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 noticed, while preparing tomorrow’s Hili Dialogue, that tomorrow is We Love Memoirs Day. Well, I’m not a fan of memoirs so much as of biographies, for memoirs can easily be distorted because the writer is the subject. That’s not so true of biographies, and it got me thinking about the biographies I’ve loved the most. I’ll mention just four (three of them comprise more than one volume), and I encourage you to note your own selections in the comments.
My criteria are simply that the subject of the biography be an interesting person—or, in the case of the first two, made interesting by the author’s research—and that the book be written very well, so the prose is a pleasure to read.
These are listed in no particular order.
1.)_ The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert Caro (1974). I read this behemoth (1,336 pages!) soon after it came out, and I couldn’t put it down. One wouldn’t think that Robert Moses, an urban planner who held a number of powerful positions in New York City, would be such an interesting subject for a biography, but Robert Moses made it so. As Wikipedia notes,
Moses’ construction projects transformed the New York area and revolutionized the way urban areas across the United States were designed and built. His philosophy of urban development influenced a generation of engineers, architects, and urban planners across the United States.
I won’t summarize what he did, as you can read the Wikipedia link to the book above or Moses’s short biography on the site. It’s a mesmerizing read, although some critics complain it has a number of errors (Moses, who was still alive when it came out, shares that opinion). You can look up these allegations after you read the book, but if you like biography you must read it. It won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1975.
Here’s the cover; click to get the Amazon link. At $16.47 for the huge paperback, it’s a great bargain:
2.) What Caro did for Robert Moses—making an unlikely subject seem fascinating—he also did for Lyndon Johnson, in a four-volume work that’s supposed to end at volume five. The Years of Lyndon Johnson (first volume from 1982), currently over 3,000 pages, and is another series of books that are hard to put down. The first volume covers Johnson’s youth through his first campaign for the Senate, the second up to his successful election to the Senate in 1947, the third his control of the Senate and passage of the Civil Rights act of 1957 (this volume won both the Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award), and the fourth up to Johnson’s attaining the Presidency after Kennedy’s assassination in 1963.
Unfortunately, the fifth and final volume, up to Johnson’s death, is still in the works, and, like the book below, it’s a race against time as Caro is now 90 and has been saying for several decades that the book is nearly finished. Caro notes that he’s written a lot of the book, and I hope he’ll finish, as the final volume will cover Johnson’s tenure during the Vietnam War and his resignation from the Presidency in 1969. This is a crucial volume in the set, and we all hope Caro finishes it.
Here’s the set on Amazon, with the boxed hardcover set going for $113 and the paperbacks from $11-14, those being great bargains as well.
3.)The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill by William Manchwster (I am speaking of the first two volumes). Manchester completed two volumes in 1983 and 1988, and I devoured them. He died of stomach cancer before the third volume could be completed, so his unfinished manuscript was co-published with Paul Reid as the final volume. I haven’t read it.
You’re drawn into the series by the first chapter of the first book, which simply recounts a day in Churchill’s life as PM at his home in Chartwell, Kent. What a life the man had! Soldier, journalist, prisoner of war and escapee, holder of many big government positions (including First Lord of the Admiralty, during which he was humiliated by the Dardanelles fiasco and had to resign), parliamentarian, Prime Minister (twice), and elder statesman. He could write very well, was a prolifie author, and his books The Second World War and A History of the English Speaking Peoples won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953. (I can’t think of another British PM who won a Nobel Prize for Literature.)
Unfortunately, the second volume of the biography, Alone, ends just when Churchill takes the reins as Prime Minister during WWII, and I was greatly looking forward to see the account of Churchill helming the UK during that war. But because Manchester died before that volume was published, I never read it, even though it came out with Reid’s help. Even so, you might read the first two volumes and see if you want to go on to the co-authored third.
Here’s the Amazon link to the trio: another bargain for the hardbacks at $79 (nearly 50% off), with the paperbacks around $15.
4.The two-volume biography of Charles Darwin by Janet Browne, comprising Charles Darwin: Voyaging (1995), and Charles Darwin: The Power of Place (2002). The first book covers Darwin’s life up to 1856, when he was starting On the Origin of Species, and the second his life at Down House, the publication of The Origin and his other books, ending, of course, with his death in 1882.
I may be biased in this selection because it is after all about Darwin, but it’s an extraordinarily well written duo, with a lot about the science. Janet has now condensed the two books into one, Darwin: A Biography, which just came out on June 30. I haven’t read it, so what I’m recommending is the two-volume set. Do read it. The cover below links to the Amazon site of the first volume
Now it’s your turn, and I look forward to hearing what biographies the readers recommend (I use those as a source of future reading).
Although the respected New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) has the right to publish what it wants, and African-American gynecological oncologist Kemi Doll has the right to write about what she thinks, their intersection in a new NEJM “voices” piece is hyperbolic and misguided to the point of toxicity. Doll’s article simply poisons the debate about merit versus “equity” in America by simply asserting that there are “structural” intentions held by academics to kill—literally exterminate—black professors. The thesis is in Doll’s first sentence—her topic sentence:
“They are trying to kill us.”
And yes, she means that literally.
Doll’s short op-ed, which you can access below, is so over the top that the NEJM has itself gone off the rails, embarrassing itself by publishing it. Its assertions are either distorted or wrong, and there’s no evidence of a conspiracy to exterminate black scholars. Doll’s “evidence” rests on two academics who committed suicide, one being Jason Arday, the Cambridge University professor of sociology who apparently committed suicide after his plagiarism and made-up stories came to light (see my posts about him here). To Kemi Doll, Arday died because the allegations against him were intended to kill him.
That, of course, is nonsense. The story is complicated, but to couch it as people wanting Arday to die is a ridiculous simplification. There may have been a bit of racism motivating some of Arday’s critics, but most of it came from the realization that Arday, a professor without much merit as well as a serial liar, was promoted largely because of his ethnicity and his claimed disability (he said he was severely autistic). It was an obvious case of ideological capture of academia, a case so clear that it has now become acceptable to talk and write about ethnicity versus quality—a topic previously taboo.
You can read the NEJM piece by clicking on the screenshot below.
I’ll quote a lot of it starting from the beginning. The quotes are indented, and my comments are flush left.
They are trying to kill us.
When Black academics say this, I imagine folks outside of our community think we are being hyperbolic. We are not. I think my non-Black colleagues are starting to get a taste of this as they realize how diabolically opposed to our own well-being most of the movements of our federal health agencies seem to be these days. It’s appalling and scary and also — yes, welcome. This is how it feels to know that there are systemic pressures working against your success, your well-being, and in the case of Jason Arday — your life.
