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.
I believe I’ve mentioned before that we’ve lost two broods of ducklings in Botany Pond this year: Vashti’s brood of 7 and then an unnamed duck’s brood of 12. I was in Savannah, Georgia when Vashti’s brood came down on Sunday, April 19, and several people fed her and her brood, though of course the brood doesn’t each much at first because they’re still going on residual egg yolk. There was a storm, and then, on Tuesday, April 21, the brood vanished some time in the afternoon. We don’t know what happened, but I have a good idea based on watching the brood of the second duck (see below).
Here’s the only picture I have on hand of Vashti’s first brood, taken by a member of Team Duck with an iPhone. There were seven; I think one is out of range or behind her.
Nobody saw what happened but she was gone. On May 1, a hen returned to the pond, and she clearly knew me, coming for food on my whistle and consorting with Armon, her spouse, who had patiently abided in the pond the whole time. Bill photos (not shown) matched her with 100% accuracy to the Vashti who left. She’s shown below. As for what happened to the ducklings, well, it’s best not to think of it.
Below: Vashti returned! After about two weeks she re-nested, using exactly the same first-floor nest she had last time. But more on that in a later post.
That was it for a while, and then, on the afternoon of May 22, someone reported a lone duckling on the other side of the building from the pond side where Vashti had nested. I rescued it at great effort with the help of another Team Duck member; the rescue was hard as it ran into a tangle of vines and leaves at the bottom of an adjacent building, but we got it and I took it to the Chicago Bird Collision monitors for rescue, where it would be taken to rehab. It was clearly a newly-hatched duckling, as it still had its “egg tooth.”
Suspecting that it might have fallen out of a nest somewhere on that side of the building, I went back early next morning, and, sure enouogh, I found yet another newly-hatched duckling on the ground near the same spot. I took it upstairs and put it in a box with soft teeshirts near a space heater (they need to be kept warm). I was fairly sure by then that there was a nest up above on the non-pond side of the building, and, sure enough, when I went back, there was a mother duck with about five babies in tow, trying to get to the pond. The problem was that she was trying to go on the north side, which required going up stairs, across a breezeway, and then going down. The ducklings couldn’t jump that high, so I had to shoo the brood around the south side of the building, through the vegetation and a fence, and into the pond.
But wait! There’s more! After the unnamed hen (I’ll call her “UH”) was in the pond, I went back to the spot where I saw her, and, sure enough, there were six more babies milling about, peeping piteously, and looking for mom. Several got stuck in a window well. I got them all, put them in a fly net, and walked them back to the pond. Picking up two at a time, I put them on a rock in the pond. The mother heard their peeping and swam to them immediately. I did this three times until there were eleven ducklings with UH. Then I went back upstairs, got the early-morning straggler, and put it on the rock. Sure enough, UH came back and retrieved that one, too. Now, with mom and all twelve babies together in the pond, I was happy—and quite proud of myself of retrieving them in the morning all by myself (this was at about 6:30-7:30 a.m.).
Here they are (or rather, were). The mother started, as always, giving them the obligatory tour of the pond.
After the circumnavigation I was glad that Mom took them out of the water to dry off, sitting on a rock and then squatting on the ducklings to dry them off and oil them:
I sat on the benches nearby, for several drakes in the pond (I don’t think Armon was one of them) began harassing the brood; they wanted to mate with the mother. She would fly away and then return to the brood—over and over again. Sadly, the harassment continued, and I was there until about 11 a.m. when the mother, followed by her entire brood, walked south through the fence into dense vegetation.
That was the last time I saw them; I didn’t want to go tramping through the bushes and weeds lest I squash somebody or scare them. I was sure they’d return, but they didn’t. (Mom later came back, like Vashti did, and she’s still here, but so far didn’t renest.) Every day for four or five days I would scour the area around the pond, including adjacent buildings near the quad, looking for the brood, but they were gone. Like Vashti’s first brood, it is certain that all the ducklings perished. I was—and still am—heartbroken.
In the next post, which I’ll write in a day or two, I’ll relate how Vashti produced seven eggs, and how with the help of Facilities we devised a scheme to capture the whole family before they could get to the pond and be harassed out of existence. But more on that later. How about some brighter topics now?
Turtles are also a perennial favorite, and we have five red-eared sliders (or rather, four red-eared sliders and one yellow-bellied slider; all are members of two subspecies of the same species, the pond sliderTrachemys scripta.) Here are some photos:
Here are all five sunning on a rock; only rarely do we see them all together like this. You can see that one has more melanin than the others; Greg Mayer, who has visited, calls it “Mel”:
More usually we see two, three, or four. Everybody who walks by them stops to look, and many people whip out their phones to take photos:
They are cold-blooded (“poikilothermic”), and so to warm up enough to swim and metabolize, they love to lie in the sun, stretching out their limbs and necks to expose as much of the blood-containing tissue as possible. We call this “turtle yoga”, and I always explain to people by the pond what is going on, as they don’t understand the stretching:
More turtle yoga. Look at those stretches!
Head shots:
But I don’t tend the turtles, save for tossing them an occasional pellet of duck food. I just make sure that nobody bothers them (and believe me, people try). With no ducks to play with, I engage with the three resident squirrels by the Pond, two of which are fairly tame and the other one skittish. The tame one will crawl up my pants to get a nut; I give them entire walnuts in the shell, and roasted unsalted peanuts in the shell (I have to worry about their blood pressure!). Here’s one who climbed on me while I was watching the ducks with binoculars (it’s early in the morning and I’m dishevelled):
The tamest one (I have not given them names):
Look at that adorable face:
That one has, besides being tame enough to know me and crawl up my body, finally allowed me to pet her, which is not something you want to do to a squirrel you don’t know. DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME! I had to get her (it’s a lactating female) to get used to being touched and now I can gently place my hand on her back while she positions a nut in her mouth:
Saturday, June 6 was graduation day at the University of Chicago. By that time Vashti had been back nesting for about three weeks (I calculated that she began sitting on a new batch of eggs on May 15, but I was off a bit, as you’ll see in the subsequent post.
Entering the Quad from the street:
Marching to the Quad. I didn’t go to graduation, but I didn’t hear of any disruptions this year. Congrats to the grads; it’s a hard slog here!
Mark Sturtevant has been kind enough to send the last batch of photos I have, some lovely ones of arthropods. Mark’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.
The various arthropods shown here were all photographed from my area in eastern Michigan. Most were taken outdoors where I found them, but a few were staged shots. Let’s begin with spiders.
First up is a species of Hammock Spider, Pityohyphantes sp. These make a small but densely tangled web across leaves and branches in the woods.
