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.
There’s a dearth of news, or should I say there’s a dearth of news that I want to write about: the interesting news is relevated to the morning Hili post. But since it’s June 1, which marks for me the Day to Begin Wearing Hawaiian shirts, I present my garb for today. I have about 50 Hawaiian shirts, acquired when I went through an aloha-shirt phase, but I wear them only in appropriat weather. This one is semi-authentic, as it’s not old but has coconut buttons and a pocket matched with the shirt’s pattern—two features of an authentic Hawaiian shirt. (The real old ones from decades ago are made of rayon, not cotton. I got it from a now-defunct outfit that had gorgeous Hawaiian shirts: “Paradise on a Hanger” (great name). Sadly, it is not longer in business, but i have enough shirts.
This one has a lovely green-and-orange fish pattern. I wish that mainland Americans would take up this habit, for you see them all over the islands of Hawaii, especially on “aloha Fridays.” It counts as “business casual” garb, too. You can hardly be unhappy when all around you are colorful shirts.
And Matthew sent this short YouTube video about a new puggle (the name for a baby platypus, Ornithorhynchus anatinus) from ZoosVictoria, which really does seem to be interested in conservation. Note that the incubation for the egg is just ten days, but it’s four months until it emerges from the den. It’s okay to hold females, but remember that males have poison spurs on their hind legs, which can inflict a painful and slow-healing wound.
From PCC(E): After watching the explosion of Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin rocket last week, a rocket that is designed to help create the first human colony on the Moon, I thought to myself, “What is all this mishigass? Why do we need a human colony on the Moon? What will it tell us that unmanned exploration using drones or robotic vehicles won’t?” I couldn’t think of any answers, but I beefed about this to my friend (and reader) Jim “Bat” Batterson, who used to work for NASA. I was surprised that he pretty much agreed with me, and wrote an email to that effect. I asked him if he could turn the email into a short post, and he gladly assented. So here’s Bat’s take on space missions (indented):
Before Trump’s election and, really, its Project 2025 budgetary guidance, NASA spent roughly equal amounts on “human spaceflight” (also called “human exploration”) and “science”. In the NASA budget, “science” is a category that includes basic/fundamental science —mostly via grants to universities and institutes in the sub-areas of planetary science, like heliophysics, astrophysics, and earth/atmospheric science. The areas within “science” are prioritized by “decadal” committees of experts who, every ten years, assess the possible knowledge that NASA could help create. These needs can be very expensive, requiring the engineering of entirely new spacecraft and instrumentation needing long timelines and large teams of unique technical expertise (think space telescopes, planetary landers, comet or asteroid fly-bys).
Human Exploration, on the other hand, deals with all endeavors in which humans go into space in rockets, capsules, and space stations. The Mars Rover, for example, counts as “Science” and not “Human Exploration” because humans aren’t involved.
Until this past year. Human Exploration and Science were each budgeted at about $8 billion yearly with an additional $3 billion in human spaceflight operations such as running the International Space Station.
Last year, the administration’s (i.e., the President’s) budget recommended cutting Science by about 50%(!), and raising Human Exploration by $1 billion. Congress rejected that and kept the budget as it was. The same attempt to cut the budget was made this year, and Congress again rejected it.
The lunar moon base or colony, as well as the Mars colonization form of mental masturbation, both fit under the exploration and human spaceflight operations budget. Space telescopes, robotic missions to the planets and asteroids, earth-observing satellites and the like are generally counted in the “Science” portion of NASA’s budget. Even if Congress again restores the full Science budget, the chaos and uncertainty brought on these multi-year efforts can easily erode NASA if talented engineers and scientists seek more stable work to support their families.
I fully agree that there is no “science” in human colonization of the Moon as opposed to using robotic rovers; and the addition of humans to the mix entails not only danger to human lives, but much extra expense. The significant science that comes out of human exploration of space is limited to understanding the complexities of humans living and working in space. The only justification I see for a lunar base is the same as that given for the “first man in space” competition with Russia in the 1960’s: the claim of “soft” military/international presence IF another country such as China plants their flag along with a human colony. Adjusted for inflation, the NASA budget of the early 1960’s was three times that of today’s budgets, reflecting the more serious devotion to putting humans on the Moon in the Sixties. You can see a good budget summary from planetary society at thislink.
