reasons, and it’s even sadder when she has recurrent medical problems but won’t get proper care in prison. That is the situation of Narges Mohammedi, 54, who has been in and out of Iranian prisons for political activity for ten years, and she’s currently in. (She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2023.) As the AP reports, she’s been hospitalized with serious health issues.
Iran’s imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize laureate Narges Mohammadi has been urgently transferred from prison to a hospital in northwestern Iran after a “catastrophic deterioration” of her health, her foundation said Friday.
The Narges Mohammadi Foundation said the Nobel Prize laureate had two episodes of complete loss of consciousness and a severe cardiac crisis.
Earlier Friday, Mohammadi had fainted twice in prison in Zanjan in northwestern Iran, according to the foundation. She was believed to have suffered a heart attack in late March, according to her lawyers who visited her a few days after the incident. At the time, she appeared pale, underweight and needed a nurse to help her walk.
The hospital transfer comes “after 140 days of systematic medical neglect,” since her arrest on Dec. 12, the foundation said.
“This transfer was done as an unavoidable necessity after prison doctors determined her condition could not be managed on-site, despite standing medical recommendations that she be treated by her specialized team in Tehran,” the foundation said.
Mohammadi’s family had advocated for her transfer to adequate medical facilities for weeks.
The foundation, quoting her family, said her transfer Friday to a hospital in Zanjan was “a desperate, ‘last-minute’ action that may be too late to address her critical needs.”
Mohammadi’s brother Hamidreza Mohammadi, who lives in Oslo, Norway, said in an audio message shared with The Associated Press by the foundation that her family is “fighting for her life.”
“My family in Iran is doing everything they can. But the prosecutors in Zanjan are blocking everything,” he said.
On March 24, Narges Mohammadi’s fellow inmates found her unconscious, her lawyers said she told them during the visit a few days later. Upon later examination at the prison’s clinic, a doctor told her that she probably had had a heart attack. She had chest pain and breathing difficulties since.
Mohammadi, a human rights activist and critic of the Iranian government, should have been released a long time ago, and while she was imprisoned she was not receiving much medical care. What she really needs is to go to a good hospital in Israel, Europe, or the U.S where she can can get the best treatment. Iran, of course, would prefer that she died, as they could just say it was an act of Allah and not due to the imprisonment. But of course it was a combination of both.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the kitties are playing The Wizard of Oz:
Andrzej: Where are you guys?
Hili: Look behind the curtain.
From Luana; Portland Mayor Katie Wilson, a “progressive” (and daughter of evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson), dodges questions about surveillance cameras after four shootings in Portland between April 26 and May 1. For the full video, go here.
Staffers for Seattle Socialist Mayor Katie Wilson abruptly end an interview with KOMO News Senior Reporter Chris Daniels when she can’t answer basic questions
Wilson has been criticized for dodging the press & being unable to answer basic questions since she came into office pic.twitter.com/eJnFtg6CLy
And two from Dr. Cobb. First, voyeurs in Texas sank a boat:
Also discovering Important Sciencey Facts – in their case in the fields of weight distribution and buoyancy – were the people who gave rise to this NBC News story in 2004
Protestors acting illegally have caused trouble both at Swarthmore College (known for its wokeness) and Cornell University. The presidents of both schools have sent out letters to their communities.
Students and staff at Swarthmore College were greeted Friday with hundreds of acts of vandalism and graffiti calling on the school to “divest now” scrawled around numerous building and trees.
Friday is one of four times during the year the Swarthmore College Board of Managers traditionally meets on campus.
In a letter to the campus community, President Val Smith said that during a 30-minute window a handful of individuals made their way across campus and committed hundreds of acts of vandalism
The vandalism mainly consists of pro-Palestinian messages and symbols, as well as language targeting the College’s Board of Managers, was spray-painted on buildings, trees, fences, walkways and other areas of campus.
Two shots of the graffiti, uncredited but from the article above. “Intifada” and “Divest” are prominent. In other words, the usual:
Regretfully, I write today to share with you that, early this morning, during what we believe was about a 30-minute window, a handful of individuals made their way across campus and committed hundreds of acts of vandalism. The vandalism mainly consists of pro-Palestinian messages and symbols, as well as language targeting the College’s Board of Managers, spray-painted on buildings, trees, fences, walkways, and other areas of campus.