Next is an Orchard Orbweaver spider (Leucauge venusta). This is as I found her along a forest trail, but usually they are in their web at an angle where it’s awkward to photograph them. I don’t know what the growths are on the leaf:
The next two pictures are staged focus stacks from the ‘ol dining room table. First is a male Long-jawed Orbweaver (Tetragnatha sp), followed by a slightly older picture of a female for comparison. I favor staged settings for these spiders since they are extremely flighty, and I just don’t have the inclination to lay down in the tick-infested grass near water where they are abundant. What I always say about these very elongate spiders is that their startling appearance is simply because they use their long chelicerae and fangs as delicate chopsticks for handling prey, and they are as harmless to you as a piece of Dandelion fluff. The extra gnarly chelicerae on the male are further modified for mating. During that dangerous time, the pair will grapple face to face with their fangs, and the male uses those upward spurs to hold open the fangs of the female. His very long pedipalps are meanwhile needed to transfer sperm to her genital openings which are waaaay back on her abdomen. This can be seen in the linked picture:
Moving on to insects, next up is an Ichneumon wasp. With the help of iNaturalist, I am inclined to identify this parasitic wasp as Coelichneumon navus:
The common woodland fly in the next picture is possibly a wasp mimic, but it is certainly a predator. It is a species of Robber Fly belonging to the “Laphria canis complex” of very similar species:
The moth shown in the next picture is in the Tiger Moth family (Arctiidae). This is the Isabella Tiger MothPyrrharctia isabella, but possibly everyone knows the caterpillar, which is the famous Wooly Bear. The moth came to the porch light one night:
I can’t identify everything, even with the considerable help of AI. All I got for the caterpillar in this picture is that it is some species of “inchworm”, family Geometridae, but I already knew that. The dark puncture mark on the body may mean that it has been parasitized, and if so then it is doomed:
The next picture is a first for me. This is a Pennsylvania Ambush Bugnymph (Phymata pennsylvanica). I have seen high hundreds of adults, which are sit-and-wait predators on flowers and decorated to resemble flower parts. But like my failure to ever see a live Cornish hen (has anyone?), I have never seen a juvenile Ambush bug! I believe that the youngsters stay down low in the foliage:
The insects in the next two pictures are commonly called Red-banded Leafhoppers (Graphocephala coccinea). This species is polymorphic in that some are green and red, and others are a lovely blue and red, as shown with the mating pair. That picture is about 10 years old, but I’ve brought it back for comparison. The picture was taken with my olde camera that had a simple 50mm lens converted to a macro lens with extension tubes. If anyone wants to try out macrophotography, you really don’t need a true macro lens. At least not right away:
The final picture is a species of planthopper that I have not seen for a long time. I call this the “White Derbid”, after its color and its family name Derbidae. The species is Otiocerus coquebertii, and like the other odd -looking members of its family, it may be found by slowly walking along forest trails and peering under the leaves of tree:
German chocolate cake, originally German’s chocolate cake, is a layered chocolate cake filled and topped with a coconut-pecan frosting. Originating in the United States, it was named after English-American chocolate maker Samuel German, who developed a formulation of dark baking chocolate that came to be used in the cake recipe. Sweet baking chocolate is traditionally used for the flavor of the cake, but few recipes call for it today. The filling or topping is a custard made with egg yolks and evaporated milk; once the custard is cooked, coconut and pecans are stirred in.
The earliest known published recipe for this cake appeared in 1956, in the Dallas newspaper The Irving News Record, where it was listed as “Summer German Chocolate Cake”. It was submitted by Daisy Pearce, who obtained the recipe from her daughter, Francis Beth (Montgomery) Tomlinson. It used the “German’s Sweet Chocolate” baking chocolate introduced over a century earlier in 1853 by American baker Samuel German for the Baker’s Chocolate Company of Boston, Massachusetts
Wouldn’t it be lovely to have a slice for breakfast with coffee? Here’s a photo from Wikipedia:
Tracy Hunter from Kabul, AfghanistanTracy Hunter from Kabul, Afghanistan, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
For King Kamehameha Day; notice the Hawaiian theme, with the official Hawaiian flag in the middle:
We had a terrible storm last night, with, they say, winds up to 80 mph. But it was over soon, and I encountered only one fallen tree on the way to work. Here’s another:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the June 11 Wikipedia page.
The U.S. began a fresh wave of attacks on Iran on Wednesday, launching strikes against several targets on President Trump’s orders, the American military said.
The attack came hours after Trump said Iran was “playing us for suckers” because it hadn’t accepted U.S. terms for a nuclear deal. The Pentagon cast the attacks as an act of coercive diplomacy designed to force Iranian concessions at the negotiating table.
“If we need to negotiate with bombs, we’ll negotiate with bombs. And we’re very good at it. Nobody better in the world,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Wednesday afternoon as he visited the Tampa, Fla., headquarters of U.S. Central Command, which oversees military operations in the Middle East.
Iran responded, launching strikes against Kuwait, Bahrain and Jordan.
U.S. military forces launched attacks on dozens of targets, including air defenses and radar sites near the Strait of Hormuz, said a senior U.S. official. No infrastructure sites were hit, U.S. officials said.
The U.S. military announced the strikes were over around 9 p.m. Eastern time, several hours after they began.
*But Trump is making confusing statements about the U.S. and the war with Iran again. I’ll be brief:
Just a day ago, President Trump said that a peace deal with Iran was imminent. Hours later, the United States and Iran launched new attacks on each other. On Wednesday, Mr. Trump said Iran was taking “too long to negotiate” peace, and later said, “We’re going to hit them hard again today.”
As Mr. Trump alternates between promising peace and threatening to return to full-scale war, neither is happening. Instead, the situation is as bewildering as ever, the two sides seeming to agree on nothing, prolonging the turmoil in the Middle East and leaving it unclear how or when the war will end.
Since a cease-fire was declared two months ago, fire has slowed but not ceased. U.S. and Iranian forces have traded occasional attacks and issued almost daily contradictory claims about blame, the fighting and peace talks.
Mr. Trump had made things no clearer, often contradicting himself about whether a peace deal is at hand, whether large-scale fighting will resume, whether the Iranians are eager to settle, and whether the Strait of Hormuz has been reopened, among other things.
*Amit Segal, in a piece at It’s Noon in Israel called “Capitulation for thee but not for me,” explains why Iran shot down the U.S. helicopter, and gives other details of the latest U.S. attack on Iran.
Donald Trump gave Iran an inch, and they took a mile.
Mere hours after a ceasefire halted the exchange of fire between Iran and Israel, a U.S. helicopter patrolling the coast of Oman was shot down by Iranian forces. Once the intelligence confirmed Iranian guilt, Trump abruptly shifted gears, declaring a U.S. retaliation an absolute “necessity.” It was quite the sudden epiphany. After spending Monday morning demanding Israel turn the other cheek, it took just twelve hours for him to discover that sovereign nations don’t survive by capitulation.
The U.S. carried out a series of strikes on air defense systems, ground control stations, and radar sites near the Strait of Hormuz. In response, the IRGC claimed to have launched strikes on 21 targets at U.S. bases in the region, including sites in Bahrain and Jordan, while Kuwait’s army reported intercepting a separate attack.