By the way, using Department-of-Defense comparisons, I like to think in terms of how many aircraft0-carrier-equivalents aspects of the NASA budget represent. A new aircraft carrier these days costs around $13 billion +/- out the door. So the cost of the of NASA Human Exploration program is on the order of a new aircraft carrier each year.
So, dear readers, both Bat and I agree that we’re wasting a lot of dough (our dough) trying to put human colonies on the Moon and on Mars. It is a performative gesture with no real scientific benefits, and only tiny and unforseeable military benefits. That money could well be used to alleviate human problems right here on Earth.
If you have any questions about this, put them in the comments and Bat will be glad to answer them.
Today we have pictures from the shore of New Jersey taken by Jan Malik. Jan’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.
Here are a few pictures from my walks on Cape May and Sandy Hook, taken this April.
Starting from the Atlantic Ocean (eastern) shore on Cape May, I met this pair of American Oystercatchers (Haematopus palliatus). In Cape May, a section of the beach is fenced off to protect nesting sites for them and for Piping plovers. They are feisty birds and every spring there is a competition for nesting sites; the bird on the right is calling at another Oystercatcher:
The pair took off to drive out the intruder:
The place where I found that pair was littered with the remains of Sand fleas (possibly Emerita talpoida). These fossorial crustaceans normally stay buried in the sand, exiting only when the sand is awash with the shallow tide, but Oystercatchers’ bills are well adapted to dig them out. I think the birds ate only the soft and juicy parts of their telsons, leaving the crustaceans mortally wounded and unable to move:
These Sand fleas are small and difficult to catch alive. That’s what their front end and first pair of legs look like. These crabs dig backwards, starting from their telson, and the front pair of legs is used as a sand anchor:
Another arthropod – the Horseshoe crab (Limulus polyphemus), came ashore, atypically for it, on the Atlantic Ocean side of the peninsula. These are treacherous waters for these spiderlike creatures, for they are easily flipped over by ocean waves and become stranded. They are an interesting part of the Delaware Bay ecosystem and I may share more pictures of them later:
On the Delaware Bay shore of Cape May, there were already many Laughing gulls (Leucophaeus atricilla), which mostly move south in winter but return to their breeding grounds in the spring. They are quite similar to the Eurasian Black-headed gull:
Terns also made their appearance. I think this may be a Forster’s tern (Sterna forsteri) because of the lack of black tips on its primaries and its pure white underbelly, but they are difficult to tell apart from Common terns (Sterna hirundo):
The terns landed on old quay pilings and started courting. There’s no way to tell females from males other than by their courting behavior; males can be slightly larger, but the difference is less than 5%, which is hardly discernible to the human eye:
The courting consists of the two mates trying to look “smug”, with wings drooped, necks extended, and bills pointed toward the sky:
Then there’s the courtship dance and ritual feeding. Here is a fragment of it, taken from a large distance, so I’ve compensated for the lack of pixels by cobbling together this composite. The male presents a fry to the female and then, if she accepts (which is not a given), circles around the female while stomping his feet:
On my way home, I stopped at Sandy Hook, a sand spit where shore gun batteries protecting New York Harbor were once located. It is now a prime nesting site for Ospreys (Pandion haliaetus):
The former Army garrison required many houses for the officers, and these are now excellent nesting sites for Ospreys. Standing in the center of Officers Row (as the area is called), I counted four nests on top of chimneys:
The meadow below the houses was full of American robins (Turdus migratorius) fattening up for the nesting season by preying on earthworms. I know little about annelids, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say it is the common earthworm (Lumbricus terrestris), since it is a favorite prey for robins:
Finally, moving to the class Mammalia, here are Sandy Hook’s harbor seals (Phoca vitulina), congregating on rocks exposed by low tide (the tide was rising so, one by one, the seals were forced to slip back into the water). There are eight seals in this picture, but I counted 15 in total. Their population around the New York inlet has increased in recent years, which may soon put them on a collision course with the fishing industry:
It’s JUNE!!! Welcome to the first day of that month, Monday, June 1, 2026, and here’s a depiction of the month in the illuminated manuscript the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, with the caption “JunePalais de la Cité and the Sainte-Chapelle”. This scene must be right outside 15th-century Paris, as that’s where Cité and Sainte-Chapelle are (they still look the same). The barefooted peasants are cultivating the crops:
Limbourg brothers, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Here’s an up-to-date video showing what you should do if someone is choking. Watch it, as we should all know how to do this. Remember to first give those five sharp blows to the back.