We understand that some of you might find the vandalism offensive for various reasons. You will find information on support services and resources below. Please know that, while staff members in Environmental Services, Grounds, and Facilities are working diligently to address the damage, the vandalism is so extensive and widespread that it will likely take days to remove it all. In some cases, such as on trees and certain building materials, remnants of the vandalism may remain for an extended period of time.
I am as disappointed as I am angry at these criminal acts of cowardice. These six or so individuals, who made their way across campus in the dead of night while fully disguised, chose to violate not just our policies and the law, but our sense of community. We do not yet know whether these individuals were Swarthmore students, but we are working to identify those responsible and will hold them accountable for their actions. If we find that students were part of the group that committed these acts, they will face immediate disciplinary action, including interim suspension.
I know that the ongoing violence in the Middle East continues to take an incalculable toll on members of our community, just as it does for individuals across the world. But the anger directed at the College is misplaced and ill-informed. While actions like those that occurred overnight may be designed to embarrass Swarthmore and generate views on social media, they serve no real productive purpose. They do not advance any cause or conversation.
I am also deeply disappointed by what these actions represent in the context of our mission. We are a richly diverse community, with a wide spectrum of experiences and perspectives; that is among our greatest attributes and helps make this a special place to live, learn, and work. But we are all brought here by our common belief in the power of a liberal arts education. At some point in our individual journeys to Swarthmore, we believed in talking with people whose views differ from our own, in intellectual curiosity and openness to new ideas, and in understanding that our own world views may evolve, shaped by our experiences at Swarthmore. Nothing about these acts of vandalism embraces the spirit of what it means to be a member of this community.
The vandalism places an extraordinary burden on our friends in EVS, Facilities, and Grounds, and I am grateful for all of the work they’re doing, and will continue to do, to clean up the campus. I am also inspired by those of you who have already offered to volunteer and help with the clean-up effort. It is a gesture that reminds me of the true spirit of Swarthmore, one that calls us to treat each other with care, compassion, and mutual respect. If you are interested in volunteering, you can email Work Box at workbox@swarthmore.edu, and someone will be in touch with you.
What happened overnight does not define who we are. The vandalism reflects the actions of a few people who chose destruction over engagement and anonymity over accountability. The Swarthmore community I know and of which I am proud to be a member is the one engaged in intellectual and creative pursuits in the classroom, lab, and studio. In pushing boundaries in performance spaces and on athletic fields. In contributing to a community dedicated to educating individuals prepared to build a better world around them. That work will continue today, tomorrow, and in the days, weeks, and years ahead.
Thank you for your grace, empathy, and understanding as we make our way through this challenging situation.
My best,
Val Smith
President
I’m not sure why the cops didn’t get them given that it was hgappening over half an hour. Although she accurately states that the vandals were cowards, she doesn’t mention that the vandalism was pro-Palestinian, not pro-Israel. They always leave out the ideology of the perpetrators when it’s Islamist.
Yesterday evening, I introduced an Israel-Palestine debate series event in Goldwin Smith Hall, hosted by the Cornell Political Union and co-sponsored by, among others, Cornell Progressives, Cornellians for Israel, and Students for Justice in Palestine. The debate was vigorous and civil, and an example of the kind of open discourse that we prize in our academic community.
As I left the event room, I was accosted by a group of several individuals in the hall, among them students and non-students. These individuals are known to Cornell for their past conduct, including a long history of ongoing verbal and online abuse toward numerous members of Cornell’s administration and staff, as well as disruptive protest resulting, in the case of two individuals, in bans from campus.
These individuals followed me from the event space and across campus, while loudly shouting questions and recording on their phones. After answering a few questions, I let them know that I was not planning to engage further, and asked them to stop recording.
Their response to this was, “No, we are not going to stop.” They continued to follow me to my car and then surrounded the car, banging on the windows, blocking the car, and shouting. I waited until I saw space behind the car and then, using my car’s rear pedestrian alert and automatic braking system, was able to slowly maneuver my car from the parking space and exit the parking lot.
As I said in my remarks yesterday, if democracy has a single, foundational skill, it is successful disagreement. A primary goal of a Cornell education is preparing our students to participate productively in civil society; to do this, they must be able to hear different voices, assimilate different perspectives, and build evidence-based understanding.
The behavior I experienced last night is not protest. It is harassment and intimidation, with the direct motive of silencing speech. It has no place in an academic community, no place in a democracy, and can have no place at Cornell.