But why did Iran target the helicopter in the first place? The answer lies in how Tehran operates on both a strategic and tactical level.
Strategically, the regime clearly has no issue with using military aggression despite the supposed “ceasefire.” Recent statements from senior officials and regime-affiliated media reveal that Tehran believes it is still actively at war. They view military action as a necessary lever to improve their negotiating position and advance broader objectives. Even the supposedly “moderate” Iranian Parliament Speaker, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, bluntly stated that military force and diplomacy are complementary tools—where violence creates favorable conditions on the ground so that diplomats can extract “legal, political and economic achievements” at the table.
Tactically, this strategy manifested directly in the Strait of Hormuz. The U.S. Navy relies on helicopters to intercept Iranian drones and fast-attack craft, opening the possibility of free passage through the vital waterway. By downing a U.S. gunship, Tehran is attempting to deter the U.S. from protecting commercial vessels and forcing the international community to comply with Iran’s maritime protection racket.
The retaliatory American strikes sparked a fierce internal debate in the regime. Behind closed doors, Iranian leadership seriously considered taking out their anger over the U.S. bombardment by launching a strike against Israel.
The IRGC pushed hard for retaliation, but the political echelon balked. The politicians understood that redirecting their fire at Israel could invite an immediate Israeli counterstrike—one they feared wouldn’t stop at air defenses and petrochemical facilities but place their core energy infrastructure in its sights. For the time being, the political echelon’s caution has prevailed, validating the age-old rule of deterrence that Trump only relearned on Monday night: tit for tat.
Iran really has discovered the value of the Strait of Hormuz, and now they’re playing that card as often as they can. Surely Trump will insist as part of any cease-fire deal that free passage be allowed for everyone. It would, it seems, require the U.S. to make a lot of concessions to Iran before that country opens up the Strait again. And remember, nobody has attacked Iran’s oil transport facilities on Kharg Island yet. The U.S. could threaten to do that, for though Kharg flows 90% of Iran’s oil.
*Over at the Free Press, the sensible Haviv Rettig Gur asks “When will the war with Iran end?” (subtitle: “The Iranian regime’s ideology compels it to keep fighting. No deal, no ceasefire, and no American administration changes that.”)
Negotiations between Washington and Tehran are under severe strain, and everyone wants to know: What does Trump actually want?
The honest answer is that it’s hard to tell—and that’s probably by design. Trump has repeatedly feinted toward peace before launching air strikes, and been loudest about escalation precisely when he was about to pull back. For a leader facing an adversary across a negotiating table, unpredictability is a genuine strategic asset. You don’t want your enemy to know where your lines are, when you’ll fold, or how far you’ll go. In that sense, the ambiguity is the point.
But there are signals worth reading. Vice President J.D. Vance and others around Trump are uncomfortable with the conflict—looking for ways to create distance from it, and in some cases, to assign blame for it to Israel. A New York Times story about alleged Israeli espionage on America, sourced to unnamed Pentagon officials, fits that pattern. A meaningful faction in Washington regards the war as a political liability and wants to find an exit.
. . .Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for his part, is heading into a close election. A very public rupture with Trump—the kind that costs Netanyahu domestically—is the last thing he needs. But it’s not hard to imagine Trump wanting exactly that—a manufactured rupture to placate part of his base. The Lebanon ceasefire Trump imposed on Israel, after all, actually ceases fire only in Beirut, not in the Hezbollah strongholds of the south. Trump gets the distance he needs, and Netanyahu gets cover for the continued dismantling of Hezbollah infrastructures and capabilities. It’s the kind of transaction that wily politicians make, and these two are nothing if not that.
But now that Trump appears to have bluntly ordered Israel to stand down from a major military response to Iran’s latest missile attack, we must ask: How serious is the rupture? Will it be short and limited, or are we on the cusp of a fundamental strategic divergence?
The truth is nobody outside Trump’s inner circle knows whether he is genuinely pivoting away from Israel or just needs to appear that way.
This is a good article, and there’s a lot more to read if you can access it, but here’s Haviv’s conclusion: it’s gonna be a long, tough fight, but he thinks that in the end Iran will be the loser, perhaps with the government even overthrown by the people.
. . . . None of this resolves quickly. If the analogy to the Nasser years holds, we are somewhere in the middle of a confrontation that has already lasted 20 years and may last 20 more. The blows to Iran are accumulating—its nuclear program set back significantly, proxy infrastructure degraded, and direct military capabilities exposed—but the regime’s ideological structure makes it incapable of drawing the conclusions from those blows that a secular or democratic state actor would draw.
What changes the equation, if anything does, is not a deal, not a ceasefire, not an American administration cycling through. It will be the regime’s internal exhaustion and the Iranian people’s eventual ability to force a reckoning with what has been done to their country. That’s a long game, measured in decades, not news cycles.
In the meantime, the battles will continue. Each one looks, from the outside, like a sudden crisis. Each one, from the inside—in Tehran, in Jerusalem, in Beirut—is just the next round of the same long war.
*The distasteful Graham “Totenkopf” Platner, a Democratic Senate candidate whose faults are being massively excused by Democrats (does he bring us “joy”?), won the Democratic primary for one seat in Maine.
Graham Platner, the progressive oyster farmer who toppled Maine’s political establishment even as a series of unsettling revelations about his past rattled his party, won the Democratic nomination for Senate on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press.
Mr. Platner’s victory, long expected after Gov. Janet Mills suspended her campaign in April, puts him in a general-election contest against Senator Susan Collins, a five-term Republican with a history of frustrating Democratic attempts to oust her.
In a victory speech that took aim at Ms. Collins, Mr. Platner declared that his political movement would “take back our power” in November and subsequently enact a raft of progressive legislation, including codifying abortion rights and passing a single-payer health care system known as Medicare for all.
Mr. Platner dismissed the news reports about his past as immaterial to the coming general election.
“In trying to so hard to understand me, they failed to understand that this is not about me at all,” he said. “This is a movement about us, about the far too many working far too hard and struggling far too much.”
The Collins-Platner contest is expected to be one of the most expensive, hardest-fought Senate races in the country, and the stakes could hardly be higher. Maine is the only state with a Republican-held Senate seat on the ballot this year where President Trump lost in 2024. Democrats must flip at least four Republican-held Senate seats in November to win a majority in the chamber.
As I said several times, I am glad I don’t have to vote on this one. And several readers have pointed out that while Collins talks a good game, in the end she usually votes with the other Republican Senators. Although I am not sure how much advantage flipping the Senate will give to Democrats (Trump can still veto anything), I suppose I’d hold my nose and vote for Platner were I a Mainer. But really, is this the best the Democrats can do? Just because someone has a blue-collar background will not guarantee that he’ll be a good Senator.