Note that Doll cites racist “systemic pressures” that are aimed at ruining the carers of black academics and even killing them. In fact, the opposite is true. Affirmative action, DEI, and the “racial reckoning” that’s been occurring for a long time have given minority academics, including women, a leg up. These initiatives, which led to Arday’s promotion and, indeed, sacralization, is clearly what got him the Cambridge professorship in the first place. Until Arday’s fabulism and plagiarism were revealed (starting with a post by Nathan Cofnas, who clearly didn’t want Arday to die), Arday was on a pedestal, told by his own chairperson at Cambridge that “We are so lucky to have you. You are the best in the world in terms of the research that you do.” Doll continues:
Jason Arday had the distinction of being the youngest Black professor in the University of Cambridge’s history. His publications specifically focused on race and racism in the British educational system, and he didn’t shy away from using his own life in his examples. After the deliberate targeting of his veracity as an academic by another former Cambridge professor, dismissed due to his racism and white supremacist views, Prof. Arday came under intense scrutiny with regard to his Ph.D. thesis and the stories in his memoir. Besides making the point that his Ph.D. advisor and the university cleared him of any deliberate plagiarism allegations, I want to be clear that I don’t care whether or not any of these allegations against Prof. Arday were true. None of them were worth his career. And certainly not his life.
Note the penultimate statement: Doll didn’t care whether any allegations against Arday were true. But if they were true (they include made-up positions he put on his c.v.), and they seem to be, then he was unqualified for his position at Cambridge. Remember that Arday killed himself only after Cambridge decided to investigate the allegations. Did anybody predict that those allegations would lead to his (presumed) suicide? I don’t think so, but Doll argues that his death was not only predictable, but engineered by academia and the media:
But Black academics know that we will always be held to a different standard, and it will look “fair” to most until perhaps we are dead. Dr. Antoinette “Bonnie” Candia-Bailey of Lincoln University expressed the severe stress, pressure, and undue criticism she weathered in her position before her suicide in 2024. Dr. JoAnne A. Epps, Executive Vice President and Provost of Temple University, and Dr. Orinthia T. Montague, President of Volunteer State Community College, died enduring the unique stressors of their jobs. Prof. Claudine Gay was hounded by accusations of plagiarism and ousted by Harvard, who bent to those who simply could not stomach a world where a Black woman was president of such a storied institution. Today, I took a moment to appreciate that she is still with us, thank God.
I urge you to check those references for suicide caused by stress, pressure, and criticism. Yes, Candia-Bailey killed herself after claiming she was bullied in academia, but Epps “died. . . . after becoming ill onstage at a memorial service, the university said.” The reference to Orinthia Montague says nothing about suicide, and I can find nothing about that in other places (e.g., here) What is ludicrous about Doll’s claims here is that she simply asserts that the last two died because of “stress and pressure”. But, for crying out loud, being a president or provost of any college is a stressful job, and there is no evidence that Montague or Epps had sufficiently more stress than other administrators because they were black, crossing a stress threshhold that led to death. Neither death is attributed to suicide, so Doll simply asserts that they were due to blackness-induced pressure. Didn’t the NEJM even check the links?
As for Claudine Gay, she was asked to resign by the Harvard Corporation because she did not handle well the allegations of antisemitism at Harvard (she had to clarify her position several times), because she was credibly accused of plagiarism, and because she could no longer lead the University effectively. Rather than boot her out of the Presidency, Harvard stood by her (even dismissing her plagiarism accusations as only examples of “duplicative language without appropriate attribution“) until the pressure from the Corporation became too great. Indeed, some people, as in NYT link I just gave, argued that Harvard was going easier on Gay than it was on students who might have done the same thing. I see no evidence that Harvard wanted to dump Gay because she was black. Indeed, why was she appointed President if there were structural pressures to ruin her career?
At any rate, Gay landed on her feet. Though she resigned the Presidency, Harvard Magazinesays that Gay returned to the faculty as professor of government and of African and American studies, earning “a base salary of $1,397,749, plus other compensation of $150,802 (again, principally the value of a University-provided official residence)”. I don’t know another regular humanities professor making nearly $1.5 million per year! Clearly, Harvard was not trying to ruin her career.
More:
The message to Black academics is clear. Come in, be great and indeed be excellent, but don’t dare dream too big. Don’t dare shine too bright. Walk the line of excellence and humility with perfect grace, and be ready to fight for your life.
The lesson is really that your ethnicity (and, in Arday’s class, his claimed early disability) can elevate you to prestige. Beyond Arday and Candia-Bailey, the argument that universities and academia are trying to exterminate black people is nonexistent.
Doll does mention one white man who lost his job after accusations of falsified data:
In contrast, as a white man, you can rise to be president of Stanford University, and after your falsified data is found and has set back an entire field of research for years — you will only lose your job and then quickly find another one as the CEO of a $1 billion biopharma start-up. Beyond this single story of nauseating privilege, it is a fantasy to act like plagiarism, falsified data, and suspicious, unreproducible results are not major and common problems in academia. We have entire websites devoted to attempting to keep pace with the number of scientific papers retracted amid scandal. Scroll through the recent posts on Retraction Watch and let me know how many of those investigators have been hounded, literally, to death by the news media. I hear the assertions that the British press is particularly vicious and unabashedly racist, which contributed to hundreds of articles attacking Prof. Arday in a matter of days. However, this country is not far behind. The New York Times, before his body was even laid to rest, asserted on social media that Arday’s death was a result of “race, diversity, and academic hiring.” Sure.
I won’t list other white academics who lost their jobs for plagiarism or other accusations, or even killed themselves as a result, as that’s just playing an anecdotes game. Yes, Marc Tessier-Lavigne resigned from Stanford after wonky and apparently falsified data were found in a paper he co-authored, but, like Claudine Gay, he landed on his feet. And remember, the attention directed to Arday was only tangentially because he was black, for it was his ethnicity and claimed disability, as well as the accusations of fabulism and plagiarism that Cambridge University at first ignored, that gave the story its viral status. The striking part was the realization of how far ideological capture had gone in academia—so far that a man totally unqualified for a professorship had gotten there without anybody looking too closely at his qualifications. (Indeed, I think the NEJM publishing Doll’s palpably ludicrous analysis is itself an example of ideological capture of the journal.)
At the end, Doll bemoans her own fate, telling us that she pretty much has it as bad as did Arday, although that cannot be true. She also analogizes her accusations of racism to lynching, for lynching is the subject of the song “Strange Fruit,” made famous by Billie Holiday in 1939 (bolding below is mine):
As someone who introduced herself here as being in it for the long haul in academia, I am in contemplation this week. Not because I am considering leaving, but because it’s important to query whether my systems and boundaries for my own well-being are strong enough to withstand the ever-present winds of white supremacy and anti-Blackness. Are my bonds with my fellow Black academics well-tended to? Are my filters to keep nonsense out of my inbox tight enough? Do I need to ratchet up my “No”s even further?
In these times where trees bearing strange fruit are on the rise (again) in the U.S. South, where Black mothers everywhere heard about Nolan Wells long before it was in the mainstream media, I don’t believe there is such thing as hyperbole. They are trying to kill us. They always have been.
And yet, we are still here.
Rest in peace, Jason Arday.
Ask yourself if you’re an academic: are colleges and universities trying to deny jobs to minorities, impede their progress, or even trying to kill them by putting in motion processes that they know will result in suicide? I’d say that, in these days of DEI, it’s the precise opposite.
But why did the NEJM even publish such a palpably misguided and hyperbolic piece? I would answer this way: the journal’s editors were trying to signal their virtue. And that’s ideological capture.