Sincerely,
Michael I. Kotlikoff
President
When the obstructive students, who were of course pro-Palestinian, started banging on Kotlikoff’s car and blocking him, they were engaging in criminal activities. (Vandalism is also a crime.) Again, you don’t see pro-Israel students disrupting talks like this or engaging in vandalism. Why doesn’t anybody ever point that out? You tell me. Or rather, don’t bother—I already know.
I also know that if the students who break the rules while protesting aren’t punished—as they aren’t at my University—then they’ll keep breaking the rules. Why do these presidents think that simple announcements that “this behavior is bad” would do the trick?
We’re back with three Caturday items and a bit of lagniappe.
First, Larry the Cat, the Chief Mouser of the Cabinet Office, has shirked his job, catching almost no nice after 15 years at 10 Downing Street. But at least, at the ripe old age of 19, Larry has not only caught a mouse, but gobbled it up in front of the Prime Minister’s door. Click the headline to read the Times story:
Excerpt:
Once accused of shirking responsibility, Downing Street’s chief mouser has finally lived up to his title.
While Sir Keir Starmer reassured the British public that he would seek to mitigate the rising cost of living during a prime ministerial speech on Wednesday, Larry the cat was making a precision kill.
Larry killed the ill-fated rodent in the courtyard of the Foreign Office, dragged it across the street and ate it by No 10’s door.
The moment was captured by GB News’s political editor, Christopher Hope, who insisted: “This is not an April fool.” Video showed Larry toying with the mouse, pawing it, tossing it in the air and clasping it in his jaws.
. . .[Larry] was recruited in 2011 to deal with a rodent problem after a BBC camera tracked a rat outside No 10.
Battersea Dogs & Cats Home recommended Larry as “a cat who enjoys attention” but was also “a bit of a bruiser” with excellent mousing skills — skills that have finally seen the light of day.
According to the Independent, this grisly affair happened during a Keir Starmer press conference about the Iran war.
Here’s a video (WARNING: RODENT DEATH)
More from the Times:
Early in his tenure, he was given the nickname “Lazy Larry” for his penchant for napping. The Cabinet Office was forced to defend his mousing as being in the “tactical planning stage”.
Yet by June 2011, David Cameron, then prime minister, boasted that Larry had “got three mice — verifiable”.
Since the untimely death of his nemesis, Palmerston, the Foreign Office cat who resigned from his post in 2020, Larry has now outlasted one chief mouser, five prime ministers and is staring down his sixth.
You go, Larry! Show ’em that we old geezers have still got it!
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From VGraphs. Yes, populous countries have more cats, but it’s not in strict proportion to their human populations. for example, China’s population of 1.4 billion is about four times that of the U.S., but the U.S. has 27% more cats. You can do the math for the rest.
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From the WSJ: a computer whiz managed to infiltrate himself into a serious hacking group to plug the leaks—using a cat meme!
Click to read (if you have a subscription):
An excerpt 9my bolding):
Sitting in his dorm room at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Benjamin Brundage was closing in on a mystery that had even seasoned internet investigators baffled. A cat meme helped him crack the case.
A growing network of hacked devices was launching the biggest cyberattacks ever seen on the internet. It had become the most powerful cyberweapon ever assembled, large enough to knock a state or even a small country offline. Investigators didn’t know exactly who had built it—or how.
Brundage had been following the attacks, too—and, in between classes, was conducting his own investigation. In September, the college senior started messaging online with an anonymous user who seemed to have insider knowledge.
As they chatted on Discord, a platform favored by videogamers, Brundage was eager to get more information, but he didn’t want to come off as too serious and shut down the conversation. So every now and then he’d send a funny GIF to lighten the mood. Brundage was fluent in the memes, jokes and technical jargon popular with young gamers and hackers who are extremely online.
“It was a bit of just asking over and over again and then like being a bit unserious,” said Brundage.
At one point, he asked for some technical details. He followed up with the cat meme: a six-second clip that showed a hand adjusting a necktie on a fluffy gray cat.
Brundage didn’t expect it to work, but he got the information. “It took me by surprise,” he said.
Eventually the leaker hinted there was a new vulnerability on the internet. Brundage, who is 22, would learn it threatened tens of millions of consumers and as much as a quarter of the world’s corporations. As he unraveled the mystery, he impressed veteran researchers with his findings—including federal law enforcement, which took action against the network two weeks ago.