*There have been several responses to Sam Harris’s piece about why he won’t debate critics of Israel (see here); among them are the expected critical piece by the Jewish Israel hater Peter Beinart, who writes for the NYT, but puts on his Substack “A reply to Sam Harris“, and a reply to Beinart by the Elder of Ziyon, “Sam Harris asked a question. Peter Beinart spent 3,000 words to avoid answering it” (h/t Danny.) And finally there’s the “The moral clarity of Sam Harris” by Frederick Alexander at The Gadfly (h/t Loretta). I’ll give a couple paragraphs to each.
Beinart, whom I’ve always disliked. This is the transcript from a video:
The first thing he claims is that you should understand the conflict in Israel-Palestine as a struggle between a free society, Israel, and jihadism. So, let’s take the first part of that equation: the idea that Israel is a free society. Sam Harris offers no evidence for this. He doesn’t quote any human rights organizations, he doesn’t quote any laws, anything, he just asserts it, ex cathedra: Israel is a free society.
Okay, well, imagine you’re reading that, you’re sitting there in the West Bank. The West Bank has been under Israeli control since 1967. You’re a Palestinian. You’ve lived your entire life without citizenship in the state in which you live. A government that has life and death control over you does not give you the right to vote. You live under military law, with a 99% prosecution rate, even though your Jewish neighbors enjoy full due process as Israeli citizens. You need military permission to travel, even though they can travel freely, and you’re also subject to something called Military Order 101, which says that you need military permission if you want to congregate with 10 or more people for a political purpose, even in a private home. Even in a private home, you can’t congregate for a political purpose with 10 or more people without military permission. This is what Sam Harris says, without any evidence, he describes as a free society. I suspect for that West Bank Palestinian, it doesn’t feel all that free.
The second part is the idea that you can understand Palestinians and Palestinian politics in the Israel-Palestinian conflict through the prism of jihadism. This is what Sam Harris writes. ‘The problem in the Middle East’—actually not just Israel-Palestine, the entire Middle East—’is not, and never has been the existence of the state of Israel. The problem is jihadism, Islamism, Islamic extremism, Islamofascism, militant Islam, or whatever words you want to describe the belligerence and triumphal lunacy of those who take the most pernicious doctrines of Islam too seriously.’
So, for Sam Harris, Muslims and Palestinians are synonymous, and the problem is that too many of those Muslims are jihadis. There’s no evidence that Sam Harris has ever heard of a guy named George Habash, for instance. George Habash, the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, one of the most radical Palestinian organizations in the 1970s. It was responsible for some of the most spectacular and terrible acts of violence, of armed resistance, including against civilians.
. . . And this idea that Sam Harris has, that it was antisemitic to start calling for a ceasefire, and criticizing Israel’s attack, assault on Gaza on October 8th, October 9th, right, evidently forgets the fact that we had a pretty good idea, as early as October 8th and 9th, that Israel’s response in Gaza was going to be absolutely horrifying, right? I don’t know, again, if Sam Harris is familiar with this quote from Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, where he says, there will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly, right? This is one of the things cited by the International Criminal Court in indicting Yoav Galant.
Beinart uses one quote, made in a hot moment, to say that we knew how Israel would respond to Hamas’s attack. Of course Sam knows that quote, but it was useless for prediction. I blame the damage in Gaza to Hamas’s tactics.
The Elder of Ziyon (read for free):
Recently, Sam Harris wrote an essay, “Why I won’t Debate Critics of Israel,” which has been widely cited and quoted. It boils down to one question: What would each side do if it had the power to do whatever it wanted? If Hamas had that power, it would carry out a genuine genocide, a project it has announced repeatedly and acted on when it could. If Israel had it, the war would already be over. Harris said the histories are irreconcilable and that no amount of relitigating 1948 will change what the two populations want and are willing to die for today, so the only honest test is the one applied to the present.
Peter Beinart’s reply runs almost three thousand words and never answers the main question. That omission is the whole story.
Beinart is a careful writer who knows exactly what Harris asked, and he declines to engage it because the answer cuts against him: Palestinians want the Jewish state destroyed, full stop. This applies to Muslims and Christians, religious and secular. Every poll shows that Palestinians overwhelmingly support specific terror attacks against Jews. Beinart cannot answer Harris’ question because he knows Harris is right.
Instead, Beinart reopens every historical and legal sub-debate Harris specifically set aside, then frames Harris’s refusal to be dragged backward as intellectual cowardice. Harris declined to argue the past because the present is dispositive. Beinart spends three thousand words proving him right by refusing to discuss the present at all.
And from Alexander’s piece (with a bonus video):
Long before progressive ideology had trained polite society to treat moral clarity as indecent, Harris understood that liberalism cannot survive without the ability to criticise dogma. The left had been explaining away extremism since Salman Rushdie went into hiding for writing a novel, but 9/11 ushered in a remarkable new settlement on the part of the cultural and political establishment. Islam, we were told, was somehow deserving of special exemptions from scrutiny. We learned that criticism of Islam as a set of ideas was equivalent to hatred of Muslims.
To see that moral confusion play out, we can turn to a fascinating cultural artefact: the exchange between Ben Affleck and Harris on Real Time with Bill Maher.
Note that Nicholas Kristof makes a few points to add to the moral confusion. He will defend the ideas of Islam down to the wire:
Affleck, standing in for polite society everywhere, simply cannot compute the moral logic Harris is offering. All he’s got is indignation. All he hears is bigotry because he’s soaked up the relentless messaging that honest discussion of political Islam is somehow a form of racism, even though Islam is obviously not a race but a set of ideas. “It’s gross, it’s racist”, says Affleck, echoing a sentiment an entire class has marinated in for a quarter of a century. Affleck isn’t stupid, by the way, nor do I think he’s dishonest. He’s just confused somewhere between becoming Batman and performing the duties of a conscientious Hollywood liberal. Like so many well-intentioned and busy people, he’s absorbed something from the surrounding noise, the way some people pick up an accent. The real dishonesty belongs to the people who feed it to him – the ones who know it’s a category error and reach for it anyway, because admitting it would lose them the argument. Such has been the political culture of our time, with truth a secondary consideration to the demands of the tribe.
. . .Which brings me finally to Israel and why I’m writing this piece today. In a recent essay, Harris wrote about an issue that has convulsed the culture in a way that has brought together every terrible idea of the modern era: moral relativism, anti-Western masochism, Jew-hatred, TikTok geopolitics, luxury-belief activism, and endless victimism.
Against this noise, Harris presents a simple test. What would each side in the Israel-Palestine conflict do with absolute power? If Israel laid down its weapons, what would happen to the Jews? If Hamas and its supporters laid down their arms, what would happen to the Palestinians?
It’s a clarifying question, which is exactly why it attracts a particular kind of clever objection. [Alexander quotes Andrew Sullivan’s critique.]