Welcome to Sunday, August 30, 2026: Sabbath for goyische cats and the sixth weekiversary since Miss Duck and her brood came to Botany Pond. Here are the babies on July 20, the second day after they came to the pond (they presumably hatched one day before Pond Entry Day). There are few animals more adorable than a baby mallard.
And here they are sex days ago. In two more weeks they’ll be eight weeks old, and about ready able to fly. They may hang around a while, but they may also leave quickly, and then I’ll feel like a parent whose kid goes off to college—except I’ll never see most of the kids again. They’ll be out in the real world, having obtained jobs as Being Mallards.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the August 30 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Well, the U.S. finally got some benefit from leaving a political heir of Maduro, Delcy Rodríguez, in power in Venezuela. Now we can take their oil!
President Trump confirmed late Friday that the U.S. reached a deal with Venezuela to secure control of a big chunk of the Latin American country’s oil reserves.
“At my direction, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, working closely with Highly Respected Interim President of Venezuela, Delcy Rodriguez, and, through a partnership with private business, have secured majority U.S. control of more than 65 BILLION BARRELS of proven Oil Reserves in Venezuela, at no cost to the American Taxpayer,” the president said on social media.
The country’s oil industry has fallen into widespread disarray following years of mismanagement during the regimes of the late Hugo Chávez and former President Nicolás Maduro.
Friday’s deal would give the U.S. a foothold in some of the most promising oil-and-gas fields. The country says it has some 300 billion barrels of proven reserves, the largest in the world. In comparison, the U.S. has about 46 billion.
Trump also said the agreement would substantially lower gas prices for all Americans. He and his team have been trying to shore up energy security in the Western Hemisphere while the Iran war has locked a big portion of the world’s oil and gas behind the Strait of Hormuz.
Rodríguez, Venezuela’s interim president, has granted a private company—a joint project of the U.S. government and a private operator in Venezuela—a 100-year lease for the oil fields, a U.S. official said. The entity would be the world’s second-largest corporate holder of proven reserves after Saudi Aramco.
This of course is a way for Trump to try to boost support, as surely rising gas prices are one reason why Trump’s approval rating has fallen, and why Republicans are in trouble for the midterms. But oil experts on the news last night said it would take months to years before this agreement would reach the gas pumps to lower prices. But I’m sure that Nobel Peace Prize laureate (2025) María Corina Machado, wherever she’s living (she dare not return to Venezuela for fear of assassination), is looking on in horror.
A federal judge in California ruled that the Trump administration violated the constitutional rights of international students when it sought to deport them for criticizing Israel’s war in Gaza.
In a 90-page ruling, Judge Noël Wise found that the key legal foundations that the Trump administration had relied on to arrest and deport foreign students were unconstitutional, because Trump officials had wielded them to target students who used their freedom of speech to express opinions that the government did not like.
“In the United States,” Judge Wise wrote, “free speech, including the freedom to criticize the government and its leaders, is not a sign of our democracy’s fragility. It is evidence of its strength.
“That strength is diminished when members of our society — citizens and noncitizens alike — must self-censor and ‘behave’ or suffer the government’s retaliation,” she wrote. “This downward spiral is antithetical to our Constitution that recognizes our right to speak freely. Here you can simultaneously hate the content of a person’s speech and love the country that cherishes the freedom to allow it.”
Judge Wise, who was appointed to the Northern District of California by President Joseph R. Biden Jr., effectively declared that a section of immigration law frequently invoked by the Trump administration violated the First and Fifth Amendments, reasoning that the provision was vague and allowed the secretary of state to remove noncitizens for speech and other activities protected by the First Amendment.
Conor Fitzpatrick, the chief supervising attorney at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which brought the lawsuit, celebrated the ruling.
“Today’s ruling proves that free speech isn’t a privilege, but the inalienable right of every man, woman, and child,” he said in a statement.
Yay for FIRE, and YAY for the appropriately named Judge Wise. I’m wondering whether the government will appeal this to the Supreme Court, but there’s nothing in the First Amendment that limits free speech only to Americans who are citizens:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
*We all know that Dolly Parton refused to say anything about politics; she maintained that she was an entertainer and not a politician, and she didn’t want to alienate her fans. But Fox News shows how deep her resistance to taking public stands went (Ricky Gervais would be happy):
“I don’t like to get involved in politics, because first of all, I have as many Republican fans as I do Democrats,” Parton told USA Today. “I don’t want to offend anybody, I have a right to myself.”
“Like God gave us free will, America gave us free speech, but you’ve got to be responsible for anything you say and do,” she added.
“I have a lot of fans out there, and I don’t want to offend anybody,” Parton said.
When Wright attempted to draw a parallel between Trump and the sexually abusive boss in Parton’s 1980 film “9 to 5,” she refused to bite.
“I’m not addressing that,” Parton said. “I learned a long time ago, keep your damn mouth shut if you want to stay in show business. … I’m not in politics, I’m an entertainer.”
When Wright pointed out that Parton was also a role model, she responded: “Yes I am. That’s why I don’t talk about people.”
Her aversion to political camps did not mean she kept quiet about everything she believed.
“I know whatever I say, people are going to listen, and they’re going to make more of it than maybe what I meant. So I have to be careful,” Parton told People in 2021. “Of course I have my opinion, but I’m not an opinionated person as a rule. You’re allowed your own beliefs and your own faith, but you don’t have to use it like a weapon when it could be a tool.”
Parton’s political neutrality was something she could joke about.
“My daddy was a Republican, my mama was a Democrat, and I’m a hypocrite!” Parton famously quipped, pronouncing “hypocrite” as “hypo-crat” in her iconic Tennessee drawl.
I’ve seen several posts on social media however, that Parton’s refusal to take political positions constituted her own “dark side,” an accusation that began in 2021 in a Vox article by Constance Grady called “How Dolly Parton became a secular American saint.” Grady’s claim was that you have to take sides in a “post-Trump America,” To wit:
Dolly Parton is beloved because she has devoted her career to standing for love. And, usefully, she is willing to be ambiguous about what exactly that love means and how much it includes people that those on different sides of the political aisle consider their enemies. But in a post-Trump America, is Dolly Parton’s love enough?
But America in the 21st century is no time for a secular pop saint. And there’s a dark side to Dolly’s ability to appeal, Christ-like, to all people at all times.
Well, I have no time for this kind of stuff. Parton did speak out in favor of LGBTQ rights, and rather than taking performative stands, she helped people: giving them money after natural disasters, and handing out books by the millions. I have no time for people now who are going after her for being nonpolitical.
Dolly Parton’s Wikipedia page was allegedly targeted by vandals with antisemitic content and offensive modifications within an hour of the public announcement of her death at age 80 on Tuesday.As millions around the world mourned the loss of the legendary cultural icon, social media users shared screenshots of modifications to her profile.
Here’s one tweet:
This is depraved.
Dolly Parton’s Wikipedia page was vandalised with a swastika and the words ‘Jew lover’ just hours after she died, we understand.