There’s a Google Doodle below celebrating Pride Month. The caption: “In celebration of Pride Month, today’s Doodle celebrates the art of disco by shining a light on the LGBTQ+ artists who helped create space for everyone on the dance floor.” Click on the icon to see where it goes:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the June 1 Wikipedia page
President Donald Trump will headline an opening ceremony for the Great American State Fair on the National Mall next month after many of the musical performers slated for the event canceled, citing the event’s associations with him.
The Great American State Fair — organized by Freedom 250, a Trump-aligned entity he created by executive order to plan semiquincentennial events — this week announced a lineup of performers. More than half canceled shortly thereafter, including Martina McBride and Bret Michaels, claiming they had not known about the organizing group’s connections to the president.
After Trump said on his Truth Social platform Saturday that he understood “Artists are getting ‘the yips’” about performing and suggested headlining the event himself, Danielle Alvarez, an adviser to Freedom 250, confirmed to The Washington Post that Trump will now kick off an opening event for the fair.
“As the visionary behind the Great American State Fair, we are excited to announce that President Trump will personally kick off this historic celebration on Wednesday, June 24 in an opening ceremony celebrating America’s 250th birthday,” Alvarez said in a statement first shared with The Post. She called the multiday event “a World’s Fair celebrating the people, traditions, innovations, and spirit that make America the greatest nation on Earth.”
Trump earlier Saturday said that he was “ordering my Representatives to look at the feasibility of doing an AMERICA IS BACK Rally.”
Two of Trump’s advisers told The Post on Saturday, on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the plans publicly, that they were quickly working to make his suggestion of being the fair’s opening act a reality.
While the president’s post suggested he wanted his speech to take place on Wednesday, the Great American State Fair was originally set to begin June 25 and run through July 10.
And get a load of this fulminating narcissism, written by the President:
Prior to Freedom 250 confirming the newly planned speech, Trump in his Truth Social post wrote that he was “thinking about bringing the Number One Attraction anywhere in the World, the man who gets much larger audiences than Elvis in his prime, and he does so without a guitar, the man who loves our Country more than anyone else, and the man who some say is the Greatest President in History (THE GOAT!), DONALD J. TRUMP, to take the place of these highly paid, Third Rate ‘Artists,’ and give a major speech, rallying the Country forward like I have done ever since being President!”
What’s he going to do for his opening act: give another speech? Will the other acts go on? Of course given the politics of most popular musicians, I’m not sure that even if Trump hadn’t politicized the event, musicians would have declined simply because the government (aka Trump) is behind this celebration. It’s a shame, as there are many good things about America, and what do we get? A CAGE FIGHT, for crying out loud!
*The CBC reported that an autistic girl, 14 years of age, went missing in Toronto, and her family offered a $25,000 for her safe return and lots of posters were put up. Would you be able to guess what happened when it was known she was Jewish? The posters were torn down, of course.
Toronto police say they’ve received reports of multiple posters for a missing teen girl being torn down, while her family has announced a $25,000-reward for any information leading to her “safe return.”
The 14-year-old girl was last seen in the area of Bathurst Street and Hotspur Road, south of Highway 401, on Saturday at 12:01 a.m., police say.
On Sunday, Toronto Reddit users posted images of what appeared to be torn-down posters reporting the girl missing. The Jewish and wider community in Toronto are concerned about these actions and the motivations behind them.
Nadine Ramadan, spokesperson for Toronto police, said in an email that police “understand reports of these posters being torn down are upsetting for the community.”
“However, removing posters is not necessarily a criminal offence,” she said. “Our focus remains on the investigation.”
Maureen Leshem, a spokesperson for the family, said it was “disturbing and cruel” to see the posters being torn down.
“When a family is desperately trying to find their child, this kind of behaviour should concern every person in our city,” she said in an emailed statement.
“Right now, the only focus should be on finding [her]. Instead, volunteers who have spent days and nights searching, postering, and raising awareness are watching those efforts deliberately undermined.”
Leshem said a $25,000 reward is being offered for information leading to the girl’s safe return.
You have to have no moral compass to tear down posters advertising for the return of an autistic girl–simply because she’s Jewish. But this is what’s happening in Canada these days, and not just Canada. But, there’s good news about the missing girl:
UPDATE: Toronto police say the missing 14-year-old was found safe on May 28. You can find the latest here. CBC News is no longer naming the girl to protect her privacy now that she has been found.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani will not attend an annual parade honoring Israel on Sunday, breaking with a decades-long political custom because of his support of Palestinian rights.