. . .The fact is, we know exactly what Hamas and its enablers would do because they’ve been telling us since their founding charter of 1988. Israel, on the other hand, contains within it the possibility of coexistence because it has already subscribed to the liberal project. The population of Israel is roughly 18% Muslim (in Britain, it’s roughly 6.5%), and some of those occupy civic positions; some are even judges. It’s not perfect, but it’s held to a standard demanded of no other country, a point completely lost on the critics who hold it there.
The evils of October 7 were so painfully, desperately obvious to me that I just assumed all rational, decent people would readily accept what happened, would look at the footage Hamas gleefully produced for us, and show immediate and unwavering concern for the people of Israel. When those things didn’t happen, or came with terms and conditions, I couldn’t quite believe it. And yet of course this is exactly how it would turn out.
. . . In the end, this is why Sam Harris matters. He’s maddening at times and occasionally gets stuck on repeat. But he’s not a performer. He’s the antithesis of those commentators for whom the issues of our day are just raw material for the attention economy – the Tucker Carlsons and Hasan Pikers of the new media landscape – rather than questions of genuine moral seriousness. He never surrenders to his audience, and anyone who’s been listening to him these last two decades, as I have, knows he would adjust his position the moment the evidence pointed him in a different direction. He has that rarest of traits in public life, the one no price can be put on: a commitment to intellectual honesty.
Amen. You can be intellectually honest, or you can be an apologist for bad ideas held by Muslims, as are Kristof and Affleck in the classic exchange above.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili doesn’t want Szaron drinking from the upstairs dog’s bowl. When I asked Andrzej why, he responded, “I don’t know. Hili is drinking from this bowl. But she chased Szaron away fom it.” Cats!
Andrzej: What are you doing? Hili: Making sure Szaron isn’t drinking water from the dog’s bowl.
In Polish:
Ja: Co robisz?
Hili: Pilnuję, żeby Szaron nie pił wody z psiej miski
Twenty years ago, I went to dinner in a “smart” restaurant with a woman who wore faded jeans, trainers, a Fido Dido T-shirt covered in dog hair and diamond earrings.
I’m sure I posted this before but it’s so good I had to post it again:
This woman was recording a vocal performance when her cat interrupted, stepped in front of the camera, and started singing in the exact same tone like, ‘Don’t forget who’s the real star here.’ pic.twitter.com/GFoRavsOtD
The chameleon’s eyes provide 360-degree vision due to their unique anatomy and the ability to switch between monocular and binocular vision pic.twitter.com/tgdjhfZvEg
I came upon this list while lost in the depths of Wikipedia; it’s an entry for “Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time,” a list that has been revised several times. And of course I had to read the article (which gives only the top ten assessed at various times) and comment.
Here’s how it was made:
“The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time” is a recurring song ranking compiled by the American magazine Rolling Stone. It is based on weighted votes from selected musicians, critics, and industry figures. The first list was published in December 2004 in a special issue of the magazine, issue number 963, a year after the magazine published its list of “The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time“. In 2010, Rolling Stone published a revised edition, drawing on the original and a later survey of songs released up until the early 2000s.[2]
Another updated edition of the list was published in 2021, with more than half the entries not having appeared on either of the two previous editions; it was based on a new survey and did not factor in the surveys conducted for the previous lists. The 2021 list was based on a poll of more than 250 artists, musicians, producers, critics, journalists, and industry figures. They each sent in a ranked list of their top 50 songs, and Rolling Stone tabulated the results.[3] In 2024, a revised version of the list was published, with the addition of songs from the 2020s.
For some reason they’ve combined the 2004 with the 2010 revision, and also the 2021 and 2024 revisions. Here are the top ten songs from the two lists:
Well of course I have my opinion, which is subjective, but I’ll give it anyway.
On the first list, if you’re going to mention a Dylan song as #1, “Like a Rolling Stone” is a good choice. However, in my view the best rock song in history was “Layla”, minus the slow piano part. Right behind it is the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life.” Neither of these songs are on either list. I’m not a big Rolling Stones fan, but many are, so I won’t comment on “Satisfaction”. “Imagine” is a very good song, but there are many Beatles songs I like better. I’ve mentioned one but there’s “Yesterday,” “Blackbird,” the medley on the second side of “Abbey Road,” and so on. Of all of Marvin Gaye’s songs, I’d put “What’s Going On” on the list, as it is, but if you’re talking about soul songs, there are many better, especially “A Change is Gonna Come” by Sam Cooke, which I see as the greatest soul song of all time. But if you aren’t wedded to political songs, I think “Ooo Baby Baby” is better than “What’s Going On,” though it’s simpler. And then you get into the great soul songs like “Try a Little Tenderness” (which I prefer over “Dock of the Bay”), “Ask the Lonely”, “I Was Made to Love Her” (or, in the Wonder genre, “Isn’t She Lovely”), “Since I Lost My Baby,” and so on.
Aretha’s “Respect” is a great song, but is it the fifth best (popular) song ever recorded? You tell me. In fact, I prefer her version of the Carole King song “You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman” (mind you, I haven’t looked at the rest of the list; I’m judging only the top ten).
The Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations” is an excellent song, but the placement here is a clunker: clearly their best song is “God Only Knows”, and its omission is a scandal. It’s their best song and clearly better than “Good Vibrations.” Paul McCartney judged “God Only Knows” as one of the best songs of all time, and he didn’t mention “Good Vibrations”. Chuck Berry was a real innovator, and belongs on the list, but I like “Maybelline” better than “Johnny B. Good”. Again, remember that this is a matter of taste.
As for the Beatles, yes, “Hey Jude” is a great song, but I can think of many Beatles songs that should rank higher, and have named three above. Let me add “In My Life” to make it an even four.
I have listened to Nirvana’s “Smells like Teen Spirit” many times, trying to find out what so many people see in it. I see little of value, but many people like Nirvana’s style. At any rate, my list would not include that song at all. And for crying out loud, how could they pass up Ray Charles’s “Georgia On My Mind,” a sad and heartbreaking ballad, in favor of “What’d I Say”? Oy gewalt!
I have little to say about the second list save the necessary inclusion of “A Change is Gonna Come” by Sam Cooke (listen to it here.) I see it as not only the best soul song, but the best civil rights song with the possible exception of “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Public Enemy’s song, along with those of Outkast and Missy Elliott, are not worthy of mention in the top 200, much less the top ten. And I’d replace the Fleetwood Mac song with “Rhiannon” or (my favorite) “Landslide”. All in all, both lists seem to me deficient, though they have flashes of good taste.
It is, as Karen Blixen might have said “fit and decorous” that the Beatles have nearly twice as many songs as any other group or artist. And although “Are You Experienced” is a world-class album, the Beatles’ “Revolver” (to my mind their best album, has at least five songs that should be on the list. To each their own.