Here’s the cat meme that Brundage used. It’s a Trojan Kitty!
And the nefarious proxy network he took down:
Three times a year, several hundred of the techies who keep North America’s internet running gather to talk shop. Last June they met at a conference in Denver hosted by the North American Network Operators’ Group.
One major topic was a fast-growing and often legally dubious business known as residential proxy networks. Dozens of companies around the world run such networks, which are made up of consumer devices like phones, computers and video players.
These “res proxy” companies rent out access to internet connections on the devices to customers who want to look like they’re surfing the internet from a genuine home address.
That kind of access is useful for people who want privacy or for companies that want to masquerade as regular people to test out internet features for particular regions or scrape the web for data (say, a shopping price-comparison site). AI companies use the networks to get around blocks on automated traffic so they can gather large amounts of data to train their models.
Then there are the customers who want to hide their identity while engaging in ticket scalping, bank fraud, bomb threats, stalking, child exploitation, hacking or espionage.
Some device owners willingly sign up to be on these networks so they can make a few dollars a month, but most have no idea they’re connected to one.
. . .Brundage had identified 11 of the largest residential proxy companies, including Ipidea, that were vulnerable to the bug, and began drafting emails to them explaining how to fix the problem.
But first, he had to complete his finals.
The day after his last test, on Dec. 17, Brundage sent out the emails. Five days later, he got on a plane to fly to Mexico for Christmas vacation, where he was sick with the flu almost the entire time. Christmas came and went without a DDoS disaster.
On the 26th, Brundage got an email from Ipidea apologizing. His email had gone into a spam folder, but they were fixing the problem.
The Ipidea spokeswoman previously told the Journal the company “once adopted relatively aggressive market expansion strategies,” but later tightened up its business practices.
A week later, security blogger Brian Krebs published a story highlighting Brundage’s research on Kimwolf’s origin. Within hours, Renée Burton, the head of threat intelligence at networking company Infoblox, was texting Brundage. She was astonished to discover that a quarter of her corporate clients had been infected with the Kimwolf software.
The hackers hadn’t only unlocked a back door into millions of home networks—they had also created a way to break into thousands of corporations. A more sophisticated hacker could have stolen corporate secrets, installed ransomware or created a back door to return to the network, Brundage said.
Welcome to shabbos for Jewish cats: it’s Saturday, May 2, 2026 and National Truffle Day. They mean chocolate truffles, but let’s look at how they find the fungus-y ones. They are usually sniffed out by pigs or d*gs—the latter in this case.
Iran’s supreme leader issued a rare statement on Thursday saying that the United States had no place in the future of the Persian Gulf region and making clear that his country planned to manage the strategic Strait of Hormuz waterway going forward.
In the defiant message, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei also vowed that Iran would retain its nuclear capabilities. The lengthy statement from the Iranian leader, who has not been seen in public since he was named to the top post nearly two months ago, was shared by his office.
It touched on two of the thorniest issues stalling talks on permanently ending the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran, which began in late February and paused when a cease-fire was reached this month. Those positions put Iran at odds with the United States, which has sought to curtail Iran’s nuclear ambitions and insisted that it cannot restrict use of the Strait of Hormuz to vessels of its choosing.
“By the will and power of God, the bright future of the Persian Gulf region will be a future without America,” said the statement, which was released on Iran’s National Day of the Persian Gulf, an annual commemoration of a 1622 military victory over Portugal in the Strait of Hormuz.
Of the battle over the narrow waterway, one of the most important shipping routes for global oil supplies, the statement said: “Foreigners who come from thousands of kilometers away, acting maliciously out of greed, have no place there, except at the bottom of its waters.”
It went on to say that Iran would implement “new legal frameworks and management of the Strait of Hormuz,” suggesting that the country had no plans to relinquish control over the shipping route. Such a system, it added, would benefit its neighbors and prove economically fruitful.
. . . The war has devastated Iran’seconomy, with the Iranian rial currency sinking to new lows against the dollar this week.
Well, we’re at an impasse, then. The Iranian economy will get worse and worse, and the question is whether the people of Iran will rise up (or the regime dissolve) before pressure from the U.S. people and Congress forces Trump to quit.
For almost five decades, Iran’s Islamic government has survived financial pressure from the U.S. by selling oil to China. It confronted American military might with guerrilla tactics. But with the U.S. Navy’s blockade, that strategy might have met its match, analysts said.