These vile edits are no longer there, but the idea that someone would choose to exploit her death to spread antisemitic abuse is… pic.twitter.com/3ZKbgJBqPa
— Campaign Against Antisemitism (@antisemitism) August 26, 2026
More:
The alterations included replacing her profile photo with an image of a Nazi swastika, changing her name to “Jew lover,” and altering her display title to reference Adam Lanza, the perpetrator of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, that claimed the lives of 20 children and six adult staff members.
One screenshot shared on X/Twitter captured a Google search result listing her Wikipedia page title as “Dolly Parton – Adam Lanza was a hero.” The edits were quickly identified and reversed using Wikipedia’s revision history safeguards, restoring the page to its proper state.
And another tweet:
Whoever hacked Dolly Parton’s wikipedia to re-route it to the sandy hook shooter genuinely i hope you rot for the rest of your life pic.twitter.com/CaSSZ0tihj
As far as I know, Parton never said anything about Jews or Israel, though she had at least one close Jewish friend. It’s a sign of the times that the worst thing you can say about a beloved American icon after she died was that she was a “Jew lover.”
*Finally, reader βPer sent me this: “A CBC editor has responded to the ‘terrorism’ kerfuffle with a blog post and I think you may find it interesting” with the reader noting that I may find the final six paragraphs edifying. Indeed! (Remember that the CBC has been criticized recently for refusing to use the word “terrorist” and “terrorism” without attribution, saying the words were “loaded” and “controversial.” The CBC editor defends his organization’s position (the bolding is mine). Here are the final paragraphs:
And we intend to mark the forthcoming 25th anniversary of 9/11 with extensive, special coverage that will continue to respectfully and thoughtfully reflect on the monumental nature of this tragedy.
CBC’s reporting on terrorism, wherever it occurs, has always been guided by the principle of attribution, and like other major news organizations, it has been our practice for decades. The reason for the extreme care around the use of the words “terrorist” and “terrorism” was detailed in this earlier editor’s blog.
But to be clear, CBC News has never said what happened on Sept. 11, 2001, was not terrorism, as some commentators have stated in recent days. We have reported fully and accurately on the reasons and motivations for those attacks as determined by police, governments and an independent commission. We’ve just made sure to do it with attribution.
Clarity and understanding are at the heart of our journalism. The leaked excerpt without context or explanation has raised more questions for the public that we must now answer.
After reviewing our current language guidance, we have decided to adjust it to clarify that direct attribution is not required for describing the historic events of 9/11 as terrorism.
We are doing so to remove what has unfortunately (and unintentionally) become an impediment to clarity and public understanding.
At the same time, as new acts of politically or ideologically motivated violence occur in our world, we will continue to follow the journalistically sound practice of attributing causes and motivations to officials and experts.
So now 9/11 is terrorism, but only that one event. Are the perpetrators of 9/11 still not “terrorists”? I don’t buy it; this is a woke language prohibition to avoid stigmatizing people who kill noncombatants for ideological gain. My reader added this:
I think, reading between the lines, this may be the editors trying to rein in their woke reporter’s unprofessional tendencies to inject their personal beliefs in hot-button issues. For example, a reporter casually describing a murderer as a ‘psychopath’ instead of doing the journalistic basics of seeking out a professional’s opinion of the murderer’s mental state. In particular, I wonder if the editors have been frustrated by their reporters showing their pro-Palestinian tendencies by using ‘genocide’ and ‘apartheid’ incorrectly.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Kulka, bitter enemies, are acting like Israel and Palestine, with Kulka playing the role of Palestine (Hili is a Jewish cat):
Hili: You again? Kulka: Yes, I propose a ceasefire on my terms.
In Polish:
Hili: Ty znowu tu?
Kulka: Tak, proponuję zawieszenie broni na moich warunkach.
This Belgian Jewish girl was gassed as soon as she arrived at Auschwitz. She was two years old, and would be 85 today had she lived. https://t.co/Wj3OI9NE2v
In yesterday’s “Real Time” comedy-and-politics bit, Bill Maher calls attention to the fact that much of the real work in Congress isn’t done by the older Senators and Representatives, but rather by their staff, who may be “too young.”
In other words, the 20-somethings are writing the bills, and, as Maher said, “the kids are not all right.” In Maher’s view, these kids , whatever their politics, grew up on social media, and on the Left they’re too woke and on the Right they’re too conservative and racist (40% of Republican staffers are fans of Nick Fuentes!). Neither side, he maintains, understands the art of compromise and of rational analysis aimed at producing solution. The Democrats, though, seem to get most of Maher’s flak. At the end he says, “The problem isn’t just the old farts; maybe it’s also the new little shits.”
Maher’s guests on this segment include Byron Donalds, a Republican Congressman from Florida, and Molly Jong-Fast, author and host of the Fast Politics podcast (as well as the daughter of Erica Jong).
Well, I have some cat stuff for you. The first is a doozy: the world’s most polydactylous cat: a Maine Coon with 29—count them—29 toes. That’s 11 more than the normal number of 18, with 5 toes on each front paw (including the dewclaw) and four on each rear foot. Click the screenshot to read the article from Parade Pets:
An excerpt:
This ridiculously fluffy gray Maine Coon kitten has so many extra toes that his family literally started counting them because they suspected they might have a Guinness World Record holder living in their house. They were right. Erebus officially holds the Guinness World Record for the most toes on a cat, and I don’t even want to imagine how long it takes to trim all those tiny claws.
The adorable video was shared by TikTok user @kendraschultz81 and features Erebus proudly showing off his impressively oversized paws.
According to WFRV Local 5, Erebus was born with 29 toes. His family, Kendra and Hunter of Blue Northern Maine Coons, realized almost immediately that they might have something extraordinary on their hands and carefully counted every single toe. After completing Guinness World Records’ verification process, Erebus officially became the new world record holder for the most toes on a cat.
Polydactyly is a naturally occurring genetic trait that causes cats to be born with extra toes. While it can occur in many breeds, it’s especially common in Maine Coons, where the extra toes are thought to have helped their ancestors walk more easily through snow and rough terrain.
The condition isn’t usually painful, and many polydactyl cats live completely normal, healthy lives. In fact, many pet parents think the oversized paws make them even more adorable.
. . . aaaand, here’s a video report on Erebus. Look at the size of these feet! At first he had lung problems, and wasn’t expect to survive, but the feisty moggy survived.
Here’s the Tik Tok video that brought Erebus fame:
Guinness hasn’t yet updated its record, as it still reports, at the link below, two cats who tied with a 28-toe count, but Erebus has one more:
A quote:
An adorable 10-month-old kitten named Toby Henderson (USA) has tied a longstanding Guinness World Records title for the most toes on a cat, after equalling Jake the Polydactyl Cat’s (Canada) 2002 total of 28 claw-some digits.
Toby, who belongs to Delaney Henderson, recently found his forever home in Lansing, Michigan, and was made Officially Amazing on 12 May 2025. He lives alongside his loving parents and sister Connie, another polydactyl cat who has two extra toes on her front paws.
Here are two photos of Toby’s feet, but remember that Erebus beat him by a toe:
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Now here’s a clickbait headline from the Washington Post that will lure cat-lovers (click to read, or see it archived here). A tuxedo kitten was first stolen from a pet store, and then somehow used in a bank robbery:
An excerpt:
A man wearing a black beanie walked into a Maryland pet store last month, approached a kitten up for adoption and ran out moments later carrying the cat.