Finally, here are the songs on the 2004 list given by decade, proving that my teenage and college years encompassed the best rock and pop music (the numbers vary by list, but on all the lists the Sixties and Seventies lead the pack for having the best songs. I conclude that, yes, my adolescence and young manhood happened to occur when the best music was being made, so it’s not just that we all think the best music is the music made during our youth.
The latest Jesus and Mo strip, called “Ta da!”, came with this caption, “Ta da! It’s a new J&M on an old theme.”
Wikipedia in fact has a whole article on “Criminal charges against Joseph Smith”. Here’s a summary:
Joseph Smith, the founder of the Latter Day Saint movement, was the subject of approximately twenty-one documented criminal cases between 1826 and 1844 across New York, Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois.
In New York, Smith was repeatedly charged with being a “disorderly person”, a misdemeanor related to his activities as “seer”. These cases resulted in one disputed outcome followed by two acquittals.
Charges in Ohio included assault, battery, and conspiracy to murder. Smith was acquitted of the assault charge, while the conspiracy charge was dismissed in a preliminary hearing.
Following the 1838 Mormon War in Missouri, Smith was indicted for treason, a capital offense. He was incarcerated in Liberty Jail for several months before escaping custody during a transfer to a different county. Smith successfully used the writ of habeas corpus to quash multiple extradition attempts to Missouri from Illinois.
In 1844, he was charged with adultery for his practice of polygamy. After Smith ordered the destruction of a critical newspaper, he was charged with inciting a riot. Rather than submit to arrest, Smith declared martial law and mobilized the Nauvoo Legion. In response, the Governor mobilized the state militia. Smith surrendered to authorities, expecting to be released on bail. Instead, Smith was charged with treason against Illinois for calling out the Legion. Because treason was a capital crime, Smith was held without bail in Carthage Jail, where he was killed by a mob on June 27, 1844, leaving several indictments legally unresolved.
Oy! What a record, and not all the charges were connected with the religion he founded! Would you embrace a religion founded by this guy after peering at the so-called golden tablets using a “peepstone” in his hat? Well, there are nearly 18 million Mormons in the world, and I guess most of them believe this stuff.
At any rate, in this strip, Mo is hoist with his own petard:
I got two new batches of photos! So hooray for the readers! Today’s photos come from Ephraim Heller, whose captions and IDs are indented. You can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.
Little St. Simons Island is an 11,000-acre barrier island on the coast of Georgia. Much of it is salt marsh, with a few islands in freshwater ponds for wading bird rookeries. I was lucky to spend a week there in April, during the nesting season. This post focuses on the wading birds, and my next post will focus on other species.
I got up before sunrise every day to bicycle to the rookery:
Like flamingos, roseate spoonbills (Platalea ajaja) cannot synthesize pink pigments on their own. Instead, the carotenoid pigments accumulated from shrimp, crayfish, and other invertebrates eaten over a lifetime are deposited directly into growing feathers. Young birds have pale, nearly white plumage; the color deepens progressively with age, so a deep magenta spoonbill is also an older one.
The distinctive, flattened, spatulate bill is a swept laterally through shallow water with the mandibles slightly open, detecting prey by touch rather than sight, necessary in turbid water.
During courtship, male and female spoonbills initially interact with some aggression, then settle into ritualized exchanges: perching close together, presenting sticks to each other, and clasping bills.
Anhinga (Anhinga anhinga) lack waterproofed outer plumage that repels water. While enabling the birds to pursue fish underwater, they must subsequently dry their feathers before they can fly efficiently. Hence, the familiar spread-winged posture seen on sunny perches. Wing-spreading also serves thermoregulatory functions, helping the birds warm up after a cold swim.
Stick-carrying by the male is pair bonding behavior: the male begins nest construction before he has a mate, placing large sticks in tree forks, and continues to supply material while the female does most of the actual building.
During breeding, the bill of the tricolored heron (Egretta tricolor) shifts to a brilliant blue with a black tip, the loral skin becomes cobalt blue, and the iris turns scarlet red. The individuals I saw must not yet have been in their breeding plumage.
The prehistoric-looking wood stork (Mycteria americana) is the only stork species that breeds in North America. The species was listed as federally endangered in 1984 after its population dropped more than 75% from 1930s levels, primarily due to habitat alteration in the Florida Everglades. It was downlisted to threatened in 2014 following population expansion northward into Georgia and the Carolinas. Georgia is now a stronghold. In 2026, the federal government removed the species from the threatened list, reflecting a breeding population estimated at 10,000–14,000 nesting pairs across roughly 100 colonies.
Wood storks require falling water levels at foraging sites. As water recedes, prey concentrates in shrinking pools, providing the density of fish that a nesting pair needs to raise chicks. A pair with active nestlings requires approximately 400 pounds of fish over a breeding season.
The great egret’s (Ardea alba) breeding plumage almost drove the species to extinction. In spring, the loral skin shifts from yellow to a vivid lime green, and long, filamentous plumes (aigrettes, from the French for egret) grow from the shoulder region, trailing over the back. Each aigrette consists of approximately 35 strands of slim feathers. These plumes develop for the breeding season and are shed afterward.
In the late 19th century, the aigrettes for the millinery (hat-making) trade commanded prices per ounce that were twice that of gold, and hunters shot entire breeding colonies in a single event. The resulting public backlash was instrumental in forming the early conservation movement in the United States. In 1896, Harriet Hemenway and her cousin Minna Hall organized Boston society women into a boycott of feathered hats, which led directly to the founding of the Massachusetts Audubon Society and eventually the National Audubon Society. The Massachusetts Audubon Society, in turn, helped pass the 1897 Massachusetts law prohibiting the feather trade, the 1900 Lacey Act, and eventually the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act. The great egret is now the symbol of the National Audubon Society.
10-12. In the colony, the male selects a nest territory and then displays: calling, performing circular flights, and stretching the neck upward with the bill pointed skyward. Males bring sticks to females sitting on nests for pair-bond reinforcement.
The aigrettes of the snowy egret (Egretta thula) were even more valuable to plume hunters than those of the great egret, and by around 1900 scientists estimated that as few as 250 snowy egrets remained in North America. Numbers recovered rapidly once hunting stopped, but habitat loss remains an issue. In these photos you can see that the loral skin of some birds is yellow (non-breeding plumage) and in other birds it is pink (breeding plumage).
NOTE TO READERS: The next week will be a busy one for me: I have to prepare for a big podcast; we’re expecting Vashti’s second brood to hatch (we are going to try to rehab mother and ducklings since I don’t want to lose a third brood in the pond), and I have a big writing assignment to deal with. For the next week or so posting may be limited to Hili Dialogues, readers’ wildlife, and perhaps some persiflage. Bear with me; I do my best.