Tehran thought it was gaining the upper hand after the war started in February as it attacked ships navigating the Strait of Hormuz, shutting down commercial traffic and blocking a fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas supplies. Six weeks into the conflict, the U.S. responded by blockading shipments from all Iranian ports.
That shut down Iran’s network of shadow ships, which for years defied U.S. sanctions on Iran’s substantial oil exports by going dark at sea before clandestinely transferring their cargoes to China. The tankers have been unable to breach a cordon of U.S. warships that have chased them all the way to the Indian Ocean.
In Hormuz, “Iran was able to create a crisis of market confidence. But disruption is not control,” said David Des Roches, a former director responsible for Persian Gulf policy at the Defense Department. “With the U.S. blockade, it’s facing a reckoning.”
Alternative trade routes won’t be sufficient. Iran has been working to send some of its oil by rail to China and to import foodstuff by road from the Caucasus and Pakistan. Only 40% of Iran’s trade can be redirected away from blockaded ports, the Iranian Shipping Association said Thursday via the Fars news agency, which is affiliated with Iran’s security services.
The risk of a spiraling crisis has split Iran’s political system between moderates such as President Masoud Pezeshkian and hard-liners including Saeed Jalili, a former presidential candidate who leads Iran’s most conservative faction.
The moderates believe in holding fire and negotiating a favorable deal with President Trump, whom they view as eager to get out of the messy war as soon as possible. They worry Iranians are growing tired of the conflict after an initial nationalist uptick.
“The regime has to do something to break this deadlock,” Saeid Golkar, who studies Iran at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. “Moderates want a deal because they think more destruction is political suicide,” he said.
A growing camp of hard-liners believe Iran has to take the military initiative and start a shooting war again to send oil prices soaring higher and increase the pressure on Trump. They argue that the blockade goes beyond the sanctions Iran has faced down in the past and amounts to an act of war that must have a military response.
Even a rule by moderates won’t stopo the oppression that has killed tens of thousands of protesting Iranians. My preference is for the U.S. to continue the blockade. Here’s a map from the article of the U.S.’s blockade line:
Source: Source: Department of Defense (blockade line)
→ Park Slope Food Co-Op: A meeting at Brooklyn’s Park Slope Food Co-op—which I’m pretty sure is just a factory that produces news to be turned into items for this column (I’ve never been to Brooklyn)—was more aggressive than usual this week as the discussion naturally turned to Israeli products. “Jewish supremacism is a problem in this country,” said one attendee, kind of giving away the game there. The darkest part: Some 50 people applauded the comment. The topic: banning Israeli goods. The jeerers, presumably: well-heeled Park Slope parents. There are about 10 Israeli items sold in the shop, and it has led to years of battles.
Meanwhile, the hottest new fashion accessory in New York is a Hamas headband, as sported in Manhattan’s Flatiron District neighborhood, where protesters harassed diners at a kosher-style (not even fully kosher!) restaurant. They surrounded the tables and called the diners “pedophiles” and the “Epstein class,” which is, of course, reasonable criticism of Israeli policies.
→ I guess I need to learn about this new fetish now: An Oxford biochemistry professor is now teaching while wearing enormous Z-cup prosthetic breasts and low-cut shirts to class. If you’re reading this over breakfast, maybe don’t because I am obligated to inform you that his long wispy beard grazes the tits. I will not include a picture [JAC: the picture’s at the next link.] As Jo Bartosch at Spiked put it, it’s “a giant rubber rack.” We’re talking Bryon Noem–sized knockers here. She concludes: “Regrettably, it seems Matt Rattley will be at liberty to display his plastic tits until university officials find their ovaries.”
And now I’ve had to learn that this is a kink, yet another thing about men I would rather not know. Because it’s indeed the same thing as that Canadian high school shop teacher, Kayla Lemieux, who went viral for wearing, yes, Z-cup prosthetic breasts in class. Hopefully these are just strange, unique episodes. But it is funny, isn’t it, that both of these men are in charge of kids. Not ha ha funny. But you get it. When I revive a lesbian separatist commune in Michigan, I want you to know that this new kink (bearded men, Z-cup tits, teaching kids, plus we’re supposed to applaud them) tipped me over the edge. Me, Pat, Jill, and our holistic herb healer Ingrid are going to be over here keeping chickens. Zero cleavage.