Stephanie Stullich, whose nonprofit organization rescued the tuxedo cat the month before, received a frantic call about the theft.
“We’d never had a kitten stolen before,” Stullich said. “So we had no idea why or how — or if we would ever see her again.”
Stullich hurried to the scene, where she wondered why six police cars were there for a stolen cat. She soon learned the kitten’s morning was more harrowingthan she had feared.
After grabbing the kitten, the thief walked into a PNC Bank near the pet store, approached a teller window while still holding the cat and passed anote that read, “This is a Robbery,” according to court documents.
Prince George’s County police said they arrived on the scene and arrested the man.
A few minutes after getting there, Stullich said she was relieved when a police officer told her the cat was safe inside the bank.
“You can’t make this stuff up,” Stullich said. “Who would believe it?”
Stullich found the cat, named Magnolia, safe in a manager’s office. The kitten, now 5 months old, was unfazed, Stullich said.
. . .Stullich brought Magnolia back to the Pet Supplies Plus in Beltsville, where the kitten attracted a lot of attention — welcomed, this time — after her unwitting participation in a crime.
More than 20 people applied to adopt her. Most cats rescued by Beltsville Community Cats receive three applications if they’re lucky, Stullich said.
The rescue group decided the person who applied before the kitten’s brush with the law — Kaylei Roldan, 28 — should adopt Magnolia. For the past month, Magnolia has been enjoying a quiet life — with cuddles, chicken-flavored treats and a cat tree — at Roldan’s apartment in Laurel, Maryland.
The perp:
Court records identify the suspect as Jacob Loethen, 19, of Beltsville. He was charged with robbery, second-degree assault and theft of at least $100 but less than $1,500, according to court documents.
Court records show Loethen is represented by the Maryland Office of the Public Defender, which declined to comment. Police did not disclose a possible motive.
And a good outcome (besides the rescue of Magnolia):
PNC Bank said it donated $150 to Beltsville Community Cats, the equivalent of the fee to adopt a kitten from the rescue group.
“The safety and security of our employees and customers — two and four-legged — is at the forefront of everything we do,” Christina Stowers, a spokeswoman for the bank, said in an email to The Washington Post. “We’re pleased that this tale has a happy ending.”
That should be “tail”. I wonder how the kitten was “used”. Did the suspect thrust Magnolia at the teller and say, “Give me all your money. I have a kitten.”? And they didn’t even charge him with catnapping. . .
Here’s a short video showing photos of the lovely Magnolia.
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From “good.good.good.co,” we learn that Nebraskans had an unofficial State Cat named Cameron, who until recently haunted the grounds of the state Capitol Building in Lincoln. Now ailurophiles are capaigning to put a statue of Cameron on the Capitol grounds. Click below to read:
An excerpt:
The Nebraska State Capitol’s unofficial feline mascot could soon become a permanent fixture outside the historic building he brought warmth and love to for a decade.
Until this spring, Cameron the “Capitol Cat” made a home away from home at the Capitol near his downtown Lincoln residence with his owner, Dianna McGinnis. After long legislative days, staffers and lawmakers alike would greet Cameron, even on nights after heated filibusters or those that stretched toward midnight. Many found relief as he awaited their attention.
Cameron retired in May as the unofficial Capitol greeter when McGinnis moved to assisted living. But his pawprint on lawmakers, staff, and community members well beyond Nebraska could soon live on with a statue on the south side of the Capitol off Goodhue Boulevard.
The life-size bronze statue of Cameron would be about 18-20 inches tall and sit atop a pedestal made from Indiana limestone, about 28-32 inches in height. The limestone is proposed to mirror the stone facing and architectural trim of the historic Nebraska State Capitol.
This is adorable:
“I mean, let’s be real, it would be so freaking cute and everybody would get their picture by it, and his little head would be petted, and it’d be shiny gold because everybody would rub his little head coming in,” state Sen. Jana Hughes of Seward, who is helping the project, said Friday.
No state or taxpayer funds would go toward the statue.
Hughes, who joined the Legislature in 2023, and former state Sen. Anna Wishart of Lincoln, who served between 2017 and 2025, will pitch the privately funded project to the Nebraska Capitol Environs Commission on Friday. The meeting is for feedback initially, and the supporters would need final approval before the statue could be affixed near the Capitol.
More:
Hughes said she first heard of the statue idea around the time lawmakers adjourned in April from one of her constituents, Scott Shafer, who works for the Nebraska Commission on Indian Affairs. Using artificial intelligence, she created a rendering of how the statue could look. However, the final design would fall to the storied sculptor supporters hope to hire.
Benjamin Victor of Boise, Idaho, the artist behind the Ponca Chief Standing Bear and Dr. Susan La Flesche Picotte statues on Lincoln Mall north of the Nebraska Capitol has agreed to sculpt the bronze Cameron.
. . .As of Tuesday afternoon, the fundraising campaign had raised almost $3,500 toward its $37,500 goal just a few days after launching. Shaw has also agreed to donate profits from his photo book about Cameron to the project through October.
The cost includes Victor’s estimate and ongoing maintenance. Meeting materials indicate minimal upkeep with materials “designed to withstand Nebraska seasonal cycles without degradation.”
While Shaw was not necessarily an animal photographer, he said he always enjoyed photographing Cameron. He has two adopted cats of his own — littermates, which his daughters named Toby, after “The Office” character, and Peanut, for a marking on his nose.
The article was published this week, and, sadly, the project appears to be in limbo, as this headling from Nebraska Public Media appeared yesterday. Click to read:
An excerpt from that:
Plans to memorialize Cameron the Capitol Cat’s years of service in the Nebraska Legislature are in limbo after the Nebraska Capitol Environs Commission expressed doubts about his ability to withstand the test of time.
Blockheads! Here’s their unconvincing explanation:
Landis said the statues included both in and around the Capitol building are placed there because of the significance of their lives and accomplishments. While many of the real people the statues commemorate and those who knew them have passed beyond living memory, Landis said they deserve to be remembered. The statues are placed on the environs to instruct the public about their lives.
“This is a well-loved cat,” Landis said. “But when the time runs out and those of you who loved this cat have passed by, what is the historical significance of the cat?”
Commission members one after the other voiced their agreement with Landis, saying that the cat cannot be seen as comparable to statues of important historical figures like Ponca tribal chief Standing Bear, who advocated for his tribe’s right to live on their own land and won against the U.S. Government.
Courtney Wittstruck, a public commenter, said Cameron’s significance was more than the love visiting fourth grade classes had for him. While intense debates were going on within the Capitol, Cameron greeted everyone, regardless of party or political view, the same, Wittstruck said.
“He became a small but meaningful symbol of the best of Nebraska: kindness, friendliness and compassion,” Wittstruck said, adding that a plaque should go with the statue to emphasize the symbolism. “It’s a reminder that we are all Nebraskans and that, at the end of the day, we have more in common than we have differences.”