Though it has gone by different names over the years, the Israel Day parade has always been a must-attend event for mayors, governors and other political leaders eager to win over the throngs of flag-waving revelers who congregate on Fifth Avenue to celebrate the birth of the Jewish state in 1948.
Not so for Mamdani. Two weeks ago the mayor’s office released a video commemorating the Nakba, an Arabic word for “catastrophe” that is used to describe the displacement of an estimated 700,000 Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war that followed Israel’s establishment.
“I said on the campaign trail that I wouldn’t be attending the parade, and I’ve made my views on the Israeli government abundantly clear,” Mamdani said at a news conference Thursday.
This is the first time in 60 years that the Mayor hasn’t marched in the Israel parade.
And, in fact, the Nakba really refers to the disaster that occurred to five Arab armies when they Israel the day it announced independence. Israel did not expel Arabs who weren’t fighting against them, but encouraged peaceful Arabs to stay. Many, many Arab residents of then fled Israel on their own— at the request of the Arab states attacking it, who said that they could return when Israel lost. It didn’t lose. Ergo, Nakba, an embarrassment for the Arab states. It’s absurd that the mayor’s office would release a video commemorating it: a blatant ideological statement that has nothing to do with the governance of New York City. A bit more:
The city’s police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, who is Jewish, told reporters she would attend.
“It is the mayor’s decision not to march, and it is my decision to march proudly,” she said as she stood alongside Mamdani at police headquarters.
The mayor’s absence, though long expected, has given fresh fuel to opponents who view his criticism of the Israeli government as antisemitic.
Rabbi Marc Schneier, founding senior rabbi of The Hampton Synagogue on Long Island and president of the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, which advocates for better relationships between Jews and Muslims, called Mamdani’s decision to not attend the parade “a slap in the face to all Jewish New Yorkers.”
AD
“Do us a favor, stay home,” he said. “We don’t need you. We don’t want you.”
Nope, but, as Sam Harris said, Mamdani is either an Islamist or a promoter of Islamism, which is a government run along Muslim Islamic lines. And it’s clear he’s an antisemite. Jews who voted for him are getting exactly what they deserve, even if it’s unexpected.
Six years ago, in the 2020 year of progressive pandemic madness, the University of California led the Ivory Tower movement to drop standardized tests as an admissions requirement in the name of equity. The experiment has been a failure, as more than 750 professors in STEM disciplines across the UC system now admit in a cri de coeur to reverse course.
“We now observe preparation gaps so severe that instructors must reteach middle-school mathematics while simultaneously teaching the material students need for sciences, engineering, economics, and other quantitatively demanding fields,” the professors write in an open letter to the Board of Regents signed by seven of nine chairs of UC math departments.
The Board of Regents in May 2020 moved to scrap the university’s SAT/ACT requirement on the spurious rationale that tests discriminate against minorities. Gov. Gavin Newsom, who appoints most regents, had claimed the tests exacerbate “the inequities for underrepresented students,” even though a faculty senate report found otherwise.
Test scores “add substantially to UC’s ability to predict student success” beyond high school grades, especially for minority groups, the faculty report said. It stressed that the university “does not appear to use standardized test scores in a way that amplifies racial disparities.” Without test scores, admissions would hinge on inflated grades, extracurricular activities and essays.
Note that the regents went against the faculty and against data suggesting that submitting tests in fact help get in qualified minorities.
Those warnings have borne out. The new faculty letter says that “for three consecutive years, 20-30% of UC Berkeley first-semester calculus students who participated in mathematical diagnostic testing displayed severe preparation deficits.” Drop standards, and learning mastery declines. Imagine that.
The letter stresses that current admissions standards cannot “reliably distinguish readiness for university-level STEM majors in an era of severe grade inflation and AI-assisted application essays.” Eliminating the test requirement has resulted in admitting students to STEM programs “without a reliable measure of whether they are prepared to succeed. This serves no one well.”
“Failing to measure preparation gaps does not remove barriers; it moves them into the classroom, where they become harder to overcome,” the professors write. “Obscuring preparation gaps harms both students individually and the University collectively. It offers the appearance of access while undermining the chance of success.”