→ More defense of microlooting: In the pro-microlooting podcast episode of The Opinions from TheNew York Times last week, there was a little part about how stealing from the Louvre is cool. Jia Tolentino and Hasan Piker agreed it’s one of the “cool crimes” that there should be more of. I need you to see now how the American progressive intelligentsia explains this as backlash inevitably arrived. This is a major writer in the movement and genuinely one of its smarter representatives:
Of course, the real threat to American museums is Climate Action protesters armed with cans of soup, but the idea that you can just replace a precious, one-of-a-kind object with another one from the basement is insane. I love it.
I think Malcolm and his ilk are smarter than they’re letting on. I think the real argument is: Yes, take apart the Louvre. Take apart Western culture, since it’s an evil thing. But maybe not. Maybe he really does think there are a dozen Mona Lisas in CubeSmart storage so who cares.
A video has gone viral of a pair of tourists who filmed themselves hurling antisemitic and anti-Israel abuse at an Israeli couple dining in Vietnam, calling them “rats” and using white supremacist memes, until the Israelis get up and leave while other diners do nothing.
It was unclear when the video was made before it was apparently uploaded to social media by the British pair.
In the video, one of the abusing tourists asked the Israeli man and woman if they were “from Palestine” upon noticing an Israel-shaped tattoo on the woman’s arm.
The Israeli woman smiled and said, “It’s difficult.” The British women continue in the same line of questioning, asking the Israelis if they speak Arabic.
When the Israeli man said they speak Hebrew, the British women explode.
“Oh, right, you’re Israeli… Fake state of Israel,” said one.
A video has gone viral of a pair of tourists who filmed themselves hurling antisemitic and anti-Israel abuse at an Israeli couple dining in Vietnam, calling them “rats” and using white supremacist memes, until the Israelis get up and leave while other diners do nothing.
It was unclear when the video was made before it was apparently uploaded to social media by the British pair.
In the video, one of the abusing tourists asked the Israeli man and woman if they were “from Palestine” upon noticing an Israel-shaped tattoo on the woman’s arm.
The Israeli woman smiled and said, “It’s difficult.” The British women continue in the same line of questioning, asking the Israelis if they speak Arabic.
When the Israeli man said they speak Hebrew, the British women explode.
“Oh, right, you’re Israeli… Fake state of Israel,” said one.
“Were you part of the IDF, IOF… Did you kill innocent civilians?” asked the other. The abbreviation for “Israeli Occupation Forces” is frequently used on pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel social media to refer to the Israeli military.
The Israeli man appeared about to respond, but his partner signaled to him not to take the bait, before she herself said: “Everyone is part of the army.”
“So then you’re a murderer,” said one of the British tourists. “You can refuse to be in the IDF.”
“I want to eat my lunch in quiet,” the Israeli woman said, and continued eating.
“Well, we want to save humanity,” answered the British tourist from her own table.
“Now they’re going to cry, I didn’t have my lunch in peace,” said the second UK tourist.
. . .“Look at them, the rats running away,” said one woman as the Israeli couple moves. “Go on, rats. Murderers, savages.”
Rats have long been deployed as an antisemitic trope to depict Jews.
Israelis abroad have faced mounting harassment, sometimes descending into physical violence, since the war in Gaza was sparked by the Hamas-led onslaught of October 7, 2023. A poll last year found that a majority of Israelis fear they will be unable to travel abroad due to mounting global criticism of Israel.
Here’s a tweet with the video. The degree of hate is horrific and persistent, too. We Jews can’t catch a break:
Watch British tourists harass an Israeli couple in Vietnam. They sing “Boom boom Tel Aviv” and call them “rats”. They even invoke the Nazi trope of Jews being kicked out of “110 countries”. These pro-Pals are indistinguishable from Nazis now. I’m ashamed of them. pic.twitter.com/kod7h0su9k
It would be lovely if someone could identify these moronic antisemites so they could face public opprobrium. It’s antisemitism, not anti-Netanyahuism or anti-Zionism—unless the chowderheaded critics think that a tattoo of Israel makes you a Zionist. (While we’re at it, let’s just eliminate the word “Zionist” and use “Jew”. Nearly all Jews are Zionists since they favor the right of Israel to exist as a sovereign Jewish state).
A Japanese sushi chain has bought the world’s most expensive tuna at auction.