See? Cameron exemplifies Nebraska’s kindness and friendliness. What more do these legislators need than that? Well, I hope they put the statue up somewhere near the Capitol building if it isn’t approved. In the meantime, here’s a video:
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Lagniappe:
Komatsu rescued! Fitted with a hard hat and put to work.
Click headline to read (from the UPI’s Odd News:
An excerpt:
A kitten rescued from inside an excavator has become the newest member of an Ohio construction crew, complete with her own vest and hard hat.
Chase Guello, operating supervisor with RiverReach Construction, was examining an excavator at a Leavittsburg job site when he found the tiny orange kitten inside the engine bay.
The crew was unable to locate the kitten’s mother or any siblings in the area.
The construction company named the cat Komatsu in honor of the brand of excavator, or Sue for short.
Sue spent two weeks in foster care before being placed with RiverReach’s shop mechanic, Jared, and his family.
“Once she’s of age, she’ll be traveling to and from work with him, and she’ll eventually become a shop cat under his supervision,” Guello told WJW-TV.
Meanwhile, video of Sue’s rescue went viral online, and came to the attention of officials at Komatsu.
The company sent RiverReach a tiny safety vest and hard hat for Sue.
Click on the screenshot below (and put the sound up) to see the Instagram post of Sue’s rescue:
Welcome to CaturSaturday, August 29, 2026, shabbos for Jewish cats, and the last Saturday in August. It’s also International Day Against Nuclear Tests. Here is a video of five nuclear tests caught on camera, and there are some far more powerful than the A-bomb dropped on Hiroshima. We’d all prefer a world without nukes, but given that they’re here, how can we be sure that the deterrent effect of nukes is effective if the enemy doesn’t know that they work? And that means testing.
First, from the NYT’s morning newsletter, a like cause:
As emergency workers flew helicopters up steep Himalayan river valleys yesterday to find survivors of a flood that killed more than 500 people and left more than 1,000 missing, scientists began to investigate its cause. They’ve been looking at satellite imagery and seismological data.
The likely culprit: A gigantic landslide high in the mountains led to a glacial collapse that sent millions of tons of ice and rock into the valleys below it, pulverizing them into mud and water. The slurry burst dams and turned rivers into hydraulic rams. “The rock that the glacier was sitting on collapsed,” one scientist said.
The scale of the disaster is staggering. It’s as if 1,000 Empire State Buildings exploded at the same time and the debris coursed down a canyon. The path of destruction ran for more than 40 miles. It washed away roads, cut bridges in half, overcame buildings and swallowed people whole.
After three days of searching for survivors of a massive flash flood that swept through Nepal and Tibet on Wednesday, killing more than 600 people, the disaster’s full extent and human toll were still being revealed in recovered bodies, battered survivors and growing lists of the missing.
The tally of missing people in Nepal rose above 2,400 on Saturday. The number has climbed dramatically since Friday, with Nepali officials saying hydropower producers had only recently shared a count of unaccounted-for workers at projects in the devastated river valleys. China said more than 500 people were missing in Tibet on its side of the border and at least five had died.
Exclusive videos verified by The New York Times show the clearest view yet of the avalanche that sent the wall of water and mud coursing downriver.
The first 48 to 72 hours after natural disasters are typically a critical window for finding survivors. But the devastation left many miles of roads unusable and damaged communications, making it harder for rescuers and aid organizations to locate people and deliver food, medicine and temporary shelters.
Search efforts along the 50-mile stretch of destruction were also complicated on Friday by fears of more flooding, as the authorities in Nepal warned that more water from new lakes created by the landslide that set off Wednesday’s flood could overflow and send more water rushing into the valleys.
About 30,000 Nepali security forces have been deployed for the relief mission, according to the United Nations. On Friday, Nepal Army personnel took many rescued people to a barracks on the banks of the Trishuli River, where many could be seen jostling to see if they recognized names on printed lists of survivors.
The Nepali authorities said that more than 3,700 people had been rescued so far, and released footage showing uniformed personnel pulling people by hand through a river of mud. Officials said they had been trapped in a tunnel that was part of a hydroelectric project that had been under construction.
Given that this is Nepal, where census data might be thin, and the fact that many people are buried under mud, I’d guess that the number of dead will eventually exceeed 3,000. It’s a horrible tragedy.
*In his week’s Tuesday NYT column, Bret Stephens ponders a prediction he made earlier, “Has World War III already started?” The answer seems to be “pretty much.” (Article is archived here.)
Shortly after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, I wrote a column under the headline “This Is How World War III Begins.” More than four years on, I wonder how much I got right.
My argument was based on the origins of World War II, which did not simply start with Germany’s invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939. Instead, the war was an accumulation of regional wars and crises, beginning with Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931, which gradually gathered into a single global conflict.
That gathering, abetted by the converging ambitions of the totalitarian states and the divisions and vacillations of the democracies, led to catastrophe. Added to this was a revolution in military technology and tactics that gave the dictatorships an early advantage in offensive combat. Also an advantage: their willingness to inflict — and endure — a level of brutality and suffering their adversaries were initially reluctant to match.
In 2022, I saw a similar pattern unfolding. . . .
And here’s his evidence:
First, as in the 1930s and ’40s, the spheres of conflict have multiplied and are merging.
Russia’s battlefield reversals seem to have done nothing to diminish Putin’s appetite for risk as he expands his campaign, in barely concealed attacks and threats, against Moldova, Poland and Germany, among other states, while his political allies repeatedly call for direct strikes on Europe and the use of nuclear weapons against Ukraine. Hamas’s assault on Israel in 2023 became, in stages, a war between Israel and Hezbollah, the Houthis and Iran; then a war between Iran, the United States and the Gulf states. . .
. . . Second, the Axis of Authoritarians has become a fully operational military alliance.
Russia is providing North Korea with help to modernize its armed forces, while the North has returned the favor by sending millions of artillery rounds and is now reportedly prepared to send thousands of additional troops to fight for Russia in Ukraine. China supplies Russia with most of the electronic components used in its drones and other military hardware. . .
. . .Third, the West is a mess.
President Trump complains of our allies’ weakness. The allies complain of Trump’s bullying, capriciousness, callowness, mendacity and incompetence. Both sides are right. The latest U.S. tariff salvo on Canada is a case in point: politically ill advised, economically self-defeating, strategically enervating. . .
The war against Iran revealed not just the munitions shortages, which helped bring the war to a premature close, but also America’s acute sensitivity to military fatalities and economic pain, which gave Iran’s leaders an asymmetric advantage given their own tolerance for human suffering.
. . . Fifth, we may be near the economic brink.
One great difference between the 1930s and the present is that, unlike then, we are not in the midst of a worldwide depression. But the warning signs of a sharp and abrupt downturn are everywhere. What happens if or when the A.I. boom starts to run out of steam, much as the dot-com boom did at the beginning of the century? Or if the currency crisis in Japan causes it to start selling off its U.S. Treasury bonds?
Stephens ends this way:
A deep U.S. recession, or a global financial panic, will inevitably worsen every trend mentioned above. In periods of economic distress, democracies almost always become more risk-averse, while dictatorships become risk-prone. That’s a pattern of history worth recalling as we continue to drift, only dimly aware, toward the gathering storm.