AI won’t help you much (if at all) on SATs, and the Berkeley data shows that you can’t have equity and merit—not so long as you don’t accept standardized tests. Colleges are starting to use them again, though.
*I keep reading about “suicidal empathy,” in which empathic feelings lead one down paths of supporting odious causes (college students supporting Hamas is one example); and now Gad Saad has a new eponymous book on it. Sadly, Quillette gave it a damning review.
Homeowner Jane invites the homeless James to live with her. “I’d hate to be homeless,” she tells herself. James starts to exploit and abuse her. She accepts it. “I would not exploit and abuse someone unless something truly terrible had happened to me,” she thinks. This is what Gad Saad would call “suicidal empathy.” In his book of the same name, the Canadian commentator rails against “the orgiastic misfiring of one of our most noble virtues, empathy.”
There is merit to Saad’s critique. He is correct that empathy is problematic when people exaggerate the similarities between individuals. In all likelihood, James is not exploiting and abusing Jane because he has been maddened by trauma. He is, fundamentally, a less conscientious person.
Saad is clear—and rightly so—that he has no inherent objection to empathy. He objects to empathy, and all other emotions, when they are not regulated by rationality. The extent to which we empathise with other people must be framed by a rational understanding of those people and their circumstances.
. . .So far, so good. But Saad, a marketing professor at Concordia University in Montreal, is a terrible guide to his theme. If the concept of “suicidal empathy” can be compared to an interesting neighbourhood, Saad does the equivalent of leading the reader on an extensive tour of an entire metropolis—ranting and bragging as he does so.
Saad has form here. A man who has never missed an opportunity to congratulate himself, he soaked his previous book—The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense—in narcissism, with incessant references to his courage, dedication, and football skills in the introduction alone. Suicidal Empathy isn’t quite that bad but he still can’t seem to finish a page without referencing his books, podcasts, talks et cetera; recounting his Twitter feuds; and making irrelevant and pandering remarks about contemporary politics.
This makes Suicidal Empathy almost impossible to read. Saad rambles smugly between subjects and tends to conflate sarcasm with wit—and with thinking that what makes a joke really entertaining is to repeat it. This passage may give you a sense of the Saad experience:
Late into the pandemic, the Quebec government had instituted a nighttime curfew that forbade people to walk their dogs outside, which they eventually rescinded after a dogged backlash. I hope that Fido does not have diarrhea during the curfew. After all, to walk your dog at 10:00 p.m. in a deserted residential area during a Montreal winter is simply too dangerous. You might pass the COVID virus to the accumulated snow. Much of the snow had yet to be mandatorily vaccinated, so empathetically speaking it was important to be vigilant. Snow Lives Matter.
I fully agree that COVID restrictions had diminishing returns. But so do jokes.
. . . In addition to this unfocused and self-satisfied style, there are deeper analytical problems. Saad is capable of making effective arguments (for example, he makes a decent case against “single-issue optimization” in the context of the pandemic). But he often leaps between arguments before he has actually finished making them, sacrificing thoroughness and coherence.
. . . If the Left can suffer from suicidal empathy, which is true, then right-wingers can suffer from homicidal incuriosity. This is a kind of self-absorbed arrogance that makes people assume that they have total knowledge of the facts of complex circumstances, including other people’s motivations, abilities, opinions, etc., and the power to control and reshape them as they please.
It goes on, but I’m familiar with Saad’s style, which is truly self-absorbed and self-aggrandizing. On the other hand, the Amazon rating is below, and on that page are a lot of blurbs from well known people. And it’s #3 on the NYT list of print/e-book nonfiction works. So somebody likes it! If you’ve read it, weigh in.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili’s still distressed at the state of the world:
Hili: Oh God, you look like you’ve just finished going through the news.
Me: You guessed it.
In Polish:
Hili: O Boże, wyglądasz jakbyś właśnie skończył przegląd wiadomości.
Ja: Zgadłaś.
From Masih, who breaks down on the CBS news as she thinks about Iranian protestors who have been killed or imprisoned. I’ve never heard her lose it before, but she’s a tough woman and four assassination attempts are too many:
I broke down crying on live CBS television. I couldn’t hold it together anymore. Because it was the 4th time that I sat in a courtroom watching actual assassins, convicted murderers sent by the Islamic Republic to kill me, face charges on American soil.