Welcome to a Hump Day (“হাম্প ডে (সপ্তাহের মাঝের দিন)” in Bengali): Wednesday, June 10, 2026 and National Black Cow Day, referring not to melanistic bovids but to the drink—usually a “root beer float“: root beer with ice cream. They’re very good, and a speciality of the A&W Root Beer chains. Some info from the first link:
Today we celebrate the black cow, which in many locations is simply another name for a root beer float—a drink consisting of root beer and vanilla ice cream. They are sometimes called chocolate cows or brown cows when chocolate ice cream is used in place of vanilla. In some locations, a black or brown cow is made with cola instead of root beer. In other locations, root beer and ice cream are mixed together, instead of the ice cream sitting on top.
Frank J. Wisner, owner Cripple Creek Brewing in Colorado, made the first black cow on August 19, 1893, after observing the snow caps of Cow Mountain the night before, and thinking they looked like ice cream scoops on top of soda. The first drinks were made by combining Myers Avenue Red root beer and vanilla ice cream. He soon began making the drink using cola, and it became known as the Black Cow Mountain drink. It is said that children shortened the name to the black cow.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the June 10 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
Breaking Nooz, ripped from the headlines: After an Iranian drone shot down a U.S. Army Apache helicopter (both pilots were saved from the water by a drone boat), the U.S. launched attacks on Iran. Iran retaliated with strikes on U.S. bases in Iran. Iran also fired at U.S. targets in Jordan, Bahrain, and Kuwait
The United States and Iran traded strikes across the Middle East early Wednesday after the U.S. accused Iran of downing an American helicopter, threatening a fragile two-month cease-fire and challenging President Trump’s repeated claims that the countries are close to a deal to end the war.
The U.S. military said its jets struck Iranian targets, including air defenses and radar sites, near the Persian Gulf. Iran said it had retaliated by launching drone attacks against U.S. naval targets in Bahrain, and firing missiles at American military facilities in Jordan. It was unclear whether the new clashes could be contained.
. . . The Jordanian military said it had intercepted five missiles launched from Iran toward a region that includes Jordan’s Muwaffaq Salti base, which has been used for U.S. air operations and was also targeted in the early days of the war. Bahrain’s military said it had taken out several Iranian drones and missiles. And the Kuwait Army said its air defenses intercepted hostile targets.
This war is not going to go gentle into that good cease-fire. . .
After trading volleys of long-range missile strikes that defied calls for restraint from President Donald Trump and threatened to tip the region back into all-out war, Israel and Iran signaled Monday that the attacks had concluded for now.
That lasted exactly one day. From the NYT:
The Israeli military struck areas across southern Lebanon on Tuesday, testing the shaky two-month cease-fire again, just a day after direct hostilities between Iran and Israel threatened to unravel the truce.
At least eight people were killed and dozens more wounded in an attack on Tyre, one of southern Lebanon’s largest cities, Lebanon’s health ministry said. The latest attacks underlined how Lebanon has emerged as a major wedge issue in efforts to negotiate an end to the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran.
Tehran has insisted that any peace agreement include security for Lebanon, while Israel has rejected any such link, insisting it will keep striking there to target the Iran-allied Hezbollah militia. After an Israeli strike near the Lebanese capital, Beirut, set off a brief round of clashes with Iran on Sunday and Monday, Tehran warned that it would attack Israel again if it resumed its “aggression and hostile acts,” including in southern Lebanon.
Hezbollah, for its part, has rejected any cease-fire with Israel, and has continued firing on Israel from its positions in southern Lebanon. Israel has occupied large parts of southern Lebanon, arguing that it is needed to defend itself against Hezbollah attacks, and the Israeli military issued new evacuation warnings in the region early Tuesday, warning of imminent strikes. Some of the attacks were in areas that were not covered by evacuation warnings, according to Lebanon’s state-run news agency.
President Trump said early Tuesday that both Iran and Israel had agreed to stop their attacks on each other, and that “a very, very good deal” between the United States and Iran could be finalized within days.
Yeah, well let’s see what Trump’s conception of “very, very good deal” is. Lebanon agreed to stop the attacks by Hezbollah, but of course Lebanon (and the UN) are powerless to do it, so who else but Israel. And any deal that leaves Hezbollah in place is a very bad deal indeed—just like Trump’s “peace plan” for Gaza that has so far left Hamas in power. The demand by Iran that Hezbollah stay in power shows, clearer than anything else, that it wants to continue fostering terrorism in the Middle East through its proxies.
For weeks, the parameters of a preliminary agreement to end the war between the United States and Iran have been clear to its negotiators. The hang-up? How to devise a deal so each side can claim a win.
Washington and Tehran — both neither fully victorious nor completely defeated in the war — badly want a deal. But they also need something they can present as favorable to the hawks and hard-liners back home.
Added to this fundamental dispute are the peculiarities of the two countries’ leaders. One of them is in hiding and slow to sign off on any proposal; the other is so unpredictable, his own envoys struggle to negotiate on his behalf.
Unsuccessful efforts at devising this alchemy of wording have mired the two sides in a state of neither war nor peace. They have left the global economy in limbo, too, as both sides continue their blockades of the vital Strait of Hormuz.
The longer this uncertainty persists, mediators warn, the higher the risk the whole peace process will be derailed. The tenuous nature of it all was reinforced on Monday when Israel and Iran exchanged strikes for the first time since the April cease-fire, bringing the Middle East back to the precipice of full-blown war before both sides backed down.
Any framework for a peace agreement is likely to require Iran to allow normal maritime traffic through the strait and the United States to halt its blockade of Iranian vessels. It is also likely to include a pledge to hold a second phase of negotiations culminating in Iran’s giving up its highly enriched uranium stockpile and Washington’s easing economic sanctions in return. And any deal is widely expected — perhaps most problematically for President Trump — to unlock some of Iran’s frozen assets.
The dilemma is how to sequence the terms, said Sanam Vakil, director of the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House.
“The U.S. wants to get everything and not give too much at the beginning,” she said. “And the Iranians want to get things at the beginning and give things along the way.”
But does anybody really know what they’re talking about vis-à-vis the war? Yes, of course each side wants to look like a winner, And that’s a problem—but not the way the Israel-hating NYT thinks. Returning to reality, one side should look like a winner, and it should be Israel and the U.S. When did the world come up with the notion that “winners’ and “losers” in wars are bad things? Do they not remember WWII?
*And Amit Segal weighs the same question at It’s Noon in Israel in a piece called “Israel vs Iran: Aftermath“, with the subtitle “Who won the latest exchange?”
Choosing sovereignty, Israel struck early yesterday, destroying air defense assets and a Mahshahr petrochemical plant producing missile materials. The strike proved to the free world that Tehran is not shielded from consequences, even in an era of Trump diplomacy. However, Iran refused to back down, firing another barrage of missiles by morning. Ultimately, Donald Trump’s 12:30 p.m. tweet demanding an immediate halt to the Israeli strikes ensured that Tehran landed the final blow.