Perhaps this is just a warning rather than a prediction, but WWIII will involve nukes, and I still can’t believe that any major country is going to use them. And of course many of us will be dead if Stephens is making a prediction that will come true in decades.
→ Lake America: Our new foreign and trade policy is basically to rename things America, as punishment. That’s what Donald J. Trump is threatening to do to Canada if they don’t agree to our trade terms. You like your little Lake Ontario? You think that’s nice? Too bad!
The president announced on Truth Social: “The United States is giving serious consideration to changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America in that we don’t expect to be doing much business with Ontario any longer.” We punish other nations by calling their waters America. It’s like schoolyard bully colonialism. In late-breaking news, he went and did it:
I think we just bring back old-fashioned colonialism and take Canada, a failed state, and keep the name Ontario, or Muskoka, or whatever funny words they use up there as a courtesy. It’s not enough to call it America and overlay funny text when you can make it America. But Trump is too busy posting a ranking of past presidents with himself at the top as The Greatest.
I can’t believe the post right above. But let’s move on:
→ Jason Arday fallout continues: America’s most prestigious medical journal, The New England Journal of Medicine, has opened its pages to a Jason Arday take. Here it is:
Yes, it’s a medical journal, and yes, Arday was a doctor of. . . education, but no matter. The piece begins: “They are trying to kill us.” It ends: “They are trying to kill us. They always have been. And yet, we are still here.” This is in the most prestigious medical journal in America. Or you can listen to this NPR podcast about Arday. And there was a huge vigil for him in Trafalgar Square in London. Arday, truly a fabulist who seems to have faked his past jobs and much else, has become the folk hero of 2026. A strange choice but a clear one. We must accept him as the year’s hero. Soon we will be told that, in fact, Jason Arday threw the first brick at Stonewall. Woke 1 might have been crazy, but I promise you Woke 2 will be crazier.
→ The left wants war:
The Green Party of England and Wales is holding its big conference and any British terrorist who’s anyone is invited, but you know who’s apparently not invited? The Jewish-Palestinian peace group Standing Together. Standing Together accuses Israel of genocide and apartheid. They say they want “peace and independence for Israelis and Palestinians” and “full equality for everyone in this land.” And they’re still not invited because, according to The Jewish Chronicle, that would violate the Green Party’s policies on boycotting Israel. News flash about the Green Party: They don’t want peace! They want war.
Which is increasingly what Americans want.
No, Cenk, say it! Say it loud, say it proud. Is it globalists? The Epstein class? Zionist monies? GQ communist Hasan Piker said on a Twitch stream, “If Jews in America keep putting this idea out there that they are singularly invested in Israel, eventually someone’s going to come around and take action—not against the state of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews.”
One more thing here: The majority of Democrats in Virginia want not just the end of support but the imposition of sanctions on Israel. A whopping 61 percent of Virginia Dems want sanctions, with only 12 percent against them, and 27 percent unsure.
Within a few years, we’ve moved from allies with Israel to neutral on Israel to the majority of Dems wanting active aggression against Israel—and the most popular left-wing influencer saying that American Jews better watch out. Or else someone’s going to come around and take action.
There are many outrageous things about this hierarchy, but as usual, it is almost certainly the case that Trump put no more thought into this than seeing a meme that praised him and sharing it without a second thought for where anybody else ranked on the list. This serves both as self-flattery and trolling of his enemies.
If you spend more than an instant looking at the chart, aside from the bad rankings and some of the terrible pictures (Millard Fillmore did not have a big, brown moptop when he was president), what ought to leap off the page is that there are only 34 presidents pictured, while 45 men have held the office (two of them, Trump and Grover Cleveland, having done so twice). Conspicuously omitted are Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush — every Republican president since 1932 except for Trump.
There’s a reason for that. Sharp-eyed internet sleuths noticed that the chart largely reproduces a “survey” of 55 academics conducted for the November 1, 1948, issue of Life magazine (an issue dated the day before the presidential election) by Arthur Schlesinger.
Have a look at the New Republic link; the two charts are, given who’s on both of them, nearly identical. More from the NR:
That also explains the absence of Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson, although whoever turned the Schlesinger chart into a Trump meme threw in three contemporary Democrats to fill out the “Failures” tier (Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and Jimmy Carter), and added — either out of respect or for a sheen of fairness — Bill Clinton to the “Average” tier.
There are, as I explained in 2024, serious methodological problems with producing presidential rankings by the consensus of a select group of academics, most glaringly the effort to produce a purportedly nonpartisan, nonideological output that very obviously includes ideological and partisan biases in its inputs. (This is why I’ve done my own ranking by separating the presidents by party.) Schlesinger and his selected panelists putting FDR second only to Washington and Lincoln during the 1948 presidential campaign was done in the same spirit, for many of the same purposes, as Trump fans putting him first in 2026. Roosevelt had only been out of office for three years, and Democrats in 1948 were wrapping their campaign themes in the need to keep FDR’s coalition together.
. . .That also explains the absence of Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson, although whoever turned the Schlesinger chart into a Trump meme threw in three contemporary Democrats to fill out the “Failures” tier (Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and Jimmy Carter), and added — either out of respect or for a sheen of fairness — Bill Clinton to the “Average” tier.
There are, as I explained in 2024, serious methodological problems with producing presidential rankings by the consensus of a select group of academics, most glaringly the effort to produce a purportedly nonpartisan, nonideological output that very obviously includes ideological and partisan biases in its inputs. (This is why I’ve done my own ranking by separating the presidents by party.) Schlesinger and his selected panelists putting FDR second only to Washington and Lincoln during the 1948 presidential campaign was done in the same spirit, for many of the same purposes, as Trump fans putting him first in 2026. Roosevelt had only been out of office for three years, and Democrats in 1948 were wrapping their campaign themes in the need to keep FDR’s coalition together.
A tractor-trailer rollover sent a truckload of squid spilling into a Rhode Island roadway, leaving a stench as they sat in the road for hours in the summer heat. Local authorities have dubbed it the “Squidpocalypse of ’26.”
It was a warm, sunny day in the coastal town of Narragansett when the spill happened Sunday, and Narragansett Police Capt. Ryan Prest said he was told that the scene “started to smell bad as the squid sat out in the sun for a few hours.”
The fully-loaded trailer was taking the squid to a processing facility out of town when the trailer dislodged and tipped on its side as the driver was navigating a turn, spilling a “substantial portion” of its calamari cargo, the police department said in a statement.
Police responded at 9:27 a.m., and the intersection wasn’t reopened until 5:15 p.m., authorities said.
“Squid has a distinctive odor to it,” Richard Stevens, a Narragansett resident and fisherman, told WJAR. “It can be very foul smelling, especially if it lands on the road and stays there for awhile.”
Heavy equipment and a dump truck were used to remove the squid, Prest said.
. . . The Narragansett Police Department made light of the situation in a social media post on Wednesday, stating that the town is “still recovering” from the “Squidpocalypse of ’26 — the spill that put ‘slippery when wet’ to shame.”
And a video, of course. Look at all those squid!
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, exchanges between Andrzej and Hili are getting pretty arcane:
Andrzej: The one for whom the bell tolls probably doesn’t hear it. Hili: That depends on the context.