From Luana, who doesn’t like Grokipedia. I haven’t tried it, but you can find it here, and the PNAS assessment here, which is not positive about the AI encyclopedia:
No, headline writers, no.
According to the study, Grokipedia doesn’t “lean right.” It’s just slightly less left-leaning than Wikipedia.
Let me give team Grokipedia some free advice… 👇 pic.twitter.com/jVRqdp5yfn
Posted by Emma; a commenter notes, in response to criticism, that there is no way to plot biological sex as a continuous distribution; these are traits connected with sex:
When people claim sex is bimodal, they never define the X-axis: what are they measuring exactly and how?
Luckily for them, we’ve taken it upon ourselves to do just that. And we’ve discovered that sex is… not actually bimodal at all.@FondOfBeetlespic.twitter.com/5aXvQeOuKJ
Two from Dr. Cobb. He calls this first one “poorly spuds”:
Have you, like me, spent the last 26 years worrying if the Canadian Potato Museum STILL has the display of various potato diseases with potatoes in little coffins? Stop worrying. I checked today. Still there.
About 60% of sharks are viviparous, meaning they use placental gestation like humans.Which means: SHARKS CAN HAVE BELLY BUTTONS.These small scars generally heal/disappear in a few months after live birth, making them a useful indicator of newborns in viviparous shark species.(📷:NOAA)
I have only three horrible words today, but I saw them all this week, and I want to get them off my chest before they tangle up my kishkes. Here they are, with examples. Two of them appear in just one article—at the New York Times.
1.) Tradwife: This word seems to have appeared recently, and is a shortening of “traditional wife”—that is, as AI sees it, “It refers to a woman who chooses to embrace traditional gender roles, centering her life around being a homemaker, raising children, and submitting to her husband’s role as the primary.” It’s an example of how the young people shorten phrases in order to look cool. I had to look it up the first time I saw it, but that’s the case for many odious neologisms.
2.) Cosplay. This has been around for a longish while, and yet I still don’t know whether to pronounce it with a short or a long “o”. And you’ll never hear me using it. But no matter, as it will never pass my lipes.
Again, here’s an AI definition:
Cosplay is a portmanteau of “costume” and “play.” It is a performance art and hobby where participants wear costumes and accessories to represent a specific character from a work of fiction, such as anime, comic books, video games, or movies.
In other words, it’s Halloween for adults.
Here are both of them used in a single piece from the NYT written by Lauren Jackson in her weekly column “Believing,” designed to tell the paper’s readers how wonderful religion is (Jackson claims to be a nonbeliever, but her lips are firmly affixecd to the posterior of faith).
The book “Yesteryear” has a fantastic, pithy pitch: A tradwife influencer named Natalie wakes up in the world she was cosplaying online, in the year 1855. It’s a thriller and a scathing critique of how women perform for the internet. It’s also a book all about religion, belief — and delusion.
It’s at the top of the Times best-seller list, and I bet it will hang out there for a while. Before it even came out, Anne Hathaway decided she’d adapt it into a movie.
I loved every page. So I called the author, Caro Claire Burke, to talk to her about it.
Both words in one sentence! Jackson thinks this kind of writing is au courant. Seriously, Jackson should jettison her breezy prose, which I guess is designed to lure sheep into the fold.
And my Worst Word of the Year:
3.) Bougie. I think this one is pronounced “boo-szhee”, and is a shortening of “bourgeois,” often used derisively to mock wealth and status. Here’s its usage in the Free Press by Suzy Weiss, the younger sister of Bari Weiss who was nepotistically given a slot as a writer for the FP. She hasn’t yet grown into her role:
Everyone who moves to the bougie Brooklyn neighborhood of Park Slope does so with big ideas about how their new life there will go. How they’re going to jog in Prospect Park; how their brownstone apartments will be an oasis in the concrete jungle, a place to read on-trend books and host delightful dinner parties for erudite neighbors.
Isn’t that so cool? She uses “bougie”. (I won’t go after “on-trend”, which is ridiculous; why not use “trendy”?) I can’t bear to go on. . .
Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) and his erstwhile friend Vincent van Gogh, are two of my favorite painters, though I like van Gogh’s work better. But nobody from the post-Impressionist era ever went off to Polynesia like Gauguin, bent on living and depicting what he conceived as the natural life, unspoiled by the trappings of the West. He produced some marvelous paintings (and sculptures, which he also was good at), though he was largely unappreciated and ignored during his life.