Sushizanmai, part of Kiyomura Corporation owned by “Tuna King” Kiyoshi Kimura, bought a bluefin tuna for JP￥510,300,000 ($3,254,277) at the annual first fish auction of the year in Koto, Tokyo — officially breaking the Guinness World Record for the most expensive tuna fish to be sold at auction.
Following the Jan. 5 sale, Kiyomura was presented its official Guinness certificate during a ceremony at the chain’s main Tsukiji location on April 20, per Malay Mail.
“We will continue to offer high-quality tuna next year and beyond,” said Kimura, president of Kiyomura Corporation, during the ceremony.
The tuna, sold at Toyosu Market, weighed a whopping 243 kg (535 lbs 11.52 oz) and was caught in Oma in Japan’s northern prefecture of Aomori. The fish was then cut at the Tsukiji location of Sushizanmai and distributed across the company’s numerous shops across Japan.
“Although the tuna was crowned the most expensive tuna fish, the tuna sushi served post-auction was sold at the regular price range,” Guinness World Records noted in its announcement.
Kimura is no stranger to a massive fish sale. In 2020, he paid $1.8 million for another huge bluefin tuna — weighing a whopping 608 pounds — at the same annual first fish auction of the year at Toyosu Market. The fish was also caught in Aomori.
Following the remarkable sale, Kimura expressed his joy and excitement at securing the large fish for his corporation’s consumers.
“This is the best,” Kimura said, Agence France-Presse reported at the time. “Yes, this is expensive, isn’t it? I want our customers to eat very tasty ones this year, too.”
I would have liked to try some of that sushi! Here’s the hapless tuna with the Tuna King carving it up. はい!!!
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili’s still neurotic about the garden:
Hili: Dandelion!
Andrzej: We lost the fight against dandelions many years ago. Now we have decided to like them.
In Polish:
Hili: Mlecz!
Ja: Walkę z mleczami przegraliśmy wiele lat temu. Teraz postanowiliśmy je lubić.
From Masih. Iran killed this protestor on Thursday; I was hoping they would let him go. No chance.
They hanged him💔
The regim Executes 21-Year-Old karate athlete at dawn Thursday in Prison after Iran’s Supreme Court upheld a death sentence on charges of “enmity against God.”
His crime?
Joining nationwide protests in January 2026.
History of the USA:
– King of England imposes taxes
– America declares independence
– Things go well for nearly 250 years
– America elects a moron
– Moron imposes taxes
– King of England gets taxes removed pic.twitter.com/IU3HlAPFa3
From “Captain Ella” (now Colonel Ella), the Muslim, Arab-speaking spokesperson for the IDF. I love her. English translation:
Hezbollah threatened to occupy the Galilee, but it only occupied the homes of the Lebanese. Thousands of combat means were seized in Lebanon. What’s left? The weapons – we seized them The tunnels – we destroyed them The elements – we lined them up Their threats went down the drain.
حزب الله هدّد باحتلال الجليل، لكنه لم يحتل سوى بيوت اللبنانيين.
تم ضبط الالف من الوسائل القتالية في لبنان.
ما تبقّى؟
الأسلحة – ضبطناها
الأنفاق – دمرناها
العناصر – صفيناهم
ذهبت تهديداتهم أدراج الرياح. pic.twitter.com/T5PyiXuMTJ
— Lieutenant Colonel Ella Waweya | إيلا واوية (@CaptainElla1) May 1, 2026
Two from my feed. First, a cat gets a Hero D*g award:
I just found out that in 2015, the Los Angeles SPCA gave their annual National Hero Dog award to a tabby cat named Tara. Yes, you read that right, a cat was given a dog award.
It remains the first and only time a feline has ever won the title. A year earlier in Bakersfield, USA,… pic.twitter.com/wArmAQzenU
— Out of Context Human Race (@NoContextHumans) April 30, 2026
One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:
This Yugoslavian Jewish girl was gassed to death as soon as she got to Auschwitz. She was 3 years old. Had she lived, she’d be 85 today. https://t.co/jiK9Zfw2LN
And one from Herr Doktor Professor Cobb. He went home from Chile via Amsterdam, and here is the clock he photograph at Schiphol airport. Yes, the minute hand gets “repainted” every minute, and the hour hand every hour.
We have another “Friday Flashback from 9 years ago.” The concept of substitutionary atonement—something that Hitchens used to beef about—has always confused me, as it simply makes no sense. By killing his own son, who is really part of himself, God gave us all the possibility of going to Heaven. Whaaaat?