In Polish:
Ja: Ten komu bije dzwon raczej tego nie słyszy.
Hili: To zależy od kontekstu.
From Masih, absolutely reprehensible behavior from an American academic. It looks as if the University of Arkansas fired Shirin Saeidi in May for “violent and anti-Semitic” social media posts”. She was not only tenured, but “former director of UA Fayetteville’s Middle East studies center.” Well, this falls under the notion of free speech to me, so I don’t think firing is in order unless it somehow affected her job. The article does mention that ” Saeidi had disregarded numerous attempts to counsel her for other behavior.” Those other behaviors aren’t specified, but to me this looks like a violation of the First Amendment, no matter how reprehensible Saeidi’s speech was:
WATCH: Former University of Arkansas political science professor Shirin Saeidi is seen in a disturbing video telling Iranian human rights activist Ladan Bazargan that she will travel to Iran, find the grave of Bazargan’s brother Bijan, executed by the Islamic Republic dance on… pic.twitter.com/unHB8sgY28
A different person weighed in on Jason Arday before even Cofanas did. Harris has a 25-minute video embedded in the tweet.
🚨 EXCLUSIVE: In 2023, David Harris, Professor Emeritus at Plymouth Marjon University, became one of the first academics to raise serious questions about the scholarly standards of Professor Jason Arday’s published work, shortly after Arday had been appointed Professor of… pic.twitter.com/1s5gnTUtU3
— Committee for Academic Freedom (@ComAcFreedom) August 28, 2026
Larry gives Brits license to leave early today. There’s apparently a “summer bank holiday” on Monday.
It’s a bank holiday weekend so I say you should finish work early and start having fun. If your boss has a plan problem with that tell them Larry said it’s fine.
This Italian Jewish girl, and probably her mother, were likely gassed as soon as they got to Auschwitz. Her father didn’t survive, either. Gianna was only two years old, and would be 85 today had she lived. https://t.co/I0gwGd3kns
As I reported recently, Ghent University in Belgium suspended Nathan Cofnas from his postdoc position after the death of Jason Arday, the Cambridge professor of sociology who apparently killed himself after Cofnas started a spate of Cambridge University and media investigations by showing that Arday had plagiarized much of his Ph.D. thesis. And that was on top of Arday’s copious fables about his life. fables that were too fantastic to be real. After initially defending Arday, Cambridge finally decided to investigate him, whereupon he was found dead. I do not hold Cofnas or the media responsible for that death.
Ghent is among the wokest universities in Europe. Yet, knowing full well that Cofnas devoted a lot of his work to the inflammatory subject of ethnicity and IQ, they hired him anyway. In her letter to Cofnas announcing his suspension, the excuses that Ghent Rector Petra de Sutter gave included Cofnas’s doing work he was not contracted to do (as if no academic diverges from their research plan!), and that Cofnas’s research “had a negative impact on the functioning of the University and the well-being of, and cooperation with, students and other members of staff.” (Maarten Boudry showed that most of de Sutter’s letter was written by AI.)
The real reason, I suspect, is that Ghent got a ton of letters objecting to Cofnas’s presence, the nature of his work, and holding him responsible for Arday’s death. Whatever the reasons, though, the suspension of Cofnay, who is not really an admirable character, is still a violation of his academic freedom.
Ghent’s “preventive suspension” of Cofnas was to precede a formal investigation, even though de Sutter was found to have urged Ghent faculty to write in opposing Cofnas’s presence at Ghent. Some impartial investigation! In the meantime, Cofnas was suspended from teaching and working at Ghent, and was banned from its campus.
I was sure that Cofnas’s suspension would be followed by a permanent firing, but not it’s not clear. Cofnas is an American citizen, and first there was an announcement that the U.S. ambassador to Belgium, Bill White, had negotiated an “amicable agreement with Ghent” that would allow Cofnas to see out the end of his one-year term without being suspended. (He was still restricted from some activities, though.)
And although there’s a newspaper article reporting that Cofnas’s suspension had been lifted, Ghent continues to hold its “investigation.” As Maarten notes above, what is the point of investigating him if they’ve reached an amicable settlement?
Here’s an article from the Flemish newspaper De Morgen that deepens the mystery. Click to read the English translation:
Quotes from the article(indented) and tweets (the bolding at the bottom is mine):
US Ambassador Bill White thanks Ghent Rector Petra De Sutter on X for ‘lifting the suspension’ of researcher Nathan Cofnas. However, according to the university, the disciplinary proceedings are ongoing and Cofnas’ disciplinary measure remains in place.
“After having spoken with all parties, I am satisfied that Ghent University and Nathan Cofnas have reached an agreement by mutual consent to lift the suspension of Mr. Cofnas.”
With that message, US Ambassador Bill White responded yesterday evening to a post on X by UGent researcher Nathan Cofnas. “I am very grateful to Rector Petra De Sutter for allowing me to stay at UGent,” Cofnas said in the post.
The reports followed barely a day after Ghent University had announced a new disciplinary measure against Cofnas. This entails that Cofnas must work remotely for three months and is prohibited from taking on teaching duties. The disciplinary measure is part of the disciplinary investigation the university is conducting against the researcher.
On X, however, both seem to suggest that Ghent University dropped the disciplinary case against Cofnas, which has been ongoing since August 20, following intervention by White. “I am against the suspension and possible disciplinary sanctions against Cofnas (…) But this is clearly blackmail by a foreign state and it is scandalous,” writes Ghent University professor Tijl De Bie on X. Philosopher of science Maarten Boudry, on the other hand, is pleased with the ‘agreement’.
Investigation continues
However, UGent confirms to De Morgen that the investigation against Cofnas is still ongoing. According to the disciplinary regulations, the preventive suspension issued by De Sutter last week can last a maximum of seven working days. Instead, a disciplinary measure covering three months followed on Wednesday. The ongoing investigation against Cofnas could also still lead to disciplinary action.
However, there had already been a meeting between the university and the American ambassador. “During that meeting, the ambassador provided further clarification regarding his statements on X,” says a university spokesperson. “UGent informed the ambassador of the disciplinary preliminary investigation, the confidentiality of the procedure, and the measures that were taken.”
The meeting took place after White announced on X last Friday that he would review all American ties with Ghent University, including academic exchanges and research funding. “Insincere, corrupt institutions that engage in scapegoating the masses, or reward such behavior, are not desirable partners for us,” said White.
In his most recent post, White seems to backtrack on that and says he looks forward to further collaboration with De Sutter and wants to continue the relationship between the university and the US.
All in all, Cofnas is not at present suspended from Ghent, but the investigation of his work and behavior is continuing, and he could still be fired. Ergo, his academic freedom is still under threat (I needn’t emphasize that an “ongoing investigation” has a chilling effect on an academic). This is what happens when you work on a taboo subject.
I’ll add that I don’t think the American ambassador should be butting into this affair, even if Ghent did violate Cofnas’s academic freedom. Ambassador White’s statement above, which is indeed a form of blackmail, is out of line. The U.S. government has no business butting into the affairs of a university in another country, as the Cofnas affair does not affect American interests.