Gauguin is buried on Atuona in the Marquesas Islands, his grave sporting a bronze cast of one of his wood sculptures:
Gauguin’s grave. Attribution: makemake, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
I just finished a recent biography of Gauguin: Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin, written by Sue Prideaux and published by W. W. Norton in May of last year. You can see the Amazon version by clicking on the cover below, which shows a photo of the painter. It’s thorough and well documented but not academic: that is, the narrative is up to date, replenished by recently available sources, and it’s an engaging read. If you have any interest in art, I’d recommend it highly. Gauguin was an important figure in the history of art, sui generis in his work but influential in the work of painters like Matisse and Picasso.
One could characterize Gauguin’s life as that of the classic “tortured artist”—tortured not by mental illness (as was van Gogh) but by an endless search for a place to escape civilization, a tortuous marriage, an endless search for money to live on, and, in the latter part of his life, severe medical issues. (His heart was bad, he had chronic eye problems, and he suffered from open sores on his legs, the result of a stomping in France by clog-wearing bullies.) That, combined with his love of lots of red wine and an odious diet of tinned food, led to his death at only 54.
Yet he had moments of great joy and beauty, and this is expressed on his canvas. In that way he resembled van Gogh. His most pleasurable moments were at his easel, where he spent a lot of time, and his paintings from Brittany, but especially Tahiti and the Marquesas, are splendid. I show a few below.
Prideaux’s book recounts a tumultuous life, with four years of Gauguin’s infancy spent in Peru (he called himself “the Peruvian savage” for the rest of his life) and later a stultifying stint as a stockbroker in Paris. He was a self-taught painter who married a Danish woman. Circumstances forced her and their two children to move back to Denmark, where Gauguin joined them on occasion. Money was always an issue, and Gauguin, like van Gogh, simply couldn’t gin up much interest in his paintings. His need to sell his art to buy food, paints, and lodging persisted throughout his life.
In 1888, Vincent van Gogh, obsessed with the idea of starting a colony of artists, invited Gauguin to live with him at the famous “yellow house” in Arles, France. They didn’t get along well, and it was during this period that, after an argument with Gauguin, van Gogh cut off his own ear and deposited it at a brothel. After only nine weeks, Gauguin fled, but not before they had painted each other’s portraits. Here is van Gogh’s depiction of Gauguin:
Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin (Man in a Red Beret), 1888, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam:
via Wikimedia Commons
And Gauguin’s portrait of van Gogh as “The Painter of Sunflowers.” Gauguin really did love and admire van Gogh, but couldn’t tolerate his eccentricities and periods of lunacy; yet for the rest of his life he would sometimes paint a sunflower in honor of his friend, even in Polynesia, where Gauguin planted some (van Gogh committed suicide two years after Gauguin fled Arles).
Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
The rest is history—and in Prideaux’s book. Gauguin took off for Tahiti in 1891, returned to France for a few years, and set out for his second visit to Tahiti in 1895, where he took up residence with young Tahitian women (13 or 14 was the age of “marriage” for many of them) and produced many canvases. But dissatisfied with the fact that French colonialism was spoiling his “paradise,” Gauguin repaired to the Marquesas in 1901, where he spent the last three years of his life. After becoming integrated into local society, he eventually stopped partying and took seriously to painting. He was found dead in his bed on May 8, 1903.
Here are a few paintings I like from Gauguin’s stay in Polynesia. Click to enlarge them.
Below is his most famous painting. Gauguin captioned it Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, (1897, oil on canvas, 139 × 375 cm (55 × 148 in), Boston Museum of Fine Arts. It is his vision of the span of life, starting with an infant on the right and moving an old woman on the left. Prideaux explains all the imagery of this and other paintings, which are reproduced in color in her book.
Paul Gauguin, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Maternity, 1899:
Paul Gauguin, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Spirit of the Dead Watching 1892, Albright–Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY. This was apparently painted after Gauguin returned home at night, with his young mistress, left in the dark, scared to death. There is a lot going on here; note the iconography at the bottom and the weird figures at the upper right.
Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons
Among the Mangoes (La Cueillette des Fruits), 1887, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. Gauguin loved color and lots of it; he was always sending back to Europe for more and different paints.