According to Army Radio’s Doron Kadosh, the Israeli defense establishment had spent the night preparing a massive afternoon follow-up aimed at broader national infrastructure to cripple the regime economically. The plan was aborted on the tarmac by Trump’s declaration of peace. Whether this second wave was purely a contingency plan in case of an Iranian response or whether it was the second part of Israel’s initial strike remains unknown.
Militarily and strategically, this brief exchange was neither a resounding victory nor a crushing defeat for either side. For Israel, it was simply the baseline response. So, back to the initial question: who won?
We still don’t know.
The silence of the ceasefire has quickly been filled by opposing narratives, kicking off what is now a staple of Middle East ceasefires: firing and testing for responses. So far, Hezbollah has been quiet regarding declarations of resistance, but its patron sought to establish a clear red line. Iran warned that any further Israeli aggression—specifically “including in southern Lebanon”—would be met with “much more severe and crushing measures.”
Israel swiftly and explicitly rejected this attempt to link Lebanese territory to Iranian deterrence. Defense Minister Israel Katz declared that the IDF will continue its operations against Hezbollah, warning that any Iranian reprisal will be met with the same “great force” demonstrated yesterday. Meanwhile, Lebanon’s president issued a call for diplomatic engagement—a declaration whose impact is as significant as the rest of the Lebanese state’s actions in this conflict: non-existent.
I guess Israel has no choice but to do what Trump says. but that’s tying its hands. Lebanon is none of Trump’s business, but it’s been made his business by Iran. I would have preferred that Israel enact its “massive afternoon followup. . . to cripple the regime economically.” What does Trump have to lose by that? (A cease-fire with Iran, I suppose.) But once again Israel is not allowed to win a war; the only country, says Sam Harris, subject to such strictures.
Before Persepolis, Iran was a headline. The Revolution. The hostage crisis. The long war with Iraq. The nuclear standoff. The name Iran had fused, in the Western imagination, with images of burning flags and chanting crowds. It was a country of events, not of people. A problem to be managed, not a civilization to be understood.
The Islamic Republic worked to keep it that way, sending articulate diplomats to Western capitals, managing media access carefully, making sure that even serious newsrooms published a version of Iran that was, in effect, sanitized. Where was the story of the women who had never agreed to any of this? In the years before social media, those voices had almost no path to the outside world.
Long before morality police became a phrase that Western journalists knew, long before millions of people took to the streets under the banner of Women, Life, Freedom, one woman sat down with ink and paper and did something that had not been done before.
Through her book, which followed her coming of age story in Iran, exile in Europe, and yearslong struggle to say goodbye to a country slipping off a cliff into brutal oppression, people in the West learned that women in Iran were being stopped on the street, beaten, arrested, imprisoned for the way they wore (or didn’t) a piece of cloth on their head. They learned that the hijab in Iran was not a cultural expression, or faith freely worn. It was a law, enforced by men with authority and batons, by a government that had decided women’s bodies belonged to the state.
No wonder the novel was censored in Iran. But the regime couldn’t stop its truth from reaching the world: Marjane Satrapi was the first person to make compulsory hijab a global story.
. . .There is a video of her, in Persian, that I keep returning to. She recites the rules, the ones every Iranian girl absorbs before she absorbs anything else. “A good woman never does this. A real woman always behaves like that.” The list is long. And after reciting every rule, she declares that she intends to do exactly as she pleases. That if the price of freedom is being called impolite or difficult, then she will pay it, and gladly.
“I would rather be impolite,” she says, “than a woman who is not free.”
It is like a manifesto for women like me.
Based on this, I’ve just ordered the first two graphic books of Persepolis from U Chicago’s interlibrary loan. I’m looking forward to reading them, and yes, they were banned not just in Iran, but in many places in America.
More than 100,000 live cockroaches illegal to keep in Australia were confiscated from a single breeder in the country’s largest-ever seizure of exotic invertebrates, officials said Friday.
The haul of Madagascar hissing cockroaches and dubia cockroaches, worth 200,000 Australian dollars ($142,000), was seized in May from a commercial breeder in the city of Bathurst in New South Wales state, according to Australia’s Department of Climate Change, Energy, Environment and Water.
The Madagascar hissing species is one of the world’s biggest cockroaches, measuring 2 to 3 inches (5 to 8 centimeters) in length. Photos released by the department showed a shiny, brown invertebrate larger than a person’s finger.
It’s much bigger than the country’s common Australian cockroach, which measures between 0.9 and 1.4 inches (2.3 and 3.6 centimeters) long. Cockroaches flourish in Australia due to its sub-tropical climates and the country is home to hundreds of species.
AD
Bathurst snake catcher Stefanie Lesser told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. that the larger exotic species were likely being sold as as a cost-effective reptile food because their large size meant fewer insects were needed. Officials urged pet owners to seek out crickets or wood roaches to feed their lizards instead.
When I was at Harvard in graduate school, I kept about five or six tarantulas as pets, and every once in a while I’d walk over to the BioLabs, where they kept a giant breeding colony of hissing cockroaches,Gromphadorhina portentosa (don’t ask me why). The little ones were good food for tarantulas. And yes, the cockroaches hiss (through their spiracles); see the video below. It’s clearly an antipredator adaptation. Why is keeping them illegal in Australia? Guess! (Think about cane toads and rabbits.)
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the upstairs d*g is temporarily sequestered upstairs:
Szaron: Freedom has returned. Hili: That’s true, but it’s limited.
In Polish:
Szaron: Wróciła wolność.
Hili: To prawda, ale jest limitowana.
From Masih; Afghan women being shot at by the Taliban for wanting an education:
Today, women in Afghanistan are being shot in the streets simply for anting an education, wanting a job. Wanting to work and wanting to walk outside without a man’s permission.
Luana sent a video (yes, from Tommy Robinson) showing a man in trying to behead someone in the street in Belfast. Apparently he gouged the victim’s eyes out as well. I can’t embed the video but you can see it here (WARNING: blood!). Two locals beat the guy off. You can read the story at Reuters: the guy survived–plus the accused attacker, a Sudanese national, was apprehended.
The suspect, a 30-year-old Sudanese national, has been detained on suspicion of attempted murder.
Police said it was understood he lived locally, having been granted leave to remain in the UK in September 2023 after claiming asylum. He had travelled to Belfast in February that year by bus from Dublin, having flown there from Paris on an unknown date. Two posts from Emma on this:
Like, he sawed.
Not a gun. Not a chopping axe, flailing. No self defence.
Two from my feed. First a repentant gorilla (he’s much bigger than his wife!):
In Japan, a gorilla named Kiyomasa got into a fight with his mate. She kicked him out of their enclosure at the zoo, and he was later spotted sitting alone, seemingly rethinking his life choices pic.twitter.com/5FbIrCfEKF
— Community Notes & Violations (@CNviolations) June 9, 2026
One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:
This Hungarian Jewish girl was gassed to death as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. She was 13 years old, and had she lived, today would have been her birthday.