Paul Gauguin, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Tehura (Teha’amana), 1891–3, polychromed pua wood, Musée d’Orsay, Paris
Public Domain, CCo, Wikimedia Commons
Here’s Gauguin about 1891. The book describes him as a handsome man, one who had no trouble attracting ladies either in Europe or Polynesia, where he lived with several women from the islands. But he was often laid low by his many maladies.
Louis-Maurice Boutet de Monvel, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
And here is his last self-portrait, painted only a year before he died. To me this image looks like the middle-aged Eric Clapton:
Paul Gauguin, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Below is the NYT review by Jennifer Szalai. Click the headline to read from the NYT site or find it archived here:
As you see, it’s laudatory. One excerpt from the review:
For much of his life, Paul Gauguin railed against the deadening effects of bourgeois domesticity. But as Sue Prideaux writes in “Wild Thing,” her terrific new biography of the artist, for about a decade early in his career the self-proclaimed “savage from Peru” enjoyed a stint as a happily married stockbroker in Paris. . .
. . . Given how eventful Gauguin’s life was, it’s remarkable how much Prideaux packs into this briskly readable volume, which clocks in at barely 400 pages. She elegantly recounts his artistic struggles and his persistent money worries. She offers lucid re-creations of key moments, like the time Vincent van Gogh, his friend and roommate in the south of France, ran at him with a razor. (The next morning, Gauguin learned that van Gogh had cut off his own ear and handed it to a brothel worker.)
But it’s Gauguin’s experiences in French Polynesia that have understandably become the most notorious. (The last major biography of Gauguin, published in 1995, called him a “syphilitic pedophile.”) By the time he died, at 54, on the tiny island of Hiva Oa in 1903, he had gotten two Indigenous girls — each about 14 years old — pregnant. Prideaux does not deny this fact, reminding us only that in France and the colonies, the age of consent at the time was 13.
“Wild Thing” is not a whitewash of Gauguin’s legacy; instead, Prideaux fills it in with more detail. As a Frenchman in a French colony, he excoriated himself for his moral hypocrisy and became a pamphleteer, taking a job writing for the opposition party’s newspaper. He also helped locals with their petitions against the colonial authorities. In a letter to the inspector of the colonies, he noted the “singular irony” of “the hypocritical proclamation of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” when it came to “men who are no more than tax fodder in the hands of a despotic gendarme.”
Toward the end of his life, Gauguin — who never fully healed from a nasty leg injury sustained in Brittany when he was almost kicked to death in a melee by a clog-wearing mob — hobbled around his island paradise, subsisting mainly on a calamitous diet of canned food. After his death, the administrator in charge of selling the contents of Gauguin’s home did not believe it would be possible to pay back creditors in full: “The liabilities will considerably exceed the assets, as the few pictures by the late painter, who belonged to the decadent school, have little prospect of finding purchasers.”
Again, I highly recommend Wild Thing. And tell us below what you’ve read and liked lately.
We have a short RWP today as there are more posts to come. First we hear from Robert Lang, who sees a surprising amount of wildlife near his home in the eastern LA “suburb” of Altadena. Robert’s intro is indented, and you can enlarge the photo by clicking on it.
Although every day sees another few housing starts in post-fire Altadena, it’s still mostly empty of people, but after a year that included plenty of rain, the vacant lots are lush with plants—a mix of native coastal sage scrub, invasive weeds, and landscaping gone wild. This temporary rewilding provides plenty of cover for the local wildlife to come down out of the hills and hang out. Yesterday the workers at our site reported that a bear had stopped by and done a walk-through of the framed house (fortunately, just lookie-looing, no damage). Today I did a short hike on the Gabrielino Trail above my old stomping ground of JPL and saw a different (younger) California black bear (Ursus americanus californiensis) just off the trail, and I shot the photo below. . .
. . . also this video.
This isn’t the bear species on the California state flag, which is the California grizzly bear (Ursus arctos californicus); that was native to this area but was hunted to extinction in the early 20th century. In the 1930s, 28 “problem bears”, California black bears, were taken from Yosemite and released in the San Gabriel and San Bernardino Mountains of Southern California. The black bear species is highly variable in coloration, ranging from black through brown, blond, and even white (the so-called “spirit bears” of British Columbia). Most of the bears we see in Altadena are brown, like this youngster, all descended from the original Problematic Twenty-Eight.
JAC: Here’s the California state flag sporting a grizzly:
Original: Donald Graeme Kelley. Vectorization: Devin Cook, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
